Verdon Towards an Operational Social Anthropology

Volume 1: An Epistemological History of Social Anthropology
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80381-953-2
Verlag: Grosvenor House Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 207 Seiten

Anthropology's original's aim, that of Maine and Morgan in the second half of the nineteenth-century, was to explain social variability. Behind that variability, anthropologists searched for regularities that a theory would explain. It was thus both comparative and positivist (aiming to be scientific). The first theory to emerge was evolutionism. It was soon followed by functional structuralism, structuralism and all the other 'isms' that came after. In the final analysis, unlike scientific theories, all these 'theories' did not supplant one another but merely agglutinated. The original project of a comparative and positivist anthropology thus completely failed, and the new gurus explain it by the very nature of anthropology's subject, human beings in society, which they claim are not amenable to scientific discourse. In this first of two books, Professor Michel Verdon rejects this defeatist explanation. To him, the failure does not stem from anthropology's 'objects' but from the knowing subject. The explanation lies in the process of knowing; it is epistemological, and he finds the ultimate reason in the 'cosmology' that underlies all theories, and that no one has hitherto explored. This enables him completely to upturn the traditional wisdom: it is this implicit cosmology that radically hinders any conceptual rigour in the study of social organization since it defines groups in a way that makes them ontologically variable. In the light of this unique diagnosis he can define a new language, which he labels 'operational', that yields rigourous comparisons leading to refutable and rectifiable theories. In a second book that will soon follow, he applies this language to a number of ethnographies and draws from them astonishing conclusions about societies traditionally studied by anthropology.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Verdon, Michel

Leseproben

DISCOURSES ON KINSHIP, OR THE THEORETICAL DECOMPOSITION OF THE SOCIAL

I Theories of social structure

Structural functionalism

Towards a ‘corporation’ theory

I begin this study revisiting what ethnologists have called ‘descent theory’. Until the 1970s, descent theory was more or less synonymous with structural functionalism and every assault on it was an attack on structural functionalism. This, to me, gives it a chronological priority. A priority nevertheless polemical in that almost every statement that followed the emergence of descent theory was more or less thought of with respect to it. Descent theory quickly became the common enemy. A seemingly imperishable one because it was dealt the hardest blows, thought to be shattered by theoretical revolutions and yet, once the dust had settled, it still appeared to have to be brought down again! To the epistemologist this indestructibility makes it a paradigm of reference.

To the adulators of Schneider and Dumont, those brilliant commentators and critics of descent theory (Schneider 1965, Dumont 1971), the undertaking may seem unnecessary. But it is not. I believe I can show that French or Anglo-Saxon ethnologists, be they American or British, did not really understand descent theory. I think the demonstration that follows will justify my claim.

Before starting I wish to make an important distinction that classical glosses neglect. At the outset I will argue that descent theory comes on top of a ‘corporation theory’ that precedes it and without which it is meaningless. Well before descent theory, this paradigm harks back to Maine’s hypotheses in his famous and brilliant Ancient Law (Maine 1861).

A historian of jurisprudence, Maine saw social organization reflected in legal systems. Through the language of laws groups would express their reality, declare their associations, and the most archaic laws would reflect the most ancient societies. Advocating a ‘historical’ method to displace the unfounded and untestable lucubrations of legal writers, arguing on the basis of a hypothetical ‘state of nature’, Maine chose to look at legal documents. He espied this first society in the oldest legal documents of Rome and India which, he believed, told about a society ruled by domestic patriarchies. This archaic society was no civil society but a domestic one, not a vast organized community but a population fragmented into sovereign domestic groups, each under the tyrannical and despotic authority of its eldest member, the Paterfamilias who, in Roman times, concentrated all the group’s power in his person. This domestic tyrant owned his subjects as one owns chattel, decided of their life or death, and could sell them into slavery. Each family behaved as a single legal individual or entity. Like a corporation, the family outlived its members’ lives and strove to perpetuate itself indefinitely by recruiting members through birth, marriage, adoption and even slavery. Maine thus distinguished the family’s criteria of recruitment – namely kinship, adoption and slavery (marriage was treated as a form of adoption) from the mechanism responsible for the family’s cohesion, which was achieved through obedience to the Paterfamilias.

Primitive forms of sociability, predating any synthesis, these domestic molecules would only later combine into a political community, a larger association in which the domestic groups of yesteryear would nevertheless retain their original singularity. And the laws of the nascent Roman state would narrate both the particularities of the first political society, and the specificity of its components.

A singular political association, this original state brought together, not individuals but families, the domestic principalities that preceded and now made up the state. In law, the early Roman state ignored the individual, discerning only members of families. The individual blended into the domestic family, the only one with a legal existence. If the individual stands as the basic molecule of our contemporary state, this is the result of an already advanced chemistry. The first State did not break down into individuals but into already constituted collectivities, the families which, even within this political alliance, retained their protohistoric sovereignty over their internal affairs. The nascent state intervenes only to oil this new interdomestic apparatus, to cushion relations between autonomous families. Each family carves out a state within the state. In Maine’s legal mind, this archaic state family has all the attributes of what contemporary law calls a corporation. It was undifferentiated, undivided, denying its members any separate legal identity, represented by a Paterfamilias working on behalf of the group. As a ‘collective individual’ the Roman family was a single legal person, a single legal entity. It was one in its responsibilities as in its privileges; dishonour cast opprobrium on all, and an insult to one called forth the vengeance of all.

This thesis of ‘patriarchal potestality’ shed new light on the bizarre discrimination that Roman law made between blood relatives of agnatic and cognatic stock. Why separate them? Because the political coexistence of sovereign families requires clearly demarcated social boundaries. The various patriarchs’ fields of authority cannot overlap without confusing the corporations’ legal identities, without endangering their coalition. A political alliance – in this archaic state it is an alliance, not a subjugation – can only be achieved between well-identified partners, and only discontinuity can guarantee this distinct and precise identity. From the outset Maine posits discontinuity as the primary condition of the group’s social identity, and of all political scaffolding. Agnates, then, are those who, in Rome, live under the authority of the same patriarch; the discontinuous field of patriarchal authority demarcates the extent of agnatic kinship. Finally, this collectivist (or ‘corporatist’) interpretation prompted Maine to separate the domestic sphere – the internal dimension of the family as a corporation – from the political sphere, the external dimension of relations between families.

The association of these ‘familial individuals’ into a political compound raised a new problem: what was it based on? What tool had originally sovereign domestic communities invented to forge their political coalition? Quite simply, blood ties, but fictitious ones, as Maine recognized, and his bold conception would never really re-emerge. His immediate successors rejected this innovative and brilliant intuition out of hand because they never understood it.

The ancient sovereign families would have joined forces politically, using common descent as a pretext to cement and legitimize their association, thereby engendering those illustrious Roman gentes, the first descent groups according to Maine1. The gens thus emerged after the family; kinship, common to both the family and gentes, manifested itself in two different ways. In the family kinship is used for ‘recruitment’ whereas in the gens, as descent rather than simple kinship, it operates as an ‘aggregating element’. In the purely political context of the gens, descent is the instrument used to amalgamate, or aggregate families into a descent group; more generally speaking it is used to aggregate groups of a given level into a more inclusive conglomeration: families in gentes or Houses, gentes into tribes, and tribes into a Commonwealth. However transparent this may have seemed to Maine, subsequent generations were blind to it and the long string of their refutations completely misfires. Let us restore Maine’s definition as it appeared to him: a descent group is not made up of individuals, but of those corporations (legal entities) known as families. A descent group is a group of already constituted collectivities, aggregated through descent. Today, descent has given way to ‘local contiguity’ in our political constitutions. It is no longer common descent that unites our (Quebec) counties into a province, and the provinces into a Canadian state; it is local contiguity.

Like descent this local contiguity is an element of aggregation, nothing more. Maine never meant to speak of ‘local groups’ occupying territories, as later commentators believed he wrote. All of Maine’s groups implicitly occupy territories. He understood that in our societies groups are recruited through residence in a given region and, in a particular context, amalgamate into a larger group on the basis of local contiguity. Maine’s conception of ‘group aggregated on the basis of local contiguity’ is to the contemporary state what the descent group is to the archaic one: a ‘group of groups’, not a group of individuals (Table 1).

Table 1 Maine’s conceptual framework

DOMESTIC GROUPS:

Families

1. Membership criteria: 2.  Factors of inner cohesion:

Real kinship Fictitious kinship: marriage, adoption and slavery Authority and obedience

POLITICAL...