Where
Humanization Begins and Where It Ends:
The Case of the Human
Family
Toomas Gross
An examination
of humanness in terms of the development and
changes in the past, present, and future of the
social and cultural implications of human
biology, concentrating on the emergence of human
family and kinship, or the sense of
"belonging" to certain social or
socio-biological networks.
Toomas Gross is
a social anthropologist at Cambridge, England.
Introduction
My aim in this
essay is to look at what constitutes humanness
from the perspective of social anthropology. I
will not be concerned so much with human
prehistory and the evolution of Homo sapiens
as a species, which is the area of expertise of
paleontologists and archaeologists, but rather
with the social aspects of being human; that is,
the development and changes in the past, present,
and future of the social and cultural
implications of human biology. It must also be
stressed that there exist not only countless and
divergent ways of looking at humanness, depending
on the angle of a particular
reference-discipline, but there also exist
numerous and often contradictory perspectives
within the confines of the same discipline. All
must be taken into account if we want to
understand what really constitutes humanness, but
all cannot be taken into account within the given
limitations of time and space, as well as our own
limited capacity to grasp the true nature of
things.
From the many
aspects of the "humanization" process,
I have chosen to concentrate upon the emergence
of human family and kinship, or, in other words,
the sense of belonging to certain social or
socio-biological networks. The feeling of
belonging is, to my mind, one of the constituting
features of our being human that manifests itself
on various alternative or simultaneous
levels–for example, we belong to a family,
to a social or cultural group, to a nation, to a
species, to God, etc.
Belonging is to a
large extent, although not exclusively, a matter
of definition. To define ourselves we need both otherness
and sameness. We often, if not always,
define ourselves in relation to others, 1 in
order to have a sense of belonging, we need
someone with whom we can identify (or in some
respects identical) to ourselves. The other can
be constructed on various levels, and the other
on one level can be part of the self on the next.
A well-known Arabic saying describes this
reality–"me and my brother against my
cousin; me, my brother and my cousin against
other Arabs; me, my brother, my cousin and all
Arabs against the whole world."2
I think that it
was not so much the emergence of the distinction
between "me" and "other", but
the emergence of the distinction between
"us" and "them" which came
after that, which was one of the most important
and crucial steps in the beginning of humanity.
That is, the perception of oneself not just as an
individual, but as a member of a group (in the
context of the present essay–a family) as
opposed to another group. Animals are probably
also capable of perceiving the individual self
and otherness, and there are various species that
are capable of perceiving it on a group level),
but the transformation of this perception from a
biological to a cultural and social phenomenon,
the development of the sense of belonging, is
what "humanizes" humans.
I will look at
belonging in the sphere of kinship, a traditional
domain of research in social anthropology.
Kinship gives us the context for finding answers
to the questions of who we are and what we are,
and to whom we belong. Descent, a particular
aspect of kinship, is an important phenomenon
that produces continuity in the society,
establishes the connection between generations,
and defines the universe of significant and
insignificant others. Kinship defines, connects
and separates both biological and social roles.
As shown by numerous anthropological studies, in
many societies these roles do not necessarily
coincide. For instance, within the concept of
parenthood, which has been one of the key-issues
in the study of kinship, a distinction between social
and biological parenthood has been
made. That is, in many societies distinct persons
are responsible for the different social and
biological roles of parenting.
In the present
essay, I will first speculate on human social
evolution and the emergence of family and kinship
reckoning in general. Then I will look at the
different cultural manifestations of kinship,
drawing upon various classical anthropological
studies, to illustrate that the way we understand
who we are and what we are is culture-specific
and not universal; thus when we are talking about
"what constitutes humanness" space
should be left for cultural relativism–that
is, our conclusions and concepts should not be
hastily imposed to other cultures. I will
conclude with a hypothetical visualization of the
end of humanization and kinship, which the
so-called New Reproductive Technologies or
assisted procreation might bring. The New
Reproductive Technologies have challenged the
Euro-American understanding of kinship as the
domain which unites biological and social roles
(adoption being the exception, of course), and
have made posing the question "What is the
connection between who we are and what we
are?" more relevant (Abrahams 1990: 131).
Humanization begins: The
emergence of human family
One of the main
problems of the evolutionary theory of man is the
reconciliation of the two contradictory
conclusions drawn from the knowledge we have. As
Geertz (1973: 114) claims, human evolution
is often seen as a continuous process. Indeed,
one of the main ideas of Darwin was the
continuity of evolution–natura non facit
saltum, as he claimed (cf. Ingold 1991: 23).
There are no jumps in the evolutionary chain
within the process as a whole, or in the
evolution of an individual species. Yet, the
difference between man and animal is not just of
degree, but also of kind. There is a great
difference between man and our nearest
evolutionary relative the great apes. Only humans
have culture. Only humans have values,
consciousness, conscience and the sense of
history. It appears that evolution has indeed
made a great jump. How does one reconcile these
two points of view–the continuity of
evolutionary process and man’s remarkable
difference from animals? For many decades the
reigning solution of the "origin-of-culture
problem" has been what might be called the
"critical point" theory, a term used
first by Alfred Kroeber. According to Geertz
(1973: 115), this term postulates that
"the development of the capacity for
acquiring culture was a sudden, all-or-none,
quantum-leap type of occurrence in the phylogeny
of the primates." At some specific moment in
history, the hominidization or the humanization
of one branch of the primate line took place. We
don’t know what happened. It was portentous,
but in genetic or anatomical terms probably a
quite minor organic alteration. This change,
presumably in the brain’s cortical
structure, enabled an animal whose parents had
not been competent, in Kroeber’s words,
"to communicate, to learn and to teach, to
generalize from the endless chain of discreet
feelings and attitudes; to be competent."
This whole process of the creation of modern
man’s capacity for producing and using
culture was a marginal quantitative change,
giving rise to a radical qualitative difference.
Kroeber compared it to the freezing of water,
which can be reduced degree by degree without any
loss in fluidity until it suddenly solidifies at
0 degrees Celsius. (Geertz: ibid.).
There were three
major considerations that led to and supported
the critical point theory. First, a
tremendous gap existed between the mental
abilities of man and his closest living
relatives, the great apes. Second, language,
symbolization, abstraction, etc. seemed to
be an all-or-none, yes-or-no phenomenon. One
either spoke or one did not, made tools or did
not, imagined demons or did
not–half-religions, half-arts,
half-languages do not seem to exist. And third,
there was the more delicate problem of what is
usually called the psychic unity of mankind–that
is, the absence of important differences in the
nature of the thought process among the various
living races of mankind (Geertz 1973: 115-116).
Theories of human social
evolution
Human social
evolution is usually presented as a teleological
sequence of various stages, which often also
represent different contemporary forms of
societies. Evolutionary thought emerged already
in Ancient Greece and Rome. In the 4th
century BCE, Dikaiarchos, for example, divided
human societies into three groups–hunter-gatherers,
pastoralists, and agriculturalists. In
the 1st century BCE Lucretius in his
poem De rerum natura reflected upon the
development of lively and lifeless nature.
During the
Enlightenment, the Euro-Christianity-centered
conceptualization of the world, prevalent
throughout the Middle Ages, was replaced with a
different, still simplistic inquiry into the
human past. In 1789, Adam Ferguson in his An
Essay on the History of Civil Society
distinguished between three stages of development
of human society: savages, barbarians,
and civilization (although, in contrast to
this spirit of the Enlightenment Rousseau
sanctified the noble savage). By the
second half of the 19th century the
study of human prehistory, both biological and
social was prolific, due in large measure to the
emergence of Darwin’s evolutionary theory,
which had a great impact on social scientific
reasoning. It was at this time, more or less,
that anthropology as a separate academic
discipline was born.
Early evolutionary
anthropology was primarily concerned with the
development of different types of societies and
kin-systems, as well as the origin of marriage
and family. In 1861, Sir Henry Maine published
his Ancient Law in which he compared the
British Victorian judicial system with the Indian
one; claiming that the former was based on contract
and the latter on status. In 1871, Sir
Edward B. Tylor in his Primitive Culture
practically repeated what Ferguson had claimed a
century earlier: that human culture had developed
through three stages–savagery, barbarism,
and civilization. But Tylor went further,
claiming that similar contemporary types of
societies could be regarded as being on different
levels of social evolution, and that those on the
lower levels–hunter-gatherers in
particular–were survivals from the
past. For Tylor this meant that if we were to
study the !kung of Africa or Austrailian
Aboriginals we would have an idea of what life
was like for our ancestors ten thousand years
ago; that is, they are windows to our prehistory.
Other influential
figures of early anthropology who touched upon
the social evolution of man were Bachofen,
McLennan, Morgan, and Engels among others, who
will be introduced later. Many of the early
theories of human social development were
dualistic in nature, viewing the whole process as
a teleological transition from one mode of
organization to another. Sir Henry Maine, as
already mentioned, spoke about the transition
from status to contract; Tönnies
about the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft;
Durkheim about the transition from mechanic
solidarity to organic solidarity.
Contemporary
anthropologists usually differentiate between
four stages in human social evolution–hunter-gatherers,
agriculturalists, pastoral societies,3 and industrial
states.4 As will be shown later,
the emergence of the hunting way of life was
crucial for the development of early family, but
it must be made clear here that contemporary
hunter-gatherers have little in common with the
pre-historic ones. The perception of
hunter-gatherers is loaded with stereotypes and
stigmatizations, which were already developed by
early social philosophers and anthropologists,
and which ranged from the noble savage
(Rousseau) to the survivals of the past
(Tylor).5 Later anthropologists have
challenged many of the common stereotypes
regarding hunter-gatherers. Tylor’s concept
of survivals was, of course, naïve,
because the history of contemporary
hunter-gatherers has been as long as of any other
type of human society, and the conditions under
which they now live (usually on the periphery of
nation states, having been pushed out from their
original productive ecological niches) are quite
different from those of the past. Contemporary
hunting and gathering groups are by no means a
window to our prehistory. Nor did they live in
seclusion in the past, but had regular contact
with other similar groups, or other parallel
existing forms of societies.
Anthropologists
have also shown that, contrary to what is often
believed, the amount of free time from
subsistence activities is the greatest among
hunter-gatherers, and that hunter-gatherers are
not only concerned with the search for food.
Malinowski still represented this stagnant view,
claiming in his well-known quote that the road
from the stomach to the head of the savage
is short. The world for the savage,
Malinowski argued, was a hazy background in front
of which only edible and useful things were
clearly distinguished. Marshall Sahlins (1974),
on the other hand, calls hunters and gatherers
"the first affluent society," claiming
that the !kung bushmen in Africa, for example,
have only to work 11 days in order to have 100
days free.
The emergence of human family
Besides
speculating on human macro-social evolution,
early and later anthropologists also studied the
evolution of particular human
institutions–the family and marriage among
others. At this point I will give a short
overview of some of these discussions, combined
with some more contemporary evidence with regard
to these topics.
It is not quite
clear when, exactly, the family emerged in the
evolution of man. We can locate it roughly, but
the exact positioning is a matter of speculation.
As Gough (1974: 112) puts it, the most
fundamental problem of the origin of family is
our ignorance about it. In trying to determine
the time of the emergence of family, different
authors have proposed periods ranging from 2
million to 100 thousand years ago. In addition we
do not know whether it emerged once and for all,
or in different places and on different
occasions. Nor do we know whether the family
emerged before the development of speech and
language, or after. As Gough (ibid.)
claims, it is quite possible that language and
family developed together for a long time.
The problem with
studying the origin and evolution of human
family, and the phenomena related to it, is that
we have three main sources of
knowledge–great apes, paleontological
fossils and contemporary
hunter-gatherers–all of which are imperfect.
The great apes of today are not our ancestors and
have gone through an evolution as long as and
quite different from our own. And while fossils
tell us much about the physical aspects of human
life, they tell us little about the social
aspects. And finally, the contemporary
hunter-gatherers cannot be considered windows to
our prehistory, as tempting as it may seem so to
do.
Judging from the
fossils, we can say that the simians that were
the ancestors of men, gorillas and chimpanzees
lived in various regions in Europe, Asia and
Africa about 12-28 million years ago. At the end
of the Myocene era, a species called Ramapithecus
appeared in Northern India and in Oriental
Africa. Ramapithecus can be considered the
ancestor of both the last Hominids and modern
humans. It was a species of small stature that
walked on two feet, had lateral teeth, and used
their hands rather than their teeth to break
edible things.
From Ramapithecus
until the appearance of Homo sapiens about
70 thousand years ago, human evolution passed
through many stages. During this process, due to
the extensive use of hands by the simians,
hunting and warfare developed. Men, starting to
concentrate on hunting, covered long distances
while lactating women could not do so. This,
Gough (1974: 126) believes, produced the first
sexual division of labor on the basis of which
the human family developed. This initial division
of labor in human history was considered so
important that Clark (1977: 19) even calls it
"one of the mainsprings of human
progress."
Some time later,
the capacity for language and speech started to
emerge. Language was an important factor from the
point of view of the development of family and
kinship, because it made possible the definition
of relatives, significant others, etc. As
Clark (ibid.: 20) puts it, the lack of
speech was one of the greatest drawbacks of the
great apes and was alone sufficient to prevent
them from acquiring the elements of culture.
Until hominids had developed words as symbols,
the possibility of transmitting and accumulating
culture hardly existed. For example, man’s
pre-linguistic counting ability was only on the
level of birds and squirrels. Serious mathematics
could develop only with the use of symbols. Clark
(ibid.) concludes that speech must have
been one of the first indications of humanity.
The problem of its study, however, is that it is
difficult, if not impossible, to detect the
ability for speech from paleontological findings.
The use of fire
was another important factor in creating the
household and uniting it together into a single
physical space, the center of which was fire.
Fire also meant the development of the art of
cooking which further enforced the division of
labor.
Gough (1974: 130)
claims that it is not clear when all these
developments took place. A climatic change
started all around the world about 28 million
years ago. Around 12 million years ago, in India
and Africa, the branches of pre-humans and the
ancestors of chimpanzees and gorillas separated
from the same trunk. Around 1.75 million years
ago the Southern and Eastern Africa were
inhabited by Australopithecus, a small
bipedal hominid with erect posture and a brain
bigger than that of the simians, who could make
tools–although other authors (see Clark
1977: 22) claim that tool-making probably started
with Homo habilis. According to Geertz
(1973: 117), Australopithecus is also the
context of the critical point theory of the
origin of culture. This small-brained (about
one-third the size of modern humans) proto-man
could make tools and hunt. Australopithecus
must thus have had an elementary form of culture
(or proto-culture). From here Geertz concludes,
somewhat surprisingly, that the greater part of
human cortical expansion has followed, not
preceded, the beginning of culture, which could
prove the contrary to what is generally
believed–that acquiring culture could still
have been a gradual process.
It is unclear,
however, whether Australopithecus could
use fire. The first known use of fire is
attributed to the Chinese man (belonging to the
line of Pithecantropus), who was
discovered in Chukutien, near Beijing, and who
lived there during the second glacial era around
500 thousand years ago. Increasing self-awareness
probably developed in the later stage of human
prehistory. It was not until the Upper
Pleistocene era that we get the first evidence of
systematic burial of the dead by Middle
Paleolithic man. The Neanderthal man, who
inhabited caves and used fire in Europe, Africa
and Asia 100 - 150 thousand years ago, was
probably the first one to develop an increased
self-awareness and a belief in the supernatural,
which is proven by the fact that he buried his
dead ceremonially. The majority of
anthropologists believe that by the time of the
Neanderthals the household way of life, the
family, and language had also already been
developed.6 The problem with the
Neanderthals, however, according to common
knowledge in paleontology, is that they are off
the main track of human evolution and therefore
not the ancestors of modern man (although recent
paleontological findings near Lisbon in Portugal
this year might disprove this belief).
Self-adornment and
the practice of art appeared only at the end of
human prehistory, at a time of rapid
technological innovation. Indeed Homo sapiens
sapiens were the first to practice
self-adornment (Clark 1977: 21).
The emergence of
the hunting way of life, which eventually led to
the sexual division of labor, is often seen as
the trigger in the development and evolution of
human families. Clark Howell (1973: 91) claims
that the development of the hunting way of life,
even at a very unsophisticated level of
adaptation, set very different requirements on
early human populations. It led to markedly
altered selection pressures and was, in fact,
responsible for profound changes in human biology
and culture. This adaptation was a critical
factor in the emergence of many fundamentally
human institutions. Some of the changes, which
represent the human way of life, would include:
- a greatly
increased home range and the defense of
territorial boundaries to prevent
infringement upon the food sources;
- a band
organization of interdependent and
affiliated human groups of variable but
relatively small size;
- (extended)
family groupings with prolonged
male-female relationships, incest
prohibition, rules of exogamy for mates,
and subgroups based on kinship;
- the sexual
division of labor;
- altruistic
behavior; including, food-sharing, mutual
aid, and co-operation; and
- linguistic
communities based on speech.
Washburn and
Lancaster (1973) also express the idea that the
hunting and gathering way of life led to the
emergence of human family. They (1973: 68) claim
that the genus Homo has existed for some
600 thousand years, and that the entire evolution
of the earlier Homo erectus to existing
races took place during the period when man was a
hunter. Furthermore Washburn and Lancaster (1973:
79) state that when males hunted and females
gathered the rewards were shared among those in
the group; this habitual sharing among a male, a
female and their offspring is the human family.
According to this view, the human family is the
result of the reciprocity of hunting, which is
formed through the addition of a male to the
pre-existing mother-plus-young social group of
the monkeys and apes. This view of the family
also offers a reason for incest taboos. If the
function of the addition of a male to the group
is economic, then the male who is added must be
able to fulfil the role of a socially responsible
provider. In the case of the hunter this
necessitates a degree of skill in hunting and a
social maturity that is attained some years after
puberty. The necessary delay in the assumption of
the role of provider for female and young can be
achieved only by an incest taboo, because
brother-sister mating would result in the
presence of an infant while the brother was still
years away from effective social maturity.
Father-daughter incest would produce a baby
without adding another providing male; this is
quite different from taking a second wife, which,
if permitted, is allowed only for those males who
have shown they are able to provide for more than
one female. Further, Washburn and Lancaster
(1973: 80) argue that the fact that the
organization of the family may be attributed to
the hunting way of life is also supported by
ethnography–that is, the institution of
family was not necessary in a society in which
each individual gets his or her own food.
The transfer from
hunting and gathering to an agricultural mode of
life brought about many revolutionary processes
that affected the development of human family. As
Clark (1977: 23) puts it, the transition to more
effective basis of subsistence was crucial in the
evolution of humanity. In every part of the world
farming has preceded and formed a platform on
which civilizations have built themselves. Having
this in mind, Gordon Childe formulated the
concept of the Neolithic Revolution comparable
in importance with the Industrial and Scientific
Revolutions.
Hunter-gatherers
and tribal societies differ
qualitatively–the first are basically
concerned with food-collection, the latter with
food-production. Transfer from food-collection to
food-production brought along many important
social changes–a sedentary mode of life, the
growth of population, the growth of productivity etc.
These took place during the Neolithic era and so
rapidly, that this transformation is sometimes
also called Neolithic paradox.
Archaeological
data show that from 40 - 15 thousand BCE man was
mostly dedicated to hunting big game, and from 15
- 8 thousand BCE to collecting plants and
fishing. The transfer from food-collection to
food-production (i.e. growing plants and
domesticating animals) took place in the
Neolithic era, first in the Middle East, later in
Far East, Africa and independently on the
American continent. What caused such a dramatic
change in the mode of life occurring
independently in many parts of the world? Since
there could have been no internal push from
hunting and gathering to cultivating land (on the
contrary – cultivation of land is much more
labor demanding), the cause had to be found in
the change of environmental conditions. One such
change could have been a global increase in
population, during which some groups would have
been pushed to less productive areas where they
had to start growing things themselves.
Archaeological findings, however, do not support
this theory and a demographic explosion should
have followed, and not preceded, the transfer
from food-collection to food-production. Some
archaeologists have claimed that the change of
weather to being seasonal may have also been a
factor.
Whatever the cause
of the change, the fact of the matter is that
food-production meant a sedentary mode of life
and this indeed caused a demographic explosion,
which had an enormous impact on the structure of
human family. Speculatively, there are various
reasons why a sedentary mode of life might have
caused this demographic explosion:
- infanticide
ended–earlier nomadic families
had to carry their children with them,
and some of them were killed to increase
the group’s mobility;
- changes in
female physiology–more food for
the newborn meant that breast-feeding
stopped earlier, fertility arrived at an
earlier age, and the interval between
pregnancies shortened; thus the number of
births increased;
- changes in
female anatomy–the ratio between
fat and muscle in the female body
increased which in turn increased
fertility;
- fewer wars
and conflicts–fewer men died,
which meant more men in the group.
The stages in the evolution of
human family
Besides trying to
localize the emergence of human family in the
evolution of man, anthropologists have also tried
to speculate on the different stages through
which the human family has evolved. McLennan and
Morgan were especially influential in this
respect.
McLennan, in his Primitive
Marriage (1865), suggested that in the
beginning there was promiscuity, which gave way
to a system in which kinship was traced through
females only (which he thought to have been the
case in ancient Greece); this in turn gave way to
tracing kinship through males only (as in ancient
Rome); and finally, to monogamy and tracing
kinship through both males and females.
Lewis Henry Morgan
and his Ancient Society (1877) had an even
greater impact. In fact, Friedrich Engels was
particularly influenced by his views and tried to
determine, on the basis of the evolution of human
family, at which point in human history
inequality between men and women emerged. In the
inequality between sexes Engels saw the origin of
later economic inequality.
Morgan, followed
by Engels, believed that after initial
promiscuity, people began prohibiting sexual
relations between the generations of parents and
children, while continuing to allow sexual
relations between sisters and brothers. This
family was called "consanguine." Later,
relations were also prohibited between sisters
and brothers; although before this there was an
intermediary type of family, where a group of
sisters, or other women who were relatives,
married a group of brothers or related men from
another band (the Punaluan family). The
monogamous family is a quite recent phenomenon.
The sequence proposed by Morgan and Engels is as
follows:
- Blood kin
family–or sexual
promiscuity–the type of family
where men and women were completely
equal;
- Consanguine
family–a group marriage
characterized by sexual relations between
sisters and brothers;
- Punaluan
family–a group marriage where a
group of sisters or other women who were
relatives married a group of brothers or
related men from another band. According
to Engels, the roles of men and women in
this family type were still
equal–economic decisions were made
together, male and female activities were
equally estimated. This was a communistic
household that Engels, following
Bachofen, believed was matriarchal;
- Monogamous
family–characterized by a strong
marriage tie and inequality between men
and women.
Morgan derived his
conclusions from the analysis of kinship
terminology. In fact Morgan based his whole
theory on kinship nomenclature. For example, if a
system designated many men father, other
than the actual biological father, then, Morgan
reasoned, it could be that some custom of group
marriage prevailed, in which many men might
be the putative genitors of the child and hence
be addressed as father by it (Fox 1974:
19).
Morgan, like his
contemporary Tylor, also divided the advances of
social organization into three stages: savagery
(hunter-gatherers), barbarism (settled
agriculture) and civilization (with more
advanced agriculture). This division is more or
less accepted by contemporary scholars. However,
his theory of the stages of the evolution of
human social life–from promiscuity through
different forms of family to monogamy–has
been rejected.
Matriarchy or patriarchy?
Early discussion
on family was also concerned with whether the Ursozium,
or early society, was matriarchal or patriarchal.
Maine in his Ancient Law (1861) talked
about the patriarchal joint-family–the
family of fathers and sons holding property in
common, the main kinship unit in India and, in
Maine’s opinion, the original form of the
Indo-European family. Some of the major
early anthropologists, however, predicated the
idea that the Ursozium was matriarchal, i.e.
that motherright preceded fatherright.
Bachofen in his Das Muterrecht (1861) and
also McLennan in his Primitive Marriage
(1865) were especially influential in this
respect. They backed their idea of initial
matriarchy with the claim that, since early
family and marriage developed in the conditions
of sexual promiscuity, which meant fatherhood was
not always detectable, the role of mother/woman
in the family and kinship system had to be much
more important than that of father/man.
However convincing
Bachofen’s and McLennan’s theory may
be, there is no real evidence for it.
Anthropologists have described no truly
matriarchal societies, neither in the past, nor
in the present, although some have claimed that
the Iroquois Confederation might have been
matriarchal, as the deputies of the
Confederation–sachems– were
allegedly nominated by women. But as Morgan, who
first studied the Iroquois Confederation himself,
admitted, there was no real equality between the
sexes (Gough 1974: 116). Commenting upon the
contemporary societies, Gough also claims, that
although it is true that in some matrilineal
societies (like the Hopi of Arizona and the
Ashanti of Ghana) men exercise little authority
over their wives (among the Nayar, men and women
can even live apart), it is still always the man
(if not the biological father then another male
relative) who exercises control over women and
children.
Family and culture
I’ve gone
through some of the theories of the emergence of
the family. But as I mentioned at the beginning
of the lecture, the evolution of family has also
taken cultural lines, directions and
trajectories. The world is becoming more
homogenious, but let’s say your look fifty
years back and we see that there were different
types of families in different cultures. So we
can talk about universals of family, but we can
also talk about the cultural particularities.
Family and its cultural
universals
Throughout its
evolution the family took on particular cultural
forms, but it also has developed certain
universal dimensions. According to Gough (1974:
115), the family in all times and cultures seems
to imply four universals:
- there are
rules that prohibit sexual relations
between the close relatives;
- there is a
sexual division of labor;
- marriage is a
socially acknowledged and long-lasting
relationship between man and woman; and
- the men
usually have higher status than women
(i.e. women always seem to be the
"second sex").
James Fox (1974:
31) suggests that the facts of life with
which man has had to come to terms in the process
of adaptation, and which are immediately relevant
to the study of kinship and marriage, can perhaps
be reduced to four basic principles, which
in his case are somewhat different from the ones
proposed by Gough:
Principle 1
The women have the children.
Principle 2
The men impregnate the women.
Principle 3
The men usually exercise control.
Principle 4
Primary kin do not mate with each other.
I will hereby
analyze the emergence of two of these
principles–the incest taboo and the
distinction between male and female roles.
Incest-taboo
Incest or rather
incest-taboo is one of the most universal rules
that regulate human societies. According to
Lévi-Strauss, the incest taboo is one of the
main differences between man and animal. Although
various other species also have it, the
functioning mechanisms in these cases are usually
different from those of man. The universality of
the incest-taboo does not mean, however, that
incest has never existed in human history. It was
quite common among the aristocracy of Ancient
Egypt, Peru and Hawaii, whose rulers and
aristocracy considered themselves divine, and
therefore their blood was not to be mixed with
that of a common man or a woman. The only
solution was not to marry out of the family, or
out of a restricted small group. We now know that
in-marriage weakens the population and the
individual organisms as well, as genes with
potentially lethal mutations, which usually are
recessive, and, due to their low frequency,
"dormant" in the heterozygotous form,
might become homozygotous causing the respective
individuals to die. Some even think that
extensive in-marriage among the Mayan aristocracy
lead to the sudden and mysterious fall of their
empire approximately 900 CE. Anthropologists also
point out, that although the incest taboo seems
to be universal, each culture determines which
relationships are defined as incest, or which
distant relatives are allowed to marry. In our
Western societies, for instance, marriage between
cousins is considered incest, while marriage with
more distant relatives is accepted. In some other
societies, however, the marriage between
relatives having a common ancestor as far back as
five generations might be considered incest.
Anthropologists
and psychologists have proposed various theories
explaining for the universality of the incest
taboo, and why people already knew to avoid
incestuous relationships before they had
scientific explanations for its consequences.
There are two interesting and contradictory
theories, which I will briefly touch upon here.
The first belongs to a famous Finnish
anthropologist Edward Westermarck.
Westermarck’s theory, which is
psychological, suggests that since the people who
should not intermarry usually grow up together
(are of the same family), or know each other from
early childhood, they lack sexual attraction
towards each other. Arthur Wolf (1968) has proven
this with the example of Taiwan in the 1960s. In
some Taiwanese regions the daughters of one
family are brought up in another, that is
together with their prospective husband, who is
already decided upon in their early childhood as
a contract between the two families. Statistics
show that these marriage are, as a rule, not
satisfactory for either side, because the man and
the woman who grew up together lack sexual
attraction towards each other. The same
phenomenon has been described in Israeli
Kibbutzes. Biologists and ethologists have, by
the way, also noticed a lack of sexual attraction
among the close kin also in case of some mammals.
Biologically this phenomenon is
functional–it avoids in-breeding and
maximizes genetic variability. Furthermore, it
has also been shown, in the study of cases of
sexual abuse of daughters by their fathers, that
such abuse is more likely if father and daughter
have lived separately, than if they have lived
together in one family.
Westermarck’s
theory and Wolf’s example are based on the
assumption that incest-taboo is intrinsic and
psychological–people who grow up in a normal
family have no inclination for incest.
Freud’s theory, on the other hand, is
completely contrary to this in many respects. He
claims that humans actually strive for incest,
but it is the society restricts them. Most of
Freud’s theory of sexuality, as we well
know, is built upon this drive toward incest,
manifested for instance in son’s sexual
attraction towards his mother (Oedipus complex),
or the daughter’s sexual attraction towards
her father (Elektra complex). The drive toward
incest is often subconscious and finds its
expression in dreams. Malinowski, the founding
father of anthropology, followed the same line of
thinking to a certain extent. But why would
society ban incest? One of the possible answers
would be that the incest-taboo is functional. It
avoids the disorganization of family and leads to
the diminution of sexual competition within the
family–preventing the sons and the father
from competing for the sexuality of the mother,
or the daughters and mother for the sexuality of
the father and the family would dissolve. The
incest-taboo also leads to exogamy and alliance
between different human groups. It is known, for
instance, that already early hunter-gatherer
groups exchanged women and thus created new
alliances with each other.
Male and female
roles
As already
mentioned above, Engels was particularly
interested in the evolution of male dominance
over women, and concluded that it emerged with
the accumulation of wealth and achieved its
extreme manifestation with the rise of the
industrial state (Gough 1974: 144). However, the
best and most regular patterns of sexual division
of labor can be seeb in the case of
hunter-gatherer societies. Of the 175
hunter-gatherer societies described by George
Murdoch, in 97% of them hunting was exclusively a
male activity, while in the remaining 3% it was a
mostly male activity. Collection of plants was
exclusively female activity in 60% of the
hunter-gatherer societies, and in 32% mostly
female activity. Fishing was exclusively or
mostly male activity in 93% of the societies
where it was practiced (Gough 1974: 133).
Anthropologists
have proposed many explanations for the almost
universal division of male and female roles in
different cultures and societies in the past and,
in many cases, still in the present. As a whole
males had/have productive and females had/have
reproductive roles. We may hereunder delimit
three speculative theories:
- The
strength theory–men are simply
stronger, and this determines particular
activities that require more physical
strength, while women have physically
less demanding ones. This, however, is
not always the case. There are many roles
that do not require physical strength,
but which in most cultures are reserved
exclusively for men; for example, in most
hunting-gathering societies men make
musical instruments, collect honey, and
are religious and political leaders.
- The
compatibility with child-care
theory–it is simply the
reproductive capacity of women which
determines their roles. But this does not
always determine post-natal roles. A good
example is Scandinavia and the increasing
popularity of paternity leave there.
- The
expendability theory or minimal
sacrifice theory–according to
this theory, men acquired the more risky
and public roles, and women the less
risky and domestic ones. Female
reproductive capacity is smaller and more
restrained than that of a man (man’s
capacity is continuous), and thus losing
a woman is more costly to the
group than losing a man.
These explanations
are based on biology. The fact is however, roles
can also have clearly social bases; that is, male
and female roles, as well as their character, are
also to a large extent determined by
socialization. The interplay between biology and
society can be well observed in the study of male
and female aggressiveness. It is widely accepted
that males are more aggressive than females. It
is a biological phenomenon caused by the
hormones. As has been demonstrated by injecting
mice with the male sexual hormone testosterone
that causes aggressiveness. But male
aggressiveness can also be a result of
socialization. The case of a Kenyan tribe Luo
illustrates this eloquently. At one particular
period of time, more boys than girls were born.
Because of the lack of girls, some boys were
given female tasks from early childhood and thus
socialized as girls. Later studies showed that as
adults they were less aggressive than normal
men and developed certain characteristics of female
personality. So being male or female is not
just a matter of biology but also of society and
socialization.
Family and its cultural
particularities
Despite its
cultural universals, family and the whole domain
of kinship is the area which possesses an
enormous cultural variation, and proves that the
knowledge of who we are and what we are is often
based not on biology, but is rather a cultural
construct. Some examples of parenthood, family
and marriage will help to illustrate this.
Family as a
cultural construct
The whole
institution of human family itself with all its
different functions–as a physical household,
as a mechanism uniting different generations, as
a basic unit in tracing descent, etc.–is
a culturally heterogeneous phenomenon.
Anthropologists have distinguished several types
of physical structures of the contemporary human
family, the most general ones being the
following:
- The
nuclear family – consisting of
mother, father and their children;
- The
composite family – polygamous
(polygynous and polyandric) families;
- The
extended family - different
generations (i.e. more than two) living
together; and
- The joint
family - nuclear families of brothers
and sisters living together.
Family is also the
basic unit for tracing descent. In 1967, Peter
Murdoch in his World Etnographic Sample
described more than 800 societies and their
kinship systems. According to his results, 36% of
the societies could be characterized by bilateral
kinship, 61% by unilineal (among them 47% were
patrilineal and 14% matrilineal), 3% are
characterized by double descent.
In matrilineal
societies mother’s brother invests to his
nephew. Anthropologists have claimed that it is
so because, as in matrilineal societies
extramarital relationships are common, the
probability of him being the father of the
children of his wife decreases. However, the man
can be sure that his sister is of his kin (since
their common mother can easily be detected) and
thus her children are also related to him.
Marriage as a
cultural construct
Marriage is a
universal feature of human societies, although at
least in one contemporary society (the Nayar in
India) no marriage institution allegedly existed
until recently. The local family (taravad)
consisted of the children and grandchildren of a
common female ancestor.
Marriage also has
its cultural forms, ranging from monogamy to
polygamy, the latter in different forms. Polygamy
is far more common than monogamy, as Murdoch
(1949) has shown in his earlier study, and most
polygamous societies are polygynous (multiple
wives). By 1949, he managed to describe 554
societies of which 514 were polygynous.
Group marriage is
one particular form of polygamy. It is worth
touching upon it here briefly, as its failure in
the Western world reveals the importance of context
and a definite sense of belonging to
humans, and constitutes an introduction to the
analysis of the New Reproductive Technologies,
which forms the last part of this essay.
As stressed above,
anthropologists thought that the early society
was promiscuous. Later, group marriage, which
anthropologists sometimes call polygynandric
marriage, was common as a cultural norm in some
remote districts of Uttar Pradesh in the
Himalayas (Majumdar 1960). Such marriages seem to
have been an adaptation to particular extreme
conditions rather than the result of free choice.
Many recent and
contemporary utopists and sects have also
predicated promiscuity or group marriage,
considering it the only form of sexuality that is
based on equality and where jealousy does not
exist. Jealousy, however, seems to be
unavoidable. We are possessive animals, so
keeping group marriages together is a hard work
and they usually fail, as Van den Berghe (1983:
77) has shown. Many "experiments" in
promiscuity prove this. The famous Oneida
family in the US during the last century, which
at its peak had more than 500 members, was not
devoid of jealousy, or male control, and soon
disorganized (see, for example, Carden 1969;
Kephart 1976; Muncy 1973). Constantine and
Constantine (1973) describe numerous group
families in the US, studying altogether 26 groups
(6 triads, 16 tetrads, 2 pentads, 2 sextads) and
conclude that group marriage does not suit human
expectations or needs. 58% of the groups broke up
in less than a year, and only 2 groups stayed
together for more than 4 years. Only 2 children
were born from these formations, and 80% of the
members claimed that they felt jealous.
The Israeli
Kibbutz, an agricultural community and organized
in many respects contrary to shtetl, the
Jewish urban community, is also a form of
communistic utopia, although not organised so
much sexually, as economically and socially (see,
for instance, Spiro 1956, 1958; Tiger and Shepher
1975). The aim of the Kibbutz was also to
eliminate the family by raising children in a
group, thereby abolishing sexual inequality and
the sexual division of labor. The utopia worked
on all other fronts except the above-mentioned
ones (Van den Berghe 1983: 101).
To this point I
have reflected on different heterosexual
arrangements in Marriage. The fact of the matter
is that marriage can also take and has taken
place between members of the same gender, and
this not only in the context of Western
liberalism and social democracy, but also in many
other cultures. The Cheyenne Indians had
so-called berdache –male
transvestites who acted as co-wives. Among the
Azande in Africa, soldiers had temporary
so-called "boy-wives." Furthermore,
homosexuality and heterosexuality have also been
periodic within cultures, for example the Etoro
in New Guinea believed that giving sperm to women
throughout the whole year would decrease their
strength and vitality, and so would shift from
heterosexual to homosexual arrangements for
periods of 200 days. Lesbian marriages have also
been described in many cultures of Africa.
Celibacy, or
abstinence, has also been practiced periodically
in some cultures. Among the Duguni, for instance,
men and women avoided sexual relationships for
4-6 years after the birth of a child. This is
quite functional since another pregnancy is
avoided immediately after the birth of the
newborn, so that the mother can invest sufficient
time and attention to the newly born child during
its critical years.
Conclusion
From the, albeit
speculative, perspective of social anthropology
we can say that the definition of family has
universal and cultural components; it is a
biological and cultural phenomenon which appears
to adapt to the changes and needs of each
particular culture. As people evolve, so do
cultures, so does the family. For this reason, we
cannot only look at the family from a
universalistic perspective, even as we cannot
look at humanisation from a universal
perspective. In any discussion of the human, we
must leave room for cultural relativism. This is
especially true as we face one important change,
and therefore challenge to the definition of
humanness and the family, in Euro-American
society today, namely, the New Reproductive
Technologies, which is the topic of my next
presentation. These technologies challenge our
very notions of family, by challenging our ideas
about parenthood. Furthermore, they have within
them the possibility of challenging our very
basic assumptions of what it means to be human.
Footnotes:
1. Such a view dates back to
Cooley's looking-glass theory of the self,
according to which we look at the reactions of
the others to find out what we are like (Cooley
1922). Otherness in this case is used as a mirror
that reflects our self. In anthropology, the
archaeology of otherness is in many ways based on
the assumption posed by Lévi-Strauss that we
think in the form of binary oppositions; for
instance, in terms of "us and them",
"right and wrong", "rational and
irrational", "developed and
primitive", "logos and mythos",
"logic and prelogic", "Culture and
Nature", and that this binary mode of
thought is universal to all humankind in time and
space. return to text
2. Evans-Pritchard (1987:
281) in his classical study of the Nuer in
Africa, for instance, showed that groups of
people in conflict may use the strategy of
fission and fusion, and depending on the scope of
conflict, different local units may fuse and act
as one, or distinguish themselves from each other
and act separately. Shore (1994: 782) speaks in
that case about segmentary process of identity
construction, one that connects different orders
or ascending "levels" of belonging.
Identity is represented as a process of
classification involving boundaries of inclusion
and exclusion. Amodio (1994: 69) illustrates such
multilevel systems simply in the following
manner: we can be opposed to you on one level,
but together they will be opposed to they on the
other one. Thus the distinction between self and
other can be blurred and kept in constant
fluctuation. return to
text
3. Pastoral societies should,
in fact, be considered a dead-end-street of human
evolution, an adaptation to certain extreme
natural conditions that make agriculture
impossible. return to text
4. An alternative typology is
based on political organization. On that basis,
bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states are
distinguished. return to
text
5. The term
"hunter-gatherer" itself has been
attacked on various grounds. Radical feminists,
for instance, have gone as far as to suggest that
the term should be replaced with that of
"gatherer-hunter," because in the
original phrase hunting, primarily male activity,
stands first, and gathering, primarily female
activity, second. Hunting, however, is not always
the main subsistence activity of these peoples at
all. It has been claimed on the basis of
Murdoch's descriptions of various societies that
around 30% of the contemporary hunter-gatherer
groups are mainly concerned with the collection
of plants, about 40% with fishing, and 25 % with
hunting, while others are not strictly of one
distinct type. return to
text
6. As for language, there are
also some who claim that already
Australopithecus, 2 million years ago, was
capable of it (e.g. Hockett and Ascher 1968),
while others (e.g. Livingstone 1969) situate it
at a much later date - between 50 and 70.000
years ago (cf. Gough 1974: 130). return to text
ABOUT THIS ARTICLE
Draft
99/12/11
Toomas
Gross: Where Humanization Begins and Where It
Ends : The Case of the Human Family
Humanness
II : Friday May 28, 1999 – Sunday, May 30, 1999
Montréal,
Québec Maximus' Slide-In Menu by Maximus at absolutegb.com/maximus
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