Kinship vis-h-visMyth Contrasts in Lbvi-Straws Approaches to Cross-Cultural Comparison

JAMES A. BOON
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

DAVID M. SCHNEIDER
University o f Chicago The enormous secondary literature which relates Levi-Strauss comparative studies t o different schools of thought has failed sufficiently to emphasize the major discontinuity within his own work. This paper characterizes the basic methodological differences in his approaches t o kinship and to myth. I t then suggests how, by concentrating on the k i n s h i p h y t h distinction, we might constructively refine various structuralist concepts, such as distinctive feature analysis and the logical foundations o f the elementary kinship structures. Only by concentrating on the few inconsistencies in Ldvi-Strauss remarkably coherent corpus o f work can an adequate critique o f his theories o f comparison be commenced.

AT THE MOST GENERAL LEVEL Uvi-Strauss has made two major contributions to anthropology as a comparative science: (1)a means of interrelating different reified societies by contrasting their principles of social differentiation and cohesion, set in relief by his concept of marriage; (2) a means of analyzing a particular human capacity-the analogical capacity-which characterizes all men, but is more conspicuous (to outside observers) in preliterate tribal myths. Both contributions are fundamentally ethnological rather than ethnographic. The Elementary Structures of Kinship (hereafter ESK) compares select groups according to how their rules and terms involving cousins relate to a theory of marriage-as-reciprocity. Mythologiques detects a self-comparativist tendency in a particular sort of ethnographic data which, in and of itself, can articulate cross-cultural differences. Myths are documents translated by fieldworkers which record a differential classification tendency (penske sauuuge). They are the evidence of how a society selects concrete items from experience to articulate its distinctive features in contrast to other societies. Mythologiques compares select groups according to how they have compared themselves. This paper emphasizes the contrast between ESK and Mythologiques, the basic differences in Uvi-Strauss approaches to kinship data and mythological data, which recall traditional contrasts between social and cultural anthropology. We argue that formal-methodological frameworks have been abstracted from these studies prematurely, and that two diverse kinds of endeavor have too often been glossed as a single structuralism. First we review and summarize the kinship/ myth opposition. Then we illustrate some areas-distinctive feature matrixes and the elementary kinship continuum-that require reconceptualizing with this opposition firmly

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grasped. And throughout the paper we ask what might result if kinship were treated more as myth. KINSHIP/MYTH In his treatment of kinship Levi-Strauss deals with ethnographic materials, reported by observers who have collected data from native informants, in terms of the following premises: (1) Each society has a distinct kinship system which can be treated apart from other aspects of the society and its culture (ESK, 480-2). (2) Each society is an entity, a whole characterized by a particular kinship system, e.g., the Kachin system, the Murngin system. (3) A kinship system can be defined provisionally as a way of classifying people and defining their rights and duties in accordance with past marriages and in provision of future ones (Levi-Strauss, personal correspondence); moreover: kinship systems, marriage rules, and descent groups constitute a coordinated whole, the function of which is to insure the permanency of the social group by means of intertwining consanguineous and affinal ties. They may be considered as the blueprint of a mechanism which pumps women out of their consanguineous families to redistribute them in affinal group, the result of this process being to create new consanguineous groups, and so on [Levi-Strauss 1967a:302-303.]

(4) The elementary kinship structures are elaborations on the irreducible social bond intelligible in the relations between a man and his sister, his wife and her brother, and offspring-the avunculate atom of kinship (LBvi-Strauss 1967:46). The indigenes own views of their kinship are considered but must be tabled as anything more than a part of the ethnographic material for analysis. In fact, along with anthropologists, natives themselves may be guilty of methodological contrivance (ESK, 110). Analytic oppositions are formed not from actual recorded excerpts of native just-so stories about their kinship relations, but from the fixed and presumably universal elements of a social organizational scheme deemed appropriate for all societies and centering on incest prohibition, exogamy, marriage, descent, residence, etc., and related nomenclatures. The symptomatic elementary trait remains the relationship of a given group to either cross-cousin marriage, or rules of exogamy, or dual organization as so many examples of one basic structure (ESK,123). We can gloss this basic structure for the kinds of societies at issue approximately as: a man takes a woman from a positively-defined class or genealogical position, which marriage implies an immediate or eventual return of a woman. The basic opposition is between con~anguinity~ (the social portion a daughter is married out of) and affinity (the social portion a daughter is married in to), with marriage as the basic cohesive operator. Whether the natives do or do not phrase the opposition in terms of marriage or even whether any of the three aspects-consanguinity, affinity, marriage-coincide with indigenous articulations is only a secondary concern. Accordingly, whether the system has clans or lineages is something for the observer to decide, for clan and lineage are technical concepts. L6vi-Strauss defines a kinship system as one which specifies the rights and duties of men with respect to the exchange of women between groups, but this exchange is specified as marriage. The mere exchange of slaves or of hostages is another matter. Such arrangements appear devoid of systematic sociological significance, whereas in positive systems the exchange of women as marriage partners occurs by perpetual social rule. Moreover, 44 marriag? provisions are complicated in actuality by children produced by the sexual relations licensed by those marriages. The relationships between men and their wives brothers are augmented by relationships between the children and mothers brothers, children and fathers, and through fathers to fathers sisters, etc.

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Thus, according to this approach marriage must entail sexual relationships which in turn must be fecund. Otherwise the condition, with respect to past marriages and in provision o f future ones, could not be met. This scheme disqualifies certain native notions of marriage as genuine marriage-e.g., unions between men and transvestites in some Plains Indians. Yet the Zulu marriage between two women-where the wife is impregnated by a designated male, while some other male is her husband and the father of the offspringapparently qualifies. L6vi-Strauss does indeed note: It is far from our mind to claim that the exchange or gift of women is the only way to establish an alliance in primitive societies (ESK, 483). He allows for friendship and homosexuality, but then expresses these reservations: However, the whole difference between the two types of bond can also be seen, a sufficiently clear definition being that one of them expresses a mechanical solidarity (brother), while the other involves an organic solidarity (brother-in-law, or god-father). Brothers are closely related to one another, but they are so in terms of their similari t y . . . . By contrast, brothers-in-law are solidary because they complement each other and have a functional efficacy for one another, whether they play the role of the opposite sex in the erotic games of childhood, or whether their masculine alliance as adults is confirmed by each providing the other with what he does not have-a wife-through their simultaneous renunciation of what they both do have-a sister. The first form of solidarity adds nothing and unites nothing; it is based upon a cultural limit, satisfied by the reproduction of a type of connexion the model for which is provided by nature. The other brings about an integration of the group on a new plane [ESK, 484.1 The new plane in Uvi-Strauss view is the cultural aspect of the human social condition, wherein offspring are morally bonded to their parents and cross-parental generation, and act accordingly. In short, the facts of human reproduction, proceeding under the orderly rules of alliance, make marriage the critical bond in the system of exchange called kinship in ESK. For, only fecund marriages can provide for the future of the system by producing the actors who make the marriages back. The future marriages convert the atom of kinship into kinships fundamental quartet (ESK, 442-443), expressed most directly to Uvi-Strauss in societies practicing cross-cousin marriage: viz., in the older generation, a brother and a sister, and in the following generation, a son and a daughter, i.e., all told, two men and two women; one man creditor and one man debtor, one woman received and one given. If we were to envisage this quartet as constructed in a system of marriage between parallel cousins, an essential difference would appear. The quartet would then include an uneven number of men and women, i.e., three men and one woman in the case of marriage between cousins descended from brothers. . . . In other words, . . . the structure of reciprocity could not be set up [ESK, 4431. Throughout ESK there persists an ambiguity in the argument arising from Uvi-Strauss distinction between two different kinds of function. There is use-function in the British functionalist sense involving how one part of a social system integrates the other parts and facilitates cohesion of the whole. The other kind of function is a kind of algebraic function, the systematic relationship among sets of meaningful parts, illustrated in the forumla A:B::X:Y (LBvi-Strauss 1950:xxxv, ff). For Uvi-Strauss two different approaches are needed in the study of kinship. Use-functions involve the organization of groups, the actual exchange of women and the different kinds of social cohesion which follow from these. But in ESK algebraic-function arguments appear only at the comparative level of the interrelations o f the sociological use-functions themselves, not at the level of isolating the actual customs and rules analyzed (see below). In studies of myth these two functions are merged, not because there is no use-function in myth but because the use-function is the algebraic-function. Because myth has no function besides establishing orderliness among the

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elements of concrete experience it selectively reduces, Mythologiques appears solely preoccupied with algebraic-functions. In ESK, however, the primary concern is the use-function and the secondary concern algebraic-function, although incest and the logic of the elementary structures themselves are partially conceptualized algebraically. The problems of cross-cousin marriage all turn on the question of how social cohesion is provided for (although not necessarily realized) by marriage norms and how a particular social organization is structured. It is shown that there are greater inherent limitations in direct exchange than in generalized exchange, and that there are greater limitations-to an analytically imposed theory of social cohesion and group dynamics-in patrilateral than in the matrilateral cross-cousin marriage. The latter elementary marriage system allows the greatest range of social segments to be included by non-conflicting marriage provision. The analysis asks which men, organized in what way, exchange which women with which other men, by what rules to achieve what kind of functional cohesion. Witness this decidedly functionalist passage: a human group need only proclaim the law of marriage with the mothers brothers daughter for a vast cycle of reciprocity between all generations and lineages to be organized, . . . whereas marriage with the fathers sisters daughter forces the interruption and reversal of collaborations from generation to generation and from lineage to lineage. In one case, the overall cycle of reciprocity is co-extensive with the group itself both in time and in space, subsisting and developing with it. In the other case, the multiple cycles which are continually created fracture and distort the unity [conceptual?, actual?-but patrilateral rules are normative, not empirical] of the group [ESK, 450; our insert]. ESK analysis consists in stipulating the marriage rules for how social bonds are formed among groups or categories. It takes the incest prohibition (i.e., social rules requiring one to copulate somewhat out) as a universal given, therefore itneed not, analyze the role of the incest prohibition in each system, but only its constant role in all systems. Systems where kinds of incest are conceived as a marriage alternative (either mythically or for a select few) are dispensed with (e.g., ESK, 487). ESK assumes the use-function of genealogy is constant for all systems and classifies people by biological parentage before asking what biological parentage culturally consists of in each ease. ESK only tangentially discusses cultures as systems of symbols and meanings for particular space-time isolates. Cultural questions of symbolic interrelationsip-what incest means in particular cases, whether adoption is equated with blood relationship and how, if one can marry a sword or a tree, etc,-are of secondary salience in analyzing each reified society, and comparisons are effected only by using a social cohesion etic framework. Levi-Strauss applied Mauss principle of reciprocity systematically to show how an analytically complete range of social cohesion-types-from two groups satisfying each others marriage needs simultaneously (direct exchange) to many groups completing a cycle of alliance eventually (matrilateral systems)-was implicit in different positive marriage rule alternatives. ESK documents the ways different kinds of total systems achieve different forms of social cohesion. And the particular elementary structure adopted is viewed as a constraint, affecting the degrees of social cohesion certain societies achieve, at least as important as demography, ecological setting, etc. To summarize aspects of ESK: (1)Uvi-Strauss employs a use-function theory based on definitions of kinship and marriage, descent, residence, genealogy, incest prohibition, exogamy, etc., which assumes all these are interrelated to fulfill needs of social cohesion. He uses actual native textual materials only insofar as they mesh with this theory. (2) His concern is with problems of social organizations and not with problems of cultures. The structuralism of the study rests in its algebraic interrelation of different social rules as most directly intelligible in cross-cousin marriage principles. Thus the major culture in ESK is the culture of the theory of social organization variants. (3) The innovation

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Uvi-Strauss introduced into the study of kinship-in a self-proclaimed direct line from R. Lowie-was his application of exchange as a central and irreducible element in social organization. Mauss concept of exchange is explicitly related to the fundamental we/they social unit (the necessarily-different-but-interrelatable-as-differentiated unit familiar in Durkheims concepts of mechanical/organic solidarity). The social unit in ESK is seen as fundamentally coded by the avunculate and marriage rules centering on it which pronounce different portions of society marryable. (4) Here are Uvi-Strauss early attempts to develop techniques of structuralism-the use of opposition, mediators, and operators, arising around the nature of the avunculate relationship perpetuated through the generations-which are later developed in the Mythologiques series. In L6vi-Strauss approach to myth the algebraic-function eventually achieves prominence. In The Structural Study of Myth he studies myths for the same reasons any comparativist folklorist might: Mythology confronts the student with a situation which at first sight appears contradictory. On the one hand it would seem that in the course of a myth anything is likely to happen. There is no logic, no continuity. Any characteristic can be attributed to any subject; every conceivable relation can be found. With myth, everything becomes possible. But on the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity between myths collected in widely different regions. Therefore the problem: If the content of a myth is contingent, how are we going to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar? [ 1967a: 203-2041. This early article glosses a simplifying technique for discovering the logic of mythic organization of materials. The technique is pronounced preliminary and the Oedipus example inappropriate. Even so, it is already clear that no simple theory of myth-analogous to the elementary structural kinship theory derived from cross-cousin mamage provisions or concepts of dual organization enables us summarily to compare the whole of one groups mythic materials to another groups. Uvi-Strauss comment that classicists might dispute the basic units he detects in Oedipus suggests that no privileged portion of myth limits the form an entire mythic system can take, as he feels the privileged portion of kinship known as marriage rules limits the form an entire kinship system can take. This technique is applied to a traditional anthropological problem in Totemism, is related to various Western philosophical traditions in The Savage Mind, and in Mythologiques is expended to demonstrate something about the texts now to be studied as a corpus. His thesis is a simple one: that New World preliterates display a common conception of the world: From the start then, I ask the historian to look upon Indian America as a kind of Middle Ages which lacked a Rome: a confused mass that emerged from a longestablished, doubtless very loosely textured syncretism, which for many centuries had contained at one and the same time centers of advanced civilization and savage peoples, centralizing tendencies and disruptive forces . . . [the set of myths] such as the one studied here, owes its character to the fact that in a sense it became crystallized in an already established semantic environment, whose elements had been used in all kinds of combinations-not so much, I suppose, in a spirit of imitation but rather to allow small but numerous communities to express their different originalities by manipulating the resources of a dialectical system of contrasts and correlations within the framework of a common conception of the world [Livi-Strauss 1970:8; our italics]. He argues this thesis by drawing algebraic analogies @ensLe sauuage) between concrete referents in the texts.4 He demonstrates the common conception of the world of Indian America by moving through its manifestations in myths, using the same logical processes by which, he suggests, this ongoing conceptualizing of the world occured. LQvi-Straussstates

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initially that the only means to verify his interpretations is: (1)to transform the constallation of algebraic analogies between the referents in one text, (decoded in light of extensive social contextual and environmental data) into those of other texts (this is essentially what Volume I1 does for I); (2) to move across the whole corpus eventually encompassed, finally to analyze its extreme reaches, and then by similar transformations to relate these distant myths back to the first parts of the corpus considered (this is what Volumes I11 and IV do for I and 11). It is an essential, not merely a convenient, starting point of Mythologiques that all texts are translatable. Something of their bizarre contents is preserved even in translations into Indo-European languages. Only if part of their internal logic is translatable can structural mythic analysis begin. There is good ethnographic reason to suspect that texts have (at a more complex level than motifs) moved across different New World languages without sacrificing certain principles of consistency, and a myth is especially valuable if multiple variants which seem related have been documented across space and languages. What appear translatable are combinations, juxtapositions, and sequences of outlandish composite images. But never is mythological data restated in terms of an external analytic (as in ESK) involving residence, descent, affiliation, cohesion, etc., although myths can in fact employ actual ethnographic facts in their systematic signification. Mythic units remain things like stinking opossums, fishermen-in-whale-stomachs, incentuous-downstream-aunts, etc.i.e., complex concrete images. Livi-Strauss adopts no motif index and finds no differentiation by social function necessary. Agricultural myths, solar myths, rites of passage myths, origin myths are all simply myth. Uvi-Strauss assumes that a groups myths approximate a record of its selective reduction of its sensory environment into orderly arrangements. But a groups mythic corpus is not simply a direct encoding of the members shared sensory experience; it is rather an encoding that is itself differentiated from neighboring groups codes, and from the same groups codes in times past. Only twice does Uvi-Strauss examine more thoroughly the myths and contexts of particular tribes (in Vol. I and the Salish in Vol. IV); but even these are not intended as exhaustive. Mythologiques rather traces differentiations across groups, which is a perfectly sound strategy for detecting the semantic environment implicit in equivalences and contrasts that New World preliterates have used to distinguish themselves from their natural surroundings and from their cultural neighbors. Someone else may attempt the definitive study of particular tribes myths, or of the way these myths relate to other social and economic matters. Uvi-Strauss does not preclude these projects, but he chooses not to achieve them and opts for an internal analysis of myth. Thus, most simply Mythologiques corresponds to an extended exercise in proving seemingly disparate elements are transformed members of the same set. But the anthropological significance of the exercise increases if it can be shown: (1)that a particular kind of general logical process corresponds to this analogical set-building; (2) that, empirically, various populations have employed the process extensively to identify themselves and differentiate their experiences from their neighbors. Then the indigenous analogizing can be reanalogized into Mythologiques; Lkvi-Strauss provides his own best summary: The Salish-speaking peoples. . . often speak in their myths of a deceitful genie who, whenever a problem puzzles him, excretes his two sisters imprisoned in his bowels, whereupon he demands their advice by threatening them with a torrential downpour: they, being excrement, would disintegrate. Now, in Salish myths, the same genie creates for himself two adoptive daughters, out of raw salmon roe. When theyre fully grown, he desires them. Testing his position, he pretends to call them by mistake my wives instead of my daughters. They promptly take offense and leave.

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Finally, the Salish tell of a third pair of supernatural women. These women are married and are incapable of expressing themselves in articulate speech. They live at the bottom of natural wells and upon request, send up dishes of hot, well-cooked food to the surface. These three motifs cannot be understood apart from one another. On the other hand, once you compare them, you notice their common origin. All the women are related to water: either, as in the case of the well women, to stagnant water, or to running water for the two other pairs. The latter are distinct from one another in that the salmon-roe daughters come from a positive, earthly source of w a t e n a l m o n streamrand the excrement-sisters are threatened with destruction by a negative, heavenly source of w a t e r t h e disintegrating rain. Thats not all: the salmon-roe daughters and excrement-sisters are the products of either raw (in the first case) or cooked (in the other) food, while the well-women are themselves producers of cooked food. Further, the well-women, if you permit me, are marrying-types as wives and good cooks. The other two pairs are non-marrying types, whether because they are labeled as sisters or because they avoid incestuous marriage with their foster father. Finally two pairs of women are endowed linguistically: one for their wise counsel, the other because they catch on to a half-spoken, improper hint. In this way they contrast with the third pair, the well-women, who cannot speak. Thus from three meaningless anecdotes you extract a system of pertinent oppositions: water, stagnant or moving, from the earth or sky; women created from food or producing it themselves, raw or cooked food: women accessible or opposed to marriage depending upon linguistic or non-linguistic behavior. You arrive at what Id call a semantic field which can be applied like a grill t o all the myths of these populations, enabling us to disclose their meaning [ 1971a:48-49].

Mythologiques maps one version of such a grill for North and South American Indian
groups. Only secondarily does it employ the grill to reach non-mythologic conclusions. But the full circular significance of the four volume study is this: the Salish myths compose a vast sociological, economical and cosmological system establishing numerous correspondences between the distribution of fish in the water network, the various markets where goods are exchanged, their periodicity in time and during the fishing season, and finally exogamy: for, between groups, women are exchanged like foodstuffs. The enjoyment of a diversified diet functions in myths as a sign of how open each small society is to the outside world, an indication of the degree to which these various societies are willing to engage in marital exchanges, and thus to communicate with one another. . . . The myths. . . referred to are the same ones which in South America serve to account for the passage from nature t o culture, symbolized by the acquisition of cooking fires, to mans benefit. But in these North American populations, which engaged widely in intertribal exchanges, mythic imagery accentuates that aspect which, to them, constitutes the distinctive trait of civilized life. Accession to culture is no longer indicated by the simple art of cooking meat, but by the founding of commerce, giving this term a social and economic sense . . [ 1971a:49].

Mythologiques frustrates the more sociologically minded reader because different groups cannot be contrasted by the ways they handle myth (except perhaps in terms of prevalence vems near absence). No solid perspective by use-function is gained by myth as for kinship, where direct exchange societies contrast holistically to patrilateral crosscousin societies, etc. Another frequent criticism is that Mythologiques overlooks the actual living groups that have created the textual materials under analysis. Yet both complaints seek to deny LQvi-Strausswhat he is most trying t o demor ;trate. He purposefully treats the texts not insofar as they are constitutive of the affect-.aden, self-identity of particular groups, rather as they establish diacritical relations across various groups-groups which need never be wholly isolated or reified. This procedure is not to imply that myths are never

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codifiers of positively integrated identity (and certainly the Salish myths as analyzed come near being this), but only that the differential or diacritical aspects of the texts can be emphasized and in fact constitute their peculiarly mythic quality: every myth is by nature a translation, originating either in another myth issuing from a neighboring but foreign population, or in an anterior myth of the same population, or in a myth that is contemporary but the property of another social subdivision (clan, subclan, lineage, family, brotherhood)-another myth that an auditor seeks to plagiarize in translating it in his fashion into his personal or tribal language, as much to appropriate it as to contradict (dkmentir)it, thus inevitably deforming it. Rarely seized upon at their origin and in a state of vitality, these relationships of opposition between myths emerge vigorously from a comparative analysis. If thus the
philological study o f myths does not constitute an indispensable preliminary approach

[our emphasis], the reason for this lies in what one might call myths diacritical nature. Each of the myths transformations results from a dialectical opposition to another transformation, and their essence resides in the irreducible face of translation by and for opposition. Considered from an empirical point of view, every myth is at once pristine (primitif) in relation to itself, and derived in relation to other myths; it is situated not in a language and in a culture or sub-culture, but at the point of articulation of cultures with other languages and other cultures. Myth is thus never in its language ( d e sa langue), it is a perspective on another language . . .[Livi-Strauss 1971b3576-577;our trans.]. In fact, in Volume I11 we see that if individual texts begin to take on a strong internal integrity, a serial plot-line consistence or a literal reflection of the life experience of the group narrating them, they become more oral novel or literature and less myth. Mythologiques demonstrates the diacritical aspect of preliterate semiotic activity. The ultimate comparutiuist integrity of myth is a negative, constrastive one. Myths express intertribal, cross-cultural, cross-language differential stereotypes. Totemic representations create an identity for a set of clans by delineating in concrete forms what each is not, what each must not do, eat, etc. In a similar way group identities achieved by myths are not positive, hermeneutic ones but differential, structuralist ones. Myths portray the relations between the natural world and the social world-real or imaginary-in a way which enables members of societies to take cognizance of themselves as much for not replicating in their actual practices the mythic universe as for occasionally replicating parts of the classifications comprising that universe. Most important, myths reveal internal principles of consistencyequivalence for the sake of equivalence, inversion for the sake of inversion-which can be analyzed without isolating each culture area as a mythic type, and without an exterior analytic of the social needs t o interrelate factions, establish residence, etc. Living groups do these things-no one denies this-but the mythic formulations are at the comparative level independent of such needs. For living groups also stereotype and classify their experience differentially; and this is the subject and object of Mythologiques. To summarize, Gvi-Strauss refuses to do with mythic data what he does with kinship data: he says kinship d&a must pertain to social cohesion needs of actual groups; mythic data need not. He studies myth first as independent, meaningfully contrasted sets of significations exchanged through time and across languages and space. Mythologiques seeks to demonstrate there is a discernable order to myth at this level. Only secondarily does he analyze particular, localized elaborations of some selection from this intercontinental semantic universe-where honey codes both sperm and menstrual blood, opossums mark ritual stench, etc.-and describe the dialectic interrelations of certain mythic texts with actual local history and environmental conditions (cf. LQvi-Strauss 196713). For the mythic units reflecting on this experience and basic social needs are pre-constrained, imperfectly coined to directly disclose any social cohesive reality. Simply as myth they have an internal logic. One might say LBvi-Strauss defines kinship (as primarily operated through marriage) as that aspect of social life which pertains to the social cohesion of proximate

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differentiated groups; and myth as that which identifies-bydistinguishing groups according to the sensory codes they have abstracted from their experience. Thus, the priorities in ESK and Mythologiques are reversed. And the central question becomes not only, as many critics have asked: Cannot there be a kinship of myth?-i.e., use-function constraints on these mythic algebraic-function relations; but more to our interest: Cannot there be a myth of kinship? By kinship we intend those classifications of solidary actors (defined by descent, marriage rule, and other symbols) which serve comparatively as diacriticals for differentiating identities across societies, and which serve within a given population to inform its experience, but not in a simple relationship with ecology, demography, or actual social cohesion. And is this kinship neglected if one sees use-function as the essential factor in matters of incest and marriage? There is, we suggest, an element of myth in kinship, whereby peoples can handle what analyzers call incest, marriage, kin terms, descent and collateral bonds, etc., independently of hypothetical social needs of the group; and ignoring this fact can lead to faulty arguments.

EITHER-OR MATRIXES AND META-MATRIXES

Differences between two kinds of analysis-here represented by ESK and by Mythologiques-can be obscured by premature confidence in formal methodologies and analytic paraphernalia such as bundles of binary distinctions. To argue that an analysis proceeds by isolating sets of distinctive features is not sufficient cause to label it structuralist or even one kind of analysis. A case in point occurs in 1. Buchler and H. Selbys Kinship and Social Organization, when the authors illustrate two examples of what they call the same kind of method of explanation, i.e., describing a set of items as a (Jakobsonian) distinctive feature matrix. The first example cited is IKvi-Strauss cross-cultural elaboration of R. Needhams work on Penan mourning terms. The significant set composed of nekronyms (e.g., eldest son dead), autonyms (e.g., John), and teknonyms (e.g., Father of John) is contrasted according to the occurrence of two features:

(1) statement of relation with a relative, (2) implication of opposition between self and others. In brief, nekronyms do state (1)but do not imply (2); autonyms are vice-versa; tekonyms do both. Hence the role of proper names in different societies can be compared. Buchler and Selbys second example is the familiar type of analysis stretching from early Kroeber to more recent Componentialists which compares and contrasts assortments of individual kinship terms, such as English father characterieed by the features of seniority, consanguinity, masculinity, etc.; mother by seniority, consanguinity, but not masculinity; son by consanguinity, masculinity, but not seniority, and so forth. The authors assertion that these two examples are the same kind of method based on a distinctive feature matrix overlooks a critical difference in the two examples. Nekronyms pertain to a relation with another relative as opposed to having nothing to do with such a relation. This is indeed a classification according to the presence or absence of the feature; yet if the feature is absent (as in autonyms), it is not automatically known what else is present; that would take further investigation.6 In such a distinctive feature matrix, then, we learn what nekronyms are about without learning at that level what they are contrastively not about. Moreover the analysis starts not from a set of terms but a pre-analyzed set of types of terms. Let us designate the product of such an analysis a meta-distinctive-featurematrix.

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In the other example the term father pertains to masculinity as automatically opposed f o femininity, to seniority as opposed to juniority, to consanguinity as opposed to affinity, etc. The inverse of the feature is positively defined by the analyzers pre-assumptionso-called common sense. Not pertaining to masculinity is pertaining to femininity; all terms must be either masculine or feminine. Such Componential Analysis of closed domains (e.g., kinship genealogies) does begin with actual native terms but describes them according to a pre-analyzed grid. It is assumed, for example, that universally not-male is equivalent t o female (rather than neuter, or at another level animal); consanguinity opposes affinity (rather than adoption or many other possibilities suggested by crosscultural data). Thus let us call this an eitherlor-distinctive-feature-matrix. By means of this pedestrian contrast in types of matrixes we can succinctly distinguish ESK and Mythologiques. ESK resembles an eitherlor classification; its axioms allow an array of eitherlor distinctions to be made: such as restricted versus generalized, patrilateral versus matrilateral-one side the positively defined (loaded) inverse of the other. ESK achieves an eitherlor matrix by pre-assigning the oppositional feature based on a theory of social cohesion; yet in other ways it differs. It is unlike many Componential Analyses because it does not analyze actual native units or categories, but analytic glosses such as cross-cousin/paralleI cousin, descentlresidence. (ESK of course employs native terms but analyzes them only after glossing them according to its prescriptive marriage theory). Moreover its locus of approach is not relations of principles for distinguishing lexical items, but relations of principles for distinguishing reified groups. Yet ESK cannot properly be deemed a Componential Analysis of social cohesion types, because although LQvi-Strauss always detects eitherlor features based on a concept of marriage, he repeatedly acknowledges that any single eitherlor opposition is good only at a particular leuel. This aspect of the study makes it at least semi-structuralist and constitutes its major advance over Lowies Primitive Society. That is, LiviStrauss does not simply chart a distinctive feature matrix of marriage formulas; he jumps around in the matrix to ponder its implications. Consider this summary passage: Can the reason be given for [the contamination of generalized exchange by restricted exchange]? Undoubtedly, yes, if w e. . . consider that the three elementary structures of exchange, viz., bilateral, matrilateral and patrilateral, are always present to the human mind, at least in an unconscious form, and that it cannot evoke one of them without thinking of this structure in opposition to-but also in correlation with-the two others. Matrilateral and patrilateral marriage represent the two poles of generalized exchange, but they are opposed to each other as the shortest and the longest cycles of exchange, and both are opposed to bilateral marriage as the general to the particular. . . . At the same time, bilateral marriage has the characteristic of alternation in common with patrilateral marriage, whereas it resembles matrilateral marriage in that both allow a general solution, and not a collection of partial solutions, as is the case with patrilateral marriage. The three forms of exchange thus constitute four pairs of oppositions [ ESK,4641. Here ESK skews toward the algebraic. All elementary structures are described as always potential; there is no compromising suggestion of axiomatic needs of social cohesion which ought to determine when which structure prevails. This structuralist skewing of ESK at once distinguishes it from earlier use-functional analyses, and that makes it something more than a Componential Analysis. The set of elementary structures is seen here as algebraic-type logical alternatives (the above fundamental quartet) always in principle open to groups establishing themselves as distinct social units cross-referenced by marriage rules to other groups. But insofar as this algebraic quality holds, arguments in ESK of functional-use potential of different elementary systems remain inappropriate, unspecifiable-vestiges of an earlier anthropology. On the other hand, Mythologiques does not even partly resemble a Componential Analysis. Rather, it is a meta-distinctive feature matrix, and represents a completely dif-

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ferent kind of comparative research. Oppositions in the series are complemented by searching textual materials to detect possible inverse categories. What in the corpus of New World mythic texts is the opposite-complement of fire? smoke? earth?, no water;. .all water?. . .no, stagnant water, as itself opposed t o falling or running water. Thus in myths hot does not simply, common sensically, oppose cold. For if myths were constructed according to a presumed-to-be-natural common sense, they would be unnecessary to indigenes and certainly not a problem for anthropology. In short, Mythologiques discloses how mythic texts encode features selected from experience in different, yet related, ways from other features selected; just as a nekronym encodes features of alter relative and self in an inverse way from an autonym. Yet Mythologiques is at once more impressive since it only glosses preliterate images according to other preliterate images presumably in the same semantic field. This is why the analysis can be corroborated only by attesting more and more encodings that rely on principles related to the initial code. We can then construct a simple distinctive feature matrix to compare and contrast roughly ESK, Mythologiques, and along the way Componential Analysis:

Basic Data actual native terms or images

Elementary Structures of Kinship Mythologiques

analytic glosses

functional etic (social-cohesive genealogy)

+
-

+
-

+
+

Componential Analysis

The chart could be rephrased as three different strategies of translation of cultural phenomena: (1) Componential Analysis begins with arbitrary sets of native language terms and differentiates them according to an imposed functional analytic (e.g., attributes of a genealogical grid) to discern their meaning. ( 2 ) Mythologiques begins with common sense translations of striking native composite images (e.g., genie defecates disolvable sisters) and more adequately translates them by mapping differential relations to other such images from a related cross-cultural textual corpus. (3) ESK begins with a functional theory of social cohesion, selects customary complexes (e.g., the avunculate and cross-cousin marriages) and nomenclature clusters that pertain to the theory, and translates their meaning as the interrelated set of types of elementary structures-the structural logic of the functional theory. An obvious conclusion is that one should never expect eitherlor conclusions to issue from a meta-matrix, or vice versa. Each of the three approaches rests on differing assumptions as to the meaning of social phenomena; what, for example, is kinship about? Is it about social cohesion needs of groups, per part of ESK? Is it about formal elegance and efficiency, per Componential Analysis? Or is it about that peculiar human tendency t o differentiate yet interrelate complex categories of experience to order social life without being directly determined by non-conceptual parameters, per Mythologiques? It might be about all three of these, or others; but the last has been most neglected by comparativist theories of kinship. Finally, we should pause t o appreciate this either-or/meta contrast in the simplest structuralist analyses of cultural data employing distinctive feature techniques, before rushing to adopt any formal apparatus as anthropologys own.

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BEYOND THE ELEMENTARY CONTINUUM One flaw in ESK was an understandable failure (in 1949) to pinpoint with consistency the locus of the models at issue. Societies do not have patrilateral or matrilateral systems; rather groups or parts of groups reveal ideas of such marriages which might be carried out to various extents. One could, as many have urged, hypothesize the necessary external conditions which determine which marriages will characterize a given population, but this is not necessarily a prerequisite to mapping the logic of attestable marriage-ideas independently. The confusing element in ESK (monumentalized in the prescriptive/preferential debate) remains the scattered claims such as a human group need only proclaim the law of marriage with the mothers brothers daughter for a vast cycle of reciprocity between all generations and lineages to be organized (ESK, 450). For marriage rules are not laws, rather norms. And norms are normative, not actual. Marriage systems are ideally organized by marriage rules. In fact marriage rules interest structuralists because they can be described as a closed set, and this fact derives from their relative independence of concrete facts. The properly structuralist argument is that marriage rules constitute a logic generally independent of, although possibly relevant to, other levels of experience. Only by stressing this independence of marriage rules-we would call it their cultural aspect%an other elementary-looking rules such as patriparallel cousin marriage preferences be compared at all. For patriparallel cousin systems do not achieve a system of reciprocity of greater scope between groups; to the contrary, they use marriage ideals to scale down the possibility of reciprocity cycles between social units interrelated through something other than marriage. Yet such systems exist, survive, and thrive in contexts as distinct as Arabia and Bali. Moreover, complex systems need not be conceptualized merely as the breakdown of elementary structures, as an intrusion first of the time dimension (in Crow-Omaha systems), then of the individualistic dimension. The degeneration argument in ESK about complex systems-like its avoidance of parallel cousin marriage principles-arises from a misplaced argument about the use-function of elementary structures. By preserving a social cohesion argument LQvi-Strauss compromised his more original structuralist position concerning the mutual occurrence of elementary structures in human social thought (i.e., their logical inter-implication). Without the social cohesion theory, LBvi-Strauss might have portrayed incest more exclusively as an axiom basic to the socio-logic characterizing I esprit humain. It would never have been even indirectly implied that incest-as-tabooed is a universally actual amalgamator of groups, but only that incest is always a conceivoble and implicit option insofar as tabooed. This would in fact be perfectly consistent with arguments in ESK describing each elementary structure as the negation of the next and incest as the logical extreme of elementariness for each structure. In the following passage the locus of elementary structures is cultural. Marriage rules conceptualize variable solidarities as opposed t o relative senses of incest, and an elementary structural tendency is always covert in human groups as they identify and differentiate themselves: Ghosts are never invoked with impunity. By clinging to the phantom of patrilateral marriage, systems of generalized exchange gain an assurance, but they are consequently exposed to a new risk, since patrilateral marriage is not only the counterpart of matrilateral marriage but also its negation. Within systems of reciprocity, marriage with the fathers sisters daughtershort cycle-is to marriage with the mothers brothers daughterlong cycle-what incest is to the entirety of systems of reciprocity. To speak in mathematical terms, incest is the limit of reciprocity, i.e., the point at which it cancels itself out. And what incest is to reciprocity in general, such is the lowest form of reciprocity (patrilateral marriage) in relation to the highest form (matrilateral marriage). For groups which have reached the subtlest but also the most fragile form of reciprocity, by means of marriage between sisters son and brothers daughter, marriage between

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sisters daughter and brothers son represents the omnipresent danger but irresistible attmction of a social incest, more dangerous t o the group, even, than biological incest, which latter will never compromise the security of the system because it cannot be conceived of as a solution. It may be understood, then, how it is that in all the abovementioned formulas both types of marriage are associated as well as opposed; that the reasons for proclaiming the excellence of the one are the same as those for abhorring the other. . . . For a system of generalized exchange, to marry the fathers sisters daughter or to sleep with the sister is, on the same grounds, to reverse a cycle of reciprocity, which is tantamount to destroying it, making water flow up t o its source; in a word, it is incest [ESK454; our italics]. If we regard the incest taboo as the logical axiom (as in the above passage) for conceiving of social differentiation, and each form of elementary marriage rule as the relatively incestlike negation of the next higher form, need we adopt any sense of an incest taboo (or exogamy) as a universal agent in establishing actual social cohesion? The structuralists interest in the incest taboo is not that it functionally interrelates actual social groups but that any such presumed mechanistic results are achieved variably, that the tension inherent in the logic of incest taboos echoes the tension in distinctions between crosslparallel and at another level between matrilateral/patrilateral, and that such incest taboo-like cultural principles to marry-out-within-limits are applied to social life at new levels. By avoiding any social cohesion theory, the socio-logic concept of incest is clarified. Moreover, a new way appears to approach the individualism of complex systems. We suggest that individualism in spouse selection is the logical opposite-complement, or (to borrow Lhvi-Strauss expression concerning social incest) the omnipresent danger but irresistible attraction, of any prescribed marriage, including cross-cousin systems and parallel cousin systems as well. In this view individual choice is most generally the perfect opposite of socio-logic incest. Incest is ultimately the relative in-marriage in conflict with any positive out-marriage rule, and individual choice is ultimately an out-marriage in conflict with any preferred relative in-marriage; the sensational individual marriage is inevitably one that is too out-out of class, or race, or community. To clarify this position, let us consider L6vi-Strauss views on complex sytems. He has generally argued: (1) these systems are less individualistic in practice than their ideals suggest, since (racial, sectarian, national, etc., endogamies aside) endogamous pockets tend somehow to form; he sees this as a more natural, less categorical, operation of an element a r y proclivity, even when positive marriage categories remain unspecified (ESK, xxxvi); (2) one must computerize any way to handle these systems enormous variables, since no cultural categories prescribe suitable partners; real marriages must apparently be traced with no native scheme to explain any divergence from total randomness; he has left the task to others. This view of complex systems perhaps appears most clearly in LQvi-Straws brief remarks on swayamvam marriage, which in Indic legends consists, for a person occupying a high social rank in the privilege of giving his daughter in marriage to a man of any status (ESK, 475), preferably her chosen hero. LQvi-Strauss speculates that such an idea was significant in the historical development of individualistic marriage (complex systems) out of a degenerated generalized exchange system: Since generalized exchange engenders hypergamy, and hypergamy leads either to regressive solutions (restricted exchange or endogamy), or to the complete paralysis of the body social [!I, an arbitrary element will be introduced into the system, a sort of sociological clinamen, which, whenever the subtle mechanism of exchange is obstructed, will, like a Deus ex machina, give the necessary push for a new impetus. India clearly conceived the idea of this clinamen, although it finally took a different path [i.e., hypergamy leads to caste] and left the task of developing and systematizing the formula of it t o others. This is the swayamwra marriage, t o which a whole section of the Mahi4751. bhirata is devoted [ESK,

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But if elementary exchange patterns are non-statistical models (cf., ESK, xxxii-xxxiii), any actual surplus of women at the top of an hypergamous system and the deficiency of brides at the bottom is-even without arguing from particular ethnographic cases-a spurious issue. There are multiple cultural ways of handling any real shortage or surplus of circulating women, without breaking down the hypergamous marriage ideals: redefining more women into the bottom ranks, female infanticide (cf. Dumont 1970:118), religious sanctions on female celibacy at the top ranks. There is not necessarily any paralysis of the body social translated in India into epical reflection; and swayamuara marriage can as readily be portrayed as the extreme positive expression of the cultural inhibition on marrying-in negatively established in ESK theory by the incest taboo. Swayamuara is not necessarily a mere secondarily formulated set of literary ideals made t o patch a faltering system of positive exchange, whereby the three basic characteristics of modem European marriage [freedom to choose unprohibited spouse, equality of sexes, and individualization of the contract] were introduced in . . . a furtive secret and almost fraudulent manner (ESK, 477). For to be consistent with the structuralist impulse of ESK, swayamuara marriage should represent not the degradation of prescriptive marriage systems, but a logical foundation, i.e., the axiomatic inverse that inevitably in the socio-mystique (per ESK, 454) sustains the values, through unconscious but conceivable contradiction, on any prescribed union or on any incestuous one as tabooed. In short, why are individualistic marriage contracts any less the omnipresent danger but irresistible attraction which (along with incest), through implied negation of preferential rules, underpins the whole of elementary structures? If patrilateral marriage is incest-like vis-a-vis matrilateral marriage, and restricted exchange is incest-like vis-a-vis these, and (we should say) parallel cousin marriage is a viable social option which is incest-like vis-a-vis even restricted exchange; then all these elementary structures are themselves incest-like vis-a-vis systems based ideally on individualistic contracts. This point (again, per ESK, 454) is another way of saying the inherent cultural possibility of individualism in marriage, the above-mentioned swayamuam, is itself the opposite side of the social incest axiomatic basis of elementary kinship theory. There are two cultural stop-gaps against marrying-too-in: one is taboos on social incest; the other is positive sanctions on marrying into unsystematically defined categories. To be perfectly consistent, a proponent of ESK structuralist theory might say that, like the avunculate (see below), swayamuura does not emerge in human societies, but is present initially. These issues can be backtracked t o Lthi-Strauss initial formulation of the atom of kinship, where he adroitly shifted from elementary families to the relations implicit in an avuncular (MB) relationship, in light of the brother-sister and parent-child incest taboo. He generalizes: In order for a kinship structure to exist, three types of family relations must always be present: . . . a relation of consanguinity, a relation of affinity and a relation of descent [ filiation]-in other words, a relation between siblings, a relation between spouses, and a relation between parent and child [Lhvi-Strauss 1967a:43]. And later: In human society a man must obtain a woman from another man who gives him a daughter or a sister [as refined in ESK, directly or indirectly, and categorically, not actually]. Thus we do not need to explain how the maternal uncle emerged in the kinship structure: He does not emerge-he is present initially. Indeed, the, presence of the maternal uncle is a necessary precondition for the structure to exist [Levi-Strauss 1967a: 44-45] . 8

By mismatching a theory of social cohesion to his cultural (Durkheimian) theory of marriage rules as codes to differentiate and interrelate social categories, L4vi-Strauss eliminated many interesting possibilities of his own atom of kinship, even at the diagrammatic level of

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idealized models. The positive alliance prescription joining category A through marriage to B logically rests not only on the axiomatic opposite-complement of denying marriage of A with A (i.e., incest) but also of denying marriage beyond the A-B social universe, that is denying individual marriage at this level. The defense that such an implied opposite-complement (individual marriage) cannot properly obtain at an elementary logic level, that this would be mixing real actors for idealized models, is merely a means of protecting the artifically isolated, axiomatically primary avunculate. We see this again in Gvi-Strauss position that the only recourse if the sibling is tabooed is the cross-relation; for this requires assuming that these consanguineous/affinal (A/B) categories are indivisible wholes, rather than seeing them as populated (divisible) categories. And it is precisely in systems where the blood sibling category might be tabooed but the so-called classificatory sibling (i.e., the parallel) category is not, that an alternative to the elementary logic of out-marriage is implicit from the start. In other words if the atom of kinship is consistently a model of ideal cultural categories, and not actual social groups, then implicit within that model is not only determining the descent category of sexually differentiated products of the original A/B categories, but also the social-unconscious flirtation with the possibility of marrying within one category (this much is granted in Lhi-Strauss notion of the irresistible appeal of social-incest) but across the multiple members of that category. The rationalist tabula rasa obscures both this point and the implicit, but tabooed, logical possibility of marrying-out of the system of organic solidarity altogether. To restate our argument in LBvi-Strauss axiomatic, avuncular sociologic: the atom of kinship assumes as its very first principle not the avunculate or cross-relation, but the Durkheimian oppositional identity of groups, i.e., social A/B descent categories cut across by the cross-relation, the affinity relation. This model disregards cases where the affinity relation does not cut across the descent-identity relationi.e., parallel cousin marriage systems. Moreover, if a tabula rasa can be populated with one set of idealized descent, affinity, and consanguineal relations, it can be populated with two or more sets. And then a logical alternative, given the prevalence of two necessarily interrelatable but distinct social categories (A/B) is an affinal relationship outside the A/B categories, an individualistic contract, not positively categorized from the A/B categories point of view, with other means of balancing or denying any exchange. If A/B is the social universe of organic solidarity, then it must be contrastable as a whole to not-A/B, and in not-A/B will be found the source of marriages not encompassed by positive prescription or prohibited by incest. Many societies build systems on this option, and it is unclear why these any less elementary than prescriptive systems given the many cultural devices for interrelating social categories other than marriage. In sum, we can salute the lasting contribution of ESK: a theory of the interrelation of the ideal systems produced by marrying different kinds of cross-cousins. Yet simulatneously we can reconsider assumptions that holistic systems of positively defined marriage categories are logically p r io r m or e elementary-than other systems, and reject any implications that swayamvara and individualized marriage unions in general are temporally secondary to more mechanistic exchange systems. Implicit in this conclusion is a rejection of R. Foxs claim that L-6vi-Strauss approach does enable us to put all kinship systems on one continuum and discuss them as variations on the alliance theme (1967:24). Patriparallel cousin marriage rules most effectively point up shortcomings in the alliance theme; as V. Dass has argued: the difference between the [Pakistani] systems I have been describing and systems of prescriptive alliance . . . cannot be expressed in terms of an opposition between parallel

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cousin marriage and cross-cousin marriage. The opposition is rather between systems that achieve exclusion of the group through marriage and systems that achieve alliance between groups through marriage [1973:42]. In such systems, ranging at least from Arabia to Bali, marriage does not ally anything or even distinguish new categories ideally to be perpetually married between in successive generations; rather it ideally closes a social unit in on itself. If one tries to salvage a functionalist cohesion basis for marriage by saying that patriparallel cousin unions cement factious agnates, then one implies a cultural principle beyond marriage that a certain social unit should be perpetuated. In that case marriage could be seen as an alliance between groups, only if the endogamous unit is hoisted to the analytic level occupied in ESK by society; but then we are forced t o see any non-endogamous unions as occurring between different societies, and the cohesion argument again falls apart. Thus the issue basically involves theoretical assumptions about bounded groups and societies. ESK assumes the existence of distinct societies internally differentiated and interrelated by marriage rules. More recent work even on cross-cousin marriage emphasizes how sets of kinsmen can effect a marriage priorly uncategorizable and thus articulate both a cross-relationship and the society within which the marriage rules subsequently apply (unless a new, undefined marriage is effected). In other words, actors in cross-cousin marriage systems might frequently shift their categorized affines, readjusting them after new actual marriages. This flexibility again challenges functionalist arguments of the actual social utility of different elementary systems. Apparently the creation of positively categorized alliance partners by extending properties of the avunculate relationship across generations occurs not just on the rarified tabula rasa of the atom of kinship but repeatedly through history. Different so-called societies can be articulated by mamage rules out of complicated social fields. Parts of ESK suggest this fact, but its secondary implications involving social cohesion obscure how even cross-cousin marriage rules might often be corrected to categorize fresh exchange partners which a generation before were not so categorized. Our alternative t o insisting that b y definition rules of marriage cohede groups (actually or ideally) is t o say marriage rules conceptually differentiate interrelatable social units or close one social unit in on itself in a field of units interrelated by some value other than marriage. The latter viewpoint would enable us to handle systems involving individualistic contracts and parallel cousins as readily as elementary structures.
CONCLUSIONS

M y fhologiques and other developments in anthropological studies of symbols and semiotica illustrate how domains of a cultural semantic field can be liberated from sociofunctional prerequisites and reveal an autonomous integrity analyzable in its own right. But, remaining now strictly within Levi-Strauss own work, Myfhologiques achieved this comparativist stance by not forcing tales of terminologies into pre-conceived analytic pigeonholes, whereas ESK assumed not only that certain varieties of kinship nomenclatures pertain essentially t o marriage rules, but that each such nomenclature can be isolated and analyzed as a closed set. Our point is merely that ESK proceeds as if kinship nomencIatures and marriage rules are normally directly interrelated in distinct societies and not, as in Myfhologiques, as if aspects of nomenclatures and images of rules might pertain more to a cross-societal corpus of categories, suggesting that groups have formulated their kinship not just according to the needs of concrete groups but according to semantic limits. Even if one granted kinship must display use-functions, that this is by definition the institutional nature of kinship-cum-marriage, LCvi-Strauss has precipitously excluded types of systems-parallel cousin endogamy, so-called complex systems-that do not fit with the

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theory of marriage as a social integrater of groups or part-groups. None of this is to imply that .kinship does not do something. But to assert merely that universally kinship cohedes all societies does not get us very far. Since some reduction and abstraction is necessary for comparison, it can be more interesting to compare the symbolic meanings of kinship than its use, for these vary widely but would seem to enjoy limiting principles. Given that all groups are not characterized by genealogy-based organization, given that real incest (i.e., biological near-consanguinal coitus) is practiced by many groups, given that many societies do marry relatively in, then every item on the kinship record (not just nomenclatures) should be approached as value, ideal, distinguishing cultuml feature articulating varying solidarities among classified actors-and not as a response to natural or social needs. This would bring a comparativist kinship study much closer to Mythologiques than ESK. ESK assumes everyone makes closed systems out of genealogically-defined people. In light of the subsequent development of Mythologiques, L6vi-Strauss might better have defined kinship as a subset of myth. Kinship interrelates diverse categories of enduringly solidary people, sometimes by descent, sometimes by marriage rules, sometimes by other symbolic devices. Myth remains the grander system schematizing the entire social and natural experience in light of other constraining schemes. In short, kinship studies might profit by joining Mythologiques in backing up to the question of what sort of analogical systems people make out of whatever they make them out of, instead of assuming they make them out of genealogical kin. In studies of myth the material of native classifications is not posited axiomatically, but is discoverable only be careful investigations of the mythic texts themselves. If each myth were analyzed as an either-or matrix, then each myth would automatically appear as a closed system, keyed directly to a socially useful moral, or representing the real experience (e.g., subsistence pattern) of the group, rather than as easily representing conceivable contrasting systems. L6vi-Strauss instead analyzes myths a s metadistinctive-feature-matrixes, claiming that this allows whatever system there might be to close itself, if and when it actually does so. In myth mans analogical capacity-his tendency to establish systems out of concrete signifiers-is portrayed as being dependent on its materials only insofar as it must have something (and it really seems anything would do) to work with. In light of evidence on adoption, ideal and actual incestuous relations, taboos on copulation and/or marriage based on decidedly un-genealogical considerations (e.g., teacherpupil), etc., we might relax our preconceptions as to the genealogical and social organizational nature of kinship data as well.
NOTES A preliminary version of part of this study was presented in the symposium on Dialectics in Structural Anthropology a t the 70th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New York, 1971. Our aim is not to review the extensive secondary literature on L6vi-Strauss, but to consider closely two internal variants of his own structuralism and to suggest the kinship/myth contrast as a focus for future theoretical discussions. To point up provisionally the genealogical bias in this position on marriage (i.e., the in-law bond) as the foundation of organic solidarity, one might ponder if a teacher-pupil relation marked by a taboo on sexual relations between the teacher-line and the pupil-line, with both the positive content of the relationship and the taboo perpetuated in succeeding generations (as in Hindu Bali; cf. Boon 1973) would not constitute a new plane of complementary functionally-efficacious organic solidarity by some means other than kinship as defined by marriage. Obviously use-function parallels social organization and algebraic-function parallels culture in the classic Rivers/Kroeber distinctions. But LBvi-Strauss usages are slightly more formalized. 4Savage thought is essentially analogical thought (LBvi-Strauss 1966).

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For a Mythologiques-oriented reconsideration of the whole of LBvi-Strauss ethnological program, see Boon (1972). His structuralism is discussed within the context of alternative anthropological approaches to symbols and classification systems in Boon ( 19763b ). Determining that John does not name a relative along with naming ego, does not alert us of the cultural possibility that John might implicitly refer to other cultural domains, e.g., Saints, and that one might find significantly more Johns with brothers named Matthew than with brothers names Myron. 7For a note on parallels in the way LBvi-Strauss conceptualizes Crow-Omaha kinship systems and a certain stage of breakdown in New World groups use of myths, see Boon (1970). Concerning the locus of models in ESK, when pushed by more empirical-minded critics such as Needham (1962) and Leach (1961), LBvi-Strauss has shifted his kinship models to their proper cultural level, but has left the vestigial social-cohesion arguments in the book. For a review of such issues, see Buchler and Selby (1968). The most recent empirical-minded denunciation of LBvi-Strauss is Korn (1973). 8LBvi-Strauss has recently (1973b:105) reaffirmed the atom of kinship as the quadrangle of relations between brother and sister, husband and wife, father and son, and maternal uncle and nephew . . . . He also points out the translation error that led Leach to accuse him of mistaking filiation for descent. Where we, following the English translation of Structural Anthropology, talk of the descent dimension of the atom of kinship we are merely refering to the verticle, opposite-complement of the alliance dimension, and we might as easily have used filiation, since descent and filiation cannot fully contrast within the logical limits of the atom. N. Yalman has argued the point in reconsidering the preferential-perscriptive debate and contrasting the nature of Kurdish patriparallel rules to Singhalese cross-cousin rules (1970 :614-615). For example, in so-called American Kinship terms are found domestic and religious fathers; figurative, in-lawed, blood, play, sentimental, and friendship aunts, etc. On this aspect of kinship nomenclature and why theories of metaphorical extension cannot adequately explain them (and for alternative ways of conceptualizing complex systems) see Schneider (1965a, l968,1969,1972a, 1972b). REFERENCES CITED Boon, James A. 1970 LBvi-Strauss and Narrative. Man 5:702-703. 1972 From Symbolism to Structuralism: LBvi-Strauss in a Literary Tradition. New York: Harper and Row. 1973a Dynastic Dynamics: Caste and Kinship in Bali Now. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago. 197313 Further Operations of Culture in Anthropology: A Synthesis of and for Debate. In The Idea of Culture in the Social Sciences. Louis Schneider and Charles Bonjean, Eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buchler, Ira R., and Henry A. Selby 1968 Kinship and Social Organization. New York: MacMillan. Das, Veena 1973 The Structure of Marriage Preferences: An Account from Pakistani Fiction. Man 8:30-45. Dumont, Louis 1970 Homo Hierarchicus: An Essay on the Caste System. Mark Sainsbury, trans. Chicaeo: Universitv of Chicaeo Press. Fox, Robin 1967 KinshiD and Marriaee. Baltimore: Peneuin Books. Korn, Francis 1973 Elementary Structures Reconsidered. Berkeley: University of California Press. Leach, Edmund 1961 Rethinking Anthropology. London: Athlone. LBvi-Strauss, Claude 1950 Introduction B loeuvre de Marcel Mauss. I n Sociologie et Anthropologie. Marcel Mauss. Pans: Presses Universitaires de France.
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1966 The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1967a Structural Anthropology. C. Jacobson and B. Grundfest Schoepf, trans. New York: Anchor Books. 1967b The Story of Asdiwal. In The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism. Edmund Leach, Ed. London: Tavistock. 1968 LOrigine des ManniGres de Table (Mythologiques 111). Paris: Plon. 1969 The Elementary Structures of Kinship. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, trans. Rodney Needham, Ed. Boston: Beacon Press. 1970 The Raw and the Cooked (Mythologiques I). John and Doreen Weightman, trans. New York: Harper Torchbooks. 1971a Interview of Claude L6vi-Strauss. Diacritics, Fall 1971. 1971b LHomme Nu. (Mythologiques IV).Paris: Plon. 1973a From Honey to Ashes (Mythologiques 11). John and Doreen Weightman, trans. New York: Harper and Row. 1973b Anthropologie Structurale Deux. Paris: Plon. Needham, Rodney 1962 Structure and Sentiment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schneider, David M. 1964 The Nature of Kinship. Man 217:180-181. 1965a American Kin Terms and Terms for Kinsmen: a Critique of Goodenoughs Componential Analysis of Yankee Kinship Terminology. In Formal Semantic Analysis. E. A. Hammel, Ed. American Anthropologist 67(5, pt. 2):288-308. 1965b Some Muddles in the Models: Or, How the System Really Works. In The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology. London: Tavistock. 1968 American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 1969 Kinship, Nationality and Religion. In Forms of Symbolic Action. V. Turner, Ed. Society. Proceedings of the 1969 Annual Sminp - - Meeting - of the American Ethnological pp. 116-1H5. 1972a What is Kinshiu All About? InKinshiu Studies in the Morean Centennial Year. P. Reining, Ed. Washiigton, DC: Anthropological Society of Washyngton. 1972b American Kin Categories. In Echanges et Communications. Jean Pouillon and Pierre Maranda, Eds. The Hague: Mouton. Yalman, Nur 1970 The Semantics of Kinship in South India and Ceylon. In Current Trends in Linguistics, Vol. 5: Linguistics in South Asia. Thomas A. Sebeok, Ed. The Hague: Mouton.