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The article revisits the old controversy concerning the relation of the mother's brother and sister's son in patrilineal societies in the light both of anthropological criticisms of the very notion of kinship and of evolutionary and epidemiological approaches to culture. It argues that the ritualized patterns of behavior that had been discussed by Radcliffe-Brown, Goody and others are to be explained in terms of the interaction of a variety of factors, some local and historical, others pertaining to general human dispositions. In particular, an evolved disposition to favor relatives can contribute to the development and stabilization of these behaviors, not by directly generating them, but by making them particularly "catchy" and resilient. In this way, it is possible to recognize both that cultural representations and practices are specific to a community at a time in its history (rather than mere tokens of a general type), and that they are, in essential respects, grounded in the common evolved psychology of human beings. One of the most discussed topics in the history of anthropology has been the significance of the relationship between mother's brother and sister's son in patrilineal societies. However, the subject seems to have entirely faded from the hot topics of the discipline since the sixties. We believe that, in reviewing this academic story of strange excitement and then total neglect, we can understand both some of the fundamental epistemological problems of anthropology and suggest some of the ways new approaches might throw light on questions which have been more often abandoned rather than resolved. The history of the mother's brother controversy. The behavior, which had so intrigued anthropologists, was involved with the rights, recognized in many unrelated patrilineal societies, of male members of the junior generation over the property and even the person and wives of senior male members of their mother's lineage, typically the mother's brother.(note 1) The example which came to be most discussed was that of the BaThonga of Southern Africa because of the particularly full and surprising description of the customs involved given by Junod, an early missionary ethnographer, in a famous book published in 1912 (Junod 1912). There the relation primarily concerned the right of mutual insult between the sister's son and the mother's brother as well as his wives and unclear claims to the property of the mother's brother by the sister's son. The tolerated violence of the behavior, as well as the sexual overtones, contributed to the fascination with the custom and probably titillated the various scholars who have discussed the subject. But it was not so much this one example which interested scholars, but the conviction that they were dealing with a peculiar relationship which occurred again and again in many totally unrelated societies, something which was all the more unexpected as it contradicted patrilineal organizational principles-since mother's brother and sister's sons usually must belong to different lineages-, and the respect usually accorded to senior generations. Examples of this peculiar relationship were thought to have been found among Australian Aborigines, in Amazonia, southern Europe, Oceania, India, not to mention other parts of Africa. Even today recent ethnographers have been struck, again and again, by the prominence accorded to this relationship by the people they have studied in many different places, for example: Northern India (Jamous 1991), Amazonia (Viveiros de Castro 1992), and Melanesia (Gillison, 1993). But this apparent recurrence itself raises a problem, a problem that is central to the argument of this . The various manifestations which so many anthropologists have recognized as different instances of the peculiar mother's brother/ sister's son relationship are clearly cognate and it is an interesting fact that, in many places in the world, people consider the relationship between mother's brother and sister's son as very special and very interesting, but these cases also turn out, on closer examination, to be very varied: sometimes involving symmetrical joking, sometimes asymmetrical joking, sometimes avoidance, sometimes significant economic privileges, sometimes sexual rights, sometimes only ritual manifestations, and, furthermore, while in some cases it is actual mother's brothers and sister's sons who have he rights in question sometimes the relation involves wide classificatory groups. The variation is in fact so great that it becomes very difficult to say exactly what thing it is which the various examples share, and this inevitably has made many wonder whether the many scholars who have turned their attention to the question have not been dealing with a non existent category. At first, anthropologists assuming a universal history to humankind along a single evolutionary path, as well as, implicitly, a universal cognitive representation of filiation and marriage, saw in such practices as the aggressive rights of the sister's son over his mother's brother's property a survival of mother right and the proof of the existence of an earlier matrilineal state (Rivers 1914). The explanation of the sister's son's privilege in terms of this alleged matrilineal stage was then famously dismissed by Radcliffe-Brown who, using his refutation to demonstrate the character of structural-functional accounts, supplied a synchronic explanation for the practice (Radcliffe-Brown 1924). Thus the controversy over the mother's brother could not have been more central in the short history of social anthropological theory and the success of Radcliffe-Brown's argument was a key element in the gradual marginalization of notions of evolution from the mainstreams of the subject. Radcliffe-Brown's explanation was, at first, mainly in terms of the "extension of sentiment" hypothesis. More particularly he argued that the sentiments of a child towards its mother were extended to the mother's family, thus the mother's brother was a kind of male mother who acted accordingly in a maternal fashion and so gave gifts to his sister's son. More important, however, was the argument that such customs could only be understood in terms of their function as part of the total social structure. Radcliffe-Brown's argument, therefore, not only went against evolutionism but also was to be a dramatic demonstration of the value of what has come to be known as structural-functionalism. For Radcliffe-Brown, therefore, the idea of an identical and single history of humankind was abandoned but a universalistic element remained in that he assumed a universal cognitive basis for the representation of kinship, mothers were always mothers and patriliny's attempt to underplay this caused problems which had to be resolved by strange customs. Furthermore, because of the commonality of the fundamental building blocks of kinship systems, large-scale comparisons could be made between societies, which were to be the foundations of the new "natural science of society". In turn, Radcliffe-Brown was criticized by Fortes and then by Goody who, while retaining the fundamental principle of a synchronic explanation in terms of a systematic social structure, criticized Radcliffe Brown's explanation for being over general, since it would predict a much greater degree of universality and uniformity than the evidence warranted. Goody's criticism takes the form of noting that, although the sentiments of children towards their mother's were everywhere the same, the specific practice in question was only found in certain societies with patrilineal descent groups without the counter balance of matrilineal inheritance and that any explanation must be tied to the occurrence of this type of group. Furthermore, and here following the later Radcliffe-Brown, he specifies the character of the institution much more narrowly than the earlier evolutionist writers, insisting on the element of privileged aggression in the snatching of property by the sister's son in ritual contexts. This strange custom he, like Fortes, explains in terms of the contradiction between what he argues is a universally bilateral kinship system and the occasionally occurring unilineal descent system. Sister's sons are grandchildren of their mother's father in the kinship system and are therefore their heirs while, in the descent system, they are in no way their successors, since descent only goes in the patrilineal line. This contradiction is resolved by the tolerated snatching of meat by the sister's son at the sacrifices of his mother's brother because, in this way, he recuperates some of his grandparental inheritance from the son of his maternal grandparents who has obtained (abusively in terms of the kinship system, but legitimately in terms of the descent system) all the inheritance coming from his maternal grandfather. This argument is clinched by a comparison of two closely related groups who vary in their property system and where the degree of inheritance "deprivation" of the sister's son correlates with the degree of snatching. This piece of work is a particularly fine example of the structural-functional analyses of its time. It assumes, with a characteristically confident tone, that the comparison of the social structure of different societies will reveal recurring connections between different features, which, it could then be assumed, had a form of synchronic causal relationship between them. This sort of comparison also implied a belief that the basic institutions of societies were everywhere of much the same kind, that they were represented in much the same way, that we knew that there were men and women in all human societies, that there was marriage and that there was filiation. According to this way of thinking, patriliny is a particular perspective put on the universally recognized facts of procreation. The belief in the universality of the basic representations of kinship of Radcliffe-Brown is thus modified but not abandoned since these representations, when they occur, are about natural, objective facts that exist independently of actors' representations. Furthermore, the emotional reaction to a certain state of affairs, in this case ambiguity over filiation, is assumed to be basically the same for all humans irrespective of culture and to produce, therefore, similar behaviors in similar circumstances. These different but related assumptions of a common ground is what made the use of comparison as a discovery procedure possible. Variations were significant because it could be assumed that they occurred within the same natural field consisting of identifiable elements, thus the general principles of Radcliffe-Brown's natural comparative science of society remained possible. This identity of the basic building blocks of kinship systems is precisely what came under challenge in the subsequent developments of the subject. The first clearly expressed formulation of the coming epistemological shift is to be found in Leach's 1955 on marriage (Leach 1955). This shift was emphatically repeated and expanded in the introduction by Needham to the ASA volume Rethinking Kinship and Marriage (Needham 1971). The basis of their arguments was that marriage or kinship, as understood by social and cultural anthropologists were not externally existing phenomena, but were merely glosses for loosely similar notions found in different cultures. As Needham put it, there was no such thing as kinship. Subsequently, in a more empirical mood, Schneider attempted to demonstrate that Austronesian kinship was a fundamentally different phenomenon to European notions of kinship and, aiming at understanding the former with the words appropriate for the latter, was a source of confusion (Schneider 1984). Thus, generalizing comparisons of kinship systems were not possible since they did not involve, as was previously assumed, comparisons of like with like. Similar in inspiration but even more startling-though to many less convincing in its extreme forms-was the point made by a number of feminists that there were no such things as women and men beyond a specific cultural context. Explicitly drawing on Schneider's critique of kinship, Yanagisako and Collier argued that the differentiation between female and male, that anthropologists had incorporated in their analyses, was a "cultural construction" and was of a quite different order than any sexual difference between organisms that might exist in nature (Collier and Yanagisako 1987). These anti nave empiricist points had two consequences for the kind of argument Radcliffe-Brown, Fortes, and Goody had presented. First of all, as was noted above, it could be argued that the grand comparisons of structural functionalism involved operations like adding apples and pears and, secondly, the social units, such as lineages for example were not similar "natural things" occurring in different societies but different and unique historical/cultural representations constructed in different settings and therefore incommensurable (see Kuper 1982). The only reason, according to these writers, why kinship had seemed so similar among different human groups across the globe was because of an ethnocentric tendency to see similarities and forget differences. Finally, the last universalistic element in the Goody argument, the similarity of behavioral response in all humans to similar situations also came under attack by anthropologists who claimed that emotions too were culturally constructed (Rosaldo 1980) and could therefore not be intuited from introspective sympathy. The implication of all this for the type of comparative enterprise that Goody and others had been engaged in seemed clear: it made it impossible. It led, if not necessarily, at least quite directly to the deep relativism of much modern anthropology. The systematic comparison, which for the structural-functionalists was to be a first step towards scientific generalizations, became clearly illegitimate if there could be no assurance that the units of analyses were commensurate. Those who studied kinship had deluded themselves that they had been dealing with biological facts, which it would be reasonable to assume would be severely constrained by nature and therefore comparable, while in reality they had been dealing with representations which, it was implicitly assumed, were the product of unique histories and therefore could take any and every form. In the case of the particular example of the mother's brother controversy the recurrence of the institution which had intrigued the earlier writers was a mirage. Every case was different and the very terms of the relationship: mother, brother, sister and son did not indicate the same kind of thing in different cultural contexts. Thus as Structural-functionalism was successful in dealing the first blow against anthropology as a natural science, the culturalist attack on structural functionalism seemed to have destroyed any hope of attempts at generalization. We had been left with nothing but anecdotes about the infinity of specific situations in which human beings find themselves. The theoretical history we have just told can be seen as unidirectional, it is the history of the gradual abandonment in the belief in the possibility of anthropology as a generalizing science. It assumes that because human beings have the ability of transmitting information between individuals through symbolic communication, this frees them totally from any natural constrains and makes them essentially different from other animals, who can only transmit most, if not all, information genetically. Animals must wait for changes in their genomes for becoming different. Humans, on the other hand, change with their representations. The existence of these representations is made possible by the learning and computational potential of the human brain, but their contents, it is implicitly assumed, are not at all constrained or even influenced by genetically inherited brain "hardware". These contents are determined, rather, by historico-cultural processes. Human history is therefore liberated from biology and people may represent the world and each other as they please. The belief in the need for cross-cultural regularities resisting historical specificity becomes simply wrong: the product of a category mistake. The extension of the aims of natural science to the study of culture and society would be like studying smells with rulers. The aim of this is not to deny the validity of, at least, some of the criticisms of earlier anthropological approaches which have just been touched on. Indeed we recognize the relevance of their arguments and there is no doubt that the whole enterprise of the Radcliffe-Brownian structural-functional analysis rested in part on the dubious foundations of misplaced nave realism. We agree with Leach, Needham, and Schneider that phenomena, described by anthropologists under the label of kinship, are cultural, and therefore historical constructions and that people's thoughts and actions are about these constructions rather than about unmediated facts of biological kinship. The implicit argument, which would see representations of kinship, marriage and gender as merely, the inevitable recognition of "how things are" will not do. We will argue, however, that this does not mean that the attempt to invoke natural factors, or even biological factors, as explanations of such cultural representations must be abandoned as though these representations and the people who hold them have, somehow, floated free from the earth onto the immaterial clouds of history. Anti-realism too can be utterly nave. We choose the example of the mother's brother/sister's son relationship in patrilineal societies to demonstrate our argument, simply because it has been so critical in the history of the subject and we try to show that it is possible to envisage, in a case such as this, an approach which combines the particular with the general, even though, we must recognize that the actual carrying out of such a study lies beyond what we can and do do here. The abandonment of over-powerful theories in anthropology came, in the first place, from the realization that the implicit and explicit cultural "universals" of traditional anthropology were not as uniform as they had been assumed to be. But anthropologists who seem to argue for a radically relativistic constructivism, often seem to lack confidence in their own arguments. Their reasoning has taken them to a point that negates what all those with a reasonable acquaintance of the ethnographic record know. This is that the regularities, which have fascinated the subject since its inception, are surprisingly evident. Thus, it is a common experience for younger anthropologists, reared on the diet of relativism which the studies mentioned above exemplify, to be shocked by discovering the old chestnuts of traditional anthropology in their field work, just when they had been convinced that these were merely antique illusions. (note 2) The dilemma that this particular history reveals is, in fact, typical of the subject matter of anthropology as a whole. What happens is that, first of all, some cross-cultural regularities are recognized: the incest taboo, for example. These lead to quick explanations in terms of the evolution of culture, their "functions", either for society as a whole, or for individual well being, or for reproductive success. These explanations are then shown to be based on a gross exaggeration of the unity of the phenomena to be explained. Then explanation is abandoned altogether and declared impossible, leaving anthropologists, and even more the wider public with the feeling, that the original question has been more evaded than faced. In this way is the very idea of the possibility of anthropology destroyed.() 网站原创范文除特殊说明外一切图文作品权归所有；未经官方授权谢绝任何用途转载或刊发于媒体。如发生侵犯作品权现象，英语论文题目，保留一切法学追诉权。() 更多范文欢迎访问我们主页 当然有需求可以和我们 联系交流。-X()，英语论文范文 |
