Coming of Age in Samoa and Nebraska

Kinship and Civil Society

Theories about the origins of culture have never been very kind to women. In nineteenth-century, social-evolutionist accounts of the emergence of the civilizing institutions of family, clan, and property—in works like J. M. McLennan’s Primitive Marriage (1865) or Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877)—women appear, when they are lucky enough to escape female infanticide, as captured and raped wives, profane carriers of tabooed menstrual blood whose ejection from the primal horde instigated the earliest forms of exogamous kinship organization.¹ In Totem and Taboo (1989 [1913]), Freud extrapolated from the evolutionist ethnographic data on kinship a theory of the origins of civilization in which the struggle of the rebellious sons against the primal father for sexual access to the females of the horde reduced women to passive sexual tokens. Both the internal and external mechanisms in Freud’s account of the civilizing process—the superego and its first moral law, the incest taboo—are inventions of an exclusively male primordial psyche.

It was Gayle Rubin, in her influential essay “The Traffic in Women” (1975), who first identified in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss a similar emphasis on the violence against and pacification of women residing at the very root of culture; a similarity the more surprising when uncovered in the work of an anthropologist reputed to have occasioned a sharp break with both Victorian evolutionism and modern functionalism.² As Rubin explains it, Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the “exchange of women” in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1967) is the culmination of a century-long tradition of speculation about the originary links of kinship, culture, and patriarchy. Like Freud and Bronislaw Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss saw the working of the incest taboo in exogamy as the mechanism through which the transformation from nature to human culture could ultimately be explained; in his account, the function of the taboo is to institutionalize exchange-based relations between primitive clans. By denying men sexual access to women within their own group, the taboo compels them to enter into systems of wife exchange with other groups. “Kinship” is the form of organization that this exchange creates, and kinship, with its rules of identification, alliance, and reciprocal obligation, is the foundation of all social organization. As Rubin (1975, 174–76) puts it:

If [as Lévi-Strauss describes it] it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give and take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it…. And it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage. As long as the relations specify that men exchange women, it is men who are the beneficiaries of the product of such exchanges—social organization…. Since Lévi-Strauss argues that the incest taboo and the results of its application constitute the origin of culture, it can be deduced that the world historical defeat of women occurred with the origin of culture, and is a prerequisite of culture.

What Rubin discovered through her reading of the anthropological tradition was a misogyny so deeply entrenched in these immensely influential theories of culture that no amount of revision could recuperate them for a feminist theory of society. Strangely, though, this is what Rubin tries to do. Rubin knows that what Freud and Lévi-Strauss describe in their works cannot actually explain something so infinitely speculative and irretrievable as the origins of civilization or moral conscience. As she puts it at one point, the “‘exchange of women’ is neither a definition of culture nor a system in and of itself. The concept is an acute, but condensed, apprehension of certain aspects of the social relations of sex and gender.” And yet rather than critique Lévi-Strauss or suggest alternative groundings of social theory outside a kinship-as-origin-of...