In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Next of Kin
  • Gerard J. van den Broek (bio)
Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: http://www.hup.harvard.edu. 422 pages; cloth, $29.95.

North American and European family values have become virtually dominant throughout the world. The ordinary modern family consists of a heterosexual couple with two or three children, preferably of both sexes. According to conventional—and these days politically correct even—wisdom, only under these circumstances can children grow into mentally healthy persons, because they grow up in a stable and loving environment, in which the parents cater to all the needs children have until they leave home and start their own families. Society and the church, even science and politics have advocated Christian values for centuries, in which the family was and still is seen as the cornerstone of society.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy tries to demonstrate that there are other family structures in which equally warm and compassionate surroundings may be realized. In doing so, she applies "modern" evolutionary theory. In this way, she is able to demonstrate that sharing—food, care—is not restricted just to humans, but can be found among many other species as well, and even creatures with small brain sizes may show something like emotional care and protection of their young. At the same time, Hrdy tries to make plausible—and it might be said that she succeeds—that love and understanding are not exclusively restricted to the mother/child relationship, but that there are definitely other individuals—so-called alloparents—who take care of the young within the social group. Hrdy claims that human mutual understanding began with emotion. Is that not exactly what Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed when he spoke of cris de la nature and cris de la passion?

Even a quick survey of the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) shows that there are so many more ways to raise a family and to construct a kinship system than just the one preferred by our society. And fortunately Hrdy indeed treats the difference between the nuclear and the extended family. However, like many other authors, Hrdy is not very clear about the concept of the "extended family." She claims that even in our society the extended family can be found frequently as a form of family organization, but this definitely does not make it a typical trait of our culture. Surely, there are many households that comprise more than two spouses and their children, but that does not make the extended family the culturally preferred or dominant one. Until the early twentieth century, many households, even in urban settings, consisted of more people than just two parents and their children. It was not uncommon at all to take care of your aging parents, or an elderly unmarried uncle or aunt even. It is a logical consequence of this type of households, of course, that more actors than the biological parents are bringing up the children.

As early as 1945 (and therefore well before the breakthrough of his Les structures élémentaire de la parenté [The Elementary Structure of Kinship] in 1949), the French anthropologist and philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote an influential article against the famous English anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and the majority of his fellow ethnologists, in which he demonstrated that the structure of kinship (parenté) could never be constructed on the basis of the biological family, consisting of a father, a mother, and their children, but that it always implies a relationship based on alliance. The atom of kinship, according to Lévi-Strauss, is the quadrangular system of relationships between brother and sister, father and son, husband and wife, and between maternal uncle and nephew. This is the simplest conceivable structure that anthropologists sometimes even observe in reality. In many systems, the relationship between two individuals is expressed by not just one but various attitudes. Among the Lambumbu in Malekula (Vanuatu/New Hebrides), for instance, there is a very special relationship between brother and sister and between husband and wife. The first is characterized by a particularly reserved attitude towards each other up to the point that brother and...

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