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85 CHAPTER FOUR The Anthropological Case for the Integrative Model Peter Wood Every viable society nurtures its children. In virtually all cases, the preferred form of bringing a child into the world and raising it is to provide a child with an acknowledged mother and father. These fairly simple declarations have long been accepted fact among social scientists acquainted with the ethnographic record. Beginning in the 1980s, however, some anthropologists, influenced by postmodernism , began to express radical doubts about the very possibility of such generalization. Seemingly simple declarations can indeed be complicated: definitions of “father” and “mother” are far from uniform across cultures. But I intend here to offer the case that these declarations are indeed valid. The discipline of anthropology organized itself in the nineteenth century around the speculations of an American lawyer, Lewis Henry Morgan ; a British Quaker, Edward Tylor; and, later in the century, a British classicist, Sir James George Frazer. Morgan made some fundamental contributions , which I will have occasion to refer to later, but he was dreadfully wrong on a key point. He imagined that human society—“Ancient Society,” he called it1 —arose in stages from a period of ancient promiscuity . Over time this promiscuity was transformed into “group marriage” in which a group of brothers married a group of sisters, and the children that resulted were common to the whole group. Morgan’sgroupmarriagehypothesiswascontroversial.Amongsupporters were scholars who speculated a once-upon-a-time condition of primitive matriarchy.2 The theory ran that no one could be certain about paternity , but maternity was seldom in doubt, and thus supplied the basis of a stablesocialorder.Amongthecriticswerescholarswhoarguedthat,onthe contrary,primitivepatriarchymusthavebeentheprimalhumancondition.3 Anthropology eventually discarded this debate as both fruitless and wrongheaded. We have no decisive evidence about the family structures of our Pleistocene ancestors, nor any reason to think that they all conformed to a single social pattern. Yet this long-discarded scholarly debate 86 Peter Wood is not irrelevant to today’s debates over the meaning of marriage and parenthood . Parts of it were absorbed into the larger culture via such works as Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, and the theme of primitive matriarchy reemerged in the 1970s in a series of popular works that gave a patina of scholarship to what was essentially a feminist fantasy. Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade (1987) is an example of this genre.4 It would be hard to say how many Americans currently entertain the idea that, once upon a time, villages really did raise children under the peaceful cooperative supervision of a group of wise women, and this golden age only came to an end because men introduced war, bloodshed , competition, and hierarchy. Nothing that we actually know from archaeology, human biology, and ethnography supports this picture, but it nonetheless seeps into our public discussion of marriage and child rearing . Imagine a society free from the oppression of the concept of “father.” Imagine a world where raising children is the joyfully diffuse responsibility of a group. This imagining, it seems to me, lies behind much of the attempt to deny the plain fact that in virtually all societies the preferred form of bringing a child into the world and raising it is to provide a child with an acknowledged mother and father. The ghost of a long-discredited anthropological hypothesis thus strangely haunts our contemporary debates over the legal and moral status of marriage and children. Morgan, Tylor, Frazer, and other anthropologists who flourished during the epoch of anthropology’s formative period eventually faced a stern tribunal of a new generation of anthropologists. In that court they were found guilty of guessing about the past; building their theories out of bits and pieces of data gathered the whole world over with little attention to local context; and paying little attention to how human societies actually work. The criticisms were overstated, but they did usher in an age of more exacting standards of ethnographic reporting, and we owe to figures like W. H. R. Rivers and Bronislaw Malinowski in Britain and Franz Boas in the United States the emergence of this new, systematic inquiry.5 The results of the work they initiated are pretty much all we have to go on in answering the questions before us now, for, sad to say, their intellectual project was more or less terminated in the 1980s. The robust kind of ethnography that sought a systematic and holistic picture of individual societies is seldom pursued by today’s anthropologists...

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