lecture

kinship & evolutionary anthropology

• beyond Hobbes and Locke

• Maine (1861): the idea of the social contract is a fiction

  • society is based in the family and in kinship groups built upon family (Roman law)

• Morgan (1871): the Iroquois and kinship systems

kinship & system of systems 

• Levi Strauss 1949

• kinship as the foundation of society

• an entry point into cultures’ and people’s systems of abstraction

lineage as a system of exploitation

• women:

  • imposed marriage

  • dispossessed of their children

  • only independent after menopause

• juniors:

  • cannot freely choose their wives

  • dispossessed of the product of their labour

  • yet, going to become elders