Levi-Strauss_Marcus

Thus promoted to the rank of second nature, culture offers history a stage worthy of itself. By gluing together real interests and mythical pedigrees, it procures for the enterprises of the great a starting point endowed with absolute value.

-Claude Levi-Strauss, The Way of the Mask

Speaking on the idioms of relatedness by which notions of alliance and descent are variously construed, Claude Levi-Strauss expounds upon the vast potential of human cultures to forge new systems of meaning and belonging. Aside from his unfashionably functionalist slant and what may be a rather problematic demarcation of the ‘mythical’ and the ‘real,’ Levi-Strauss nevertheless expresses what is unquestionably an enduring—in fact, crucial—element of the anthropological investigation: the sheer wonderment and fascination at the manifold ways by which the world’s peoples sense and make sense of their lives. Indeed, I think it is safe to assume that despite some dramatic shifts in anthropological theory and methods since Levi-Strauss’ The Way of the Mask, studies of kinship retain this basic mission of unearthing the profound and complex ways by which taken-for-granted manners of being familial and familiar provide order and meaning to social life.

Notwithstanding the plurality of kinship configurations across the world—matrilineality and patrilineality, hypergomy and hypogamy, exogamy and endogamy, matrilocality and patrilocality—the work of comparative anthropology reveals some striking parallels that can just as easily challenge existing models of relatedness as they can forge new ones. One particularly salient example of such a ‘category-confounder’ was Levi-Strauss’ societes a maison, ‘House societies,’ the elaboration of his theory of alliance that had already been revolutionizing the anthropological study of kinship (previously dominated by theories of descent). Levi-Strauss posited ‘the House’ as an underlying unit of social organization in societies between the kin-based and class-based levels of social evolution. The most significant feature of the House is its hybridity, combining and negotiating otherwise oppositional poles of kinship for the economic and political expediency of its namesakes and residents. That is, rather than being mutually exclusive, the rules of matrilineality and patrilineality, hypergamy and hypogamy, alliance and descent, exogamy and endogamy, and heredity and election, are united and made substitutable in the House for the convenience of the household. The House is legitimized through the idiom of kinship, ensuring its perpetuity through the continuous transmission of wealth, names, and privileges down a real or “mythical” line of descent.

The power of Levi-Strauss’s House theory lies in that fact that it set the precedent for anthropological attention to the dynamic processes of corporation and cohabitation where strict lineage theory had previously presided. Thus, it provided the framework through which to analyze societies whose systems of relatedness could not be reduced to descent. It is a fascinating irony to note that by proposing a new category for kinship, Levi-Strauss opened up a space for analyzing the more intimate intricacies of lived, household dynamics of alliance beyond functionalist and formalist categorization itself. For our purposes of studying the household, it provides an critical model for how households remain socially salient despite the ambiguities and vicissitudes of such constituent factors as household composition and the configuration of kinship, the questions we have been raising of how you can have a family household if its members do not necessarily live together continuously and are not necessarily "related."