Early Human Kinship was Matrilineal
Knight, C. (2008). Early Human Kinship Was Matrilineal. In N. J. Allen, H. Callan, R. Dunbar and W. James (eds.), Early Human Kinship. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 61-82.
It is said that kinship is to anthropology ‘what logic is to philosophy or the nude is to art’ – it is ‘the basic discipline of the subject’ (Fox 1967: 10). To ask questions about early kinship is to return to many of the fundamental historical and philosophical issues out of which anthropology emerged.
Humans do not tamely accept the ‘facts’ of their biological relatedness. They collectively shape and reconstruct those facts. Following the philosopher John Searle (1996), let’s begin by drawing a distinction between ‘brute facts’ and ‘institutional facts’. Birth, sex and death are facts anyway, irrespective of what people think or believe. These, then, are brute facts. Descent group membership, marriage and property are facts only if people believe in them. Suspend the belief and the facts correspondingly dissolve. But although institutional facts rest on human belief, that doesn’t make them mere distortions or hallucinations. Take the fact that these two five-pound banknotes in my pocket are equal in value to one ten-pound note. That’s not merely my subjective belief: it’s an objective, indisputable fact. But now imagine a collapse of confidence in the currency. Suddenly, the realities in my pocket dissolve.
For scholars familiar with Rousseau, Marx or Durkheim, none of this is especially surprising or difficult to grasp. Some kinds of facts are natural. Others are ‘social’ or ‘institutional’. Since the inception of their discipline, however, anthropologists have been unable to apply such understandings to kinship. In Searle’s terms, they have argued over whether the facts of kinship are ‘brute’ or ‘institutional’.
What is it to be a ‘son’ or a ‘daughter’, a ‘mother’ or a ‘niece’? Taking careful notes among his Native American informants in 1846, Lewis Morgan (1871:3) discovered to his initial surprise that an Iroquois child had several ‘mothers’. Early in the twentieth century, Bronislaw Malinowski (1930) reacted against this idea, reshaping anthropology on the basis that it was patently absurd. No child could possibly have two mothers. Malinowski acknowledged that his Trobriand Island informants, like many other people, might systematically ‘distort’ the true facts of kinship. Two sisters, for example, might describe themselves as ‘mothers’ 61 to one another’s offspring, their children correspondingly addressing both as ‘mother’. However, Malinowski insisted that such notions were ideological fictions, not to be taken seriously. Correctly analysed, the facts of kinship would always turn out to be (a) biological and (b) individual.