Revisiting Matrilineal Priority
Knight, C. (2007). Revisiting Matrilineal Priority. In J. Lasségue (ed), Émergence et évolution de la parenté. Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm/Presses de l’École normale supérieure, pp. 25-43.
Nineteenth century anthropologists widely agreed that early human society was not based on the nuclear family. Lewis Henry Morgan instead championed the matrilineal clan as the first stable institutional framework for human family life. In this, he was supported by theorists who later came to include E. B. Tylor, Friedrich Engels, W. H. R. Rivers, Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud. Until the 1920s, most anthropologists still accepted a ‘stages’ view of the evolution of kinship, in which matrilineal descent systems universally preceded their patrilineal counterparts.
When Morgan’s evolutionist schema was discredited early in the twentieth century, it was largely on the basis of two interventions. First, Franz Boas claimed to have discovered a Vancouver Island tribe (the Kwakiutl) in the throes of transition from patrilineal to matrilineal descent, reversing Morgan’s supposedly universal sequence. Second, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown offered an explanation of the ‘avunculate’ in terms of universal psychological and sociological principles, claiming that the ‘matrilineal survival’ interpretation of this peculiarity of kinship could therefore be dispensed with.
In this article, I make no attempt to return to the debate or adjudicate on the substantive issues involved. My more modest aim is to recall key features of the debate, highlighting the motivations and agendas involved at the time.
If there is one thing on which all schools of social anthropology are agreed, it is that the nineteenth century ‘mother-right’ theory of early kinship is of no more than historical interest. Of all the theoretical conquests achieved by Boas, Kroeber, Lowie, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown and their allies during the first decades of the twentieth century, the overthrow of the Bachofen-Morgan evolutionary scheme has appeared the most secure. To the extent that twentieth century social anthropology solved the problems it set out to address, those responsible for this paradigm shift must posthumously be accorded full credit. Should we conclude, however, that twentieth century social anthropology stumbled from crisis to crisis, solving not one of the most basic problems facing it, then a search for the roots of our crisis might return us to that decisive moment in the history of our discipline.