Elementary structures of kinship

Abstract

What is the basis of society: the social contract or kinship? Adam Kuper begins his classic, The invention of primitive society (1988: 17–41), with this problem, as seen through Henry Sumner Maine's Ancient law (1913 [1861]). Maine championed kinship over the social contract, and the reversal of the previous dominance of the social contract marked the beginnings of social anthropology. It also marked the rise of kinship as the key area in which much in anthropological theory – whether evolutionist, functionalist, structuralist, relativist or interpretivist – would be tried out, before being passed on into other areas: totemism, mythology, and so on. The notion of a ‘social contract’, people agreeing collectively to give up their individual freedoms in exchange for mutual protection, had been central to Thomas Hobbes's argument in Leviathan (1996 [1651]). For Hobbes, living sociably and living under the authority of a state were much the same thing, and they were not natural for humans. Society is not the natural condition of humankind because it was invented. Humans are not social in what he calls ‘the state of nature’. Rather, humans become sociable individually thorough training, and collectively through a social contract and submission to social and state authority. Later in the seventeenth century, Sir Robert Filmer attacked Hobbes's ideas on the social contract and argued instead that the state should be seen as a kind of family, with the king as ‘father-figure’.

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