The industrial or military applications of modern physics and chemistry have acquainted us with the notions of critical mass and critical temperature. They concern thresholds below or above which matter manifests properties that remain hidden under ordinary conditions. One might have believed these properties nonexistent, even inconceivable, before the thresholds were crossed.
Human societies too have their critical points, which they reach when the course of their existence is seriously disrupted. Suddenly, latent properties reveal themselves: sometimes they are vestiges of an ancient state that resurfaces after it was believed to have disappeared; sometimes they are still present but normally invisible, buried in the deepest part of the social structure. Often, in fact, they are both at once.
I was reflecting on these matters a few months ago while reading in the press the text of Earl Spencer’s speech at the funeral of his sister, Princess Diana. Most unexpectedly, his remarks revived the role of the maternal uncle. Some may have believed that, in the present state of society, this is merely one kinship relation among others to which no particular significance is attached. By contrast, in our society’s past and in the present of many exotic societies, the mother’s brother was or remains a key player in the familial and social structure. It seems quite a coincidence that Earl Spencer lives in South Africa, since a famous article by Radcliffe-Brown appeared in the
South African Journal of Science in 1924 bearing this title: “The Mother’s Brother in South Africa.” In it the author sheds light on the importance of that role. He was one of the first to seek to understand what its significance might be.
In the first place Earl Spencer, in imputing his sister’s misfortunes to her ex-husband and to the royal family as a whole, assumed the position of “wife-giver,” to use the jargon of ethnologists, who retains a right of access to his sister or daughter and can intervene if either he or she believes she is being mistreated. Above all, he affirms that between him and his nephews, his sister’s sons, a special bond exists that gives him the right and the duty to protect them from their father and the paternal lineage.
Such a structural role allotted to the maternal uncle is not recognized by contemporary society. It was so recognized in the Middle Ages, however, and may also have been in antiquity. In Greek, “uncle” is theīos (from which the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese terms zio and tio are derived), which is to say, “divine relation,” which would suggest that this relative held a place of choice in the family constellation. That place was so important in the Middle Ages that the plot of most of the chansons de geste turns on the relationship between the maternal uncle and his nephew(s). Roland is the uterine nephew of Charlemagne; Vivien, of William of Orange; Gautier, of Raoul de Cambrai; Perceval, of the Grail King; Gawain, of King Arthur; Tristan, of King Mark; Gamwell, of Robin Hood; and on and on. That kinship created bonds so strong that they overshadowed all others: The Song of Roland does not even mention the hero’s father.
The maternal uncle and the nephew assisted each other. The nephew received presents from his uncle; the uncle knighted him and sometimes even supplied him with a wife. The intensity of the feelings between them is expressed eloquently in the words attributed to Charlemagne in another chanson de geste,
L’entrée en Espagne (
Entry into Spain), when Roland leaves him to go into battle: “If I lose you / moaned the emperor, I will be all alone / Like a poor lady when she has lost her man.”
The relationship between uncle and nephew, it seems, is less apparent in Italian and Spanish chansons de geste than in French and Germanic ones. Perhaps that is because in the Germanic tradition it is situated within a larger institutional framework, called “fosterage” in English. The custom of fosterage, strictly observed in Ireland and Scotland, stipulated that the children of noble lineages be entrusted to another family, who reared them and saw to it that they were educated. As a result, the moral and sentimental bonds between these parties were stronger than those acknowledged within their birth families. The same custom also existed in continental Europe, at least in the form of so-called uncle fosterage. The noble child was entrusted to his mother’s family, generally represented by the maternal uncle, for whom the child occupied the position of nourri (literally, “nurtured one”), which he would thereafter retain. In Old French, the word nourri had a sense much broader than simply that of being fed.
These practices were once taken as evidence of an ancient predominance of maternal law and matrilineal filiation, which, however, is nowhere attested in ancient Europe. We now understand that, on the contrary, they are one effect among others of patrilineal filiation. It is precisely because the father holds familial authority that the maternal uncle, a true “male mother,” assumes the countervailing role. In a society of matrilineal filiation, conversely, the maternal uncle exerts familial authority and is feared and obeyed by his nephew. A correlation thus exists between the attitude toward the maternal uncle and that toward the father. In societies where the relationship between father and son is casual, that between uncle and nephew is strict; and where the father appears as the austere agent of familial authority, the uncle is treated with tenderness and liberty.
Countless societies throughout the world illustrate one or the other arrangement: filiation is transmitted either directly through the men, from father to son, or through the intermediary of women, from uncle to nephew. In both cases, the maternal uncle is part of a four-term system (along with his sister, her husband, and the children born of their union) that unites in the most economical way conceivable the three types of family relations necessary for a kinship structure to exist, namely, a relation of consanguinity, a relation of alliance, and a relation of filiation: in other words, a brother–sister relationship, a husband–wife relationship, and a parents–children relationship.
That structure has become nearly invisible, submerged in the complexity of modern societies, but it acquired new relevancy through Earl Spencer’s remarks. He defined flawlessly the internal relationships within a four-term familial system. His sister and he, he said, were united by a warmth and closeness dating back to their earliest childhood: “We spent such an enormous amount of time together—the two youngest in the family.”
1 Conversely, the relationship between the princess and her husband and his lineage was marked by “anguish…tearful despair.” And just as the relationship between brother and sister stands opposed to that between husband and wife, so too, in the earl’s speech, the relationship between uncle and nephews, to whom he pledges to give a kinder upbringing, [contrasts to that between father and sons.] That is, two sets of contrasting relationships, one positive, the other negative, correspond exactly within a structure that can rightly be considered the kinship atom since it is impossible to conceive of one more simple (though there are more complicated ones).
Contrary to what has long been believed, consanguinity is not the foundation of the family. Because of the prohibition of incest, which is practically universal though realized in many different forms, a man can obtain a woman only from another man, who gives his daughter or sister away. There is thus no need to explain how the maternal uncle makes his appearance within the kinship structure. He does not make an appearance, he is its condition, an immediate given within it.
That structure, still recognizable two or three centuries ago, disintegrated under the influence of the demographic, social, economic, and political changes that accompanied the industrial revolution, sometimes as causes, sometimes as effects. For us, unlike what occurs in societies without writing, kinship ties no longer exert a regulatory role over all social relations; the overall coherence of these relations depends on other factors.
The intense emotion stirred throughout the world by the death of Princess Diana is explained in great part by the fact that this tragedy placed her at the crossroads of major themes in folklore (the king’s son who marries a shepherdess, the evil stepmother) and religious themes (the sinner put to death who, by her sacrifice, takes on the sins of the newly converted). It is then easier to understand how the tragedy allowed other archaic structures to reappear. A maternal uncle was able to embrace a role that, in the past of our own societies, would have belonged to him and that still belongs to him in others, even though that role now lacks any legal or even customary foundation. “We, your blood family,” proclaims Earl Spencer, as if the rights over his nephews that he claims for himself had a basis in mores. “She would want us today to pledge ourselves to protecting her beloved boys William and Harry from a similar fate and I do this here Diana on your behalf…to continue the imaginative way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men.” In the name of what authority could he aspire to do so without resuscitating a kinship structure that used to predominate in human societies, that was believed to have disappeared from our own, and that, as a result of a crisis, has risen again to the actors’ consciousness?
The work of a young Chinese ethnologist trained in France has just introduced new documents regarding the preeminent place granted to the maternal uncle in certain exotic societies. An ethnic group along the border of China in the Himalayas possesses a familial and social system that is remarkable in every respect. Back in the thirteenth century, it sparked Marco Polo’s curiosity. The domestic cell—which we hardly dare call a family, so far removed is it from our usual notions—is composed of a brother, a sister, and her children. These children, who belong exclusively to the maternal lineage, are the fruit of sexual relations the woman is permitted to have with any man to whom she is not related (since the prohibition of incest applies here as elsewhere). These unions, though sometimes relatively long-lasting, are usually confined to furtive, short-lived visits. The woman may receive an unlimited number of these visits, to which the men dedicate themselves as soon as night has fallen. When a child is born, there is no way of knowing which of these occasional lovers is the father, and in fact, no one cares to know. The kinship terminology does not include any term to which the sense of “father” or “husband” could be attached.
2The author of these interesting observations believes, rather naively, that he has discovered a unique case that overturns all received ideas about the family, kinship, and marriage. That is a mistake in two respects. The Na represent a case, perhaps an extreme case, of a system for which other examples have long been known, especially in Nepal, southern India, and Africa. And such cases, far from demolishing received ideas, illustrate a familial structure that is simply a symmetrical and inverted image of our own.
These societies obliterate the category of husband, just as we ourselves have obliterated the category of maternal uncle (for which our kinship terminologies no longer have a distinct word). Not, of course, that in one or another of our families that uncle cannot occasionally play a role, but that role is not written into the system in advance. There is thus nothing surprising about a family that has no role for the husband; or at least, it is no more surprising than a family without a role anticipated for the maternal uncle, which seems natural to us. No one would claim that our own societies invalidate kinship and marriage theories. Nor does Na society. These are quite simply societies that do not grant, or no longer grant, a regulatory value to kinship and marriage but rather turn to other mechanisms to assure their functioning. Kinship and marriage systems do not possess the same importance in all cultures. In some, they provide the active principle that regulates social relations. In others, such as our own and no doubt that of the Na as well, that function is absent or very diminished.
The point of these reflections, which began with an event that a few months ago stunned the public imagination, is this: to better understand certain driving forces in the operation of societies, we cannot make use only of those that are the most remote from us in time or space.
For interpretations of ancient or recent customs whose meaning was no longer known, people used to turn almost automatically to ethnology, which viewed them as survivals or vestiges of a social state still present among “uncivilized” peoples. Contrary to that outmoded primitivism, we have come to realize that forms of social life and types of organization well attested in our history can in some circumstances become current once again and can cast a retrospective light on societies very remote from us in space or time. Between so-called complex or evolved societies and those wrongly called primitive or archaic, the distance is less great than some may have believed. The faraway illuminates the near, but the near can also illuminate the faraway.