File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9705, message 142


Date: Fri, 30 May 1997 22:49:39 -0400 (EDT)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: Re: Resistance and stratification among house-based societies




For Marxist anthropologists, Levi-Strauss's paradigm of the "house society"
has been one of the most stimulating and provocative to emerge in recent
years (cf, M Bloch, "The Resurrection of the House Amongst the Zafimaniry of
Madagascar," in Carsten and Hugh-Jones, eds., *About the house: Levi-Strauss
and Beyond* [Cambridge, 1995: Cambridge University Press], pp. 69 - 83).  
This is all the more surprising given the brief, almost cursory treatment of
so novel an idea.  In *The Way of the Masks* (1983), he compares the
Kwakiutl *numayma* to the noble houses of feudal Europe, while merely
hinting that the category of "house societies" might be extended to include
Ancient Greece, feudal Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Melanesia and
Polynesia.  His recent work is scarcely more illuminating (cf. *Anthropology
& Myth* [1987]) and has fueled continuing debate about the applicability of
his model to questions of resistance and stratification in developing
societies, which have of late engaged the attention of Marxist-influenced
anthropologists like Janet Carsten and Susan McKinnon (see, especially, the
latter's *From a Shattered Sun: Hierarchy, gender and alliance in the
Tanimbar Islands* [Madison, 1991: University of Wisconsin Press]).

The relatively new focus on the interrelations between buildings, people and
ideas, the different ways in which houses come to stand for social groups
and represent the world around them, may offer a clue in our own debates
about the potential for resistance and revolution prevailing in this or that
class or group within our own culture.  Places in which the to and fro of
life unfolds, built, modified, moved or abandoned in accord with the
changing circumstances of their inhabitants, houses have dynamic,
processional characteristics enscapsulated in the word "dwelling".  

Intimately linked both physically and conceptually, the body and the house
are the loci for dense webs of signification and affect and serve as basic
cognitive models used to structure, think and experience the world.  This in
turn suggests a homology between the relations body: house: landscape, and
organism: dwelling: environment.  The former set emphasizes form, the latter
function.  Levi-Strauss himself cites the elaborate architectural
constructions of the Indonesian Batak and Atoni to illustrate his argument
that the house is an example of Marx's notion of fetishism.  The varying
forms of resistance to capital that mark different classes and groups in
both capitalist and pre-capitalist societies confirm Levi-Strauss's
contention that complex structures develop out of elementary ones.

This is a key feature of Levi-Strauss's house-based societies: they
constitute a hybrid, transitional form between kin-based and class-based
social orders, "a type of social structure hitherto associated with complex
societies [but] also to be found in non-literate societies".  More
significantly, the concept of the "house" blurs the oppositions - unilineal,
cognatic, alliance, descent -- which anthropologists have used to classify
forms of social organization.  In the house, Levi-Strauss suggests, we may
discover a new social type to deal with societies which are neither
lineage-based nor organized around clearly defined marriage rules.
Post-colonial African societies, for example, once explained in terms of
descent and lineages might now be fruitfully analyzed in terms of their
houses ("Maison", in Bonte and Izard, eds., *Dictionnaire de l'ethnologie et
de l'anthropologie* Paris, 1991: Presses Universitaires de France).

Levi-Strauss's idea that the development of class, capital and kingdoms all
represent a progressive invasion and erosion of the "old ties of blood" is
realized in his concept of "house societies" and their transitional role
between pre-capitalist and capitalist cultures.  His concepts are of special
interest as we move toward post-capitalism and the new social and political
relations that this entails.  The relations between house, hierarchy,
stability, on the one hand, and dwelling, mobility, resistance, fluidity and
revolution on the other, is one I would like to explore further on
marxism-and-sciences.

Louis Godena   



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