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 --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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