Applying the theory to the mother brother/sister's son relation--论文代写范文精选

Abstract
Underlying the theories of the structural functionalists concerning the mother's brother/ sister's son relation in patrilineal societies is the assumption that all human beings really reckon kinship bilaterally. This makes the occurrence of unilineal rules to form descent groups something which somehow "goes against nature". Thus Fortes (Fortes 1969) contrasted, on the one hand, the domestic domain where relations were governed by biology and natural emotions, and, on the other hand, the lineage domain which was constrained by politico-jural considerations which conflicted with this biology. For him, therefore, the claims of the sister's son were a kind of reassertion of underlying bilaterally. Goody, although distancing himself somewhat from the Fortesian formulation, seems to imply something similar in that the reason why the sister's son is being "cheated" from his inheritance by the patrilineal rule is because in reality, he, like the maternal uncle's children, is a true descendant of his mother's parents. The objection to Fortes's and Goody's position, however, has been, as we saw, that they seemed to assume that people act in relation to genetic relations, rather than in terms of a very different thing, their representation of socially specified relations. But what if there was some indirect causal link between the social representations and genetic relations? Then the accusation of nave empiricism might fall away and the Fortes/Goody argument might be partly reinstated. How this might be possible is what much of the rest of this paper is about.

We begin by noting that support for the structural functionalist's assumption of the universal bilaterality of kinship seems to come from an unexpected source. This is Hamilton's neo-Darwinian explanation of kin altruism, and its development in sociobiological theory (Hamilton 1964). However, this kind of theory has been rejected out of hand by most social and cultural anthropologists (e.g. Sahlins 1976). It is necessary to briefly outline the theory of kin altruism and why it has been rejected to see if, after all, it might not be used legitimately in favor of the kind of argument implicit in the writings of Goody and Fortes.

The by now familiar kin altruism argument can be summarized as follows. Genealogical relationships in the strict biological sense exist among all organisms including humans. The transmission of heritable biological traits through genealogical relationships is what makes natural selection possible. Natural selection favors genes which have the effect, given the environment, of rendering more probable more replications of themselves in future generations. This includes genes that promote the reproduction of the organism in which they are located, genes that promote behaviors favorable to the survival and reproduction of descendants of the organism in which they are located, and also-and this is fundamental to the Hamilton thesis-genes that promote survival and reproduction in yet other organisms which, being genealogically related, are likely to carry copies of the same genes. A gene causing an organism to pay a cost, or even to sacrifice itself for the benefit of its lateral kin may thereby increase the number of copies of itself in the next generation, not through the descendants of the cost-paying or self-sacrificing organism (which may thereby loose its chance of reproducing at all), but through the descendants of the "altruistic" organism's kin who are likely to carry the very same gene.

The potential contribution of "kin altruism" to what is known as "inclusive fitness" favors the emergence of a disposition to helpful behavior adjusted to the genealogical distance between the altruist and the beneficiary. For such a disposition to exert itself, the organism must have the possibility of discriminating kin from non-kin, and among kin, degrees of relatedness. This does not mean, of course, that the organism must have the conceptual resources to represent genealogical relatedness and its degrees precisely and as such. What it means is that, if the ecology is such that degree of relatedness can, at least roughly, be discriminated thanks to some simple criterion such as smell, appearance, or habitat, then a disposition exploiting this possibility may be selected for.

The importance of the theory of kin altruism for evolutionary biology and for the sociobiological study of animal behavior is not in dispute. But what are its consequences, if any, for the study of human behavior? At first sight, this theory transposed directly to humans, would predict that the requirements of this altruism should, in humans, favor an instinctually based universal bilateral recognition of kinship. This would give a priori support for the structural functionalist's assumption. Here, however, is where the objections of most anthropologists come in.

These objections are fundamentally two. One, the great variability in kinship systems throughout the globe seems unaccountable in terms of panhuman characteristics. Secondly, humans live in the world via their representations, and how you get from genes to representations or norms is just not thought through in the sociobiological literature (which has been criticized precisely on this ground by evolutionary psychologists; see Tooby & Cosmides 1992).

The first objection means that the explanation in terms of genes is far too direct. One should note however that the sociobiological position not only is compatible with the recognition of some degree of variability, but also purports to explain it. The expression of genes is always contingent on environmental factors, and it may be part of the contribution of a gene to the fitness of the organism that it has different phenotypic expressions in different environments. For instance, the sex of many reptiles is determined not directly by their genes, but by the temperature at which eggs are incubated, females developing better, it seems, and being more often born in a warmer environment, and male in a colder one (Shine, Elphick, & Harlow 1995).

Closer to our present concern, Alexander (1979) offers an explanation of both matrilineal inheritance and sister's son rights in patrilineal societies in terms of uncertainty of paternity. An evolved disposition to favor kin should be sensitive to degrees of doubt or certainty of relatedness. In particular, a man's investment in his putative children should be sensitive to his degree of confidence that he is actually their biological father. If there are reasons why this degree of confidence should be low, then a man's closest relative in the next generation may well be his sister's children. On this basis, Alexander predicts "that a general society-wide lowering of confidence of paternity will lead to a society-wide prominence, or institutionalization, of mother's brother as an appropriate male dispenser of parental benefits" (1979: 172). One may accept the premise that there is an evolved disposition to favor kin that is sensitive to confidence in relatedness and yet doubt Alexander's conclusion, in particular regarding the institutionalization of matrilineal inheritance. True, there is ethnographic evidence showing that confidence in paternity tends, with exceptions, to be lower in matrilineal than in patrilineal society as the famous case of the nineteenth century Nayars illustrates (Gough 1959) but it is most probably even lower in societies which have neither matrilineal nor patrilineal descent groups (Gibson: 1986, Stack: 1983). Furthermore, a correlation is not sufficient to determine that there is a direct causal relationship, let alone what the direction of such a causal relationship might be.

The ethnographic and historical record shows that matrilineality and patrilineality and related patterns of inheritance are fairly stable systems, with very rare documented examples (such as Barnes 1951) of a society shifting from one to the other. On the other hand, changes in sexual mores towards or away from greater permissiveness and associated lower confidence in paternity are very common and may be caused by rapidly shifting economic, demographic or ideological factors. It cannot be the case, then, that a lowering of confidence in paternity systematically, or even frequently, leads to the institutionalization of matrilineality. Alexander's claim, therefore, is at best unconvincing. One could, for that matter, argue that the greater commonness of low confidence in paternity in matrilineal society is an effect rather than (or as much as) a cause of the descent system. When the inheritance system is matrilineal, then a man knows that his heirs will be his sister's children rather than those of his wife. His chances of investing in his wife's children welfare may be further reduced by rules of separate residence of the spouses, as are often found in matrilineal societies. To the extent that the opportunities for a man to invest resources in his wife's children are limited, it may matter relatively less whether these children are biologically his own, especially if the counterpart of greater paternity doubts is a greater chance of having children with other men's wives. This fits well with the common ethnographic observation that, in most matrilineal societies, there is less control over the sexual fidelity of women.

Extending Alexander's line of reasoning to the case with which we are concerned here, one should predict that the chances of having institutionalized privileges for the sister's son in an otherwise truly patrilineal system should be greater when paternity doubts are greater too (but not great enough to tip the system over towards matrilineality). In this case, however, there is no evidence that we know of showing a correlation between institutionalized privileges of sister's son and paternity doubts, let alone a causal link in the hypothesized direction.

The second standard anthropological objection to a biological account means that, even if we accept that a disposition to Hamiltonian kin altruism is biologically advantageous and therefore likely to have somehow evolved, something which is clearly plausible, it is not clear at all what would follow regarding cultural norms of human behavior. Probably nothing directly and unconditionally since dispositions to behavior need not actually lead to behavior, let alone to culturally codified behavior; they may be offset or inhibited in indefinitely many ways. Moreover, assuming that a disposition is not inhibited, it still need not be reflected in a cultural norm. In most human society, for instance the disposition to use, in certain conditions, an eyebrow flash as a sign of recognition is both uninhibited and culturally uncodified (see Eibl-Eibelsfeld 1975). Should we then, like most cultural and social anthropologists simply forget about all this biological stuff and, like the theologians and philosophers of old, recognize that the categorical uniqueness of human beings frees them completely from animality?

The epidemiological approach offers a way of avoiding this type of dismissal, yet taking into account what is valuable in the objections. Let us accept, as a hypothesis, that there is an evolved disposition to try and differentiate people in a way sensitive to their degree of genealogical relatedness to self.(note 5) It is most unlikely that such a disposition would be such as to cause the individual to seek actual genealogical information as such. It would be rather a disposition merely to seek whatever available information might indicate relatedness to self. Now, such a disposition would favor the cultural stabilization of systems of representation providing for such ego-centered differentiation without determining their exact nature. The disposition would not be the source of these representations. These would arise as part of the process of distribution of ideas and practices-the historical dialectic of thought and communications so to speak-and its interaction with the individual cognitive development of the members of every new generation. The epidemiological approach seeks factors explaining the transformation and stabilization of representations in the process of their transmission, including biological factors. It does not pretend, as might a classical sociobiological approach, that these biological factors somehow generate the representations or that culturally sanctioned behaviors are phenotypic expressions of genes.

One prediction that would follow from the hypothesis we are considering is that individuals would tend to show interest in evidence of relatedness, whether or not culturally codified. For instance, if a single kinship category included full-sibling, half-sibling, and more distant relatives, with the same cultural norms of behavior vis--vis all, the prediction would be that individuals would nevertheless tend to differentiate both cognitively and behaviorally between these different types of individual falling under this common category (see for instance Bloch 1998). This further interest could be carried out individually, without being particularly culturally condoned, as we have just envisaged, or it could contribute to the stabilization of further cultural representations (e.g. folk-theories, tales, alternative or complementary terminologies for kin) drawing finer-grained distinctions than the basic kinship terms system. In other words, whenever representations involving classifications and norms which distinguish kin in terms of closeness appear amidst the babble and multiplicity of other representations caused either as a result of individual imaginations and circumstances, or through more general socio-historical circumstances, these particular representations will seem strangely "right", "attractive", "natural" or "obvious" to people. This would be the case without individuals being at all sure why these representations have these qualities, and even, if they gave reasons, these reasons would often be merely post hoc rationalizations.

Assuming this general framework, we should make the following predictions. In unilineal systems where transmission of rights and goods and generally helpful behavior creates an inequality of treatment among individuals that are equally closely related to ego, and therefore goes against the predisposition in question, there should be a general, non deterministic, tendency to compensate for this imbalance. Norms or institutions capable of playing, in such a system, a compensatory role would simply stand a greater chance to stabilize than in systems where the imbalance did not exist in the first place. The special rights of the sister's son found in some patrilineal cultures could well be a case in point.

The relationship between biological disposition and cultural norm we are envisaging in this case is one between a biological causal factor obviously not sufficient and maybe not necessary, but such as to render more probable the emergence and stabilization of norms of the type in question. We emphasize that this more sophisticated naturalism makes, in this case, weaker claims than the common-sense naturalism of anthropologists such as the cultural evolutionists of the nineteenth century, and Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Fortes or Goody. According to their common-sense naturalism, there are natural kinship facts that people are somehow aware of and that guide their sentiments and behaviors. This makes a strong universalistic claim about human cognition, emotion and behavior, which are taken to be neatly attuned to natural facts. If these classical claims may superficially appear misleadingly weaker and more acceptable than those we are tentatively considering here, it is only because they are made, for the most part, implicitly, whereas we have tried to spell out a possible naturalistic approach.

According to the approach we are considering, there are indeed biological facts, and in particular genealogical relationships. These however need not be cognized as such by people. A predisposition to attend to reliable correlates of these relationships cognitively, emotionally or behaviorally, in one or several of a multiplicity of possible ways, is likely to have evolved in many species, including the human species. In humans, this attention to relatedness encounters a wealth of relevant cultural inputs. More specifically, the developing child, searching his or her environment for evidence of relatedness to others, finds kinship terms ("kinship" now in the cultural rather than the biological sense), people identified as related to her by means of these terms, dos and don'ts relating to kinship categories, folk-theories, etc. Because of her evolved disposition, the child attends to this information or even seeks it, retains it, guides her behavior accordingly, and becomes, in turn, a transmitter of such information.

At this stage we seem to be just defending a weakened, updated and explicit version of the implicit or less explicit naturalistic claims of Fortes and Goody regarding the mother's brother/sister's son relation in certain patrilineal societies. In fact, given the sweeping and careless way in which these claims have been dismissed, this is worth doing anyhow. We are defending them, however, in a way that is not contradicted by the very real uniqueness of each case. Furthermore, unlike sociobiologists assuming a fairly direct connection between genes and culture, we claim only an indirect relationship of genetically favored receptivity to specific information, favoring in turn the stabilization of cultural representations of a more or less specific tenor.(论文代写)

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