Kinship, Incest Taboo, and Exchange

A great virtue of Godelier’s book is that it provides meticulous documentation of the different phases in the evolution of Lévi-Strauss’s thought. Although the story can be told in linear terms, it is also important to consider Godelier’s corrections to Lévi-Strauss on the basis of later work; or, to see where he takes some side steps before returning to the main narrative.

I will argue that there are some blind spots in Lévi-Strauss’s formulations resulting from the very aspiration for a unitary theory of kinship that Godelier comes to share, but we should not be in too much of a hurry to delineate what and if these are blind spots. Let us begin by asking, could a study of kinship systems generate foundational principles on which human societies might be said to rest? We might wish to remind ourselves here that a dramatization of a story of origins with mythic overtones was common in political philosophy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to explain the necessity of the state or of social contract. Within these discussions, the institutions of family and kinship were not minor actors on stage. For example, debates about sovereignty asked if fatherly authority could be seen as a model for the rights of the king over his subjects. Lévi-Strauss himself engages with the work on Rousseau in particular but has little use for such stories of origin as is evident in his dismissal of Freud’s theories of a primal scene in which the sons kill the father and, overcome by remorse and fearful of fraternal warfare, they institute the incest taboo. As Godelier says, for Lévi-Strauss the prohibition of incest cannot be the inexhaustible consequence of a unique event that occurred in a mythical protohistoric past (96). Instead, he (Lévi-Strauss) asks how the prohibition on incest as it is practiced now generates the conditions of possibility for social life to emerge. Lévi-Strauss asked if the biologically defined nuclear family was the basic unit of kinship as most anthropologists assumed, which would cede a foundational role to biological facts in defining human existence; or, if the principle of reproduction was precisely the point where culture broke from nature and, in a way, established its authority over it.

The original role played by the incest taboo for Lévi-Strauss (1969) related to its universality on the one hand and its cultural variability on the other; that is to say, that the prohibition on incest was universal but which women would be counted as sisters and which women as potential wives was the work of culture. The second important point with regard to the incest taboo was that since sisters were forbidden as spouses, it became necessary for men to receive wives from other men; the positive rule thus generated by the negative prohibition was that of exogamy.

Two consequences followed from the above formulation. First, the atom of kinship, its basic building block, was seen not as the biological nuclear family, as most anthropologists and social theorists were prone to believe, but as the elementary relation of wife-giver and wife-receiver that, in order to be reproduced in the next generation, led to the prescription of marriage with a cross-cousin. Lévi-Strauss designated the resulting systems as “elementary structures” within which, depending on the kind of cross-cousin prescribed, there was a further distinction between restricted exchange and generalized exchange. Going further, Lévi-Strauss distinguished between elementary structures based on a prescription for marriage with cross cousin (defined through both genealogy and through membership of a marriage class, making a number of women available as spouses) and complex structures characteristic of modern Western societies. Unlike the case of a positive marriage prescription in elementary structures, individuals were free to choose their spouses much more widely in complex structures subject only to the prohibition of incest. Nevertheless, preferences based on nonkinship factors such as class, race, and religion, as well as physical proximity or distance could reveal constraints as well as preferences underlying their choice of spouse. Although Lévi-Strauss did not develop this line of thought further in his work, he did write on “house societies” that he saw as lying between elementary and complex systems (In addition to Godelier see also Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995). I suggest that one important point to note here is that had Lévi-Strauss chosen to study the marriage patterns in his own society and tried to derive principles of exchange from complex structures, he could not have arrived at the cross-parallel distinction that played such a fundamental role in his deliberations and informs much of Godelier’s line of thinking on kinship. We now take it so much for granted that elementary structures are deducible from the study of “primitive” or simple societies that we do not interrogate the intellectual apparatus behind that move in delineating foundational principles of kinship or of religion. These are lingering residues of evolutionary thinking even in the theories of structuralism, although these are presented as logical arrangements rather than diachronic changes.1 The naming itself—one as “elementary” and the second as “complex”—is curious given that both our authors show the complexity of the “elementary” structures. I will have further occasion to ask if the elevation of the cross-parallel distinction obscured other ways of thinking of marriage preferences (for example in Muslim societies.) But before that, let us have a look at the distinction between restricted and generalized exchange in a little more detail.

Within the trajectory of thought outlined above, it is clear that elementary structures played a foundational role in Lévi-Strauss’s thought—they allowed him to make the fundamental point that though alliance and decent were both elements of kinship systems, descent was secondary. It was of some importance to Lévi-Strauss that he be able to show how marriage could be redefined as affinity so that it was not only the choice of spouse but a number of other factors such as the distribution of relationship terminology showing that affinity was already presupposed in the fact that, say, a mother’s brother was also terminologically wife’s father; or the father’s sister was terminologically mother’s brother’s wife—the actual marriage only actualized what the structure had already entailed. Said otherwise, a cultural rule by which women could be classified as marriageable for a particular ego did not so much produce affinity as it presupposed its existence. However, this is not the end of the story, for what was at stake for Lévi-Strauss was also to show that the principle of alliance could provide a global connection, a thread that ran though different components of the social field so that marriage did not simply provide partial connections through a rule prescribing individual behavior that could only yield a proliferation of discontinuous connections through short cycles of exchange. Godelier acknowledges this impulse in The Elementary Structures of Kinship but also gives it less weight than Lévi-Strauss was prone to give. In order to understand how restricted exchange was more than series of disconnected exchanges, it is important to understand the role of locality in restricted exchange that is achieved by pairing restricted exchange with what Lévi-Strauss calls disharmonic regimes, which means that membership in a marriage class is determined by a pairing of descent with locality and that these go in opposite directions. In effect, if a child inherits membership of a descent group from the mother, he or she would inherit membership in a locality from the other parent, in this case the father.

Godlier underplays the importance of disharmonic regimes on the ground that there are many exceptions to the pairing of systems of disharmonic regime with restricted exchange. However, he can defend this undermining only by downplaying the role of sections that functioned for Lévi-Strauss as marriage classes (contra Radcliffe-Brown 1930). But if we disregard the role of marriage classes in determining the pattern of alliance under restricted exchange, we are led to jettison Lévi-Strauss’s search for principles that could link every section with every other section within restricted exchange. This would lead to restricted systems of exchange becoming a series of individual arrangements among families rather than being the global principle that Lévi-Strauss was trying to identify in the role marriage alliances and affinity as principles of exchange played. It is, of course, true that Lévi-Strauss constructs abstract models of alliance under each system from very fragmentary records of actual marriages and that real genealogies would be much more messy and noisy, but if we were to take the evidence from real genealogies, the search for overall principles would also have to give way to the real politics of marriage alliances and the impact of devastating colonial wars on kinship structures. Godelier goes halfway in both directions. Indeed, if actual genealogies were to be considered, then one of the differences between elementary structures and complex structures—that is, that in the former case there are explicit rules for determining marriage preferences and in the second, the rules are implicit and have to be deduced from actual data on marriages—would become much more blurred.

Godelier notes that the section system among the Australian groups was a later development and arose due to historical contingencies, but I would contend that the theoretical interests of Godelier take him in a different direction than what interested Lévi-Strauss, which was his insistence on continuous or global connections. This move created the possibility that the genealogical preference would carry less value for Lévi-Strauss than the prescription stated in terms of marriage classes. There emerges an important conceptual rift between Godelier and Lévi-Strauss here that cannot be easily settled by Godelier’s insistence that, historically, sections were later developments in the Australian case or that they played more of a ritual role than that of regulation of marriage. This is pertinent because Godelier himself is not averse to a shift to ritual and cosmic registers in the Islamic or the Hindu case to explain the logic of kinship in the case of patrilateral parallel cousin marriage for Muslim societies, and the prohibition on cousin marriage in the case of North Indian Hindu kinship. Said otherwise, there is cost to sticking to the distinction between parallel and cross cousins as the foundational principle of elementary structures and subsuming Muslim kinship and North Indian kinship within a theory of exchange grounded in this distinction, as I hope to show later.

The simplest examples of restricted exchange in Elementary Structures of Kinship are the four-section system of Kariera (the eight-section system of the Aranda is a further development of the four-section system.) The marriage prescription stated in genealogical terms would mean that ego marries his bilateral cousin (MBD who is also FZD). However, the same rule could be stated in terms of the pairing of sections through marriage when the genealogical specification moves from the actual cross-cousin to any classificatory cross-cousin. Here is where the importance of locality reveals itself—in the simplest model an individual belongs to both, the matrilineal moiety of his mother that is dispersed and the patrilineal moiety of his father composed of a segment of the local descent group. The individual must marry outside both sections (the dispersed moiety of the mother and the localized moiety of the father) and the child born of the marriage will belong to a different section than that of either the father or the mother. It is easy to show that in this system a male ego will not repeat his father’s marriage but will repeat his grandfather’s (FF) marriage. Thus, in the situation that A and B refer to maternal moieties and 1 and 2 to paternal moieties, if a man from A1 marries into B2, his children will belong to A2 and his son will marry into B1, so that the grandchildren will belong to A1. Synchronizing the different marriage cycles of men and women over two generations, the rules of alliance provide connections among all four sections. Lévi-Strauss’s careful delineation of the cycles of marriage of men and women over three generations attests to the importance of connectivity among all sections, as does his dismissal of marriage with the patrilateral cross-cousin as providing only an illusion of continuous connections.2

Most anthropologists gave much more attention to generalized exchange—some even rendered the distinction between restricted exchange and generalized exchange as demonstrating the distinction between direct reciprocity and indirect reciprocity. Seen exclusively in genealogical terms, bilateral cross-cousin marriage might seem to entail the assumption that a man who had given his sister in marriage demanded a wife in return.3 Godelier avoids falling into the trap of a simple binary opposition. Indeed, his meticulous tracing of the underlying Dravidian terminological structure and its transformation in the Murngin (Australia) and Kachin system (Burma), as well as the Iroquois system, shows a deep understanding of a critical point Lévi-Strauss made about the many connections between restricted exchange and generalized exchange. The number of ways in which different oppositions such as directionality of how women moved and reversal of this directionality, short cycles and long cycles, continuous and discontinuous exchanges, not to speak of the skewing and masking of the cross-parallel distinction in the Crow-Omaha type, show the overlap or divergence between restricted and generalized exchange, especially as seen from the perspective of the system (as opposed to egocentric rendering of the marriage rule). From this point of view both systems bend toward each other and each might transform into the other. In fact, Godlier points out that in time, restricted exchange came to be seen as a limit case of generalized exchange. This conceptualization also allowed Lévi-Strauss to think of historical contingencies though, as Jonathan Friedman (1987) showed, both Lévi-Strauss and Edmund Leach (1964) simply bracketed the effects of the opium wars and the role of British colonial administration in generating the Gumsa-Gumlao model of the oscillation between hierarchy and equality in Kachin political formations and its relation to the understanding of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage. Interestingly Godelier spends considerable effort to show Lévi-Strauss’s conceptualization of history in the context of his analysis of myths but avoids discussing the same questions with regard to the crucial case of Kachin kinship.4

In the interest of space, I will concentrate on two important criticisms Godelier makes. The first relates to the applicability of the theory of alliance to what is often said to be “Arab kinship”; and the second is Lévi-Strauss’s relative disinterest in Indian kinship, which has consequences, Godelier feels, for the whole field of kinship studies. Godelier traces a brief history of how the question of Arab kinship and marriage came into the discussion. In 1959 Jacques Berque organized a symposium in Paris in which he brought out the difficulties so-called Arab kinship and marriage rules posed for Lévi-Strauss’s theory of alliance. Godlier considers Lévi-Strauss’s response, especially his characterization of the Arab systems as “aberrant,” as unconvincing and rightly observes that no system is “aberrant.” First, he observes that later work shows a far greater geographical spread of agnatic endogamy than Lévi-Strauss had assumed. Second, Godlier observes that marriage within a close degree of consanguinity has a religious and cosmological dimension in the Muslim world as well as moral and social value—no kinship system, he says, is aberrant from this point of view. However, Godelier himself seems to have made several claims in this regard that do not stand up to close scrutiny.

First, consider Godelier’s summary of the “Arab” kinship system: “the Arab kinship system allowed and often imposed the rule that a man must marry his father’s brother’s daughter” (121). In fairness to Godlier, this is a widely accepted definition of Muslim kinship practices, but it is entirely unclear to me how this definition came to stick in the first place. If we look at the Quranic verse 33.50, which provides God’s approval for the prophet’s marriages, it says:

O Prophet, indeed We have made lawful to you your wives to whom you have given their due compensation and those your right hand possesses from what Allah has returned to you [of captives] and the daughters of your paternal uncles and the daughters of your paternal aunts and the daughters of your maternal uncles and the daughters of your maternal aunts who emigrated with you and a believing woman if she gives herself to the Prophet [and] if the Prophet wishes to marry her, [this is] only for you, excluding the [other] believers. We certainly know what We have made obligatory upon them concerning their wives and those their right hands possess, [but this is for you] in order that there will be upon you no discomfort. And ever is Allah Forgiving and Merciful.

I will not go into the details of the wide-ranging commentaries on this verse or to the earlier verses that refer to marriage for believers. The point is that the Quran recognizes the social value attached to cousin marriage, but it refers to daughters of paternal uncles, paternal aunts, maternal uncles, and maternal aunts; it does not isolate marriage with FBD as the prescribed rule. In an earlier paper (Das 1973), I had suggested that to render marriage with cousins in the case of Muslim societies in Pakistan as a prescription for patrilateral parallel cousin misstates the value placed on marriage within the biradari (a dispersed group with fuzzy boundaries defined by collateral kinship) regardless of which cousin is chosen, with a rule prescribing a particular cousin within a genealogical grid. If we paid attention to how marriages were actually arranged and which cousin among the different cousins was chosen, one would see the significant role of older women and the impact of marriages in the previous generation on the marriages of ego’s generation. The different weights placed upon sibling relations as between brothers, brother and sister, or two sisters was often a result of years of accumulated obligations or grudges born out of the politics of gift giving and of kinship more generally.5 My point was that it was misleading to think of cousin marriage in these societies as displaying the values of exchange; rather, the discourse on marriage as, for instance, in popular Pakistani fiction centered around games of honor and sibling solidarity and not around exchange. Recently Maunaguru (2019) has shown how in war-torn Sri Lanka the cross-cousin (male or female) who had migrated to another country such as Canada was seen to be under an obligation to marry the cousin resident in Sri Lanka to provide a means of escaping the war. This obligation, however, was equally fueled by the recognition given by immigration authorities to customary rules of marriage that made the marriage seem authentic in the judgement of these bureaucrats.6 Godelier comes close to recognizing that something other than men exchanging women might be at stake when he says that a different avenue of thought in relation to Arab marriage might have been to acknowledge that “kinship always entailed exchange but that the exchange was not always that of exchange of women by men.” I would go much further and ask if the salvational importance given to the rule might be in need of rethinking (see Das 1998). The plethora of customs and habits that surround a rule might explain why marriage with a cousin expressed in genealogical terms might have a different value than that formulated in terms of marriage classes; or how looking at marriage of cousins through the lens of sibling solidarity and obligations to each other might be based on a different modality than marriage as expressing values of exchange.7

It is to Godelier’s great credit that he does not ever succumb to the highly simplistic readings of Elementary Structures of Kinship that populate discussions on reciprocity or exchange. Sometimes he even comes close to a radical disavowal of the dichotomies between restricted and generalized exchange or elementary and complex systems. For instance, in his discussion of the Crow-Omaha systems, he states that the deep structure of the system is the same as the basic Dravidian case and shows that the parallel-cross distinction is sometimes on the surface and at other items is masked, so that “we have not really left the elementary structures behind with the Crow-Omaha systems” (152). From this standpoint Godelier says the definition of elementary and complex needs to be reviewed, and “until we can either rethink these from scratch or abandon them for another typology the issue will remain blurred” (152). I could not agree more but do not see how we can take on this project if we continue to think that the task of kinship studies is to generate typologies. Instead, we may ask, what is the concept of a concept? Might we ask how our respondents live with, improvise, use the concepts at hand (see Brandel and Motta 2021)?

Let me demonstrate the last point with reference to Indian kinship. It is well known that Dumont (1953) had greatly admired the “crystalline beauty” of the Dravidian system, which he found primarily in South India. Thomas Trautman (1981) had explained the local variants found in the geographical region from South India to Sri Lanka as falling within either the pure Dravidian system or the proto-Dravidian type. In comparison to the Dravidian system, the kinship system and the relationship terminology in North India was considered chaotic and messy because it was not formed on the principles of the parallel-cross distinction. Trautman (2000) had suggested that we could find a threefold marriage pattern in India—the Dravidian type found in South India and the Munda type to be found in central India. The Indo-Aryan type for which Lévi-Strauss had suggested a background of general exchange was seen to be based on the fact that there was a strong ideology embedded in the idea of kanyadan—the gift of the daughter who was given in marriage without any expectations of return. On the basis of Robert Parkin’s (1992) work on the Munda kinship terminology and marriage rules, the third type prevalent in Central India was identified as having some features of restricted exchange and others of generalized exchange. Godlier accepts this triadic pattern for India. The problem with this entire theoretical maneuver, however, is that it takes the Dravidian system as the model and then finds others to be departures from this model in some regard or the other. Already, Sylvia Vatuk’s (1969) classic paper on North Indian kinship terminology had shown the range of overlapping notions—e.g., those of generations, age, sibling order, and different expressions of affinity—that were found in the determination of kinship terminology or of life-long exchange of prestations. These findings were largely ignored on the grounds that Vatuk’s findings were local in scope and did not yield general principles—this was in spite of the fact that the terminology with small variations can be found in large parts of North and East India.8 I will leave aside for the moment a closer examination of kinship and marriage in Central India, where a range of practices show the ubiquity of secondary marriages (see Parry 2001). A stringent critique of the idea of a kinship system was launched by Anthony Good (1996) on the basis of actual marriages and the determination of a “correct” marriage by courts in Sri Lanka, but further discussion of this aspect would take us too afar. However, a serious evaluation is needed on what is missed when kinship is reduced to “kinship systems” that rely on models rather than actual genealogies or attention to the way marriages are actually arranged. What I do want to return to is the supposed solution for finding a unifying principle for North Indian kinship, which Godelier discovers to be lying not within kinship but at the ritual and cosmic levels. What he is referring to is the principle of kanyadan—the gift of a virgin according to which the father gains ritual merit in giving the gift of his daughter in marriage to another appropriate family without any expectation of return.

Now the problem that the scriptural requirement of kanyadan posed to French anthropologists was that it seemed like a system in which there was no countergift, violating Mauss’s (1990) formulation that ultimately every gift solicits a return. Godelier argues, after Raheja (1988), that in fact there is a countergift in that the wife-receivers take on the ritual pollution that women are subject to because of menstruation, thereby relieving their respective parental homes from the burden of having to absorb that pollution. This is the “return gift,” even if it is masked. It is worth listening to Godelier on this point: He says, “From the Hindu standpoint woman’s nature is evil. She is sexually insatiable and so dangerous to men and society. Therefore, it is the father’s duty to marry off the girl as soon as possible . . . Through a series of ritual acts, the takers accept responsibility for the inauspicious omens that accompany the transfer of the woman into the family therefore ensuring the giver’s well-being” (84).

The conflation of different concepts—that of evil, pollution, and inauspiciousness—is puzzling. What is even more disconcerting in the above citation is that Godelier shows little understanding of the complex character of what is translated in English as “pollution.” First of all, pollution and purity are not opposites, as both states are present in all life-cycle rituals—thus, for instance, in death rituals the corpse is seen and addressed as the inert form of Shiva (see Das 1982), and the expression of pollution in the case of the mourner is to take on an ascetic mode for the duration of the period of pollution. This mode places the requirement for the strictest purity in conduct to be maintained. Second, the Sanskritic texts distinguish between pollution that is auspicious (shubher ashaucha) as in birth rituals and that which is inauspicious (ashubher ashauch) as in the pollution that comes to attach to the mourners (Das 1982; Madan 1985). As for the nature of evil and sexual insatiability, the voice of the renouncer who usually voices these notions with regard to women is quite distinct from the voice of the householder whose ritual obligations depend on the auspiciousness of the wife. Godelier is right that there is a notion of danger that is attached to the marriage rituals, but that is related to the difficulties her father and brothers have in renouncing her though they recognize its necessity—something that Lévi-Strauss was well aware of when he characterized female poetry in the regimes of generalized exchange as the lament of the brother who must reconcile to the loss of his sister (Lévi-Strauss 1969, 350)

In the end, I wonder if I am guilty of a betrayal when I say that insights abound in both Lévi-Strauss and Godelier, and there is no question of simply turning away from them; but tragically the pressure of the world now makes different demands than the search for human survival in the principles of exchange can provide. Perhaps the world always made these demands, but they were not heard. After all, Lévi-Strauss himself turned to the question of what is thinking that reveals itself in the layers and layers of mythologies, to which we turn now.

Mythologies and Impersonal Thought

Given the vast corpus of myths that provided the concrete materials on which Lévi-Strauss worked and the colossal edifice of his writings on mythologies, Godelier takes a different methodological approach to the discussion of mythology as compared to the earlier discussion on kinship. Although he provides a chronology of Lévi-Strauss’s writings on myths, Godelier opts for isolating one or two new thoughts in each period. This analytical strategy works well precisely because Godelier’s mastery over the whole material forms the background that gives depth to every point he focuses on. I will not rehearse here the well-known methodological innovations that Godelier traces, such as the use of permutation groups to define the boundaries of a myth or the canonical formula Lévi-Strauss proposed from algebraic group theory that consisted of inversions between term value and functional value of a constituent element in the transformations that myths undergo (see Scubla 1998; Maranda 2001). However, it is important to note here that the four volumes on mythologies go much further than the earlier essays on myth and the simple distinctions between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes—in fact, one of the most important theoretical intervention here is to have shown that it is never satisfactory to analyze a single myth, despite Lévi-Strauss’s earlier experiments with the myth of Oedipus and even with the more complex rendering of the story of Asdiwal (Lévi-Strauss 1963; 1976).

Allow me a small diversion as I point out that Lévi-Strauss also finds that in his earlier studies — for instance, in his analysis of the Oedipus story, he overlooked that the characterization of Oedipus Rex as “myth” was the result of later work such as Freud’s taking it into psychoanalytical theory. As Brandel (2021, 115) states it: “the “myth” of Oedipus did not exist for the Greeks as ‘fluid and inconsistent’ reality (it became myth in the period between Homer and Freud).” The larger point Brandel is making is that myth as a fluid and inconsistent form can only be found in the set made up variations of the story, which demonstrate how a fundamental contradiction that cannot be resolved is slowly softened in variations of the same myth as each myth in the cycle takes up the residues of the “original” myth, original only in the sense that the contradiction in its stark opposition such as born from one or born from two; or life and death, is slowly made bearable by substituting the original terms by other terms that admit of mediation. The logic of myth and the logic of literary texts might be said to differ, according to Brandel, in that the transformations of elements in a myth happen through other myths that belong to an identifiable cycle, say among neighboring tribes. In the case of a literary text, the shifts of perspective happen by movements between grammatical and semantic levels in the same text.

Let us now take a closer look at some of the new points in the study of myth that Godelier identifies and often navigates critically but with care. I will focus on the following issues. First, what is the place of the empirical in Lévi-Strauss’s delineation of what he calls savage or undomesticated thought? Second, how does the distinction between signs and concepts matter for access to the real? Third, how is mythological thought impersonal? What relation does the idea of impersonality have with the status of the subject?

As Godelier makes clear, what was translated as “savage mind” in English did not have anything to do with the thought of “savages” or with that of “primitive or archaic humanity.” Godelier characterizes this thought as thought in its untamed state as distinctive from mind cultivated or domesticated for the purpose of yielding a return. At one level, then, mythological thought is contrasted with scientific thought or with expert knowledge captured in the contrast Lévi-Strauss makes between the bricoleur and the engineer, and at another level with the relation of imagination to the real.

Lévi-Strauss (1966, 16) characterizes the term bricolage as a kind of science that he prefers to call “prior “rather than “primitive.” Mythical thought then appears as the science of the concrete rather than as a product of man’s myth-making faculty that, some claim, results in “turning its back to reality” (16). Godelier discerns here the importance of the affective register of thought for Lévi-Strauss, particularly the emotional attachment of humans to animals and other life-forms (2018, 272). However, he (Godelier) contends that the borderline between productions of the savage mind and of the domesticated mind become fuzzy as we consider the techniques and skills that evolved for survival (hunting, fishing, cultivation) that must have entailed new forms of “domesticated” thought that could not have been that distant from “savage thought.”

Godelier’s line of inquiry is interesting, but I think that there are more challenges here than are evident at first sight. For instance, if we look at the distinction between the engineer and the bricoleur, a crucial feature that Lévi-Strauss identifies is that the engineer is trying to make his way out of the constraints that his milieu imposes, whereas the bricoleur “by inclination or necessity” remains within them. This would cede the emergence of new modes of thought to the engineer. Yet, Lévi-Strauss does concede the appearance of contingency in savage or undomesticated thought when he says that “primitive peoples have managed to evolve not unreasonable methods for inserting irrationality, in its dual aspect of logical contingency and emotional turbulence, into rationality” (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 243). These are gems of thought that have been obscured in the literature on structuralism by the overly broad pictures of stable positions—such as the opposition between structure and history within which the writings of Lévi-Strauss are often read. Godelier opens up these questions in productive ways, though one might not agree with him on some of the points, especially with regard to issues of necessity and contingency, where sometimes he is inclined to paint the distinction with too broad a brush.

The discussion above brings up to another important point that Godelier isolates from the colossal writings on this topic: the distinction between concepts and signs. The tensions between signs and concepts appears occasionally within the anthropological literature but has not been the subject of sustained reflection. For Lévi-Strauss, linguistic signs provide a link between images and concepts, and, as he says, “Signs resemble images in being concrete entities but they resemble concepts in their powers of reference. Neither concepts nor signs relate exclusively to themselves; either may be substituted for something else. Concepts, however, have an unlimited capacity in this respect, while signs have not” (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 18). As we saw, this difference is mapped onto the figures of the bricoleur and the engineer. For the bricoleur, the possibilities of creation are constrained by the fact that he or she must use elements from an already existent set, which had other uses and now must be reimagined within a different configuration.9 While acknowledging that the distinction between the bricoleur and the engineer is not absolute, Lévi-Strauss thinks that their difference is real: the engineer works by means of concepts and the bricoleur by means of signs. “One way indeed in which signs can be opposed to concepts is that whereas concepts aim to be wholly transparent with respect to reality, signs allow and even require the interposing and incorporation of a certain amount of human culture into reality” (1966, 20).

Lévi-Strauss’s formulation of this difference between concepts and signs goes to the heart of the matter—one might restate this by saying that the range of signifying practices through use of signs tends to show a variety of ways in which reality might be veiled. Lévi-Strauss thinks of that as some bits of human culture coming into reality. In contrast the imagination of a concept is that its mode of reference is transparent—hence thought as rendered in concepts must have an object (otherwise what is it referring to?) with which it stands in a transparent relation. However, if we were to think of concepts not as representations with fixed referents but as capable of stitching together different contexts (Benoist 2010), then we would need to go further than Godelier’s discussion takes us. For Lévi-Strauss, myths work with words that already have a meaning in ordinary language and the meaning they acquire within a myth is an additional meaning. But how is this different from the way concepts acquire meanings through application in which they are projected into new situations in everyday life?

One could argue, after Wittgenstein (1968), that concepts are never static or bound to single words—as we project them to new situations in everyday life, they gather new meanings and new applications. No doubt there are situations in which there is a clear appearance of figurative language, when the ordinary meaning of words does not hold, as is the case of metaphor, but one might well ask if the boundaries between words in their ordinary life and words as embedded within philosophical thought is not too sharply drawn in Godelier’s writting. If we work through the entire corpus of the writings on myth and on systems of classification in Lévi-Strauss, one comes to feel that there are too many slippages between conceptual system, concepts, signs, figures of speech and that their overlaps and crisscrossing could yield many productive ideas for anthropology to rethink the relation between mythic and anthropological thought.10

One aspect of Lévi-Strauss’s analysis that troubles Godelier is what I would call the impersonal character of mythic thought. The oft-cited comment is “I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the act.” Godelier asks, are myths then mythic subjects in their own rights? These are, indeed, long-lasting issues with reference to mythic thought, for their collective nature precludes the idea of singular authors to whom their production can be traced. I think it is best to concede that there are no satisfactory answers to these questions; yet, one must also consider that such questions keep repeatedly emerging in anthropological and philosophical thought, as for instance in speculative realism. It seems often a version of the ability of humans to dare themselves to imagine their own inexistence (e.g., in Buddhism and the theories of the void); indeed, if myths are in the nature of models in which thinking takes place in their reflections upon themselves creating an illusion of resolving fundamental contradictions that cannot be resolved—who is doing the thinking? Godelier’s attempt at an answer seems not entirely satisfactory—if satisfaction is to be had. Let me recapitulate it in brief here.

Godlier argues that myths are “truth narratives.” As he says, “Since the beginning of time, men, in producing myths, strive by means of thought to explain to themselves the surrounding universe and their existence in this world. And they do this not for the pleasure of manufacturing theories, but out of the need to act upon the world and on themselves” (411). Now the problem is that the counterintuitive latent schemata cannot be laid out, so how do these function as “truth narratives” as people listen to them, recite them, and absorb the stories of what seem like relations between human and animals steeped in fantasy, such as the marriages across species or gift-giving relations between humans and animals in Amerindian mythology? Godelier does not seem to have taken on questions about different kinds of ontologies because, I think, he would find some of these ontologies to be badly made for the practical ends that he draws our attention to. What he does instead is evoke the notion of “belief” to explain the efficacy of mythic thinking.

Godelier faults Lévi-Strauss for ignoring a fundamental issue pertaining to belief. I cite three passages from Godelier to this effect. As he says, “But Lévi-Strauss’s analyses of mythical thought leave aside, as we have said, the fundamental problem of the fact of believing, of the belief in imaginary realities, or he deliberately ignores it” (319). And later, “But it is not enough to imagine that the impossible is possible. It has to be believed. It is the fact of believing in them that gives the imaginary deductions of myths their truth-value” (415). “To believe that the impossible is possible necessarily means postulating that at the same time that, somewhere, beyond or in the world where each person lives and performs their actions on others, on nature and on themselves, there exist entities and forces that are normally invisible but which are capable of doing what humans cannot. That being so, humans are bound to want to communicate with these entities and strive to convince them to act in their favor” (416).

The problem with the first citation is that it assumes that the category of belief is unproblematic. Yet as Needham’s (1972) classic work on belief showed, there are enormous problems when we move from belief as a noun to believing as a verb. This is not the place for me to rehearse the enormous literature in both philosophy and anthropology on belief, but at the very least one might point to the asymmetry between first-person authority and third-person authority in considering the problem of belief, as well as the work on ritual that shows the intimate relation between belief and doubt, on the one hand, and the relation of the subjunctive to questions of interpreting ritual and myth as true statements, on the other (see Puett 2014) . To say that mythic statements are true because they are believed to be true is simply to attach a new label to what remains a very interesting problem in cross-cultural translation; that is, how is one culture’s self-evidence another culture’s puzzle?

I agree that the issues posed by the relation between possibility and actuality are enormously important, but Godelier betrays a certain naiveté in the manner in which he settles on the question of the human: as if the human is knowable in advance. I have argued elsewhere that as soon as we step outside the Christian tradition, which has come to define many of the concepts of the anthropology of religion, we can see the distortions introduced in rendering other traditions knowable in Christian terms (see Das 2020, especially chapters 9 and 10). Just to take one instance, at least one strand of ritual thinking in India (the mimamsa) gods were simply grammatical entities and had no ontological existence outside the duration of the ritual (Clooney 1997; Das 1983). When Godelier talks about the subject, he assumes that the subject exists at the level of the individual or the person.11 But even if one were to bracket the question of dispersed subjectivity, if one were to go along with Godelier to think more on the relation between subject position and subjectivity, a very naïve picture of interiority emerges in the “solution” to the problem of what constitutes the truth of what seems like impossibility to Godelier and might seem like badly made ontologies to others.

I hope my admiration for both, Lévi-Strauss and Godelier, will be evident in this review essay. There is an enormous amount to learn from Godelier’s work on Lévi-Strauss. There are issues on which much more could have been said in appreciation and in disagreement, such as Godelier’s insistence on reinstating ritual as the accompanying enactments of myth. This works for some rituals, but in other cases ritual theory has gone into completely different directions. There are interesting shifts that happen in Lévi-Strauss’s thinking, for instance on the relation between metaphor and metonymy, about which Godelier is silent. There are also other topics that are very relevant for the discussion on ritual, such as the whole issue of sacrifice, but Lévi-Strauss’s views are completely colored by his placing of sacrifice only in conjunction or contrast with totemism. Thus, for any reader who decides to take up this text, there are going to be tremendous rewards and tremendous challenges. But as an anthropologist, who first discovered Lévi-Strauss accidentally in 1966 in the Ratan Tata library in Delhi and who often turns to his writings for the pleasure of dwelling in his thoughts, I gratefully acknowledge how much I learned from reading Godelier’s work on Lévi-Strauss.

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent books are Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein (2020), Voix de la Ordinaire (2021), Slum Acts (forthcoming), and Words and Worlds: A Lexicon for Dark Times (edited with Didier Fassin, 2021). Das is corresponding fellow of the British Academy and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Works Cited