Dynamics of Family Interaction: The Culturing of Nature
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These are notes I'm taking for Professor Varenne's class on the Dynamics of Family Interaction. I'm using it as an opportunity to play around with wikis and shared community knowledge. Please feel free to contribute to these notes or share your ideas about how it can be expanded, changed, improved.
Contents |
The Culturing of Nature: Incest and parental love
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Readings
- Daly, Martin and Margo Wilson. The truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian view of parental love. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
- Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The elementary structures of kinship Chapters 1,2,3 Tr. by J. Bell and J. von Sturmer. Boston: Beacon Press. 1969 [1947].
Reading notes
Daly, Martin and Margo Wilson. The truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian view of parental love
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The elementary structures of kinship
- Chapter 1 - Nature and Culture
- impossible to refer to evolution of mankind without reference to social organization
- some responses to stimuli are entirely biological, others social
- culture serves are a substitute to life, transforming it into a new synthesis
- problem of "testing" out natural or social causes on newborns
- A: reminds me a lot of A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- man cannot be expected to reveal a "precultural" state
- brings up studies in primates and other animals as analogies or comparisons to human behavior
- A: Huizinga mentions 'play' as something that comes before culture
- Malinowski is wrong!
- different primate species have different organization of sexual activity, some monogamous, some polygamous, some incestuous
- absence of rules seem to distinguish natural from cultural process (p. 8)
- A: what is a "rule"? when is a rule not a rule? what makes a rule a rule? How can you distinguish a "there is no rule" situation from "there are rules, but no one follows it"?
- there is regularity in nature and culture, but they appear in nature where they are the weakest in culture, and vice versa
- wherever there are rules we know that the cultural has been reached
- transition between natural and cultural facts unknown
- everything universal is natural and spontaneous; everything cultural is relative and particular
- prohibition of incest, but different cultures may define "close relation" differently and be judged differently by others with a stricter view
- Chapter 2 - The Problem of Incest
- incest is both social and pre-social in its universality and type of relationships upon which it imposes its norm
- sexual life only instinct that requires stimulation of another person
- incest prohibition is both on the borders of culture, beyond culture, and is culture
- seen as a social reflection upon a natural phenomenon
- why would humans be again endogamous methods when they use it for animals?
- temporary danger of endoganous unions cannot be the cause of incest prohibition
- other explanations assume that close relations are less sexually attracted to one another
- psychoanalysis see pursuit of incestuous relationships as universal
- why should incest be punished so severely in some societies?
- can be compared to suicide, which is also punished, but suicide doesn't exist in the animal world
- society forbids only that which society brings about
- another explanation sees incest prohibition as a social phenomenon whose expression in the biological is accidental
- Lubbock: transfer from endogamous to exogamous marriage by wives captured in battle (but not an explanation for incest prohibition)
- Durkheim's theory based on observations of Australian aboriginal society; fear of clan blood leads to women being subject to many magic beliefs and prohibitions
- incest results from wanting to avoid own clan blood
- LS:relationship linking the stages is arbitrary; fear of menstrual blood not universal
- Durkheim and others' theory are so dependent on contingent episodes that they seem to be unlikely explanations for a universal phenomenon
- LS: sociologists, when they cannot explain something, declare it outside of its field
- prohibition of incest is where nature transcends itself
- A:but is this the only example? what of play?
- Chapter 3 - The Universe of Rules
- incest prohibition as a transition from natural fact of consanguinity to social fact of alliance
- in culture, individual always gives more than he receives, and receives more than he gives
- education and invention as inverse of one another
- nature and culture move in double rhythm of receiving and giving
- nature "requires" marriage but does not dictate its specific outcomes
- "nature imposes alliance without determining it, and culture no sooner receives it than it defines its modalities" (p. 31)
- incest prohibition seems to be a rule independent of its modalities
- authority of family based on possession and control of food
- anthropologists have suggested that monogamy most prevalent in societies on the most primitive economic and technical level
- Hume: most desirable women must form a minority so that demand for women remains a disequilibrium
- marriage in primitive societies vital in preventing the "two calamities": bachelor and orphans
- A:do changes in society affect what age men and women are expected to get married, bear children, etc.?**
- A:Random thought about marriage depicted in The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki
Class notes
Link to Professor Varenne's notes
- Continuing from Session 1
- Whitehead's argement parallel's Parsons in the 1950s
- V: if you ask the same kinds of questions you end up with the same answers
- same arguments about families and education get remade
- things don't change that much in the United States; oldest constitution
- since 1950s people have argued about whether divorce is a good or bad thing
- V: be wary of whoever says they have the "answer"
- even if there is a "best" family system for school performance, some students will still fail
- Human societies as evolutionary
- anthropologists/sociologists went to study "primitive" societies
- culture always comes from biology
- we are not determined by our bodies but constrained by it
- sexual reproduction in the past 50 years has been transformed by technologies
- what has been described for animals must apply to humans
- people are less likely to take good care of children who are not their own
- can it be "selfishness" and non-genetic?
- Social biologists
- show that many emotional things (e.g. love, beauty, etc.) can be explained biologically
- primarily interested in relations between sexes; focus on perpetuating personal gene
- every individual has different interests; increasing competition
- need to defend "Darwinism" even if it is difficult to apply it to humans all the time
- Darwinism vs. intelligent design as a postmodern argument; it's all "discourse" (Foucault)
- most of our children are not taken care of by biological parents: daycare, teachers, nannies, etc.
- The truth about Cinderella
- being nice to children as part of courtship
- explaining stepchildren and parental love by projecting into biology
- rare for "pure genetics" to take over
- anytime someone talks about genes you come close to social biology
- social biology fits into journalist views about human societies
- plowing societies (Ireland to Japan) are more patriarchical because of scarcity of land; can produce a lot of food; need more control; women can't protest because they lose access to resources (land, food)
- women can be powerful as they age and bear children
- matriarchical societies (south of Sahara); women can leave more easily
- "primitive" societies today may have been more complex in the past, and should not be seen as precursors of modern, industrialized societies
- what allows us to survive in different conditions regardless of social biology
- The elementary structures of kinship
- LS: we are not nature or culture but both
- culture transforms nature; you don't "create" the world; you make it
- how do people get together for biological reproduction
- anthropology in the 1960s focused mostly on family life (kinship)
- all cultures have rules about who you can and cannot have sex with; and rules about who you can and cannot marry
- weight of social conventions, but how do they work; what is a social convention?
- no human societies have "random sex"
- rules are universal but different everywhere
- even in the US, each state have different rules about incest
- rules are arbitrary in that there are no ecological reason for it to be one way or another way
- cultural customs are arbitrary
- the birth defect argument against incest between first cousins still holds true in gay incest even though they will not have children
- in other societies it is ok to marry cousins (although they vary, some approve cross-cousin marriage, some approve parallel-cousin marriage)
- Rousseau: humans became humans when they created a social fact
- incest/statutory rape falls along continuum; classifications among incest
- what is wrong with incest given birth control? but it is still rare even though there is nothing biologically wrong but it is wrong in terms of legality, morality, etc.
- what is wrong has to do with power relationships
- LS loves variation without rationale
- LS: some argue that people who are raised together are not attracted to each other; but if that's the case why would we have a rule?
- Other readings
- Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species by SARAH HRDY
- motherhood as seen by woman social biologist
- some mothers will not take care of their own children
- in some cases taking care of a child can be too expensive for the mother
- difference between "instincts" and "conditions"; in certain kind of conditions, it makes more sense to do something more than something else
- JANE GOODALL
- studies of animals often tend to project "male fantasies"
- what looks like hierarchy is misleading
- women decide who is the dominant male
- females find ways of having sex with the non-dominant males; more mixing of gene pool than previously thought
- when male animals fight they do not kill each other; when females fight they kill, in particular others' offsprings
- Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species by SARAH HRDY
Except where