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From Consanguinity to Consubstantiality Julian Pitt-Riversʼ ʻthe Kith and the Kinʼ

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From Consanguinity to Consubstantiality Julian Pitt-Riversʼ ʻthe Kith and the Kinʼ FROM CONSANGUINITY TO CONSUBSTANTIALITY JULIAN PITT-RIVERSʼ ʻTHE KITH AND THE KINʼ Laurent Dousset Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur lʼOcéanie, Marseille Aix-Marseille University Marseille, France laurent.dousset@pacific-credo.fr In 1973, Julian Pitt-Rivers published a chapter in Goody’s The Character of Kinship that, although rather infrequently used and quoted, suggested a work- around to the major criticisms that were expressed towards kinship studies in the 1970s. Reintroducing the notion of “consubstantiality”, Pitt-Rivers suggested a bringing together of emic and etic approaches to kinship classification and ontol- ogy. As straightforward as it may appear, the concept, when combined with Burke’s use of the notion in relation to that of “context”, crystallizes a methodol- ogy for embedding structural and formal approaches of kinship within the social domains of relatedness and action. While discussing Pitt-Rivers’ proposition, this paper illustrates the application of consubstantiality as an explanatory model of the extension of self in the Australian Western Desert through two examples: the diversity of marriage scenarios and their consequences and the “unusual” usage of some terminological classes in relation to close kin. After Needham’s and Schneider’s critiques in the 1970s evacuated kinship as a non- subject for anthropological research, many scholars endeavored to redefine what was once the pinnacle of the discipline in more emic terms. In the attempt to depart from euro-centric definitions of genealogy and classification, which were previously explicitly or implicitly considered universal aspects of human societies, notions such as ‘related- ness’ made their way into the theoretical apparatus. The advantages of such a concept were that it based whatever was to be analyzed on local and culture-specific modes of relating to others and that it did not assume the existence of any predefined domain of relationship conception, representation or construction. The inconvenience was, as we all know, the mystification of ‘culture’ in terms of incommensurable symbolic webs dis- jointed from the notion of ‘society’ and the latter would be progressively eliminated from the anthropological glossary. Every individual appears to have his or her own culture, or nearly so. As Friedman explains, complex subjectivities and emergent socialities are now linked to the generalized cultural pluralism of different identities, albeit ethnic, religious or territorial. Culture is transformed from a structure of existence to a mere role set: “the individual can practice culture by choice, by elective affinity, like joining the golf club instead of the Wahabists, at least on Monday” (Friedman 2012:239). In the light of this change of paradigm, some have applauded the disappearance of so-called anthropological meta-discourses, while others have warned that the overempha- sis of particularized narratives was weakening the discipline’s capacity to engage in theo- retical interactions. As expected, the real world is not as dichotomous as some would have it and in my own work I was to discover that both meta-discourse or theory and lo- cal narratives are in fact complementary, not exclusive, methodologies. There had to be ways to bridge a gap that increasingly appeared to me to be of an ideological rather than an epistemological nature. Interestingly, I found refuge in a paper that was published in the same period as Needham and Schneider’s critiques, but that had not, it seemed, at- tracted the attention I now believe it deserved. The suggested opportunity it provided for combining structure and practice, or universalism and relativism, in one and the same analysis was probably too simple and straightforward—and therefore also powerful—for it to be adopted at a moment of anthropological history in which scholars were aiming at divorce rather than reconciliation. What I am referring to is Julian Pitt-Rivers’ chapter published in Jack Goody’s The character of kinship (1973), two years after Needham’s Rethinking Kinship and Marriage and eleven years before Schneider’s A critique of the study of Kinship.1 Nelson Graburn (1977:1157), in a review of Goody’s volume, wrote the following paragraph: Julian Pitt-Rivers' paper, ‘The Kith and the Kin,’ again starts with the basically moral nature of kinship and the notion of amity and parallels the latter with Sahlins' notion of generalized reciprocity and Schneider's idea of diffuse enduring solidarity. But he identifies the symbolic fundament of kinship relationships as that of consubstantiality. He then examines and classifies various types of institu- tionalized relationships, such as adoptive and ritual kinship, friendship, and mar- riage, in what is perhaps the most stimulating paper in the book. Unfortunately, at this stage at least, that is about all that was to be said about Pitt- River’s contribution, “the most stimulating paper.” Also one, I wish to add here, that is, despite its potential, a neglected contribution in the realm of understanding human rela- tionships, be it based on the axiom of ‘kinship’ or that of ‘relatedness.’2 What the concept of consubstantiality—the extension of the idiom of shared substance—as defined in “The Kith and the Kin” allows for, I argue in this article, is the reintroduction of materialist as- pects in studying kinship through an articulation of ‘structure’, ‘substance’, ‘practice’ and ‘context’. After a few considerations on the notion of consubstantiality in general as derived from the Christian religion and in particular as applied in anthropology, I will move on to adapt the usage Pitt-Rivers suggested for this concept to that of consubstantiality as a sharing of contexts as proposed by Burke (1969a and 1969b). I will then use a few eth- nographic examples taken from the domain of kinship to illustrate how marriage rules, as opposed to marriage practices, as well as formal terminological systems as opposed to their contextual usages, gain from an understanding of kinship as being part of an onto- logical value system expressed in particular contexts. Consubstantiality before Pitt-Rivers Consubstantiality is not, as such, an innovative notion, of course, since it is a major con- cept in Christian theology, probably adopted from the Egyptian tradition (Beatrice 2002). Homoousion (or Latin consubstantialis), as it was clarified at the Council of Nicea in the year AD 325, is the intrinsic nature of the Trinity and the relationship between God, his uncreated Son and the Holy Spirit. In the words of the Athanasian Creed, “the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God.” A distinct, although related, concept is that of ‘consubstantiation’, according to which the body of Jesus Christ exists together with the substance of bread in the Holy Eucharist. It does not express an identity of substances in the same sense as consubstan- tiality does, but only their parallelism or coexistence. As is the case with many anthropological concepts, the usage of consubstantiality is derived from preexisting semantic histories and fields, but it also departs from them in significant ways in academic jargon. There are early traces of the uses of consubstantial- ity as an elucidatory mechanism in the anthropological literature (see Jones 1986). The objective in much of the latter was, however, not that different from its Christian usages and endeavored to explain religious phenomena as embedded in consubstantial concep- tions and perceptions: people consider themselves to be sharing some sort of substance with religious forces and this sharing constitutes their essence and person. Totemism, for example, was explained as a phenomenon in which consubstantiality is involved. Lévi- Bruhl spoke of “the mystic consubstantiality in which the individual, the ancestral being living again in him and the animal or plant species that forms his totem are all mingled” (in Bullock 1931:185, also see Frazer (1931[1929]:20 or Lang 1905). In many cases, this consubstantiality between the individual and his or her totem, in particular in what is called ‘conception totemism’ was explained by the postulate of ‘nescience’: the lack of knowledge in so-called small-scale societies, and in particular the societies of Australian Aborigines, about the physiological process of procreation (for example, Ashley Montagu 1974[1937]; see Merlan 1986 for a discussion). The concept of consubstantiality was, in these contexts, simply used to refer to the indigenous cosmogony (read ‘non-science’) about ontogeny and phylogeny. Since Australian Aboriginal people do not understand the physiological function of sexuality, they explain reproduction as some sort of reincarna- tion of mythic beings and essences and thus consider themselves to be consubstantial with them. As one can easily understand, this usage has not evolved from a religious grounding of the concept and it does not address the question of relatedness as one of the foundations of interaction among human beings. Pitt Rivers’ redefinition of consubstan- tiality, however, provides an important step forward in this respect. From Pitt-Rivers' consubstantiality to Burke’s context As I have already noted elsewhere (Dousset 2005), it is significant that Holy (1996:9) introduces his discussion of anthropological perspectives on kinship with the notion of consubstantiality as it was forged by Pitt-Rivers: “people see themselves as mutually re- lated to each other because they share a common substance and they see themselves as unrelated to those with whom they do not.” While sharing substance is, in Pitt-Rivers' view, still somehow related to material exchanges and circulation, it is not limited to the sole consequence of procreation: “consubstantiality can be established by other ways than by breeding as the example of blood brotherhood shows” (Pitt-Rivers (1973:93). Indeed, suckling the same milk or eating the same food are, in many cultures, processes that lead to shared substances and, therefore, to the establishment of relatedness and kinship ties (see for example El Guindi in this issue and Strathern 1973).
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