Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture by Marvin Harris

Author:Marvin Harris [Harris, Marvin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: anthropology, Social Science, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9780394412405
Google: UjrQzBDtaYwC
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1979-11-15T00:35:44.212551+00:00

Hypogyny, Hypergyny, and Political Economy

Lévi-Strauss’s emphasis upon “structures” systematically blocks off the path to an explanation of why in weakly stratified societies such as the Kachin and Purum the superordinate lineages give women to subordinate lineages, while in more highly stratified societies such as those in India and feudal Europe, the elite castes take women from below. This problem was discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. When a superordinate group gives its women in marriage to subordinate groups (hypogyny), it does so not because it has an asymmetrical rule of marriage but because it is using marital alliances to consolidate or increase its control over its subordinates. The asymmetrical rule of marriage is an instrument of political economy. Thus in the case of the Kachin, as Lévi-Strauss himself notes, the chiefly lineages give women to their subordinates and receive free labor and cattle in return as bride price (ibid.:238).

The universal tendency in all stratified systems, however, is for superordinates to dispense with wife-giving to subordinates (hyper­gyny)* whenever the overall police-military situation permits them to extract surpluses and conscript labor by means of purely political machinery. The emergence of asymmetrical woman-taking (hypogyny) by superordinate strata expresses the developed capacity for exploitation, not the triumph of one “structural principle” over another. As ex­plained in the discussion of infanticide in Chapter 5, with hypogyny, the superordinate group continues to receive payment in the form of dowry, but now it also gets the “gift” of lower-ranking women, who are used as secondary wives or concubines (cf. Pillai, 1975; Dickeman, 1975a, 1975b). In unstratified systems, the superordinate lineages gain control over subordinate males by giving them women; in stratified systems, the superordinate lineages control subordinate males firmly enough to exploit their labor and their women without giving anything in return. Actually “hypergyny” and “hypogyny” are sterile formalisms that must be interpreted in the context of inheritance. For the crux of the matter is not whether men marry up or down, but whether their children are able to share in the wealth and politico-economic machin­ery of the superordinate group they marry into or out of. In the Kachin case, the children of hypergynous marriages between lineages are disen­franchised, because inheritance is unilineal, through men not women, just as the children of hypogynous marriages between full-blown Indian castes are disenfranchised.

What the structural analysis of these phenomena leaves wholly unexamined—indeed, deliberately blocks off—is the fact that the mar­riage systems of advanced stratified societies are not primarily systems of exchange at all, but systems of no exchange—that is, primarily endogamous systems that function to concentrate wealth and consoli­date and maximize politico-economic control. Wretched legions of poor and exploited castes cry out against the structuralist sophistry which would have us believe that the reciprocal exchange of women lies at the basis of stratified marriage systems. In fully developed state societies, when the highest-ranking superordinates enter into alliances, it is always with groups, families, or individuals who are themselves superordinates to most of the population. While one can speak of the

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