The Metamorphoses of Kinship by Maurice Godelier

Author:Maurice Godelier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Article 191 states that ‘a man may not have relations with several free women, as well as with their mother, in the same place’.

Article 191 – If a freeman cohabits with (several) free women, sisters and their mother, with this one in one country and that one in another country, there shall be no punishment. But if (it happens) in one and the same place knowing (of their relationship), it is a capital crime.

Article 194 – If a free man cohabits with (several) slave-girls, sisters and their mother, there shall be no punishment. If blood-relations sleep with (the same) free woman there shall be no punishment. If father and son sleep with (the same) slave-girl or harlot, there shall be no punishment.

Article 200 – If a man does evil with a horse or a mule, there shall be no punishment. He must not appeal to the King nor shall he become a case for the priest. If anyone sleeps with a foreign (woman), and (also) with her mother or (her sister) there will be no punishment.52

Clearly these articles in no way confirm Héritier’s statements. Not only may two male relatives by blood, two close consanguines, sleep with the same woman without committing incest or incurring punishment. But above all, in each instance, the lawmaker has been at pains to specify the social status (free man or woman, female foreigner, prostitute, female slave . . .) of the partners because it is this status that determines whether or not they have committed a forbidden sexual act and deserve punishment – either by the priest or by the king. Nowhere is it said that two women – mother and daughter, or two sisters, or two sisters and their mother – are committing an incestuous or reprehensible act with each other because they have had sexual relations with the same man. Nowhere is there any mention of a possible encounter, via these successive and multiple couplings, between identical substances – the men’s semen or the women’s vaginal fluids. And yet, in the unions forbidden or authorized by the Code of Hammurabi, there is indeed a transfer and encounter of identical substances. As Bernard Vernier has stressed:

In all of these situations ‘identical substances may be brought into contact’ . . . But it is the woman’s status that, alone, suffices to determine the meaning of the behavior and give rise to forbidding or allowing . . . consanguines to sleep with the same freewoman. And if the woman is a slave or a prostitute, even a father and his son can share her.53

Vernier shows us that in all of the cases cited by Héritier, from the Code of Hammurabi to the Bible, she has ‘totally neglected in her interpretation’ the social distinctions and oppositions present in the mind of those who drew up these codes. Through the erasure of these social relations and the stakes they entail, situations formally resembling incest (of the second type), between two close relatives via a third person of the opposite sex, will automatically appear to be nearly universal.

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