On Centrism and Dualism - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

CENTRISM AND DUALISM
LÉVI-STRAUSS, still unsatisfied with these attempts at understanding social organization in
cognatic societies, proposed that his characterization of the house should be applied to all
those societies where anthropologists, following the premises of descent theory, encountered
analytical problems. LÉVI-STRAUSS saw these problems resulting not only from an incomplete
set of structural types but, more fundamentally, from a non-workable substantivist or
essentialist orientation to social organization (GILLESPIE 2000b: 28-29).
Part of this orientation was the concept of corporate group that was defined according to
principles such as descent or residence. LÉVI-STRAUSS indicates that this concept derives from
an English jural unit and its juridical application would not match the French equivalent
‘personne moral’. Because of the Anglo-American anthropologists’ tendency to assign people
to specific corporate groups, it had become axiomatic to ‘cut up social reality’ into groups
with bounded and mutually exclusive membership and to classify various kinship practices
into ‘types’ based on the specific principles followed in any single society to delimit such a
group (ibid.: 29).
These fundamental assumptions become an analytical problem in societies which trace their
kinship relations ‘cognatically’ or ‘bilaterally’, as is the case in large parts of Southeast Asia.
Here the people appeared to organize themselves into corporate groups despite the absence of
consistently applied rules. Groupings often have vague or permeable boundaries and
recruitment to them often does not strictly follow genealogical or descent lines. Even
‘kinship’ (in the sense of a belief in shared body substance) sometimes does not feature in
either the formation of groups or the reference of what we call ‘kinship’ terminology (cf.
ERRINGTON 1989: 235). The indefiniteness and porousness of the group boundaries
questioned the groups’ function as jural entities as well as the presumed fixity of kin-based
social identity (GILLESPIE 2000b: 29).
Staying true to the premises of his structuralism, LÉVI-STRAUSS criticizes the overemphasis of
principles used to delimit group membership and express group boundaries. This would
undervalue the relationships established and maintained between groups. To him the houses
of what he considers to be house societies become most visible in their interaction with one
another (ibid.)
It is thus a dynamic formation that cannot be defined in itself, but only in relation to others of the
same kind, situated in their historical context (LÉVI-STRAUSS 1987: 178).
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