On Centrism and Dualism - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

CENTRISM AND DUALISM
arose due to the lack of fit of “house society” within the existing taxonomy used to divide societies
into different types (GILLESPIE 2000b: 40 original italics).
A further problem regarding anthropological typology, is that LÉVI-STRAUSS’ conception, in
which the house is perceived to blur traditional but now indefensible kinship categories and to
span what is actually a continuum from unilineal to cognatic principles, would, in fact,
encompass most of the world’s known societies. 76
This classificatory problem is epitomized by the fact that scholars such as CARSTEN, GIBSON,
and HOWELL all point out, that there is some confusion whether we are to consider the
cognatic societies of Indonesia or those with descent groups and asymmetrical alliance, as
paradigmatic of LÉVI-STRAUSS’ ‘type’ (CARSTEN/HUGH-JONES 1995: 18).
For Signe HOWELL (1995), LÉVI-STRAUSS does himself a disservice by including in his
category of house(-based) societies a random selection of societies predicated upon very
different ideological constructs, just because the house is of prominent social and symbolic
significance. She points out that, as a result of including both ‘types’ of Indonesian societies
in his analyses, the analysis of both societies would suffer (ibid.: 150). 77 Because LÉVI-
STRAUSS, himself, applied his concept of house in such a broad variability of contexts, it is
commonly seen as having no typological value.
These problems expose a great conceptual dilemma of typological orientation to social
organization. In many typological approaches, societies and their constituent units are
classified into what are presumed to be mutually exclusive essentialist types, defined on the
basis of one feature or a constellation of features, to be compared and contrasted on that basis.
PFEFFER (1992) emphasizes the importance of culture-specific forms of classifications in
anthropological approaches that seek to investigate ‘meaningfulness in a cross-cultural
comparison’ (PFEFFER 1992: 43). These culture-specific forms must be comprehended as
constituting wholes. This holistic approach concentrates on elements and their relationships in
a specific cultural order that has to be compared as a whole to other such wholes. When
anthropology’s task is understood as the cross-cultural comparison of meaningfulness then
any attempt of defining universally applicable typological categories, based on isolated
structural features becomes futile (cf. HARDENBERG: 2007: 165).
76 “In the end the problem is not one of discovering which societies are ‘house societies’ but of discovering
which ones are not.” (CARSTEN/HUGH-JONES 1995: 18)
77 “For a long time I was confused by LÉVI-STRAUSS’ definitions of ‘house’, especially in the chapter on
Indonesia. I now feel that my confusion might mirror his own. His insistence on ‘house’ as mediating a universal
conflict of relations between descent and affinity arose, perhaps, not so much out of the ethnographic material on
the Kwakiutl, or even the Iban and other Borneo societies, but out of his own lifelong concern with elementary
structures.” (HOWELL 1995: 261)
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