based viewpoints will give the opposite judgments. The opposition itself
is a product of folk culture that in Europe is based on an older distinction
between body (nature) and spirit (culture). Many times wefind in
anthropology that analytical concepts rest on older folk concepts and
prove difficult to disentangle from these. The problem is compounded
by the fact that the nature/culture opposition is almost like a founding
myth of human sociality, placing humans beyond nature by virtue of
their creation of culture (along withsomething that often stands as the
proxy for culture, language).
We will argue here, perhaps not surprisingly, that this opposition has a
stultifying effect on attempts to bring together‘culturalist’and‘naturalist’
arguments about human life patterns. There have been, of course, brilliant
pieces of work that remain founded in it; most notably Claude Lévi-
Strauss’s early work on kinship and marriage (Lévi-Strauss 1969 )in
which he saw the prohibition of incest and the institution of forms of
marriage as among the elementary manifestations of human culture. For
Lévi-Strauss also cousin marriage was the sign of this elementary develop-
ment of culture because cousins are the next close category of kin to
siblings. If sibling marriage is prohibited, cousin marriage is the next step
away from it, according to this argument. This elementary move, he
argued, also produced the phenomenon of the importance of the mother’s
brother in many kinship systems. The mother’s brother, according to this
viewpoint, represents the creation of marriage ties and the production of
marital alliance, projected into the next generation after children are born
of the marriage. Lévi-Strauss’sfinding here was intriguing, and it stands
whether we accept his theory that kinship ties began as a result of a cultural
prohibition on incest. The mother’s brother is indeed an interestingfigure
and has attracted interpretation from Radcliffe-Brown and much later
Maurice Bloch, as well as manyfieldworkers in the Papua New Guinea
Highlands (see, e.g., Strathern and Stewart 2011 , with references). In the
case of marriage (from the male viewpoint) with mother’s brother’s daugh-
ter, the mother’s brotherfigure becomes particularly important, as a kins-
man who also is a potential affine and bridegiver: again, a representative of
the intersection and transition between nature and culture; or, otherwise
put, between in-group and out-group relationships.
The foundational myth therefore stands behind Lévi-Strauss’sspirited
suggestions. We can, however, accept the ethnographic significance of
his work without adding the philosophical and evolutionary elements he
addstotheethnographyofcousinmarriagesystems.Cousinmarriages
48 BREAKING THE FRAMES