The Debate on the Ancient Family
An anthropologist named Bronislaw Malinowsky would become the champion of the nuclear family and would single-handedly bury the entire story of the maternal clan. This guy was triggered by the suffragettes who won the vote for women. It made him feel insecure in his own home. In a radio broadcast in 1956, he said:
A whole school of anthropologists, from Bachofen on, have maintained that the maternal clan was the primitive domestic institution … In my opinion, as you know, this is entirely incorrect. But an idea like that, once it is taken seriously and applied to modern conditions, becomes positively dangerous. I believe that the most disruptive element in the modern revolutionary tendencies is the idea that parenthood can be made collective. If once we came to the point of doing away with the individual family as the pivotal element of our society, we should be faced with a social catastrophe compared with which the political upheaval of the French revolution and the economic changes of Bolshevism are insignificant.[i]
Thus, he said, he would “prove to the best of my ability that marriage and the family have been, are, and will remain the foundations of human society”. He went to great lengths to show that marriage was universal, even claiming that apes get married![ii] In 1931 he debated Briffault, author of the book The Mothers, about the matrilineal clan, in a series of broadcasts on the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation).
At first, the two rivals got along nicely. A guy named Peter Myers introduced them over tea and commented that Malinowsky seemed “much taken by Briffault. In many respects their personalities were not unlike […] they were urbane, witty, and bon vivants. Both spoke half a dozen European languages with ease, and they were interested in the same subject. They liked each other.”[iii]
But with the radio debate, this friendship came to an end. The discussions became more and more acrimonious. Here are some excerpts from the radio debate:
Malinowski: “I shall, however, in the course of these talks, prove to the best of my ability that marriage and the family always have been, are, and will remain the foundations of human society.”
Briffault: “The word ‘family’ covers a variety of meanings, precisely because the conception and constitution of the family have undergone many changes. Family, in Latin familia, meant a man’s goods and chattels, his man-servant and his maid-servant, his ox, his ass, and his wife. Or, again, when we say that the cat has a family, we are not referring to a group consisting of papa, mama and baby … the primitive human family resembled the animal family more closely than does the civilized family. It consists essentially of mother and children.”
Malinowski: “The modern hedonist and misbehaviourist is bent on destroying the home since this is to him the synonym of boredom and repression. You surely don’t mean that the clan is really a reproductive group in the same sense as the family?”
Briffault: “I most certainly do. The maternal clan is, as I said before, a family group, not a group of families. The assumption that there can be no other form of family, no other reproductive group, than that consisting of papa, mama and baby will no doubt appear very natural to most people, but it is not scientific.
The savage father is, in my experience, considerably fonder of children than is the average English father, but he does not regard them with a possessive feeling, and is equally fond of them whether they are or are not his progeny. Those obligations devolve not on the father, but on the children’s uncles.
Civilized man is essentially lonely […] The savage is never lonely. His social unit, the clan, is a big family. […] Affection is not concentrated on the man-woman relation; it is diffused in the comradeship of the clan. The savage, as a general rule, is quite kind and tender to his women. But no more so to his wife than to his mother or sisters or his brothers or children of the clan. The dependence of woman in patriarchal society is an economic dependence. That economic advantage of men is not necessarily the outcome of superior ingenuity but is the result of the division of labor between the sexes. One very definite reason why patriarchal society cannot be supposed to represent the primeval condition of the human race is that such an economic dependence of the women and economic monopoly of the men does not exist in the lower phases of culture. Far from the men possessing the advantage of a superior banking account, it is, on the contrary, the women who are the producers of every form of primitive wealth.
One consequence of that organization and that form of marriage, which we call matrilocal, is that there are no illegitimate children. The term illegitimate has no meaning in the lower cultures. All children, being members of their mother’s clan, and not of their father’s family, are equally legitimate and no legal contract of any kind, no religious ceremony is required to make them so. A legal contract is required to make a child legitimate only where he must inherit his father’s name and property. It is only where property is at stake that the legitimacy of marriage, the legitimacy of the children comes to be of importance. […] Where the men possess considerable wealth, which happens for the first time in pastoral societies, we find that polygamy is universal and extensive.”
Malinowski: “Marriage, it is said, ‘was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of His Holy Name.’ Now this, in a way, is true of every human community; in most human societies there exists an almost mystical bond of mutual dependence between husband and wife. The notion is universal that the honor and success of the husband depend upon his wife’s conduct, while the welfare of the wife is determined by what the husband does. In the traditional ethics of Europe, the wife’s misconduct brings dishonor on the husband – a dishonor which, according to the ethics of dueling, can only be washed in blood. To the savages a similar notion says that the wife’s adultery may have fatal or, at any rate, dangerous consequences for the husband.
Every society, then, teaches its members the two matrimonial commandments. The one given to the males is: if you want to possess a wife of your choice and have children with her, you will have to shoulder your share of duties and burdens. The one for the woman is: if you want to become a mother you must stick to the lover of your choosing and do your duty by him as your husband as well as by your children.”
Thus, Briffault’s arguments were based on actual evidence in the world, while Malinowski’s were based on religion, and on his view how of things should be. Malinowski brushed aside the overwhelming evidence for early mother-right. People today use the same arguments against women working outside the home, or libido drugs for women, or same-sex marriage: we can’t destroy the “traditional” family. Some men on social media wave away the evidence for traditional female-centric cultures, confidently opining that it just couldn’t be true. Wishful thinking has always trumped facts.
That argument of Malinoski’s was the last word. Briffault never got to respond, because the BBC shut down the debates. Too many people were triggered by it.
The damage was done. It was no longer acceptable in academia to raise the topic of the maternal clan, which E. Evans-Pritchard declared “as dead as mutton.”[iv] Thus, it wasn’t possible to talk about kinship at all, because matrilineal kinship is the elephant in the room.
[i] In a radio broadcast by Malinowski from 1956 (qtd. in Knight, “Early Human Kinship was Matrilineal,” 70).
[ii] Knight, “Early Human Kinship was Matrilineal,” 70.
[iii] Peter Myers, “Bronislaw Malinowski on the Anthropology of Marriage.”
[iv] Knight, “Early Human Kinship was Matrilineal”, 74.