[lbo-talk] Sociality and culture ( was bonobos)

[Charles Brown]

 Jerry Monaco 

(4)  Kinship systems that are both extensive and symbolic or symbolized,
both in the present, across generations, and across life-times.  As far as I
know only modern humans have the capacity to recognize and represent this
kind of kinship system

For Charles only this last is a "real" kinship system.

^^^^
CB; Don't try to speak for me. I think missing link species are where
culture, language and kinship developed.  Missing link species are not
identical with chimps ( of course).

The cross and multiple generational dimensions of kinship are their
qualitative essence. They are the leap, the discontinuity that Godelier
finds absent.

^^^^^

By the way I am not making up this idea that we can analyze our nearest
cousins in terms of kinship systems. Maurice Godelier points out in his
critique of Levi-Strauss that chimpanzees and bonobos already live in
societies that exhibit constraints and processes of human kinship systems.
You might want to call it a simple kinship system.  Godelier is one of the
few Marxist anthropologists I know who actually pays attention to primate
studies.  The NLR reviewer of Godelier's book *_*Métamorphoses de la
parenté._
puts Godelier's conclusion as follows: "The passage from nature to culture
with *homo sapiens* thus cannot have been a sudden, discontinuous
transformation, but must have been more evolutionary in nature."  **

^^^^^^
CB; Well, yes, I have to listen to Godelier. 

As to the discontinuity, there is a discontinuity in the long run between
chimplike ancient species and humans. This is like Darwin noting that there
is an absence of "intermediate" species between the species he looks at.