Marriage Exchanges: A Melanesian Comment

Abstract

Levi-Strauss's (117, 118) capture of marriage systems terms of elementary and complex structures continues to hold us ransom to a certain conceptualization of the underpinning exchanges. Marriage its double sense refers to the flow of unions between exchanging social units and to other transactions which accompany marriage, such as bridewealth. These latter transactions may be an adjunct to the transfer of rights persons, or may facilitate long-term cycles of generalized exchange. In substituting reciprocity things for reciprocity persons, however, they are also seen to subordinate the exchange of spouses to encompassing structures of general exchange relations (163), and eventually to promote a move toward complex structures (139; cf 84) where such exchange ceases to be of structural significance. Melanesia presents clear examples of units defining themselves through exchange, including the exchange of women (134). Yet Melanesia's place The Elementary Structures of Kinship (118, Chap. 28) is not that of the classic alliance systems but is akin to those intermediate types which relate to elementary structures through their marriage prohibitions and to complex ones through the character of their alliance networks (117, 118a; see 34, 55, 63, 178). With some exceptions (e.g. 146a, 210), Melanesian societies fact fit the few cases Levi-Strauss skeptically refers to as defining their marriage rules not in terms of kinship, but rather terms of social groups which may or may not give wives to or receive wives from one another (117, p. 17). This entails a problem, as he intimates, namely whether the span of the group involved is part of or exogenous to the marriage rule itself; otherwise we are left with the tautology of groups defined as wife-givers and wife-receivers.