Same-Sex Avoidance Relations and What They Reveal about Male Competition

Abstract

Avoidance relations between male kin are a pervasive social phenomenon, yet the subject has received comparatively little treatment in the anthropological literature. When anthropologists have addressed it, they have usually done so indirectly, or put forward theories better suited to explaining other social phenomena. The most common explanations one comes across in the anthropological literature to account for avoidance relationships between male kin, or what I also describe as same-sex avoidance relations in the paper, are the incest taboo and Radcliffe-Brown's theory of respect. In contrast to these explanations, I propose to demonstrate that the reason male kin avoid each other in certain types of settings is not just to maintain a sense of authority and precedence as Radcliffe-Brown's theory implies, or to avoid contravening incest prohibitions, which as Robert Lowie pointed out long ago is incorrect. Rather, because closely related male kin should not compete with each other, as this would contravene the ideology of descent which demands loyalty to one's kin.