170 Gayle Rubin The Traffic in.Women171 privileges vis-a-vis others are defined in terms of mutual kin- biological procreation.It is permeated with an awareness of ship or lack thereof.The exchange.of goods and services, the importance of sexuality.in human society.It is a descrip- production and distribution,hostility and solidarity,ritual tion of society which doesnot assume an abstract,genderless and ceremony,all take place within the organizational struc. human subject.On the contrary,the human subject in Levi- ture of kinship.The ubiquity and adaptive effectiveness of Strauss's work is always either male or female,and the diver- kinship has led:many anthropologists to.consider its inven- gent social destinies of the two sexes can therefore be traced. tion,along with the invention of language,to have been the Since Levi-Strauss sees the essence of kinship systems to lie in developments which decisively marked the discontinuity be- an exchange of women between men,he constructs an im- tween semihuman hominids and human beings (Sahlins, plicit theory of sex oppression.Aptly,the book is dedicated 1960;Livingstone,1969;Levi-Strauss;1969) to the memory of Lewis Henry Morgan. While the idea of the importance of kinship enjoys the status of a first prineiple in anthropology,the internal work. ings of kinship systems have long been a focus for intense Vile and precious merchandise controversy.Kinship systems vary wildly from one culture to -Monique Wittig the next.They containall sorts of bewildering rules which govern whom one may or may not marry.Their interal The Elcmentr)S on the origin and nature of human society.It is a treatise on complexity is dazzling.Kinship systems have for decades pro- the kinship systems of approximately one-third of the ethno- voked the anthropological imagination into trying to explain graphic globe.Most fundamentally,it is an attempt to discern incest taboos,cross -cousin marriage,terms of descent,rela- the structural principles of kinship.Levi-Strauss argues that tionships of avoidance or forced intimacy,clans and sections, the application of these principles(summarized in the last taboos on names the diverse array of items found in descrip. chapter of Elementary Structures)to kinship data reveals an tions of actual kinship systems.In the nineteenth century, intelligible logic to the taboos and marriage rules which have several thinkers attempted to write comprehensive accounts perplexed and mystified Western anthropologists.He con- of the nature and history of human sexual systems (see Fee, structs a chess game of such complexity that it cannot be 1973)One of these was Ancient Society,by Lewis Henry recapitulated here.But two of his chess pieces are particu- Morgan It was this book which inspired Engels to write The larly relevant to women-the "gift"and the incest taboo, Origin of the Family,Private Property,and the State.Engels' whose dual articulation adds up to his concept of.the ex- theoryis based upon Morgan's account of kinship and mar- iage.季 change of women. The Elementary Structures is in part a radical glosson In.taking up Engels'project of extracting a theory 'of sex another famous theory of primitive social organization, oppression from the study of kinship,we have the advantage Mauss'Essay on the Gift (See also Sahlins,1972:Chap:4).It of the maturation of ethnology since the nineteenth century. was Mauss who first theorized as to the significance of one of We also have the advantage of a peculiar and particularly the most striking features of primitive societies:the extent to appropriate book,Levi-Strauss'The ElementaryStructures which giving,receiving,and reciprocating gifts dominates so- of Kinship.This is the boldest twentieth-century version of cial intercourse.In such societies,all sorts of things circulate the nineteenth-century project to understand human mar- in exchange-food;spells,rituals,words,names,ornaments, riage.It is a book in which kinship is explicitly conceived of tools,and powers. as an imposition of cultural organization upon the facts of