Chess of Kinship RW

8/6/2019 Chess of Kinship RW

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II: THE CHESS OF KINSHIP AND THE KINSHIP OF CHESS

The standard anthropological representation of "kinship," f i r s tpresented by Lewis Henry Morgan in was a static pattern, usefulfor st r ic t ly comparative purposes, and i t set the discipline on a inert ial or "structural functional" trajectory, in which pattern, consis-tency, and especially relativi ty became key points of reference. As suchi t stood in sharp contrast to the way in which human lives are actuallylived and thought upon, the patterning of event and the design of stra-tegies. Both the field of nd the cast 2 players are part of theoverall design, an arbitrary framework for the working out of fortunes.

In kinship you mate at the beginning of the game, in chess you matea t the end. The word "mate" has a very different etymology in each case,and a very different meaning, but i t is the same sound used in much the sameway, and i t is very strategic.

In chess you start out with a ll your personnel there a t once, rankedand ordered in a very specific way, and with some exceptions you proceedto di1dnish their numbers as the game progresses. In kinship you start outconceptually with very few personnel, and proceed to multiply their numbersas Then you proceed to rank and order them according tovery specific categories--generally genealogies and lineages rather thanknight, bishop, rook, and pawn. (You can always get more pawns at a pawn-shop.)

In chess there is a single strategy, known only to the game i t se lf , and

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each player t r ies to figure out what i t is . When one of them gets i t - - i tgets the other one. In kinship there are a great many potential strategies,but everyone, including the anthropologist, thinks they know the one thatcounts. Or at least pretends to , because you don 1 t want the other playersto see your cards, and most of them are bluffing in any case. And the onewho dies with the most strategies, wins.

Chess is a very high profile intellectual game, but in th e end i t is notreally intellectual at all--more of a Jedi mind-trick, or l ike the role of agrifter--the kind of con-man who preys on other con-men in Redford and Newman 1smovie The Sting. The grifter holds the middle ground between kinship and chess,and that middle ground is called strategY. Whose strategy? That 1 s i t , you justgot it in onel Kinship and chess are parallel worlds, defining highly specificsocial, cultural, and physical contexts, which are only slightly overlapping.Nonetheless, there is at least one way in which they are one and the same thing.

And, though 11 strategy 11 pretty much covers i t - - th is being the main reasonanyone bothers with kinship, apart from steri le classificatory games, and themain reason anyone bothers with chess, apart from of course winning--let us goon. Of course, nobody ever bothers about winning and losing in kinship, nosirreel Just a few highly disreputable individuals, some of them called umen 11and others 11women. 11 Oh, and I almost forget, "children. 11

There are many things about kinship that are not true of chess, and manythings about chess that are not true of kinship. But there i s one thing aboutboth that most compels us, a thing that makes comparisons paradoxical, and para-doxes therefore comparative. This is the chiasmatic, or double-proportional


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comparison, the thing that Tony Crook, who discovered i t a t Bolivip, PapuaNew Guinea, while decrypting the secretive "Mother House" complex, calls"changing the subject in mid-sentence"--a sort of syntactical "cross-cousinmarriage" i f the comparison be allowed. The Daribi people, also of PapuaNew Guinea, call i t porigi, and describe i t as begerama pusabo n theirlanguage, "the talk that turns back on i t se l f as i t is spoken.n When asked"What makes a man a big-man, i s i t having a lo t of wives, or pigs?," Daribiwill respond: 11A man who can talk porigi effectively gets a ll the wives andpigs he wants. 11

Before I go on to demonstrate the pivotal role that chiasmus plays inboth chess and kinship, i t might be helpful to understand just exactly whatkind of strategy i t involves. For example, the ancient Greek philosopherHeraclitus made his reputation by uttering cryptic statements l ike "We l ivethe gods's deaths and they l ive ours." Does this mean that Heraclitus knewsome secrets about human beings and gods, or their strange relations, thatothers did not know? Hardly, Heraclitus was as entirely innocent of thiskind of knowledge as you or I; he just knew how to use the ergative well,and use i t in a chiasmatic strategy. An ergative expression iJ one in whicha conventionally active action or verb i s displaced into a passive role, withan exponential gain in power and emphasis. Note that "living someone else'sdeath" is an exemplary ergative of this sort , rather l ike "dying on the job"in a worker's paradise, and, when used chiasmatically in a double proportionalcomparison, i t conjures a powerful ironic effect , as in the late Soviet joke:11We pretend to work, and the State pretends to pay us. 11


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In other words the best way to keep--or even invent--a secret is tomake it a function of the form (like the porigi) rather than th e content.In this way the formal strategy shared between chess and kinship is morelike a coup in topology and mathematics than i t resembles th e rrrelational"or emotional gambits favored by so-called 11 humanists. 11 Let me i l lustrate:stated both symmetricilly and asymmetrically a t once {in the way that Hera-cli tus configured his prophetic utterances), the secret that there is nosecret becomes a sort of half-truth about i t se lf , and therefore a double-truth about anything else--more or less what the fractal mathematicians calla 11 strange attractor. 11 (The Elders of the Mother House at Telefolip, P.N.G.,actually use this device as a major teaching for their ini t ia tes ,and in 2000 Mike and I caught one of them in the act of trying to usei t--cal led in that case 11The Two Dolls 11--on

So there is a problem with this double-jeapardy illusionism after al l ;what did the Elder do to Mike and I that he had not already done to himself?Did the strange attractor called The Two Dolls not control him as well?And how did his self-conceit in this way differ from that of the grif ter,the sleight-of-hand magician, the chess grandmaster, or for that matterthe kinship-expert1 I t was just a way of talking, to be sure, but thenFreud called his psychoanalysis 11 the talking cure. 11 And th e game of chessis likewise said to be very educative.

do we find the double-proportional chiasmus in the chess game?The layout of chess is a study in contrastive symmetries; there are two sides(or players), white and black squares (8 X 8) arranged in a totally symmetri-


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cal format, and each player begins vith a symmetrical layout of pieces(bishops, knights, rooks, and pawns, traditionally called 11 men, 11 but notexplicitly gendered). These are the "four arms," priesthood, cavalry, forti-fication, and infantry, in the military regimen of ancient India, vhere thegame originated.

And then there is the other proportion, and that is the one dictatedby the only explictly gendered pieces on the board, which, according to therules, must face each other across the board--an asymmetry--vith the whitesquare on the r ight of the player chosen by that color. These are the Queenand King, the most important elements in play, the ones that have their tradi-tional courtly roles reversed (part of the same asymmetry). Normally, inreal l i fe , i t is th e Queen that holds the social positioning of the realm,vhereas the King "kicks ass" and is the commander-in-chief. But in cheJJI!tthese roles are reversed; the is the most effective warrior of al l ,and th e King, position, holds the value of the game.

A strange attractor, called "The Tvo Dolls," for in fact i t energizes(e.g. ergatizes) the game and makes i t much more than a mere game, turns i tinto a metaphor of royal statecraft . In strategy, that is , the two royalsare played against each other in counterpoint to the maneuvers of the two"armies." Basically, i t i s a l l about mating. Check i t out.

Like two Barbie-dolle, each trying to out-Barbie the other. One is temp- to say we have the same contradistinction in kinship, between the so -called genealogical framevork that ranks and orders the scheme as a vhole,and the interplay of affinal kin, those related ("by alliance"} through ex -


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plic i t gender-interaction. But that is deceptive in that genealogy isas much a function of gendered interaction as aff inity, having the samesource, and affinity is as much a function of genealogy as i t is of mar-riage. Hence 11 descent theory" and "alliance theory" are, as the Norse say,"t\io horns on the head of the same goat, 11 and i t is not a doubly proportioned

Ione, The key to the chiasmus \ia.s given by Claude Levi-Strauss in The Elemen-tructures of Kinship.

;We might \iell do a l i t t le proportion-shifting of our o\in and cal l i t11The Elementary Kinship of Structures," so \iell did i t turn the tables andadvance a positive or proactive approach to the subject. To complete theatom of kinship, according to the negative con-figured by Morga.nian genealogical reckoning must be counterbalanced by someexplicitly stated positive counterpart, a kno\in kin strategy for counteringthe distributional scattering of the generations. Just as there is a.n in-cest taboo, so must there be an outcest taboo; marrying iu, consolidatingone's l ineal gains, is just as important a.s marrying out, regardless of otherconsiderations.

So far so good, for \ie have a. double-proportional counterpart to therank-and-order versus gendered role-reversal schema. found in chess, in that

/the face-to-face gendered relation of man and wife is counterparted, in Levi-Strauss's "atom of kinship" schema, by the "strange a.ttra.ctor"--the "back-to-ba.ck 11 kinship engendered by the man's sis ter and the wife's brother and theirrespective progeny--the so-called "cross cousins" in the standard kinshiprepertoire.


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IThe explicit proviso of Levi-Strauss's 11 cross-cousin" argwnent, that"the mother might just as well have been somebody's father, and the fathermight just as well have been somebody's mother," was made, a t different timesand in different contexts, by Radcliffe-Bro\Jn and by my Barok congeners inNew Ireland, each unaware of the other's existence. I t suggests an imaginalcounterplay of purely metaphorical reproduction going on behind the scenes ofMorganian kin protocols--like the metaphoric intrigues of the King and Queenin chess vis a vis the straightforward maneuvering of their "armies."

Thus the actual marriage of cross-cousins, however classificatory, isan "easy answer" to, and a quick fix for, the dilemma posed in L'vi-Strauss'sargument, something of an overcommitment to the premise. A kin relation motive.-ted b,y a strange attractor has no more a certain or predictable structural

outcome than a gambit in chess. Both are stochastic, determined as much bytheir o\JD presence as by the other factors in play. The Daribi, who cal l theircross cousins hai ' , say that they are "exactly the same as siblings," but withan important difference. Since they belong to different wealth-sharing groups,male hai ' must exchange continual payments of wealth to redeem the leviraticclaims they share in the inheritance of each others's wives.

I found only one instance of real cross-cousin marriage at Karimui; thiswas at Hagani, a place where I resided. A man of Sora' pressed his claims toan unwed Hagani woman. He would hang around outside the longhouse for daysc.rying "She is mz cross-cousin, why can' t I marry her?"

"Finally we got so t ired of this we just le t him have her, 11


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"Aren't you supposed to beat them both up and give them a st i f f lectureabout ho-w they are bad people?"

"Well, sure, ideally; but by that time our relations with Sora' had got-ten so dicey we just decided to give i t up . 11

Among the "matrilineal" Usen Barak of New Ireland the situation is morecomplicated; they call this kind of marriage "marriage -with the tau (realfather 's real s ister) orcross cousin)." rlesidents of' the tva northernvillages, a .subdialect group, put it this vay: "The ancestors vould never havetolerated anything but s t r ic t adherence to the rule of marriage with the r ith the erosion of moral values in modern times, however, there ismuch laxness, particularly among the three southern villages."

Among the three southern villages, another subdialect group and the onewhere I resided, they countered: 11The ancestors would never have toleratedanything so incestuous as marriage with the tau or ow that moral stan-dards have relaxed, however, the people of Belik and Lulubo are free to f'ollovtheir base desires. This is particularly true of the hamlet of Lulubo called"Giligin," where everybody marries their tau or

Since I had some good friends as 11Giligin 1 s Island," as I called i t , Idecided to check things out. Fortunately one of them vas not only fluent inthe English language, but also l i tera te ; with his help I collected the completegenealogical record of Giligin to a depth of five generations, and examinedeach of the marriages carefully. Even making allowance for the so-called "clas-sificatory" or categorial kin reckoning, I could find no instance of marriage

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with the tau orn the whole set . When I finished I said to me con-frere: "Now I can see that every single marriage at Giligin has been "'iththe r i2ilm" "Yes, 11 he replied, beaming; "as I told you, we here atGiligin are a strict ly moral people."

Speaking of strange attractors, the only instance of direct cross-cousinmarriage that I found in the whole Usen area was in my own village of residence,Bakan, in the area that categorically denied the practice, and i t involved oneof my best friends, the man who lived in the house next to mine. When I askedhim to account for i t , he said 11 I t was a matter of pure chance, I had nothingto do with i t ." Then, straightening himself up to his ful l height, which wasconsiderable, he explained 11 I am known as one of th e most moral men in thiswhole area."

* * *Chess is a game in which there is a single dyad, that of the two play-

ers, "'ho take turns in making moves, assuming the roles of one of six opta-t ional and function-specific pieces, l ike occupational assignments in a mili-tary caste-system. Kinship is not a game, i t is or those caught up ini t , and serious work for those who study i t . Another big difference is thatin kinship, although ideally arranged in dyads, each participant is involvedin a great many different relationships at a ll times. And although that in-volvement i s simultaneous, from the moment of birth and before, the kin partici-pant must learn to differentiate what amounts to a sir.gle, diffuse, and al l -enaoapassing mode of relating, and adapt their action to the specifics of eachdetermined relationship role.


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There is no direct analogue to that in chess, i s by contrastdigi ta l in the play-mode, Both Radcliffe-Brown and Bateson have pointedout that the adaptation of relating in kinship is limited to three genericanalogic imitation, each one of them a variation on the single theme.of relating appropriately. There are 1) respect (deferential) relationships,like those of in which the obligations between junior and senior areconspicuously exaggerated; 2) avoidance relationships, in which the pointedavoidance or absence of interaction the parties constitutes the sub-stance of the relationship i t se l f , and J) joking relationships, in which theperformance of inappropriate behavior, speech, or both offers the al ter theoption of either acceptance or rejection, and therefore affirmation or denialof the preferred bonding. These three modalities divide the play of kin rolesamong them, and the necessity of differentiating among them is one of the f i rs tthings a child learns.

Joking, the pretended unseriousness of relating as opposed to the feignedoverseriousness of respect or deference, brings us to the vexed question of theoverall or long-term purpose or design of kinship. Answering i t is no easy ob-jective (questioning it is worse), for i t is neither structural nor functional,and i t is no surprise to find that i t hinges on the very same double-propor-t ional paradox--the strange attractor-- that bedevils i ts entanglement in every-day affairs. Kinship is "connections . established among the living on behalfof the dead" and a t the same time "connections among the dead made on behalfof th e l iving (Wagner 2001)," and thus neither "life" nor "death" i s goingto supply us any but a dismissive answer. 11In a riddle answer is


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'chess, 1 " wrote Jorge Luis Borges, 11 \olhat is the one word that i s nevermentioned? 11

Instead of the solution, in other words, \ole might as well start guessingat what the riddle i tself might be . Nor is the riddle an easy one, thoughone is reminded of the closing l ines of a scnnet \olritten by Edna Saint Vin-cent Millay about the ancient Egyptians:

"Their \olill was la-w, their will -was not to die.And so they had their way; or nearly so. 11

Sti l l , \ole get some clues from the work of Richard Huntington among the Baraof Madagascar, and from that of Gregory Bateson among the Iatmul of theSepik River in Papua Ne\ol Guinea. Death, for the Bara, i s a matter of thecrystallization of l i fe ' s statuses and relationships--the very fact or mat-ter of death threatens the living with a kind of "deep freeze" peril , a con-tageous absorption of l i fe ' s spontaneity into an ageless matrix of crystal-line perfection. ( 11The perfect," as the saying goes, "is the enemy of thegood.") Faced \olith the presence of death, the Bara conventionally do every-thing possible to reassert th e spark of l ife; they stampede the catt le throughth e village, create havoc, drink themselves si l ly on rum, and the nubileteenagers gather in groups in the forest, chant obscene songs to one another,and couple promiscuously. Had Millay written a sonnet about the Bara prac-t ices, she might have called them "death warmed over. 11

Nonetheless, what the Bara have to t e l l us about kin relationships hasl i t t le to do with humor, seriousness, or abject avoidance; faced with thedesolation of mortality and what we have learned to call "survivor's guil t ,"


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they pretend--pretend (real) violence, hilari ty, alcoholic rush, andth e sublime ecstasy of (11 0h, my mama should see me illegitimateintercourse (11 Burgundy adultery," as a friend of mine used to call i t - -agood name for a starship).

And that is one of the keys--the 11might have been 11 or "philosophy ofas i f 11 --io the riddle are supposed to be ccncerned s UQ. kinrelationship gn earth that is not to egree matter of pretending (thoughin chess i t is erious), a subtle art that every child learns a t anearly age. There is UQ such thing UQU-fictive kinship; when the breaks so does the kinship, and have something of an iron ofkinship: I.fiA! kinship is hing that i l going Ql1 in any pretextthat might otherwise be confusedin relationships.

Nor is death i t se l f the thing one thought i t going to be , and thisis the lesson taught in Gregory Bateson's Naven. Though it is a countereffectof the integral duality of Iatmul l i fe , something that Bateson singled outand called schismogenesis, the latmul honorific mortuary r i te is a case inpoint of obviation. This is a highly counterintuitive alternative to the usualsense of completion or consummation of a human l i fe , a positive negation, inthe end result is neither the subject ("life") nor i t s antithesis

( 11death"). The obviate human being (11Todt Yllii VerkHI.rung, 11 11Death and Trans-figuration" as Richard Strauss called i t ) is neither living nor dead.

In Bateson's account, a l l the symbolic accou trements of the deceased'sl i fe and achievements are assembled together in the form of a token humanfigure, an effigy representing the deceased.


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This figure was set up by members of the initiatory moiety ofwhich the deceased was a member. I t was a boast of the greatnessof their moiety. And when the figure was completed a l l the men ofboth moieties crowded round i t . The members of the opposite moietycame forward one by one to claim equivalent feats. One man said:11 I have a 'Wound here on my hip, 'Where (the people of) Kararau spearedme. I take that spear, 11 and took the spear set against the figure 1ship. Another said: 11 I killed so-and-so. I take that spear," and soon t i l l a l l the emblems of pro\1/ess had been removed (Bateson 155).

The ri tual Iatmul mortuary practices not only answer the riddle of l ife-in-death and death-in-life; they obviate i t . Obviation is the destiny of sym-bols, as natural to them as death is to human beings. The word 11obviate 11means not only 11 to render obvious that which was heretofore obscure, 11 butalso, according to i t s dictionary definition, 11 to anticipate and dispose of. 11To anticipate death in l i fe .!.! to dispose .Q!As to Bateson 1 srole in this , as the anthropologist, one might well conclude that "the histor-ia n te l l s the story, the l i terature interprets the story, but the anthropolo-gist obviates the story, 11 renders i t innocuous as though it had never beenin the f i r s t place. Kinship is obviated not in the way we understand i t ,but in the way that i t understands Though 11underdetermine 11 might be abetter word than 11 understand," as in Millay 1 s sonnet.

This puts a whole new spin on our subject, for we have nothing in ourwhole epistemological repertoire to that something as inert and ab-stract as 11kinship 11 might have powers of comprehension at a l l , nor that any-


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one might, as Ingmar Bergman has i t in the movie The Seventh Seal, "playchess with death" med DBden)--though that is just exactlywhat the Iatmul do in their mortuary r i te . The Iatmul are "understood" &owell in that r i te that they have nothing l e f t to live for, or even or.More generally, insofar as kinship is concerned, not only are our verythought-patterns embodied in the things we think about (events, circumstances,objects), but they also run the danger of being "understood" either too wellor not well enough by our parents--the closest one can come to kinship incar-nate--and thus growing up absurd. nthropologist's offspring alwaysrun some danger of growing up absurd--but then, consider the source.)

Moreover, i t is just precisely this inversion of subject and object,the ergative, or strange attractor, that ve have seen to bring both chessand kinship "out of the woodwork" and into the world of lived reali ty, es-pecially when one considers not simply what constitutes them, but whatempowers tl1em.

Metaphors ta lk, to you; they have agency, and minds of their own (thoughadmittedly a tad bit schizophrenic). Chess makes your hands move with a

patience and ski l l that not even a lover would tolerate. As for the chesspieces themselves: 11 l t is not the hand of God that moves us, but the god gi.hand. 1 The kinship that "understands" one better than one can understand i tand the chess that compels the player into "unnatural" moods of intense con-centration are parts of an encompassing double-proportional "feedback loop"that extends far beyond the limits of 11 bush sociology" and grandmaster tour-naments. I t i s one that involves the meaningful properties of language as


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in language relates to i t se lf as as the in the speakers of language relate to one another--and that inter-twining is as much a part of our heritage as the double-helical infrastruc-ture of DNA.

There has been an unspoken assumption among students of kinshipthat their subject is related to the need for human solidarity--fami-l ies , bonds, groups, and that sort of thing. And although that is admittedlya "functionalist" idea, related to the admittedly 11 structuralist11notion that metaphor or trope is the font and sole purveyor of meaning inlanguage, the connections necessary to bring these together extend be-yond the l imits of disciplinary bounda:ties and require 11thinking outside ofthe box. 11

So might as well star t from scratch. We have never found a humanassemblage that did not possess both a spoken language and a mode of relat-ing expressed through kin terminology. Thus we can conclude that both ofthese are necessary to the existence and composition of the speciesHomo sapiens, the species, be i t noted, that responsible for the conceptof species in the f i r s t place. (We are the great classif iers of the and classify ourselves as such.)

But meaning is the "wild card, 11 so to speak--a 11box11 that must necessari-ly think outside of i tself--re-classify i t se lf beyond the abi l i ty to classifyi t is doing in the process of doing so. No ust exactlywhat a novel or innovative metaphor--a re-invention of language as i t -means, unti l or unless i t has become 11 t ired 11 and has classified i t se l f


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among the familiar and conventional signifiers that make up the lexicalproperties of language.

That is a very long-winded way of putting i t , and i t has been saidmany times before. But the long and short of i t is that trope or metaphoris always brought into being by making unlikely and unconventional cross-connections in the lexicon--creating an identity between two unlikely partsof language, just as a novel strategy in chess evolves by making unlikelycombinations of pieces and moves (a knight-fork, for instance--one of myfavorites, along with, of course Burgundy adultery). To put i t succinctly,metaphor is the mating and meaning strategy Qi language, the necessary wayin which laneuage relates Likewise, kin the neces-sary reference-coding of kin relationship (without which it would not knowi t se lf for what i t pretends to be) is th e way in which speakers of languagerelate to one another. Both are part and parcel of the reproduction oflanguage through i t s speakers, and the reproduction of the speakers themselvesby means of language.

One of Gregory Bateson's best and most famous adages was "One cannot notrelate." That is undeniably true, but unfortunately i t leads to the fallacyof assuming the reali ty of naive or spontaneous 11 relationships, 11 a kind ofcollateral damage l e f t over from the "psychiatry" era of the 1970's, when onecould actually get money from the government for pretending that sort of thing.Even for chess players, the need for face-to-face relationships has been sub-verted by the Internet. Relating, which means "putting the sides together,"is both basic and essential, and defines the human condition both on and off


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the chess board. There is a big difference here. Shal] we psychoana-lyze the knight to find out what it 11 feels l ike 11 to move two squares overand one to the side? I don 1 t think so.

Chess thro\ls that much-abused term, 11 relationship 11 into high re l ief .Seen from the top, the knight's potential moves describe an octagon, butunfortunately a real knight can only access one of these positions a t atime. The bishop's moves describe an angular la t t ice, the rook's a Car-tesian coordinate system, but only the board i t se l f describes a ll of thesea t once. I t is not necessarily the foursquare (actually X two dimen-sional rlubix cube puzzle i t appears to be, for i t is equally conceivableon a diagonal format, and can also be visualized as a series of internestedknightly octagons. Each player, or 11 side, 11 faces a mirror-perspective oftheir strategic layout, 11 consults 11 the chess-relational mirror, \lith thesingular exception of the two gendered pieces, the Queen and King.

There are no easy answers to the question of why human beings consultmirrors in any case; perhaps i t is nature's very own form of counterintel-ligence. For the one you see in the mirror has both sides reversed, as wellas front and back, and no one else will ever see you that way. That bas dis-t inct advantages in mating of course, in both senses of the term, and a l lthings considered i t is th e chess view of yourself; 11move and mate in two."(I check myself in the mirror before I go out, and so does my date; andthough the date i t se lf may come to nothing, the two ofave a greattime together--almost as i f they were playing a game.) But who are thismysterious hat just stole our evening from us? Let us continue.


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The real difference between one "side" and the other, or between thegame and reali ty, comes with the realignment of gender with respect tola tera l i ty . Normally in the game of l i fe an individual has only one genderand two sides, a right and a l e f t . In chess, however, each player plays onlyone side, but has two genders, a King and a Queen, one on the l e f t and theother on the right. In the context of the game, as opposed to real l i fe ,the players are not really human beings at al l , but are playing the rolesof what I have called the Antitwins (Wagner 2001: Chapter 4), a cross-purposedsubvariant of the human form that is somehow necessary to our existence. Theydo a ll the things we cannot, and we do a ll the things they cannot ("They throw.2!!!:. dice, we throw theirs"--Wagner 2001: lac. ..!!. ), or, in the words of theMary Tyler Moore theme song, they "can take a nothing date and make i t seemworthwhile."

Normally there is no such thing as proof in chess; there are rules, gam-bits , and plenty of execution. (Imagine Robespierre trying to substitute apiece called "The Guillotine" for the King and Queen.) But the proof of theAntitwins in chess is that the King and Queen have exchanged their normativeroles--the Queen has taken on the role normally attributed to the king in reall ife: making cool moves and working strategy, and the king exercises the rightof position and social status--for the king by position holds the value ofthe game i t se lf .

* * *The game of chess, of course, has nothing to do with human matings,power -plays, or domestic arrangements, for even in i t s own fantasy world


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it belongs to the top of the poli t ical food-chain. Full of the imageryof royal houses and their power-plays, it is a l l about power, and what mustbe done to safeguard power while controlling the moves of others. Kinship,of course, is nothing l ike that or is it1 By the time it becomes ananthropological object of study i t is already an almost mathematical abstrac-t ion, a generator of events that your average kinsperson would scarcely re-cognize ("who, me'? A Not Q!l your l i fe . Ah'm a kissin ' cousin;jes ask my Mama, Auntie-Twin"). Even so, l ike even the most mundane domesticcr is is , i t trades on the profit margin of control and credibi l i ty. Thinkingabout i t , our usual reaction to a generator of events, has almost nothing todo with what it i s and how i t works. The twelfth century Japanese sage Degenwrote: "what is happening here and now is obstructed by happening i t se l f ; i thas sprung free from the brains of happening. 11

One morning in 19g9 I was busy with what I thought was a huge discoverya t the time: tha t incest is not the tabooed object or form of misbehaviorwe had thought it was, the opposite of kinship, but rather i t s perfect apposi-t ive. I t is the formless content of a ll kin relations as against the content-less f2!m of the way they have been described and studied. Transported, I be-gan to sketch out the f i r s t group!pottrait Ci f the Antitwins ,. \fhich I . labctlad"the twincest," "the icon of incest," and 11 the mirror-gender symmetries."

But time really f l ies when you're having fun, and I realized I had for-gotten to check my mail that morr.ing. When I did I found a draft copy ofJadran .Himica.' s 11The Incest Passions 11 (Himica 1991), the best and by far themost articulate study yet conceived on the subject of incest as a sui generis


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phenomenality. But that discovery, as Mimica was well aware, is besidethe point that the actual, regular, and even compulsive practice of down-right incestuous relations in a ll modern societies, within the closest fami- .l i a l relationships, exceeds a ll reasonable expectations. To understand whatthis means and why i t especially among highly educated people in

modern industrial societies, one would need not only an incest taboo but anoutcast taboo as well. And i f that outcest taboo worked jus t as poorly as the{barely understood) incest taboo seems to, then a ll the rationalizations orirrationalizations made to support i t would likewise go for nothing, forthinking is not what family behavior is a l l about. Control is what i t i sa ll about.

Kinship, l ike history, natural process, and the strategy of the machine,presupposes a logic of consequentiality, or cause and effect , in the happeningof things. Relationship, however, betokens something altogether different,more l ike the antilogic of irony, wherein one is given the effect f i rst , asin the opening scenario or 11 setup 11 of a joke, and then surprised with the un-l ikely causality of the puncrliine. Even to put i t this way, though, is some-thing of a singularity, or joke on i t se l f , for jokes and relationships--basic-ally monkey wrenches thrown into the machineries of thought--do not fal l intoa consistency of thinking things backwards (as though one had discovered theperfect system for nonsystematic thinking), but carry an inherent disqualifi-cation in the strategy of their telling or working out. They celebrate theuncanny


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have to include as well th e incest taboo and i ts outcest variant, thearbitrary 11rule because there have to be rules" upon which Levi-Strausspredicated the whole incest-cum-reciprocity argument of The ElementaryStructures Qf Kinship. But we have seen that proscriptions and reciprocitiesof this type produce both th e prohibition and the thing prohibited (the practiceof incest as well as i t s prohibition) out of the same central motif, and withthe same generous faci l i ty with which the Daribi both affirm and deny the"siblingship 11 of cross-cousins, and the Barak both inadvertantly practiceand proscribe direct cross-cousin marriage with commendable moral ardourand self-contradictory results in each case. Of course, when dealing witha strange attractor the t radi t ional exception that proveS the rule turnsvery quieklyinto the rule that proves the exception, so of course there mustbe people ("somewhere 11 ) that follow the rule of direct cross-cousin marriagejust exactly as Levi-Strauss had predicted. In 1964 I spent a few days withjust such a people, the Yagaria speakers of Lagaiu Village in the easternhighlands of Papua New Guinea. Very thoroughly, in consultation with a groupof elders, I managed to el ici t their kin terminology, correlate i t exhaustivelywith th e genealogical record, and determine that they married according toa very s t r ic t regimen of bilateral marriage (they called thecategory of marriageable l ines Though I did not stick around longenough to see how the "system11 worked in practice, 1 111 bet i t did, for Ifound them to be very sharp rationalizers.

\tihere else in science can one find such pi .quant irrelevancies? Our hero


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Gregory Bateson developed the double-bind theory of schizophrenia out ofthe double-proportional schismogenesis model he had discovered in hiswork among the I atmul. Although i t remained in vogue among psychiatristsfor only a very short time and soon los t groWld to other, more 11 clinicallycorrect11 therapies, i t imitated schizophrenic symptoms l ike nothing else inthe world (no one has ever managed to chizophrenia, or cross cousinmarriage either). Often the best we can do is imitate; I t is rumored, forinstance, that our solar system (the sun, with i ts attendant eatelliticbodies} developed by gravitic accretion out of a primordial disc shapednebular cloud. In that case gravity would be the primum mobile, and mostof the gravity in the solar system is invested in the sun i tself . But waita minute, there is another proportion to this schismogenesis, for most ofof the angular momentum (gravity's necessary counterforce) in the systemis invested in the planets, sate l l i tes , asteroids, and even the tenuousOort cloud. Hence another 11 origin 11 for the whole is a distinct possibility,which is that the sun once had a companion star located in th e orbitalvicinity of Jupiter, one whose explosion redistributed the system's angu-la r momentum into the we find today. Since neither hypothesis pre-cludes the other, the question of which is the "correct" one is as t r iv ialas that of how exactly the cross-cousin relation ought to be formulated, andas inconclusive, both being predicated on a strange attractor. The problemwith thinking things this way, and of the strange attractor, i f I may makeso bold, i s one of self-absorption ru1delf-involvement; i t is justsimply that a system formulated in this way lacks the ability to step QY!-side 2f. i t se l f and t se l f for t is .

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Chess of Kinship RW

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