Kinship as Logic of Space

Klaus Hamberger

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Klaus Hamberger. Kinship as Logic of Space. Current Anthropology, 2018, 59 (5), pp.525-548.
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Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 5, October 2018 525

Kinship as Logic of Space

by Klaus Hamberger

The article studies kinship systems as topologies of social space. These topologies emerge as agents become contiguous
through physical interaction and mutually substitutable through perspectival shifts. Social space is structured by the
temporal asymmetry implicit in the concept of generation and by a gendered polarity of containing and being con-
tained. The different ways this gendered polarity is incorporated into relations of contiguity and substitution result in
diverse topologies that are manifest in architecture, residence, and mobility patterns no less than in genealogies and
relationship terminologies. These variations are illustrated through comparison of the segmentary systems of West
Africa, the dualist organizations of central Brazil, and the asymmetric alliance systems of eastern Indonesia.

The Topological Approach to Kinship
The controversy on the biological or cultural foundation of
kinship, which has regained the anthropological fore in the
past decade, distinguishes itself from earlier versions of the
debate by the absence of any reference to kinship systems.1 I
define “system” here as any set of relations linked together
by some common logic. This systemic feature is so typical
of kinship relations that the latter are deployed as examples
in standard textbooks of relational logic. Yet acknowledge-
ment of this essential characteristic is absent from current
anthropological debates on kinship, among advocates of both
the biological and the cultural approach.
The “extensionist” position (currently represented by Shapiro
2008, 2012)2 argues that all structural features of kinship can be
derived directly or by extension from biological ties yet is not
concerned with accounting for the extension rules that would be
required to bring about the observable diversity of empirical
kinship systems. Conversely, the “constructionist” line (Carsten
2000, 2004; McKinnon 2005) claims that kinship ties are cul-
turally constructed yet shows no interest in identifying the
constraints that would explain why many of the logically pos-
sible constructions rarely or never occur in the real world. As a
result, the debate appears to confirm Schneider’s (1972) verdict
that kinship is a pseudo-object of anthropological study. If we
base its definition on the procreative model, we expel from the
field of comparative study the greatest part of what kinship
means to most societies. If, on the other hand, we drop the
reference to procreation, we end up with an amorphous husk of
“relatedness” (Carsten 2000), the countless realizations of which
are far from being recognized as kinship in any society. In both
Klaus Hamberger is Associate Professor (Maître de conférences)
at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Laboratoire
d’Anthropologie Sociale, 52 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Paris, France
[klaus.hamberger@ehess.fr]). This paper was submitted 18 II 16,
accepted 17 IV 17, and electronically published 16 VIII 18.
cases, kinship disappears as a distinct “system of symbols and
meanings” (Schneider 1972).
Schneider’s antinomy remains inevitable as long as we focus
on the natural or arbitrary character of the (procreative or other)
“symbols” destined to express (relational) “meanings,” instead
of considering the working of the “system” as such. For if kin-
ship, as Schneider argued, cannot be demarcated as a distinct
cultural domain (like religion, politics, and so on), this is because
it constitutes not a domain but rather a logic of relations, which
may be at work in any domain. In other words, what char-
acterizes kinship is not the semantic sphere from which the
relational symbols are borrowed but the operations by which
such symbols are connected and permuted. Just as any discur-
sive symbolism can be nonmetaphorically called a “language,”
whether or not it uses the phonetic apparatus, so too the
question of whether or not nonprocreative ties can be consid-
ered as kinship relations depends on whether or not they can
be shown to form a system structured by the same logic as,
for example, genealogies.
One obvious candidate for such a system is the network of
relations that people form by living together in a shared spa-
tial environment. As anthropologists have long acknowledged
(see, e.g., Kroeber 1938), residence is a primary pattern of social
structure, as “natural” and as “universal” as procreation, and is
used by many societies as the privileged frame of reference for
what we are used to calling their “kinship system.” In fact, the
morphology of kinship structures can be rendered by networks
of places and movements as well as by networks of filiation and
1. A fact already noted by several observers (see, e.g., Parkin 2009).
2. My aim here is not to give a historical account of the controversy,
which would require us to start (at least) with Harold Scheffler and Floyd
Lounsbury for the “extensionist” approach and with David Schneider for
the “constructionist” approach. Tracing intellectual genealogies still farther
back is a complex task, since front lines have shifted considerably (thus,
both approaches are opposed to Morgan, and both draw on Malinowski,
though for different reasons).

q 2018 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2018/5905-0003$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/699736
 526
marriage. Thus, to take one popular example, it is now generally
accepted that the “house” is no less important as a generative
scheme of kinship than the “family” (see Lévi-Strauss 1991). A
reorientation of kinship analysis based on residence rather than
on procreation (already proposed by Titiev 1943, 1956) is thus a
pertinent project. Starting from a generalized and materialized
version of Lévi-Strauss’s concept of “house-based” societies, a
series of empirical studies analyzing kinship in topological
rather than in genealogical terms (Anderson, Wishart, and Vaté
2013; Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Joyce and Gillespie 2000)
has proved the fertility of such an approach.
The emergence of a topological model of kinship has been of
critical methodological importance, because it pushes us to
reformulate the basic operations that generate kinship net-
works in an idiom sufficiently general to be valid regardless of
whether they are performed through bodily processes such as
procreation and sex or through spatial activities such as co-
habitation and displacement.
In speaking of the “basic operations” that generate kinship
networks, the plural is crucial. We are not asking what kind
of relation kinship “is,” since kinship could not work as a system
if it consisted of only one such relation. Indeed, responses to
the question “What is kinship?” usually convey two fundamental
ideas: a notion of sameness or resemblance and a notion of
closeness or propinquity. Everywhere kin, as opposed to non-
kin, are conceived of as people who are “alike” or “close,” and in
many languages terms such as these are actually used to denote
the relations that anthropologists habitually gloss in English by
the word “kin” (see Barry 2008:19). However, one would be ill-
advised to confound these notions of sameness and closeness, or
to subsume them under some general concept of “relatedness.”
Their distinction (or even opposition) can be essential to kinship
systems. Kin who are close to each other need not be alike, and
indeed often must be unalike. For instance, in societies such as
the West African Ewe-Watchi, where closeness and likeness,
respectively, characterize kin on the father’s side and kin on the
mother’s side (Hamberger 2011), the incest prohibition amounts
to keeping the two kinds of relation separate. To be sure, relations
of closeness and sameness may, in certain contexts, coincide—
for example, when an Ashanti king marries his son to his sister’s
daughter so that the paternal “spirit” will not leave the maternal
“house” (Rattray 1927:323). But even then, they still remain
distinct, and it is by virtue of their distinction that they can form
the basis of a relational system. Underlying this distinction be-
tween relations of closeness and relations of sameness is a more
fundamental opposition involving the operations by which they
are generated: operations of contiguity (through which two
elements become mutually connected, i.e., “close”) and opera-
tions of substitution (through which two elements become mu-
tually exchangeable, i.e., “similar”).
Conceptualizing “kinship” as a system generated by conti-
guity and substitution would, of course, hardly suffice to dis-
tinguish it from other “systems of symbols and meanings.” All
such systems rest on these same two operations, which Jakobson
(1963 [1956]) once called the “two aspects of language.” Or, as
Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 5, October 2018
Leibniz put it, any “logic” is just a particular way of connecting
and substituting symbols.3 Now the point is that kinship is more
than a “system of symbols and meanings.” It constitutes, as
Sahlins (2013:61) has recently stated, an “order of intersubjec-
tivity.”4 Kinship relations are not first and foremost classifica-
tory devices but modes of interaction. They do not link just
symbols. They link agents. From this perspective, the basic
operations of contiguity and substitution here are, respectively,
tantamount to placing oneself with respect to the other and
putting oneself in the other’s place.
To use the notion of “place” in this context is not simply
metaphorical. This is because contiguity and substitution are
not only aspects of language; they are also aspects of space.
The empirical finding that many societies frame their kinship
concepts in terms of residence and domestic space has its
theoretical explanation in the fact that the logic of kinship as
such can be understood as logic of spatial construction. Be-
fore turning to a comparative study of empirical cases, let us
examine the basic principles of this logic: relational compo-
sition, generational order, and the gender polarity.
Principles of Constructing Social Space
Social space can be defined most generally as a system of
intersubjective relations structured by contiguity and substi-
tution. In effect, all spatial relations can be envisaged under
two different aspects. On the one hand, they link the elements
copresent in a given view of the world, structured by the
reference system of a given subject’s body, dwelling, or en-
vironment. Under this aspect, space appears as structured by
contiguity, as an “order of coexistences,” as Leibniz called it.5
On the other hand, spatial relations link different views of the
world through perspectival transformations (each of which
consists of a multitude of simultaneous substitutions). Under
this aspect, space appears as structured by similarity, since
spatial structures are “similar” to the extent that they can be
transformed into each other.6
The inclusion of social relations into this generalized no-
tion of space has several consequences. First, it allows us to
apply the formal instruments of spatial analysis (such as re-
lational algebra) to kinship relations. Second, it makes it
possible to conceive of kinship as a logic structuring material
3. Unpublished note, cited in Gerhardt’s edition (Leibniz 1996 [1890]),
vol. 7, p. 31.
4. On this point, see also Hamberger (2013).
5. Leibniz’s third letter, in Clarke (1717:54–71).
6. The conception of space as a system of contiguity and similarity
relations has its roots in Leibniz’s concept of the “monad,” which forms
part of both an order of connections (as an infinitesimal component of
the universe) and an order of substitutions (as a unique perspective of the
universe). Leibniz applied this concept not only to physical space in its
restricted sense (the “machine of the universe”) but also to social space
(the “city of minds”; Monadology, §87). Not surprisingly, he illustrated
his theory of space using the example of genealogy (Leibniz’s fifth letter,
in Clarke 1717:206–209 [§49]).
Hamberger Kinship as Logic of Space
space, and to integrate, on an equal footing, the empirical
study of architecture, residence, and mobility patterns with
that of genealogy and terminology.
The formal analysis of kinship by means of relational algebra
has been carried farthest in the domain of kinship terminologies.
Authors such as Read (1984, 2007, 2012, 2013a), Read, Fischer,
and Lehman (2014), and Leaf (2006) have shown that kinship
terminologies can be analyzed as closed generative systems,
irrespective of the particular domain (procreative, residential, or
other) to which the terms may refer. Their approach draws on
the insight that every kin term denotes at the same time a po-
sition, that is, contiguity to a given “self,” and a perspective, that
is, substitutability between the kin terms used by this “self ” and
those used by another “self.” For example, the position of my
“uncle” is that of a “brother” in the perspective of my “mother.”
In this manner, kin-term systems can be analyzed as networks of
relations between relations, without reference to their meanings.
For instance, provided that we know how the term “mother” is
linked to the other terms of the system, it does not matter
whether we interpret it as “woman who bore me” or as “woman
from the natal household.”
Kinship here appears as a “space” in the formal-algebraic
sense of a “structured system of positions” (Read 2012:92). The
system is structured by the operation of relational composi-
tion, which uses given relations to define new relations (e.g., by
composing “uncle” out of “mother” and “brother”). This op-
eration involves both contiguity and substitution. Contiguity
establishes the (direct or indirect) link between ego and alter
(e.g., ego’s mother or ego’s uncle). Substitution (of ego for alter)
makes it possible for ego to consider a third position from alter’s
perspective (e.g., ego’s uncle as the mother’s brother). The con-
struction of social space through relational composition thus
rests crucially on the capacity to establish indirect connections
and to effect perspectival transformations. Read (2012:152ff.)
considers the emergence of these operations as the decisive
evolutionary step toward the formation of social networks that
are independent of prior face-to-face interaction and thus can
extend beyond the local residential group. On this reading, the
appearance of “social space” as an abstract conceptual struc-
ture is thus simultaneous with its emergence as a concrete res-
idential structure. At the same time, repeated relational com-
position enables the integration of large numbers of individuals
into extended genealogical networks. All these different (ter-
minological, residential, and genealogical) structures are thus
ultimately generated by the same basic operations that are si-
multaneously at work at both the conceptual and the perceptual
and practical levels. Once we assume that they are guided by a
common logic, it becomes unsurprising that the kinship ter-
minologies, settlement plans, and genealogies of a given society
should often exhibit morphological similarities.7
7. See Read (2012:79–80). These homologies may extend beyond social
space to space in general. Thus, Bennardo (2016) has recently proposed a
fundamental homology between kin-term systems and spatial reference
frames.
527
However, connections between conceptual, residential, and
genealogical structures involve more than formal similarities.
Indeed, as our case examples below show in greater detail, the
frontier between genealogical and residential structures is not
always that clear-cut. Procreative ties are frequently conceptu-
alized in idioms of dwellings, which are in turn likened to
procreative organs (most commonly the maternal womb).8 Con-
versely, ties created by coresidence and commensality are of-
ten ascribed the same enduring character as ties created by,
say, intrauterine symbiosis. These features are a consequence
of the more general principle that the concepts of space and of
body are inseparable (Bourdieu 1972; Ingold 2000; Merleau-
Ponty 1945). Both shape each other in the course of everyday
and ritual interactions. While bodily movements continually
form and transform the environing network of paths and
places, the kinetic, visual, acoustic, or thermic structure of
space in turn continually fashions the actions and dispositions
of the body. The “house” is both a product of and a primary
tool for this ongoing mutual constitution of body and space
(see Allerton 2013, Cassiman 2006, and Dessertine 2016 for
fine-grained ethnographic demonstrations).
The unity of body and space has proved a fruitful paradigm in
anthropology. One purpose of this article is to explore its im-
plications for the conception of kinship. It means that the in-
teractions producing social space include sexuality and pro-
creation but are not restricted to them. Rather than sharply
distinguish procreative kinship from residential or territorial
kinship, we should conceive them as different scales of a single
spatial continuum of bodies, dwellings, and landscapes. In this
sense, the topological model, I argue, actually encompasses the
genealogical model. Clearly, to substantiate such an approach
requires us to do more than simply show that both spatial and
genealogical structures are based on contiguity and substitution.
It will be necessary to demonstrate that the specific features of
genealogical structures—such as generation and gender—can
be given a genuine topological meaning.
To do so, let us first consider the topological meaning of the
operation of relational composition, which, as underlined
above, integrates contiguity and substitution relations. Space, I
suggested above, can be understood as a system of intersub-
jective relations in which contiguity takes the form of (direct or
indirect) interaction and substitution takes the form of per-
spective change. Now the operation that integrates these two
aspects is the spatial operation par excellence: movement. Move-
ment simultaneously creates a relation of contiguity (by shap-
ing a place within a new environment) and a relation of sub-
stitution (by transforming the perspective on both old and new
environments). Viewing movement as a form of social inter-
action, we may say that it establishes proximity between agents
who share each other’s place and similarity between agents
who can adopt each other’s perspective. Movement thus be-
comes the practical process of relational composition, and
8. See, e.g., Cassiman (2006:113) for West Africa, Hugh-Jones (1995:233)
for northwestern Amazonia, and Waterson (1991:196) for Indonesia.
 528
movement between local groups is decisive for the emergence
of social space as an integrated relational system.
At the same time, however, the notion of movement intro-
duces a fundamental asymmetry into the operations of conti-
guity and substitution. Contiguity may turn into a hierarchical
relation between a newcomer and the native whom s/he joins;
substitution results in an oriented relation between a successor
and the predecessor whom s/he replaces or represents. These
dynamic versions of contiguity and substitution lie at the core
of the idea of generation, one of the fundamental traits of
kinship. As we shall see below, hierarchical contiguity and ori-
ented substitution may also characterize the static morphology
of space, for example, in the form of nested compounds or di-
rected paths.9 Even when considered synchronically, social space
is intrinsically structured by time.
To grasp kinship fully as logic of space, we still have to take
account of another of its fundamental traits, namely, gender.
It has long been acknowledged that gender is not just one of the
basic “facts” on which kinship systems are built but that the two
are interdependent and mutually constituted (Collier and Ya-
nagisako 1987). A topological conception of kinship thus nec-
essarily involves a topological conception of gender. The key to
this topological conception of gender, I argue, is to be found
in the notion of encompassment. Every topology constitutes a
system of nested environments, each of which may encompass
(or be encompassed by) other environments. Encompassment
gives rise to two conceptual pairs: container versus contained
and inside versus outside. I suggest that these two related po-
larities, interacting in often complex ways, constitute the topo-
logical meaning of gender. First, most (if not all) human soci-
eties, past and present, conceptualize the interior as female and
the exterior as male (so that men may be feminized in quotidian
or ritual contexts when they are considered “inside”). Second,
the female is characterized by a capacity to contain others (so
that men may be feminized in contexts of spirit possession or
cannibalism). The “male/female” polarity thus rests on the
complementary ideas of an externalized content and an inter-
nalized container. This would seem paradoxical but makes an-
alytical sense when “male” and “female” are treated not as static
positions but as dynamic orientations of movement and growth.
This topological conception of gender, which I substantiate in
greater detail for three cultural areas below, is more complex
and general than the “public/domestic” dichotomy, traditionally
considered fundamental to gender (see Rosaldo and Lamphere
1974). Its basic feature lies in being thoroughly relational, by
which I mean that one and the same position can be either inside
or outside, depending on the reference frame. Gender in this
conception is relative (eastern Indonesians “houses” are male
for their sisters’ husbands and female for their wives’ brothers),
dynamic (West African men become increasingly male as they
move from the status of infants toward that of ancestors), and
9. A well-known example of hierarchical contiguity is what Lévi-Strauss
(1958 [1956]) called “concentric dualism.” But diametric relations—such as
opposition or complementarity—can also exhibit hierarchical traits.
Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 5, October 2018
perspectival (the northwest Amazonian longhouse appears as
male from the outside and as female from the inside; see Hugh-
Jones 1995). To be sure, the topological polarities admit of great
variations, from the female “confinement” found in nineteenth-
century Western bourgeoisie (Beauvoir 1949; Durkheim 1893)
to women’s almost unrestricted access to space in nomadic
hunter-gatherer societies such as the !Kung San (Draper 1975,
1992; Lee 1979; Marshall 1976).10 The topological concept of
gender precisely allows us to understand variation in gender
relations as part of variation in social space as a whole.11
Gender, like generation, thus has a genuine topological
meaning, which means that social space can constitute a “kin-
ship system” in its own right (and not just a spatial model for
other—genealogical or terminological—systems). But the in-
corporation of gender into the topology of social space is fun-
damental in yet another respect. As we noted, movement is the
practical form that relational composition takes in the con-
struction of social space. This holds in particular for the move-
ment formalized in the institution of marriage, which not only
implies an individual residence change but also enables the
composition of indirect (affinal) relations between members
of different residential groups, thus integrating them into a
cohesive kinship space (see Chit Hlaing and Read 2016; Read
2012:173–174).
Now, in many societies, the orientation of this movement is
bound to a gender criterion. According to whether it is women
or men who are supposed to leave their natal group on marriage,
gender becomes a decisive factor for the relative scope of face-
to-face interactions and perspective changes and polarizes the
interplay between contiguity and substitution. This polarization
affects not only individual experience but also the formation of
localized or dispersed kin groups. Though from an abstract
formal point of view any kinship relation can be considered
under the aspect of contiguity or substitution, “closeness” and
“sameness” thus often become the peculiar forms that kinship
takes when traced in the male or female line. As a consequence,
the topology of social space will differ, depending on whether
the movements that connect local groups take place at their
inner (female) or outer (male) frontiers or at the inner frontier
for one group and the outer frontier for the other. As we shall see
below, in each case the constitutive movement connecting local
groups entails a particular form of perspectival transformation,
which can therefore serve to characterize the topology of the
resulting space.
10. Even in !Kung San culture, the inside-outside polarity remains
valid. Though the women’s place (to the left of the fire in front of the
hut) is no closer to the hut than the men’s place (to the right), the hut is
the domain of women (who construct it), the fire that of men (who make
it), girls sleep inside or close to the huts, while boys sleep in the open in
the middle of the camp circle, etc. (see Marshall 1976:82–89).
11. See Draper (1992) on the correlation between the equality and
mobility of !Kung San women and the openness and ephemerality of
their dwellings.
Hamberger Kinship as Logic of Space
To be sure, the three aforementioned types of constitutive
movement (inner, outer, and inner-outer) by no means exhaust
the diversity of social topologies. Gender is not the only deter-
minant of movement. More importantly, gender is itself, as we
have stated, a relative and continuous, rather than an absolute
and dichotomic, feature of social space. However, these ideal
types can help us to select our ethnographic sample so as to
grasp the largest possible range of topological variation.
In what follows, I explore these contrastive topologies by
drawing on three regional clusters of empirical kinship systems,
each of which incorporates a distinct type of gendered move-
ment: the segmentary systems of West Africa, the dualist or-
ganizations of central Brazil, and the asymmetric alliance sys-
tems of eastern Indonesia. Their comparative analysis will
allow us to study the concrete working of the logic that has
up to now been presented in a necessarily abstract way. While
their treatment in this article is directed toward making a
general theoretical argument and therefore necessarily em-
phasizes the differences between the regions and the similar-
ities within each region, it goes without saying that none of
these clusters can be reduced to a single topological template.
Though each of them is characterized by some distinctive basic
schema of spatial construction, this schema is above all a local
one. It may operate in different ways, to different extents, and
on different levels, thus producing a vast variety of topologies
within each cultural area. As I try to illustrate by way of some
examples,12 the potential of the topological method lies in its
capacity to account for such intraregional variation.
Within each of these regional clusters, we find cases that have
become emblematic for one or another tradition of classical
kinship theory: the Tallensi compound was the master example
of structural-functionalist descent theory, the Bororo village
gave rise to a series of structuralist analyses, and the Atoni
house has served as a major inspiration for the anthropology of
“house societies.” By revisiting these familiar cases from an
alternative viewpoint that brings them all within a common
theoretical frame, I endeavor to demonstrate concretely what is
to be gained by treating social space not just as a spatial rep-
resentation of the kinship system but as the kinship system
itself. The epistemological implications of this viewpoint are
addressed in the conclusion.
Movement as Projection: The Segmentary
Systems of West Africa
It is now widely acknowledged that the mechanical model of a
segmentary society, organized from top to bottom by a hierar-
chy of segments in complementary opposition and coded in a
genealogical language perfectly fitting territorial organization
(Middleton and Tait 1958), never applied to any existing society,
12. See ninth paragraph (“To a certain extent . . .”) in “Movement as
Reflection: The Moiety Systems of Central Brazil” and the sixth para-
graph (“As has often been remarked . . .”) in “Movement as Translation:
The Asymmetric Alliance Systems of Eastern Indonesia.”
529
in West Africa or elsewhere.13 However, the conceptual prin-
ciple of segmentation remains useful, provided that one does not
consider it as capturing global social space but rather views it as
a local schema—a “matrix,” as Fortes (1949:63) called it—for its
construction. This “matrix” is given by the polygynous vir-
ilocal compound. Illustrated by the Tallensi homestead (Fortes
1949:53; schematically represented in fig. 1, left), the social space
of this compound rests on a hierarchical opposition between the
patrilocal “house” (associated with a man) and the matricentral
“rooms” (each associated with a woman) that compose it. The
unity of the house is represented by its central and frontal male
sector, oriented toward the outside (courtyard, vestibule, and
portal), while segmentation operates in its backward, peripheral
female sector, situated inside.
This type of spatial organization, which has been adopted by
a large number of West African societies, particularly in and
around the Volta basin,14 provides the structural model of lin-
eage segmentation: the patrilineage (often conceptualized as
“house”) is divided into segments (frequently called “rooms”)
originating in different women (Fortes 1953:33). In accordance
with the development cycle of residential groups, this process of
segmentation is endlessly repeated: every room is the germ of a
new house (or group of houses) founded by uterine brothers.
Now if uterine kinship divides the agnatic group into comple-
mentary segments, this is because it unites uterine kin through
mutual substitutability, the model of which is the equivalence of
siblings (Fortes 1949:256). This dialectic of outward comple-
mentarity and inward substitutability rests upon the differing
orientation of the operations that construct social space: while
the contiguity of agnates determines the unity of the encom-
passing local group, the similarity of uterine kin provides the
criterion for the distinctive unity of each of its internal segments.
The dynamic of segmentation continuously transforms mater-
nal “rooms” into paternal “houses.” In this way, lineage struc-
ture emerges as a genealogy of nested places, each place being, so
to speak, male on the outside and female on the inside.
This dynamic is not gender neutral, in the sense that agnatic
and uterine signs could simply be inverted. As Fortes (1953:33)
has noted, by contrast with the model of agnatic segmentation
just presented, the segmentation of uterine groups in matrilineal
societies, where it exists, does not follow paternal links. Several
authors (e.g., de Heusch 1978; Douglas 1969) have emphasized
that the substitutive capacity of merging collateral (but also
lineal and oblique) kin characterizes, in the African context,
exclusively the uterine link. For substitution to have a seg-
mentary effect it has to work in the maternal mode, at the female
“interior” of the virilocal residence group.
This does not mean, however, that the substitutability of
uterine kin is restricted to this interior. Uterine kin constitute a
13. See the critiques made by Sahlins (1961) and Horton (1971:84),
which preceded the systematical revisions in Holy (1979).
14. See, among many others, the analyses of Drucker-Brown (2001)
for the Mamprusi and of Bourdier and Minh-Ha (1983), Cassiman (2006),
Liberski-Bagnoud (2002), and Hahn (2000) for the Kasena.
 530
Figure 1. Three schematic West African compound plans: Tallensi (after Fortes 1949), Mamprusi (after Drucker-Brown 2001), and
Kasena (after Cassiman 2006 and Hahn 2000). Female and male areas are indicated as gray and white, respectively. The diagrams are
not drawn faithfully to scale and shape.
“continuous entity” (Fortes 1949:41) that cuts across agnatic
houses. Siblingship is just a special case of a more general uterine
relation (expressed by the Tallensi term soog) that reaches be-
yond the limits of the local agnatic group and is characterized
by a “strong feeling of mutual identification.” This mutual iden-
tification manifests itself by a generalized substitutability: the
debt, the fault, the property of one uterine relative is the debt, the
fault, the property of the other. Nobody can refuse a uterine
relative’s request, and a person’s guilt “contaminates” his or her
entire uterine kin group (Fortes 1949:36).
This Tallensi concept of uterine kinship as “a mystical bond
which . . . transcends and opposes the diversification of person
from person” (Fortes 1973:316–317) echoes the conception of
uterine kin as “one person,” frequent among bilinear societies
such as the Ashanti (Fortes 1950:257), Lobi (Rouville 1987:
153), or Ewe (Hamberger 2011:25). In fact, as noted by Rat-
tray (1932:240), the Tallensi soog is homologous to the Ashanti
matriclan (mogya).15
While the principle of uterine substitutability is most evident
in West African societies with “bilinear” traits, it is present in a
wider range of societies. Fortes (1949:252–253, 238n) empha-
sized that the equivalence of full siblings derives from their
common subjection to the mother’s spirit, on which depend,
notably, the children’s reproductive capacities. This conception,
widespread in West Africa, is frequently expressed in the idea
that a person’s destiny, in particular his or her procreative
destiny, is determined by the mother’s prenatal choice.16 This
15. Rattray is speaking of the Nankanse soo, which he describes as
manifesting “all the characteristics” of the Tallensi soog (Rattray
1932:345). Contrary to Fortes, Rattray (1923:35) treats the terms mogya
(blood) and abusua (clan) as synonyms.
16. The West African concept of “prenatal choice” involves the idea
that a person chooses her earthly destiny, just before birth.
Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 5, October 2018
idea is equally found in West African societies without explicit
uterine groupings yet structured by the logic of segmentation by
mothers, such as the Gourmantche or Samo. Concerning the
former, Cartry (1973) has interpreted this spiritual communi-
cation in terms of a primordial identity of mother and child.
Rather than constituting a causal link, the mother’s influence on
the child’s destiny is a relation of equivalence. This equivalence
is at the root of lineage segmentation, since a woman’s prenatal
choice determines not only her sons’ destiny but also that of
their agnatic descendants: a lineage segment is precisely a
group of descendants affected by one woman’s prenatal choice
(Cartry 1966:51ff., 1973:271). That this equivalence is best
thought of as substitution can be seen from the mutual ex-
clusivity of procreative activities: the child can procreate only
when the mother has ceased to do so. Similar ideas are held
by the Samo (Héritier 1996 [1984]:110–111), among whom a
specific ritual is performed at puberty, permitting a woman to
replace her mother in her procreative functions. The ritual is
again repeated several years on, when the husband takes pos-
session of the woman and her premarital offspring (Héritier
1977:57–58). The same ritual that cuts the tie between a
woman and her mother thus also creates the tie between her
child and its social father and to this father’s agnatic group.
The latter, in turn, assigns the child a position in the order of
lineages and generations by naming him or her. Thus, maternal
and paternal relations operate in opposite directions: while a
man can become a father only to the extent that he is a son to a
father, a woman can become a mother only on ceasing to be
a daughter to a mother (see Houseman 1988). This is why pa-
ternal links (father–male ego and male ego–son) form a con-
tiguous network, while maternal links (mother–female ego and
female ego–daughter) are mutual substitutes.
This West African logic of agnatic contiguity and uterine
substitution, demonstrated here for several Volta basin so-
Hamberger Kinship as Logic of Space
cieties, reaches beyond the field of social morphology. I have
explored it in further detail for the Watchi Ewe of southeastern
Togo (Hamberger 2011), among whom it permeates every do-
main of social and cultural life. Agnatic relatives in Watchi
society are not so much characterized by their genealogical links
as by the fact that they inhabit the same “house” (synonym of
“paternal family”), cultivate the same soil, and are ultimately
buried in the same ground. In origin stories as well as in tra-
ditional practice, the paternal link is created by a cession of land,
thus endorsing a hierarchical relationship of contiguity between
native and newcomer. By contrast, uterine kinship manifests
itself above all in joint liability, activated in cases of vengeance or
debt. In precolonial times, any uterine relative could be killed,
pawned, or sold in place of another. Reciprocally, every slave,
acquired in exchange for money or a kinsman, became the
uterine relative of his or her buyer. Considered as “one person,”
uterine relatives are characterized by a bond of mutual substi-
tutability that tends to erase hierarchy. Ultimately the terms
“paternal” and “maternal” have logical rather than genealogical
meaning: the term for “father” serves as a suffix denoting any
relation of belonging (in particular belonging to a place), and the
expression “child of the same mother” is synonymous for “the
same thing” (i.e., for being mutual substitutable). To have “one
father” is to be close; to have “one mother” is to be similar. The
interplay of these two principles shapes the topology of many
virilocal societies in West Africa.
The principle of uterine substitution serves not only to in-
ternally divide local agnatic groups but also to connect them
externally. One of the best-known examples of the “external”
working of the principle consists in the privileges enjoyed by
the uterine nephew, who belongs to another local group. In
many West African virilocal societies, the nephew can ask his
maternal uncle, in the form of more or less aggressive joking,
for anything that the latter possesses, including sometimes his
wife. As Griaule (1954:40) was the first to note, “everything hap-
pens as if ego substituted himself symbolically for his uncle”
(also see Cartry and Adler 1971). In the Dogon case to which
he referred, this substitution rests on a more general mutual
identification of uterine kin, which, symbolized by the pla-
centa, obliterates differences of generation and gender. Sim-
ilar conceptions of the avuncular link can be found among
the Mossi, where the uterine nephew is “identified” with the
mother’s brother, whom he may ritually replace (Lallemand
1977:338). But above all, as Fortes (1949:30, 301–302) observed
among the Tallensi, the privileges of the uterine nephew imply
that the uncle’s house is the nephew’s second home, an abso-
lute refuge from which he can never be excluded. The identi-
fication of houses originating in “one room” thus is at work
not only within the lineage (where it operates as a principle of
segmentation) but also across lineages. This can also be seen in
the so-called semicomplex marriage prohibitions, which ex-
clude marriage not only with certain relatives but also with all
members of these relatives’ descent groups (Héritier 1981;
Lévi-Strauss 1965). Among the Tallensi, for example, the ex-
ogamy of the “house” extends to all women belonging to the
531
mother’s “room,” that is, her lineage segment (Fortes 1945:204).
Marriage prohibitions of this kind are frequently associated
with an “Omaha”-type skewing of the kinship terminology: just
as the mother’s “room” is extended to the entire “house” that
emerges from it, so too the kin term for the “mother’s brother”
is extended to his male agnatic descendants, irrespective of
generation.
The identification of maternally related houses with maternal
rooms in West African societies can also be observed in the
opposite sense. Thus, in the Tallensi compound, the rooms
belonging to women of the same clan are often adjacent to each
other (Fortes 1949:58). The same principle is explicit among the
Bassar, where shrines located at the entrances of rooms recall the
origins of each of the lineage’s matrisegments. This spatial ar-
rangement corresponds to the Bassar naming system, which
links each child to its mother’s clans. Just as the Bassar house is
composed of rooms whose female owners originate from out-
side, the clan is, “in its own substance, composed of elements
coming from several other clans” (Dugast 1992:318, 326). Uter-
ine links structure the interior of agnatic houses to the extent
that they connect each house to the outside. A woman’s room is
thus not only the germ of the house of her sons. It is also the
image of her own natal room (and of the house that has grown
from it), projected, at a reduced scale, into her husband’s house.
The projection of one house into another is the characteristic
form that the perspectival transformations connecting local
groups take in the context of West African virilocal societies. It is
practically brought about by the incessant movement of women
(and their children) between natal and marital “rooms.” From a
more general perspective, this oscillating movement forms part
of a wider pattern of female circulation. West African women
are highly mobile, both residentially and matrimonially. Fre-
quently changing houses and husbands, they also move con-
stantly between local markets as traders. The gendered structure
of space here resides not so much in a static division as in dif-
ferently oriented movements. Male movement gradually leads
from the peripheral “inside” of the maternal room to the central
“outside” of the ritual arena, eventually passing through initia-
tion forests or labor migration to the coastal cities. This char-
acteristic outward and centripetal movement continues even
after death: male household heads are transformed into ever
more remote ancestors. Origin histories often place the mythical
encounter of the founding ancestor with the autochthonous
earth spirits who ceded him the territory at the top of this ag-
natic chain, thus tracing the first frontier between inside and
outside and marking the ultimate center of social space. By
contrast, female movement oscillates between several “insides”
while transiting through the peripheral “outside” of proximate
markets.17 Oriented by the architecture of houses, male and
female movements form a dense network of intense circulation
that has shaped, and continues to shape, the social landscape of
West African space.
17. For an analysis of the center-periphery connotations of male
ritual and female trade in West Africa, see Piot (1992).
 532
Movement as Reflection: The Moiety
Systems of Central Brazil
The Amerindian villages of central Brazil are generally laid out
as circles formed by uxorilocal family houses, inhabited by
uterine kin groups except their married male members. Some-
times, as among the Northern Ge or the Bororo, these uterine
groups also own a spiritual estate (e.g., a stock of names) and can
be considered as matrilineal “houses” in the Lévi-Straussian
sense (see J. C. Crocker 1979:266–267 and Lea 1992, 1995).
However, veritable descent groups (such as clans), when they
exist, generally constitute themselves in the center of the village
circle—a domain reserved to men and strongly demarcated
from the periphery of family houses owned by and associated
with women.
While the village center is located within the circle of houses
and thus may appear as the “interior” part, it in fact mediates
access from and contact with the outside and thus is, in a to-
pological sense, relatively more exterior than the family houses,
which are oriented toward the village center. This polarity is
reconfirmed in the interior of family houses, where a frontal
male sector contrasts with a backward female sphere. As in the
case of the West African compound, the opposition between
male center and female periphery thus corresponds to an as-
sociation of men with the outside and women with the inside.
This polarity is found all over Amazonia (see Hamberger 2012
and references therein), but nowhere as neatly as in central
Brazil. Here, all men, and not only the young, spend a large part
of their time, sometimes (as among the Mundurucú) even most
of their time, in this masculine area detached from the family
sphere.
Central Brazilian “uxorilocality” is thus tempered by an ar-
chitectural disposition that allows men to live among their (real
or classificatory) kin. Some authors (e.g., Murphy 1960:103)
have even considered this to be the final cause of this type of
organization. However, the association of center and outside
as focal zones of male activity does not, as in West Africa, take
the form of a portal or vestibule opened toward the (absent)
other, but of a central area and/or building—such as the “men’s
house”—that serves as a place of encounter with the other.
Moreover, contrary to the West African compound, whose
male inhabitants are typically agnates (men of the same group),
Amazonian male space typically brings together affines (men
from distinct groups). This feature is common to its multiple
forms across Amazonia: as a collective dormitory where future
brothers-in-law sleep side by side (Shavante; Maybury-Lewis
1967:108), as an arena where ritual or sportive adversaries af-
front each other (Canela; Crocker 1990:197ff.), or as a guest
house for visitors, including spirits (Tapirapé; Wagley 1977:102ff.).
The space of men is always the space of the other.
Almost everywhere in central Brazil, this “male space” shows
a dualist organization (sometimes several). Moiety structures
are common, though their functions and modes are very di-
verse. Moieties may be exogamous (as among the Bororo or
Mundurucú), tend toward endogamy (as among the Tapirapé),
Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 5, October 2018
or have no matrimonial function whatsoever (as among the
Northern Ge). They may rest on a principle of uterine descent
(Bororo and Canela) or agnatic descent (Mundurucú, Tapirapé,
Sherenté), combine the two principles (Apinayé), or reject
them both (Kayapo). They may base themselves on nonde-
scent groups such as age sets (Timbira) or simply on personal
choice (Panará). Yet whatever their particular manifestation,
their mutual relation always involves a principle of reciprocal
substitution.
This principle is most explicit among the Bororo.18 Based on
matrilineal clans and moieties, Bororo society has turned its
village plan (fig. 2, left) into an all-purpose classificatory grid in
which every person, every object, and every concept has its
place. The uterine group occupying a given sector of the village
circle “owns” the items, names, and so on associated with it
(Crocker 1969:47). Thus, things and ideas are organized by the
same principles that organize social groups, namely, hierarchi-
cal complementarity between upper and lower clan sections (on
an east-west axis) and symmetric opposition between moieties
(on a north-south axis). As Crocker (1977:136–137) has pointed
out, these two organizing principles respectively correspond to
contiguity and substitution.19 The complementarity of clan sec-
tions forms part of a vast array of contiguity relations between
persons and other beings (proximity, participation, ownership,
etc.) that generally characterize maternal kinship. By contrast,
the relation between moieties is conceptualized as a father-son
tie, which is intimately linked to the idea of a mutual substitu-
tion of opposites. The son is the father’s image, the actual in-
carnation of the latter’s self (Crocker 1977:138). This also holds
for clans: while the uterine group is the “owner” of a set of
names, spirits, and rituals, the task of its “sons” (i.e., the sons of
its male members, who form part of the opposite moiety) con-
sists in representing these names, incorporating these spirits,
and performing these rites (Crocker 1977:136). This conception
can be seen in men’s funerary rites, where the person of the
deceased is represented by a “son” of his clan (ideally, the man
whose initiation he has sponsored). In like manner, every man
acts during the ritual as representative of a deceased member of
the other moiety, so that ultimately all kinship ties are inverted:
consanguines become affines, uterine relatives are turned into
father and son, and exchanges between allies appear as maternal
gifts (J. C. Crocker 1979:289). This reversed world has its per-
manent expression in the men’s house, where the “northern”
moiety is located in the south and vice versa (Crocker 1977:141).
Substitution here links opposite positions; it takes the form of a
mirror relation.
This conceptualization of the intermoiety link is found all
over central Brazil, though rarely as explicitly as among the
18. In what follows, I base myself primarily on the work of J. C.
Crocker (1969, 1977, 1979, 1985) and Fabian (1992).
19. Crocker calls them, respectively, “metonymical” and “metaphor-
ical.”
Hamberger Kinship as Logic of Space
Figure 2. Three schematic central Brazilian village plans: Bororo (after Crocker 1985), Mundurucú (after Murphy 1960), and Kayapo
(after Posey 2002). Female and male areas are indicated as gray and white, respectively. The diagrams are not drawn faithfully to scale
and shape.
Bororo, for whom it is a cosmopolitical principle.20 Whether in
the mutual initiation of children (often enacted as kidnapping),
the exchange of sisters, or, more frequently, the exchange of
spouses (be it in ritual or in a semi-institutionalized form of
sexual rivalry 21), men of opposite moieties constantly replace one
another: as fathers in initiation rites, as brothers or husbands in
exchanges of women, and as entire persons in funeral service.
This mutual substitution often assumes the form of a ritualized
hostility, where initiation sponsors act as assailants (Karaja;
Pétesch 1992:251ff.) and grave diggers as trophy hunters (Mun-
durucú; Murphy 1958:53ff.). True, substitution is far from
being everywhere in central Brazil represented as a “paternal”
link. Even in the Bororo case, the initiation sponsor and spir-
itual “father” (who is always a member of the father’s clan and
thus a “father” in their Crow-type terminology) is actually the
preferred brother-in-law (J. C. Crocker 1979:285). Shaped in a
dualistic mode, the “paternal” link here becomes an expression
of affinity. In other central Brazilian societies, the diametric
dualism that structures the male center opposes affines, co-
affines, or consecutive age sets. Nonetheless, despite the great
diversity and complexity of intermoiety relations, the links
between males always take the form of substitution.22
The central Brazilian model thus exhibits a topology funda-
mentally different from that of the West African model. Con-
structed on exactly the inverse principles, it is anything but a
simple negative of the latter. Shaped in uterine rather than ag-
natic terms, the principle of contiguity no longer gives rise to a
20. See Caiuby Novaes’s (1997) report on the funeral ceremony of a
Salesian priest jointly held by Bororo and whites, which permitted each
“moiety” to redefine its place within Brazilian society.
21. See the elaborate systems of the Tapirapé (Wagley 1977:64) or the
Canela (Crocker 1990).
22. For the working of the principle of substitution in the absence of
moieties, see the example of the Enawene-Nawe (Nahum-Claudel 2017).
533
gradual transition from a peripheral female “inside” to a central
male “outside” but remains confined to a female periphery that
is opposed (rather than subordinated) to the male center.
Conversely, the principle of substitution, which now charac-
terizes the “paternal” (in fact, affinal) rather than the maternal
link, no longer underlies the segmentation of the periphery
but the cohesion of the center. The perspectival transformation
that integrates social space rests not so much on the similarity
of equivalents as on the opposition of mirror images. It works as
a specular reflection.
Amazonian social space differs from West African social
space above all in the fact that it places relations of substitution
at its center. To be sure, mutual replacements involving moieties
are not restricted to the village center. They may extend to its
periphery, particularly when, as in Bororo culture, moieties are
exogamous. Even where this is not the case, as among the
Timbira, Apinayé, Kayapo, or Panará, the ideal marriage is still
with the “other side of the plaza” (W. H. Crocker 1979:233; Da
Matta 1982:38; Ewart 2013:34; Vidal 1977:128). Nevertheless,
the pathways connecting the peripheral houses run radially
through the center. In central Brazilian villages, encounters with
the radical other (affine, enemy, or animal spirit embodied in
sacred instruments) take place in the male center.23 True, the
center in West Africa in its own way also provides access to the
radical other (e.g., the autochthonous earth spirits as first givers
of land). But this relation is mediated by a long chain of con-
tiguous links that lead from one ancestor (and ancestral house)
to another, following the hierarchical structure of agnatic de-
scent. In Amazonia, by contrast, this relation involves direct and
antagonistic encounters in the village center, marked by recip-
rocal substitution and expressed in an idiom of affinity.
23. This also concerns relations with whites (see Ewart 2013:72–84
for an in-depth analysis).
 534
To a certain extent, the transition between these two models
can be observed on a lower scale within Amazonia itself. The
Bororo case, with its “Crow” equation of affinity and paternity,
forms part of a series of variations within the Amazonian region
that lead from a purely affinal model of symmetric male sub-
stitution to a purely agnatic model of asymmetric male conti-
guity. As we pass from the Bororo to the Southern Ge, paternity
turns from a relation of substitution into a relation of contiguity,
as exogamous agnatic moieties arise within the male center.
Proceeding on to the Upper Xingu, male space increasingly
encompasses the peripheral houses (which cease to be uxori-
local), though the central flute house remains a focus of male
activity. Arriving at the Pano groups, the village circle disinte-
grates into paired or single virilocal houses defining their own
agnatic center. Finally reaching the Amazonian northwest, we
find dispersed agnatic house communities that, though still re-
lated by long-distance symmetrical marriage exchange, exhibit a
segmentary territorial organization strikingly reminiscent of
“African” models.
On a still closer scale, a similar transformation can be traced
within central Brazil, as the kinship principles structuring the
male center vary from alignment with the uterine organization
of the female periphery (among the Bororo or Timbira) to re-
liance on real or adoptive paternal links (among the Sherenté
or Kayapo). This polarity between uterine and agnatic central
structures corresponds to the relative importance of male and
female names, which are transmitted, respectively, by the ma-
ternal uncle and the paternal aunt. Continuous shifts between
uterine and agnatic poles are facilitated by peculiar variants of
Crow-Omaha terminologies. These partly symmetrically skewed
terminologies allow for all sorts of intermediary forms between
uterine (“Crow”) and agnatic (“Omaha”) skewing, according to
the prevalent relations between female periphery and male
center (see Coelho de Souza 2012:209ff.; Da Matta 1982:124ff.;
Maybury-Lewis 1979:238–239; Viveiros de Castro and Fausto
1993:160). As can be seen from these examples, the gendered
principles of spatial construction may operate in different ways
at different scales, giving rise to the huge diversity of social to-
pologies for which native America is renowned.
Movement as Translation: The Asymmetric Alliance
Systems of Eastern Indonesia
The spatial organization of the societies of eastern Indonesia
practicing asymmetric marriage alliance (“generalized exchange”
in Lévi-Strauss’s 1949 terms) is independent of the residence
rule, which in this region is highly variable. More precisely, there
is a common but dynamic rule: initial uxorilocal residence is
gradually transformed into virilocal residence by a constant flow
of gifts from the husband’s to the wife’s natal group.24 A few
24. See McKinnon (1991:140–141, 1995:179) for Tanimbar, Schulte
Nordholt (1971:96, 119) and Cunningham (1967:76–77) for the Atoni,
Traube (1980:294) for the Mambai, Hicks (1990:26–27) for the Northern
Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 5, October 2018
exceptions left aside, this process is virtually infinite, and in
general a few children remain with their maternal kin—in some
instances they constitute a sort of bridewealth (Cunningham
1967:77 and Fox, cited in Waterson 1991:159). As a conse-
quence, the “patrilineal” or “matrilineal” character of the ex-
changing local groups is a matter of ideology rather than of actual
genealogy.25 In most cases, this ideology is agnatic, and uxorilocal
residents are considered a “female” section (of inferior status) of
the local group (Cunningham 1964:58). This relation between
male and female divisions within the group is homologous to the
relation between groups linked by marriage alliance. Following
the model of the brother-sister relation,26 wife-giving houses
distinguish themselves as “male houses” or “male inhabitants”
from wife-taking houses, considered “female children” or “sis-
ters’ children.” The two groups are linked by one-way-oriented
and repeatedly “followed” matrimonial “paths.”27 As Allerton
(2013:75) has underlined, these “paths” are not just metaphor-
ical but real trails, emerging from the incessant circulation of
persons and gifts. Contrary to virilocal West Africa, where the
movements of women in marriage create a continuously re-
shaped network of uterine connections, the marriage paths
linking eastern Indonesian houses form a virtually enduring
framework, no less than the houses themselves.
This is because paths are conceptually parts of the wife-giving
house. Indeed, the wife-giving house is considered to encom-
pass28 the wife-taking house, and sometimes (as in Tanimbar)
even the entire “row” of wife-taking houses linked through
concatenated alliances (McKinnon 1991). The Atoni consider
preferential marriage with the spouse “of the path” (i.e., the
matrilateral cross-cousin) as “marriage within the house” (Cun-
ningham 1964:58).
Relations between givers and takers are thus always of the
same kind, regardless of whether they link two houses or two
parts of the same house. Alliance constitutes a permanent
hierarchical relationship of contiguity between encompassing
and encompassed houses, unaffected by subsequent changes
in postmarital residence and, in theory, even by marriage
Tetum, and numerous indications in van Wouden (1968 [1935]) for Timor,
Roti, Flores, Sumba, and Savu. For a critical review, see Barnes (1980b).
25. This fact has been emphasized from the beginning by the eth-
nographers of eastern Indonesia; see Kruyt (1921:790), cited in van Wouden
(1968 [1935]:59), and Schulte Nordholt (1971:131–132).
26. For the importance of this sibling model of affinity for eastern
Indonesia, see Barraud (1979, 2001) and Errington (1987), who contrasts
the eastern Indonesian model with that of the cognatic or endogamous
societies of western Indonesia.
27. See, e.g., Schulte Nordholt (1971) and Cunningham (1967) for the
Atoni, Traube (1980, 1986) for the Mambai, and Allerton (2013) for the
Manggarai.
28. I use the term “encompassment” here in its usual understanding,
without the specific connotations it has in the work of Louis Dumont. It
is, however, clear that the social topology of eastern Indonesia is par-
ticularly favorable to the application of Dumontian concepts (see, no-
tably, Barnes, de Coppet, and Parkin 1985 and Barraud 1979).
Hamberger Kinship as Logic of Space
itself. Residential changes affect distance but not encompass-
ment. While the dynamics of virilocal residence continuously
push a man to extract himself, his wife, and his children from
his parents-in-law’s house, topologically he never leaves it, and,
ideally, he need not even enter it, since it is the house of his
maternal relatives.
This ideal structure is frequently expressed by the termino-
logical identification of the mother’s brother with the wife’s
father. In some cases (such as Kédang), this equation is extended
to the mother’s brother’s descendants by means of “Omaha”-
type skewing. In a West African context, terminological practice
of this kind would imply the dispersal of alliances, but here it
expresses the perpetuity and the asymmetry of the paths linking
wife-giving and wife-taking houses (Barnes 1976:392ff.).
This network of constantly renewed paths provides the
framework for continuous flows of life and wealth. Where the
“house” is centered on an agnatic backbone, this “flow of life”
(Fox 1980), associated with blood and the placenta, displays
strong uterine connotations. Thus, Manggarai mothers are
considered to “root” the matrimonial journeys of their daugh-
ters (Allerton 2013:83), and Mambai consider a marriage that
reverses the orientation of alliance as an “affront against female
blood” (Traube 1986:95). In Kei, the soul, inherent to blood, is
transmitted in a continuous chain from mothers to daughters
(Barraud 2001:281). Yet at the same time, this oriented chain of
uterine substitutions is supposed to run through the established
rows of agnatic houses that have been rendered contiguous by
alliance: the placenta has to take “the right path” linking givers
and takers. Substitution and contiguity are here just two as-
pects of the same asymmetric relation. Paths and houses to-
gether constitute an integrated space, whose perspectival trans-
formations are “prescribed” by its morphology. They involve
neither a change of scale (as in West Africa) nor a change of
orientation (as in Amazonia) but rather “transport” an iden-
tical frame of reference from one place to another. We can
characterize this mode of social topology as taking the form
of translation (in the geometrical sense).
As has often been remarked (Lorrain 1975), the extension of
this principle to the entire social space produces the “homog-
enous” geometry characteristic of Euclidian space.29 In practice,
the logic of asymmetric alliance rarely works at the global level,
which accounts for the great variety of eastern Indone-
sian alliance systems. In Kédang, for example, the asymmetric-
alliance rule remains a strictly local principle that does not give
rise to any overall pattern (Barnes 1980a:86). In Seram, it leads
to the emergence of stable asymmetric patterns, which, how-
ever, disappear at higher segmentation levels (Valeri 1975–
29. “Homogenous” spaces are characterized by a systematic corre-
spondence between contiguity and substitution: to each pair of positions
corresponds a unique transformation of space. By virtue of this property,
“elementary structures” of kinship can be analyzed with the same (al-
gebraic and figurative) instruments as geometrical spaces (see Héran
2009 and the discussion in Hamberger 2010; Lorrain 1975; Tjon Sie Fat
1990).
535
1976:96–97). In Tanimbar, by contrast, the relations between
ancestral “houses” are conceptualized as a “circular connu-
bium” on the global scale (Pauwels 1985:137).
Nevertheless, whatever the (local or global) extension of the
model, alliance always appears in a double mode: from an ag-
natic perspective, as an encompassment of the part by the whole;
from a uterine perspective, as a flow from predecessors to suc-
cessors. If the asymmetric-alliance societies of eastern Indonesia
are as much “path based” as they are “house based” (Allerton
2013:75), this is all the more so as the “paths” here are parts of
the “houses”—and vice versa, as illustrated by the Tanimbarese
model of the “row” (McKinnon 1991; Pauwels 1990).
Such a conception of space has certain implications for its
gendered structure. On the one hand, we find in eastern Indo-
nesia the familiar schema associating women with the inside
and men with the outside—Atoni terminology even equates
“outside” and “male” (Cunningham 1964:40). This dichotomy
commonly expresses itself in a hierarchical opposition between
front and back, top and bottom, and as an opposition—typical
of Indonesia—between right and left (see fig. 3). On the other
hand, the “female” part of the house can denote the coresident
descendants of women and even the entire wife-taking house, so
that the same gendered dichotomy is applied to both the con-
jugal relationship within the house and the sibling relationship
between houses. Contrary to the house in some other societies
practicing asymmetric alliance—for example, in central Asia
(Oppitz 1999)—the Indonesian house has not adopted a tri-
partite organization that differentiates wives from sisters. As a
consequence, the model of a male exterior encompassing a fe-
male interior is applied to both the relationship between hus-
bands and wives within the house and the relationship between
(male) wife-giving houses and (female) wife-taking houses. This
may appear counterintuitive, since wife takers are everywhere in
eastern Indonesia considered as immigrants.30 The paradox lies
not in the fact that outsiders are integrated into the interior of
the house but in that these internalized outsiders are the wife-
taking houses rather than the wives. Even in virilocal settings,
local groups of men situate themselves conceptually within the
house of their wife givers—their “masters of the house,” as they
are called in Tanimbar (McKinnon 2000:172). Whatever the
residence rule, a husband’s proper place in relation to his wife
givers is at his wife’s side in the “female” part of the house—the
“male” part being reserved for his wife’s brothers.
As a corollary, the female interior is not, as in Amazonia or
West Africa, located at the periphery of the male space but at
its center. This is evidenced at both domestic and territorial
levels. Throughout the Indonesian area, there is a strong
association between femininity and sacredness (see Waterson
30. In Timor, wife takers are called “new men” (Clamagirand 1980:141;
Francillon 1989:29; Traube 1980:296), regardless of the residence rule.
Conversely, sisters are called “outside people” in Flores (Allerton 2013:31).
The exceptional association of women with the outside reported by Forth
(1981:40ff.) for Rindi appears to refer essentially to the fact that women in
virilocal systems come from outside the local group.
 536
Figure 3. Three schematic eastern Indonesian house plans: Atoni (after Cunningham 1964), Southern Tetum (after Francillon 1989),
and Tanimbar (after McKinnon 1991). Female and male areas are indicated as gray and white, respectively. This male/female di-
chotomy is reproduced within the “female” area as difference between light gray and dark gray. The diagrams are not drawn faithfully
to scale and shape.
1991:191). The privileged sacred sphere is here the house
interior, which as a female domain constitutes the temple of
the local family group. In Timor, for instance, the ritual pillar
that establishes contact with the agnatic ancestors is situated
in the female half of the house,31 and the cult is performed by
the group’s wives. This has been explained in terms of wom-
en’s mediating role in relation both to wife givers and to the
dead and the divinities (Cunningham 1964:61; Hicks 1985:32).
Indeed, Atoni architecture and ritual in particular establish a
homology between wife givers and divinities, both associated
with the outside, heaven, and masculinity. In Kei, homology
turns into equivalence: wife givers are ritually identified with
divinities, and wife takers venerate their wife givers’ ancestors
above their own (Barraud 1990:204–205). This subordination
of paternal to maternal ancestors is consistent with a spatial
logic whereby the wife-giving house encompasses the wife-
taking house. The pillar of the agnatic house here connects
with the same source as the flow of uterine life. Femininity in
eastern Indonesia not only assures the connection between
houses (as is the case in West Africa) but also constitutes the
central axis of each house as a mediating link between hier-
archically nested houses (which is not the case in West Africa).
By locating its center in the “female” interior, each local group
defines itself as “female” with respect to an encompassing
“male,” wife-giving exterior, which is both its host and its
source of life.
The principle of female centrality reoccurs at the territorial
level. Thus, in Timor, the center of a kingdom is inhabited by a
sacred chief considered as female, surrounded by a male outside
(Cunningham 1964:53; van Wouden 1968 [1935]:41, 100ff.).
To be sure, to the extent that this sacred chief represents the
31. The back section of the Tetum house (Hicks 1976:58), the left
section of the Atoni house (Cunningham 1964:42).
Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 5, October 2018
totality of society, he frequently exhibits androgynous traits
(Schulte Nordholt 1971:439; Traube 1986:103ff.). The same ob-
servation also holds for the god of the community in Tanimbar
(Pauwels 1985:137), being at the same time both taker and giver,
encompassed and encompassing. Antinomies such as these are
inherent in any totalizing synthesis of asymmetric systems. The
idea of an all-encompassing totality contradicts their logic. Even
society as a whole may be founded not in itself but in a wife-
giving “outside.” Thus, the inhabitants of Tanebar-Evav con-
sider themselves as “nephews” of the spirits who represent the
external source of local law (Barraud 1979:61ff.). In eastern
Indonesian sociocosmology, no group can define itself without
reference to an encompassing other.
Conclusion
The examples discussed in the preceding sections show that
what we call “kinship systems” are actually different topologies
of social space. I have concentrated on elucidating how the in-
terplay between relations of contiguity and substitution may be
affected by the gender polarity. In each case, the topology of
social space can be characterized by a particular form of per-
spectival transformation that connects local groups, in accor-
dance with the gendered pattern of movement underlying res-
idential and matrimonial practices. To summarize schematically
(see fig. 4), the virilocal West African model combines “male”
contiguity with “female” substitution. The characteristic per-
spectival transformation results in internal segmentation of the
agnatic “house” by uterine “rooms” that represent downscaled
projections of the wives’ natal groups. The uxorilocal central
Brazilian model combines “female” contiguity with “male” sub-
stitution. Here, the characteristic perspectival transformation
consists in the mutual reflection of male groups in a diametri-
cally divided central space outside the uterine family houses. In
Hamberger Kinship as Logic of Space
Figure 4. Schematic representations of the social topologies of West Africa, central Brazil, and eastern Indonesia. Circles represent
local groups, arrows the movement of spouses from natal to marital group, and gray and white indicate female and male areas,
respectively. In West Africa, wives’ natal groups are projected into the husband’s group as segments; in central Brazil, men’s groups
reflect each other in ritual and matrimonial dualism; in eastern Indonesia, wife-giving and wife-taking groups form a (potentially
circular) chain of asymmetric alliance.
the eastern Indonesian model, which is neutral with respect to
residence rules, contiguity and substitution are aspects of all
relations. The characteristic perspectival transformation here is
a “translation,” that is, transportation of an unchanged local
frame of reference along a chain of allied houses, so that each
house can, according to point of view, be considered exterior or
interior, “male” or “female.”
It is not my intention to suggest that these three model to-
pologies define a kind of “elementary structures” of social space.
Gender-dependent operations of contiguity and substitution can
combine with each other in numerous ways and at different
scales, thus opening the way for an infinite variety of complex
topologies. Each of the three selected regional clusters constitutes
an open region within a continuous field of variations. They were
selected for study in this paper because their combination of
gender-dependent residence patterns with elaborate house or
village architectures renders them particularly apt to illustrate
the basic principles of the topological approach. This approach
is not, however, restricted to particular types of society. Its
principles are equally valid for ambilocal societies (such as those
of western Indonesia) or for societies whose primary reference
systems are landscapes rather than houses (such as are found
in Australia and, to a lesser extent, in Melanesia).32
32. Thus, for example, the Iban longhouse, composed of detachable
ambilocal rooms, is divided into a male outer veranda and a female inner
kitchen (Sutlive 1972:346ff.); in the Aranda camp, which is not com-
posed of closed dwellings, female and male meeting places are situated at
the inner center and the outer periphery, respectively (Spencer and
Gillen 1927:502). On the Melanesian conception of maleness and fe-
maleness as analogous capacities for external relations and for internal
growth, see Strathern 1988 (e.g., 259, 333).
537
Far from reducing all kinship systems to linear combinations
of some elementary models, the topological approach allows us
to take full account of their complexity. This is because the to-
pological approach integrates domains that have often been
examined in isolation. It allows the study of relationship ter-
minologies, marriage rules, and descent groups and the study of
house, settlement, and landscape morphologies and of resi-
dential and migratory networks to be considered within a single
comprehensive field.
It is only through a comprehensive view of social space that
we can hope to understand the factors underlying the inter-
cultural and historical variations of kinship. In the perspective I
have proposed in this article, a general theory of kinship has to
start with the material conditions affecting the practical process
of spatial construction, in particular the gendered pattern of
movements within and between local groups. This orientation
links up with earlier traditions in anthropology for which spatial
organization likewise played a pivotal role (Linton 1936:168ff.;
Lowie 1920:70ff., 160ff.; Murdock 1949:200ff.). According to
these models, ecological and technological conditions deter-
mined the sexual division of labor and hence the gendered or-
ganization of space, which in turn favored certain forms of
residence and marriage arrangements, gave rise to the emer-
gence of descent groups or stable alliance relations, and ulti-
mately inflected the structure of relationship terminologies.
Today, we no longer attempt to reduce complex kinship trans-
formations to linear causal chains. But the basic insight of the
earlier analyses—namely, the need to begin with space—re-
mains valid, not because space provides the intermediary link
between kinship and the material environment but because it
allows us to understand kinship as the logic that structures this
environment.
 538
If we thus conceive of kinship as “logic” of space, does this
mean that kinship systems constitute primarily conceptual
structures that are subsequently expressed through material
space? Much of the material that has been presented in this
paper could be (and has been) interpreted as if house and
settlement structures were diagrams “representing” the kin-
ship system (see already Lévi-Strauss 1958 [1953]:348). Kin-
ship, in this view, constitutes an abstract system of ideas, for
which material space provides a concrete medium in which to
model such ideas in the practice of everyday life.
The analyses presented in this paper point in a different
direction. They suggest that, while human beings certainly ex-
press their ideas and their values in the space they construct,
these ideas and values, together with actions, perceptions, and
dispositions, are in turn shaped and constrained by the spatial
environment in which human beings live and move and which,
for the greater part, has been constructed by their neighbors
and predecessors rather than by themselves (see Hillier and
Hanson 1984:44; Ingold 2000:186).
To appreciate the relationship between the abstract space of
relational concepts and the concrete space of material inter-
actions, it is thus important to recognize that there is no uni-
directional causality here. Even more importantly, it is vital to
acknowledge that the distinction between conceptual and ma-
terial space is itself an abstraction, which, while it may be le-
gitimate for the sake of formal analysis, should not mislead us
into conceiving them as two separate realms. To some extent,
the premise of their separation has provided the common
ground of “constructionist” and “extensionist” theories of kin-
ship: for the former, kinship organizes a material substrate into
culturally meaningful patterns; for the latter, it emerges as a
cultural epiphenomenon from material processes. Most kin-
ship controversies (old and new) are largely variations on this
theme (see Viveiros de Castro 2009).
Yet separating relational form from material content is in-
adequate for conceiving space. As Weyl (1923:44) put it, mat-
ter does not move into space as into a uniform tenement house
but shapes this house for itself in the manner of a snail. An
analogous observation also holds true for social space. As
Bourdieu (1972) was among the first to underscore, the ma-
terial structures of the house not only “express” but actively
shape social relations. This is because social relations, far from
existing in themselves and being subsequently inscribed into
material space, are from the outset part of this space (see Hillier
and Hanson 1984:201ff; Ingold 2000:198). In other words, so-
cial space is not just represented by material space; it is a
material space, and kinship is the practical logic by which this
space is produced and reproduced.
This means not that space generates the conceptual system
of kinship ideas but that kinship, as a relational logic, is at work
at both the conceptual and perceptual/interactional levels. As
our case examples have shown, both generation and gender
have an intrinsic topological meaning. They need not be mapped
onto space from an idea system external to it. Material space is
a cultural system in itself. It not only materializes the ideas that
guide our social interactions but also directly constrains and
Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 5, October 2018
orients these interactions by shaping our perceptions and
dispositions, as well as our ideas.
Studying kinship means studying the topology of this space
in its dynamic and gendered aspects. This topology may, in
particular settings, adopt the predominant form of genealo-
gies, just as in other settings it may adopt the form of classi-
ficatory grids or of exchange cycles. But to reduce kinship to
one or another of these specific structures would be as falla-
cious as to confound the concept of space with a particular geom-
etry. The topological approach to kinship is therefore more
than yet another alternative to the classical approaches. It en-
compasses them. By drawing on the entire range of everyday
and ritual practices that shape and model social space, it allows
us to inquire more fruitfully into the conditions under which
different topologies emerge and change. If the topological
approach thus goes beyond classical approaches to kinship,
this is to resume a thoroughly classical project: neither to deny
nor to celebrate the empirical diversity of kinship, but to un-
derstand it.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 112th Amer-
ican Anthropological Association Annual Meeting at Chicago,
November 22, 2013. I am grateful to Olivier Allard, Laurent
Barry, Dominique Casajus, Gideon Freudenthal, Laurent Gabail,
Patrick Heady, Michael Houseman, André Iteanu, Eric Jolly,
Marianne Lemaire, Aude Michelet, Karen Middleton, Marika
Moisseeff, and the anonymous reviewers of Current Anthro-
pology, as well as to my colleagues from the research group
“Kinship and Relational Logics” of the Laboratoire d’An-
thropologie Sociale, for their many valuable comments and
critiques.
Comments
Catherine Allerton
Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and
Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, United
Kingdom (c.l.allerton@lse.ac.uk). 21 VII 17
This is a highly accomplished and original paper that dem-
onstrates an impressive breadth of scholarship and depth of
attention to comparative detail. Klaus Hamberger argues for
renewed attention to kinship, not as a particular kind of rela-
tionship or a set-apart domain of social life but as a distinctive
logic of relations. This logic, he argues, structures not only such
phenomena as kinship terminologies or genealogies but also
the organization of house space and patterns of settlement. Thus,
kinship systems, in his view, should be considered as “topol-
ogies of social space,” in which procreative, residential, and
territorial forms of kinship can be considered together as “dif-
ferent scales of a single spatial continuum.”
Hamberger Kinship as Logic of Space
This unified, holistic approach to social space allows Ham-
berger to approach older ethnographic material with new,
creative insights. While pointing out that the “regional clus-
ters” he has selected should not be approached as closed fields,
he demonstrates how the kinship systems of West Africa, cen-
tral Brazil, and eastern Indonesia have distinctive logics that
explain certain gendered, sociospatial orientations. For exam-
ple, Hamberger approaches the (in)famous “segmentation” of
the Tallensi and other groups as a dynamic principle, contin-
ually transforming maternal “rooms” into paternal “houses”
and leading to a “genealogy of nested places.” In his analyses of
eastern Indonesian societies (the material that I know best),
Hamberger makes the thought-provoking point that a married
man, though he may live separately from the house of his wife’s
natal family, never really leaves that house in a topological
sense. Certainly, in the Manggarai region of the eastern Indo-
nesian island of Flores, a woman’s children, though they may
be part of the house of her husband, are forever connected to
her natal kin. This is why any important journeys such children
make—whether to school and university or along their own
marriage paths—must be “rooted” not in their father’s house
but in their mother’s natal house.
In outlining this nonrepresentational approach to space,
Hamberger breaks with a long tradition in anthropology that,
since Durkheim and Mauss’s Primitive Classification (1963
[1901–1902]), has seen social relations as providing the model
for the classification of social space. Even Lévi-Strauss (1991),
in his otherwise highly innovative approach to “house socie-
ties,” followed this tradition by giving ontological priority to
the social relations that could be objectified in a house. For
Lévi-Strauss, the point of the house was that it fixed (and even
fetishized) unstable and apparently contradictory social pro-
cesses. By contrast, Hamberger rejects the idea of a “unidi-
rectional causality” according to which kinship, as an onto-
logically prior classification, structures space. Instead, he notes
the complex, mutual interplay of space, ideas, actions, and
values, rightly drawing attention to Bourdieu’s (1972) work on
the Kabyle house as one of the first attempts to analyze this
mutual interplay.
Though Hamberger notes his work only in passing, we
should also recognize the important contribution of Ingold
in moving beyond “constructionist” or “representational” ap-
proaches to the environment. Ingold’s phenomenological ap-
proach, though different from that of Hamberger, has empha-
sized how human environments have a fundamental historicity,
continually emerging and shaping us “in the process of our
lives” (Ingold 2000:20). For Ingold, this means that a distinc-
tion cannot be drawn between a “natural” landscape of phys-
ical features and a “cultural” landscape of representations and
projected symbols (189). In seeing social space as “encom-
passing” kinship, Hamberger also refuses to make such dis-
tinctions, noting at the end of his paper that his approach
would also work for societies (such as those of Australia and
Melanesia) that emphasize landscapes rather than dwellings.
As Hamberger notes, far from being reductive, his topo-
logical approach allows us to appreciate and analyze kinship
539
systems in their complexity. He argues that what makes kin-
ship different from other logics is that it links human agents in
particular “modes of interaction” that involve imagination and
emotion. For myself, this must be one of the ultimate goals of
any analysis of kinship: to show how a person’s experiences,
emotions, and imagination could be influenced, from early
childhood, by being born into a material world that shapes and
is shaped by a distinctive kinship logic. This is what I tried to
do in my analysis of Manggarai house rooms as a place for
souls, showing how sleeping and eating patterns shaped gen-
dered kinship connections from birth and how the domestic
group develops in tandem with a particular room (Allerton
2013:17–43). Reflecting on some of my Manggarai material in
the light of Hamberger’s article, I find myself drawn to mem-
ories of couples whose unions were declared incestuous and
who lived beyond the boundaries of villages. Since, according
to Hamberger, social space is the kinship system, it is heart-
breaking to reflect on the experience of such couples, and their
children, who existed in a kind of “no-man’s land” of Mang-
garai social space.
Finally, how might anthropologists draw on this innovative
framework in future writing and research? One potential ad-
vantage of Hamberger’s “comprehensive” view of social space
is that it allows us to consider the animism that characterizes
many eastern Indonesian societies (but which is often analyzed
in terms of “religion”) alongside kinship, land ownership, and
residence patterns. Eastern Indonesian landscapes are land-
scapes of ancestors, spirits, and energies, and it would be fas-
cinating to explore their distinctive animisms in terms of topol-
ogies of social space. A second issue concerns ongoing forms
of migration from eastern Indonesia to places elsewhere in In-
donesia or in Malaysia. Much of this migration has previously
taken a circular form, but increasingly, people from Flores are
choosing to settle (or are, because of securitized immigration
regimes, becoming “stuck”) elsewhere. A key question for fu-
ture research on the distinctive kinship systems of eastern
Indonesia will therefore be how experiences and logics of social
space are influenced by new forms of movement and residence.
If, as Hamberger argues, we should see movement as “a form of
social interaction,” how might we begin to think about the
kinship and spatial implications of nonmovements, relocations,
and failures to return?
Laurent Barry
Laurent Barry, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, 3 rue d’Ulm,
75005 Paris, France (barry@ehess.fr). 26 VII 17
In 1956, Claude Lévi-Strauss devoted several chapters of An-
thropologie Structural to the relations between spatial organi-
zation and kinship. Klaus Hamberger takes up the torch by
dedicating his text to the analysis of kinship seen as a logic of
social space.
Let us say it clearly: Klaus Hamberger’s analysis is brilliant
and perfectly documented. It brings us from central Brazil to
 540
eastern Indonesia by way of the study of the segmented sys-
tems of western Africa.
The limited length of this commentary does not allow me to
summarize all the richness of this excellent article, and I leave
the pleasure of discovering the detail of its analyses to the
reader. I therefore make do with putting forth two positions
taken by the author and from which I keep a certain amount of
distance, as they raise certain deep questions that deserve to be
revisited.
The first of these positions holds to the fact that, wanting to
escape the Schneiderian criticism that considers that kinship
cannot distinguish itself as an independent “cultural domain,”
Hamberger dodges the issue by recognizing that these studies
do not constitute a true “field” after all but the simple expres-
sion of a relationship logic that can work just as well elsewhere.
There is, it seems to me, a real ambiguity in this proposal and
in this “soft” version of the studies of kinship, where these
would be a simple “network of relations” applied to incon-
gruous objects without prior links, a network that would even-
tually create the illusion of a more or less unified “field” in the
eyes of ethnologists but also of equally abused agents. We can,
however, easily objectify the existence of this “field” of kinship,
and the fact of recognizing this domain as specific and auton-
omous is far from being the result of only the speculations of
anthropologists, as Schneider insisted, but is based ab origine on
myriad emic constructions produced by the populations that
they study.
There is thus no society that does not formally distinguish at
least some kinship connections (by likeness or by blood rela-
tionship) and third-party relationships (by neighborhoods, by
power, by friendships, by subordination, etc.). Nor is there any
population that does not use a sui generis lexicon, kinship ter-
minologies, to refer to these so-specific relationships. Finally,
there is no society that does not place responsibility on some
recent unique sexual taboos that we designate as “incestuous
prohibitions.” That there is therefore a set of recurrent insti-
tutions in all the societies that anthropologists study and that
these institutions are inextricably linked to each other in the
eyes of the actors themselves, is that not enough to justify us in
establishing this object as a particular field?
The second point to which I would like to return is more
central, as it holds to what Daniel Andler and Isabelle Stengers
(1987) qualified as “nomadic concepts,” in other words, the im-
porting of a disciplinary field of concepts born in another sci-
entific field. Although these conceptual migrations are sometimes
heuristic when applied to very particular cases, there are no
proven examples in the history of science where a theoretical
set taken as a whole could have fruitfully migrated between two
distant disciplinary fields. Newtonian theory did not seed the
theory of evolution, and evolutionary theory in its turn gave
rise only to pale dreams in the social sciences when they at-
tempted to appropriate it.
However, Hamberger bases most of his approach on such
reappropriation. Here he follows the same risky path that
Claude Lévi-Strauss once traced in his structural analysis of
myths, when he wanted to transpose the rules of the linguistic
Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 5, October 2018
study of language to the semantic content of the narrative
under the pretext that both have a common medium, the
language. Hamberger, for his part, thinks it possible to migrate
whole areas of mathematical methods and analysis tools for
the study of physical space into the social space on the pretext
of the presence of certain common metaphorical expressions
between the way in which we characterize certain traits of
social space (which is not to be confused with kinship, ac-
cording to him) and certain traits of physical space—via the
notion of closeness and likeness in particular.33 And, as was the
case in the past with the structural analysis of myths, this
nomadic concept certainly uses well-defined techniques but
remains, on the other hand, extremely vague in its modes of
application, which inevitably results from their ad hoc use
according to the needs of the author’s demonstration.
Let us take a simple example. For Klaus Hamberger, “social
space” is structured by two specific features: on the one hand
by a temporal asymmetry linked to the succession of gen-
erations and on the other by a gendered “polarity” expressing
itself through a double concept, that of being contained or
containing and of the opposition between inside and outside.
The container and the interior are identified here with the fem-
inine gender, whereas the idea of being contained or the ex-
terior is brought closer here to the masculine sphere.
In many cases, mere ethnographic description will, of course,
suffice to corroborate this rather widespread idea. But what
happens when it finds itself in disagreement with this hypoth-
esis? In this case, rather than remaining at the immanent level of
the ethnographic description, the author authorizes—in these
specific cases but not in others—the use of the topological theory
to reverse the immediate experience.
A glaring example is the reading of the organization of the
houses of central Brazil, where the empirical observation places
the masculine places in a situation of centrality and interiority
and the feminine places in situation of periphery and exter-
nality, which contradicts the diagram interpretation of the au-
thor. In this case, Hamberger very ingeniously reverses our
reading by favoring a topological version with a mere factual
description:
While the village center is located within the circle of houses
and thus may appear as the “interior” part, it in fact mediates
access from and contact with the outside and thus is, in a
topological sense, relatively more exterior than the family
houses, which are oriented toward the village center. . . . As
in the case of the West African compound, the opposition
between male center and female periphery thus corresponds
to an association of men with the outside and women with
the inside.
The spin is beautiful, and all this is said subtly, to the point
that in many cases the demonstration has unanimous support.
33. “The inclusion of social relations into this generalized notion of
space . . . allows us to apply the formal instruments of spatial analysis
(such as relational algebra) to kinship relations” (second paragraph of
“Principles of Constructing Social Space”).
Hamberger Kinship as Logic of Space
But is it always true? Is the turnkey import of a theory from one
discipline to another here globally fruitful? The ingenuity and
rigor of Klaus Hamberger do their best to make it happen, but
I am not totally convinced that he has achieved it for now.
Giovanni Bennardo
Department of Anthropology and Cognitive Studies Initiative,
Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois 60115, USA
(bennardo@niu.edu). 25 VII 17
Space in Kinship
As one of the major ontological primes, space has been sug-
gested as fundamental to the phylogenetic and ontogenetic
complexification of human cognition (Gattis 2001; Jackendoff
2002; Jackendoff and Landau 1992; Lakoff 1987; Levinson
2003; Mandler 2004, 2008; Mix, Smith, and Gasser 2010; Schu-
bert and Maass 2011; Slobin et al. 2010; Talmy 2000a, 2000b).
For example, Clark (2010) argues that space and language per-
form similar cognitive functions, namely, they reduce the com-
plexity of the environment. Space grounds language, and Spivey,
Richardson, and Zednik (2010:33) show how abstract verbs are
understood in terms of spatial relations. The idea that “abstract
concepts are connected to space at a deep, unconscious level—
literally the product of neural juxtaposition” (Mix, Smith, and
Gasser 2010:5) leads one to expect an early reliance on spatial
information in cognitive development. This is what Mandler
(2004, 2008) demonstrates in her research about cognitive de-
velopment in preverbal children.
Once the role was established that space plays in the de-
velopment of cognition, in the formation of concepts—for ex-
ample, the relationship between space and time (e.g., Bender,
Beller, and Bennardo 2010; Boroditsky 2000; Ramscar, Mat-
lock, and Boroditsky 2010)—and in the construction of lan-
guage, research focused on social cognition. “The results con-
verge in the insight that much of social thinking builds upon
spatial cognition” (Schubert and Maass 2011:3). In other words,
it is suggested that “space plays a role for thinking that goes far
beyond it being just a medium for communication. Indeed, it
seems that it can become the medium of thinking itself, with
spatial and social cognition being closely and intrinsically in-
tertwined” (3).
Since space is an early contributor to the development of
cognition, concept formation, and language, and since the
same perception-action couplings are at work in both spatial
and social cognition (see Tversky 2011), it is plausible to expect
that it may play a relevant role in the construction of knowl-
edge representations such as “kinship”—intended as a com-
ponent of social cognition.34 This last possibility amply justifies
34. In Bennardo (2009), I demonstrated how a Tongan preferential
organization of the representation of spatial relationships is replicated in
other domains of knowledge, e.g., time, kinship, and social relationships.
541
Hamberger’s attempt at highlighting the homology between
the logic of space and that inherent in kinship. I would like to
point out in this brief commentary how what we know about
the content of the spatial cognitive module—in short, space—
may add some further clarifications to his insightful sugges-
tion.
A fundamental component of space is the concept of frame
of reference (hereafter FoR). An FoR is a set of coordinates
(three intersecting axes: vertical, sagittal, and transversal) used
to construct an oriented space within which spatial relation-
ships among objects are identified. Three major types of FoR
are suggested (see Bennardo 2009; Levinson 2003). A relative
FoR is centered on a speaker, and it remains centered on the
speaker when the speaker moves, for example, when one says,
“The ball is in front of me.” Two subtypes of the relative FoR
are translation and reflection. The former is realized when the
front axis projected from the speaker is divided in two by an
object and another object is described as “in front of it” or
beyond it, and the latter when the second object is again de-
scribed as “in front of it” but this time it is in the space between
the speaker and the object. An absolute FoR uses fixed points
of reference chosen in one’s environment, for example, car-
dinal points or land-sea or one point, as in “The town is south
of the river.” An intrinsic FoR is centered on an object, and it
remains centered on the object when the object moves, for
example, “The ball is in front of the car.” Research conducted
in several cultures has determined that communities develop a
preference for one of the FoRs over the others—typically,
however, all three types of FoR are used.
The ontological primacy of space in cognition ensures that a
preference for any FoR is reflected in the construction of other
organizations of knowledge, in particular social cognition and
specifically kinship. In fact, when, in Bennardo (2016), I sug-
gested a homology between types of FoRs and types of kin-
ship terminology systems (KTSs), I implied that a preference
for an FoR would be reflected in the presence of a specific type
of KTS in the community investigated, and vice versa.
What is the logic employed in the construction of an FoR?
The basic conceptual unit is a point, that is, ego; out of this
point vectors are projected along directions that are conven-
tionally called front, back, left, and right. These vectors meet
objects, and they are located in relation to the original point or
ego—thus, a relative FoR is obtained. Alternatively, the lo-
calization is obtained by using conventionally agreed-on points
in the environments, such as cardinal points—thus obtaining
an absolute FoR. And finally, the oriented field of the object to
be localized is considered as separate from that of the original
point or ego—thus, an intrinsic FoR results. The logical pro-
cesses used are then projection, relation, and repetition that
includes duplication (for an extensive treatment, see Lehman
and Bennardo 2003 and Levinson 2003).
This logic of space is acknowledged throughout Hamber-
ger’s article and discussed at times in ways that may obscure its
content. I attribute the reason for this to his attempt to proceed
in a way that takes into account the dynamic instantiation of
kinship in social life as ethnographically exemplified in the
 542
communities described. One illustrative example consists of
his correct use of movement to account for generational order.
He does not clarify, however, that time is part and parcel of the
conceptual content of movement (see Lehman and Bennardo
2003),35 thus making it the logical tool that generates historical
depth in kinship structures. Similarly, it is the logical process of
repetition—including duplication—that generates two space
fields named male and female, that is, gender, as is done in
space to obtain the intrinsic FoR.
Finally, I read Hamberger’s use of “movement as projec-
tion” for the description of the West African communities as
an instantiation of the logic of space found in the relative FoR.
Similarly, his “movement as reflection” for the central Bra-
zilian communities can be read as an instantiation of that
found in the reflection subtype of the relative FoR. And finally,
his “movement as translation” for the eastern Indonesian com-
munities may stand for the one in a translation subtype of the
relative FoR. What has been left out is the discussion of other
kinship systems that may instantiate the other two FoRs, that is,
the absolute and the intrinsic. The Hawaiian KTS may represent
the former and the Eskimo KTS the latter (see Bennardo 2016).
I want to conclude by praising Hamberger for contributing in a
substantial way to a revitalization of the research on kinship that
considers as fundamental its being rooted in space.
Susan Drucker-Brown
Division of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Free
School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom (sd100@cam.ac
.uk). 15 XI 17
“Kinship as Logic of Space” is a stimulating and scholarly pa-
per. It suggests that we depart from universal polarities im-
plicit in notions of generation and gender and use instead
“topologies of social space.” Conceptions of “containing” and
“being contained,” continuity, substitution, and perspectival
shift are the analytical tools presented here. The processes that
constitute kinship are manifest in domestic architecture and
patterns of mobility and residence. “Agents” seems to be the
term the author uses for the persons we might call “kin.” But
this is one element in a systematic abstraction used to create
an all-encompassing topological framework for the analysis of
kin relations. The author sees places and movements, rather
than procreation and filiation, as basic constituents of the “net-
work of relations that people form by living together in a shared
spatial environment.” The author’s use of relational algebra in
his analysis presents difficulties for the reader who lacks any
knowledge of more than the simplest mathematics. Despite this,
the presentation of an alternative frame of reference for un-
35. Movement is also used to construct any of the FoRs. In fact, vec-
tors projected from a point or ego are instantiations of points following
each other in time with a direction.
Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 5, October 2018
derstanding the behavior and the ideology underlying specific
kinship structures caused me to rethink my own data from
northern Ghana.
In comparing the ideology and patterns of mobility char-
acteristic of Mamprusi and Tallensi peoples (Drucker-Brown
2001), who live as close neighbors in northern Ghana, I found
variations in the patterns of movement within the house and
differences in norms of behavior according to gender and age
that were consistent with the underlying ideologies of the hi-
erarchical Mamprusi kingship and those of the more egali-
tarian Tallensi lineage structure.
Mamprusi, when they speak of the coresidents of a single
compound, clearly distinguish the compound (yiiri) from the
coresidents (yiiridima, literally “house-people,” a category in-
cluding both men women and children). In the Mamprusi
polity, the compound gate (zanoari) is the metaphor used for
segments of their patrilineages. Within each patrilineage, gates
that share descent from common ancestors contain members
who compete for office. Although not all Mamprusi claim
office, “gates,” rather than “houses,” constitute Mamprusi pat-
rilineage segments.
These are not the “nested segments” of a Tallensi patri-
lineage. Members of gates containing potential rivals do not
share domestic space.
With respect to gender, both Tallensi and Mamprusi con-
ceive of rooms (Mamprusi: dugu, Tallensi: dug) as space par-
ticularly associated with women, though both groups have
special rooms for senior men. This “male space” is not a room;
it is called zongo by Mamprusi and zong by the Tallensi. Men
and women’s rooms face the unroofed, central area of the
circular compound (Mamprusi: dindongo, Tallensi: dendongo).
However, patterns of mobility in this central area, as well as the
use of women’s rooms by men and children, are by no means
identical in the two communities. Patterns of mobility reflect
different underlying attitudes toward hierarchy, producing very
different interactions within the shared domestic space.
I found it extremely difficult to use the topological frame-
work for a different analysis of my material. The level of ab-
straction that characterizes that framework seemed to me to
neglect significant ethnographic detail. Nevertheless, this is a
challenging and suggestive work.
Dwight W. Read
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles,
California 90095, USA (dread@anthro.ucla.edu). 17 VII 17
Topology and Kinship: Description or Explanation?
Hamberger’s schematic representation of three different spa-
tial topologies from three geographic regions, West Africa,
central Brazil, and Indonesia, sums up the theme of his article.
In each region, kinship ideas of a group that guide the structure
Hamberger Kinship as Logic of Space
(and structuring) of social space are represented topologically
with respect to a group’s living space, using the principles of
contiguity and substitution that, Hamberger argues, underlie
both social space and material space, thereby connecting kin-
ship with space through topology.
The spatial structures discussed by Hamberger are deter-
mined through mappings going from the ideational level of
social space to the phenomenal level of material space. Ham-
berger observes that a topology of space is culturally con-
structed by culture bearers as a model reflecting their theory of
the organization and structure of social space. From this per-
spective, the relevant ontology for space goes from a local
theory regarding the structuring of social space to a spatial
model.
If all that is being claimed, then, is that kinship relations are
transformed into a topology of spatial relations through the
operations of contiguity and substitution applied both to kin-
ship and to spatial relations, then we would just have a ratio-
nale for the use by culture bearers of the topology of spatial
models to represent to themselves the structure of their social
space. However, Hamberger wants to show more, namely, how
“the potential of the topological method lies in its capacity to
account for . . . intraregional variation” and to show “what is
to be gained by treating social space not just as a spatial rep-
resentation of the kinship system, but as the kinship system it-
self.” (emphasis added). Thus, he argues, social space and
material space are to be equated. With regard to this equating,
one direction, that kinship idea systems (see Leaf and Read
2012) shape material space, is not at issue; less clear is the other
direction, with its purported topological equivalence between
spatial structures and kinship systems.
That culture bearers express their kinship ideas through a
spatial topology structured by the pattern of social relations
comprising their social space is neither new nor controversial.
However, uncertainty arises when space is topologized so that
spatial relations become a model for culture bearers regarding
their theory of social space and the model is to then be viewed
as if it is the theory. What is new here is a profound claim going
beyond just identifying the existence of a mapping from kin-
ship ideas to spatial structure through topologies. Hamberger
is arguing, in essence, that because both kinship relations and
spatial relations are supposedly organized through the princi-
ples of contiguity and substitution, it is possible to incorporate
“the study of relationship terminologies, marriage rules, and
descent groups and the study of house, settlement, and land-
scape morphologies and of migratory mobility networks . . .
within a single comprehensive field.”
However, the claim for a single, comprehensive field runs
into the same problem that he finds with the kinship extension
hypothesis. For the latter, the genealogically framed equiva-
lence rules underlying the posited kin-term extensions are not
culturally salient (Kronenfeld 2009 [1980]); thus, an analy-
sis based on equivalence rules is descriptive, not explanatory
(Read 2000; but see Read, forthcoming, for a nongenealogical
resolution of the extension problem). Similarly, the topology
543
argument does not account for the different topologies except
by prior reference to social space. Hence, a spatial topology
does not account for the differences in local theories about
kinship, as Hamberger recognizes. Yet without accounting for
these differences, the argument runs the risk of just being
descriptive and not explanatory.
Further, what constitutes the “kinship system” in the con-
text of spatial relations is not clear. Evidently, it does not in-
clude, for example, the system of kinship relations expressed
through the kin terms making up a kinship terminology, since
the topological representations that Hamberger discusses for
the three kinship systems he considers relate to aspects of their
social systems and not to the underlying system of kin-term
relations upon which their kinship systems are grounded.
With regard to what a kinship system is, Hamberger notes
that Schneider’s argument that kinship “cannot be demarcated
as a distinct cultural domain” incorrectly presumes a semantic
theory of kinship that does not take into account the way kin-
ship involves “a logic of relations” (see Read 2001). This logic,
as Read (2001) has shown, accounts for “kinship as a system of
relationships [freed] from the assumption that the relation-
ships are first of all genealogical and reproductive and . . .
terminological structures are cultural constructs whose fea-
tures are explicable through the logic governing their genera-
tion as abstract structures without reference to a genealogical
grid” (80–81). The independence of the system of kin relations
expressed through kin terms from a genealogical framework is
established through the way kin terms can be systematically
elicited without appeal to genealogy (Leaf 2006) as a concep-
tually closed idea system (Leaf and Read 2012).
The “logic of relations” for each of a wide range of kinship
terminologies has already been worked out (see Read 1984 for
the American/English terminology; Read and Behrens 1990
for the American kinship terminology, the Shipibo terminol-
ogy, and the Trobriand terminology; Bennardo and Read 2007
for the Tongan terminology; Read 2010 for the canonical Dra-
vidian terminology; Read 2012 for the !Kung San terminology;
Leaf and Read 2012 for the Kariera terminology; Read 2013b for
diachronic changes in the Polynesian terminologies; Read 2013c
for the Iroquois terminology; and Read 2018a for the Hadza ter-
minology).36 These examples show precisely the sense in which
the kinship relations expressed through kin terms are, as Ham-
berger expresses it, a “set of relations linked together by some
common logic” and how this allows us to understand kinship
diversity without the fallacious reduction of kinship to either the
“form of genealogies [or] . . . the form of classificatory grids or of
exchange cycles” that is of concern to Hamberger.
36. In addition, for the Thonga-Ronga (Omaha) terminology, see Read
(2018b).
 544
Reply
Debate, like all reflection, is a process of switching perspec-
tives, and I am grateful to the commentators for the diversity of
viewpoints from which they envisage the argument of my
paper. They nearly all focus on the nature of the link between
the structures of kinship and those of material space and its
implications for the significance of phenomena located both at
the center of classical kinship studies (such as terminologies or
incest prohibitions) and at their periphery (such as animism or
migration). Though apparently highly abstract, this episte-
mological problem directly translates into the practical ques-
tion, raised by Drucker-Brown, of what a topological approach
means for empirical on-the-ground ethnography and close
cross-cultural comparison. I will therefore try to clarify my
position by starting with a concrete example.
Consider the three West African topologies represented in
figure 1, which include the Tallensi and Mamprusi studied by
Drucker-Brown. The drawings are schematic compound plans.
Though no local resident and no fieldworker ever observes com-
pounds in this way—from a bird’s eyes view and juxtaposed to
each other—they nevertheless render iconic account of the
contiguity relations reported from the field. In all three cases,
the “house,” oriented west, is composed of a circle of “rooms”
around a central courtyard, where periphery and center cor-
respond, respectively, to an “interior” female sphere and a
more “exterior” male sphere, adjacent to the main portal. (As
in central Brazil, this association of center and outside may at
first sight appear counterintuitive, as pointed out by Barry; it
is not, however, a theoretical construction but is explicit in the
ethnographic data and easily understandable from the ob-
served patterns of movement.) Now at the same time these
compound plans—and, in fact, the compounds themselves—
constitute generative schemata (“matrices,” as Fortes called
them) for the morphology of society as a whole. In order to
“see” this, we have to operate a change of scale and conceive the
“rooms” as large territorial units comprising the dispersed
compounds of agnatic lineage segments sharing the same an-
cestress. What is more, we have to look back and forth between
the plans of different houses (as in fig. 4, left) and conceive of
the rooms of married women as substitutes for their distant
natal rooms, as if both rooms were just different instances of
the same continuous uterine entity.
While this interplay between agnatic contiguity and uterine
substitution is a common feature of West African spaces, it of
course does not exhaust their topological variations. As Drucker-
Brown underlines, the three schemata are not identical: the
rooms are arranged in different ways, entailing different pat-
terns of movement and interaction, which in turn imply dif-
ferent attitudes to hierarchy and equality. According to whether
the headman’s hut is placed within the senior wife’s yard
(Kasena), is situated in the central courtyard facing the senior
wife’s hut (Mamprusi), or simply does not exist (Tallensi),
Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 5, October 2018
different patterns of symmetry or asymmetry emerge among
the wives’ “rooms” as well as among the sibling sets and lineage
segments that grow out of them. As Drucker-Brown (2001) has
argued in an exemplary application of the topological ap-
proach, the different patterns of house architectures thus may
elucidate the differences between the acephalous segmentary
society of the Tallensi and the centralized monarchy of the
Mamprusi.
How should we conceptualize this relation between the
physical patterns of sleeping arrangements, quotidian move-
ments, and face-to-face-interactions, on the one hand, and the
social patterns of lineage segmentation, marriage alliance, and
political authority, on the other? As a mapping from the ide-
ational level of kinship ideas to the phenomenal level of spatial
models used to represent them (Read)? As a homology rooted
in the proximity of the cognitive processes involved in social
and spatial thinking (Bennardo)? Or as a set of metaphors,
further augmented by the importation of alien nomad con-
cepts into the study of kinship (Barry)?
Obviously, Tallensi and Mamprusi do not construct their
huts, compounds, and sacred groves as I construct my dia-
grams, in order to represent their ideas about sibling sets,
lineages, and clans. Nor do we need to hypothesize some un-
conscious analogical thinking to explain why compound and
lineage structures are so similar to each other that they can be
designated with the same words. In fact, we need no hypothesis
whatsoever to bridge the gap between the epistemological lev-
els, cognitive modules, or scientific domains to which these
structures respectively belong, once we accept that there is no
such gap. There are only variations in the scales and aspects of a
single, continuous spatial reality. There is nothing metaphor-
ical in calling a hut, a sibling set, and a lineage segment “rooms”
if we understand by that not only the adobe dwellings that grow
out of the earth but also the aggregates of more or less mobile
bodies that emerge from them, be they humans of flesh and
bone or spirits of wood and stone, man-made or not. These
bodies, dwellings, and landscape features are all parts of the
same material reality, linked to each other by movement and
growth rather than by symbolic representation.
As Allerton rightly points out, this nonrepresentational
approach owes much to the phenomenological tradition from
Merleau-Ponty to Ingold and in particular to ethnographers,
such as herself for the Manggarai or Cassiman, Liberski-
Bagnoud, Hahn, Bourdier, and Minh-Ha for the Kasena, who
have empirically shown how gender, generation, and descent
are not just thought of but actually experienced as spatial.
Transiting from inside to outside is not just a symbolical ex-
pression for moving from the sphere of children and women to
that of adult men. It actually means a gradual straightening of
the backbone, a progressive widening and brightening of the
visual field, an acceleration of steps, both at the micro scale of
daily life and at the macro scale of individual and collective
biographies. In such a setting, becoming a man, a father, a line-
age ancestor concretely means getting up, setting out for one’s
Hamberger Kinship as Logic of Space
field, occupying the public square, migrating to the cities or
overseas, penetrating into the sacred grove, or being buried in
front of one’s gate. Conversely, becoming a woman here is ba-
sically a matter of circulating across the less accessible spheres of
sleeping rooms, back yards, and nocturnal market places while
carrying in one’s womb, on one’s back, or in one’s lap on the
backseats of overcrowded bush taxis the children who thus
become so intimately synchronized with one’s own rhythm of
life that they will always form, wherever they are, a single “con-
tinuous entity,” to use again Fortes’s terms for uterine kin.
I thus endorse the phenomenological arguments—as far as
space is concerned in its contiguity aspect. As Merleau-Ponty
argued, all contiguity relations are ultimately derived from the
existential relations between the experiencing subject and the
world that s/he not just represents but inhabits and with which
s/he communicates. As a structure of copresences, space is a
network of interactions (or a meshwork of correspondences, to
use Ingold’s terms). However, my argument builds crucially on
the fact that space is not only a structure of copresences. It is
also a system of substitutions and perspective transformations,
which are not limited to the continuous flow of perspectives
in the subjective experience of movement. They include the
transformations of the subject’s perspective into the virtual
perspective of another subject, and these intersubjective trans-
formations, which allow me to envisage the world simulta-
neously in my own and in the other’s body, are as fundamental
to the experience of space as are the interactions between these
bodies. Barry is right in noting that this transformational ap-
proach is indebted to the structuralist tradition, which, in pass-
ing from Lévi-Strauss to Hugh-Jones, has largely been released
from the representational model that was inherent in the lan-
guage paradigm.
In fact, transformations of space (and kinship) appear to be
bound up with a representational model only if they are en-
visaged as primarily linguistic devices—as in the case of kin-
term products studied by Read or in the case of linguistic
reference frames analyzed by Levinson. I cannot discuss here
Bennardo’s (2016) thesis that kinship terminologies and lo-
cation terminologies are structurally correlated. In any case,
the formal transformations that shape these symbolic spaces
differ from those real transformations that, founded in phys-
ical movements such as postmarital residential change, lie at
the heart of the morphogenesis of material spaces and, in a
sense, characterize their topology. I have no means to judge
whether such topologies correlate with linguistic reference
frames—given the general independence of these reference
frames from the sociospatial environment (Levinson 2003:241),
this seems unlikely. They do not correspond in a straightfor-
ward manner to kinship terminologies (for example, Crow/
Omaha terminologies are compatible with any of the three ex-
ample topologies, simply because they are well suited to spaces
composed of stable unilocal groups). But even if there were a
perfect correlation between the material structure of kinship and
the symbolic structure of kinship terminologies, this would not
545
mean that the former is grounded in the latter—any more than
experiential space is grounded in vector algebra.
The transformations that constitute social space as a system
of perspectives are not about representing the other’s point of
view but about experiencing it. Perceiving the world simul-
taneously in one’s own and in the other’s place is not just a
mental experiment but a practical experience, though an ex-
perience of identification rather than of encounter. A Tallensi
man is always at home in his maternal uncle’s house because
he lives it as a replication of his own maternal home. The
“mystical” bond between Tallensi uterine kin here is as real and
as material as the propinquity of agnates. The logic of substi-
tution has the same reach as the logic of contiguity. Just as both
are, as Leibniz held, the fundamental devices of symbolic
thought, so both are equally at work in the fabric of spatial
experience.
Conceiving of kinship as logic of space thus has nothing to
do with transferring a concept from one domain to another. It
is rather to acknowledge that the contiguity and substitution
relations of kinship are experiential operators, working ac-
cording to a logic that is certainly wider and richer, but not
necessarily “softer,” than that operating in the conceptual
realm of kin terms. This does not mean that all kinds of spatial
processes—childbirth and burial, migration and initiation,
commensality and sacrifice, hospitality and sex—give rise to
kinship relations. It means that they do so to the extent that
they are guided by a particular common logic.
To be sure, kinship is not the only logic of space. It is the
specific logic of spaces that are structured by the rhythm of
generations and the polarity of gender. The principles of this
logic are still far from being fully understood. The most general
is the fundamental importance of movement as a correlate of
spatial connection. Conceived of in spatial terms, incest is not
so much a rejection of difference as a refusal of movement, as
appears well illustrated by Allerton’s example of the Mang-
garai, who sanction incest with actual spatial disconnection.
More specifically, it is the gendered pattern of movement that
appears most intimately connected with the particular shape of
space, well beyond the instance of postmarital residence change
on which I have concentrated in this article. I do not claim that
the topological approach provides a ready-made explanation
for this connection. But it provides a condition for its expla-
nation, in considering births and buildings, marriages and mi-
grations, sexual relations and mutual visits, not merely as in-
terconnected or homologous phenomena but as phenomena of
the same kind: as spatial processes, forming part of a single
material texture that it would be pointless to divide into eco-
logical and biological structures, on the one hand, and tech-
nological and social structures, on the other. Far from consti-
tuting a hybrid logic anchored at either side of the nature/
culture divide, the unity of kinship manifests the undivided
unity of space.
—Klaus Hamberger
 546
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