How the atom of kinship relates to a sy stem of kin-ship relations e xpressed t hrough a ki nship termi nology i s not considere d, and in fact it. In the details mentioned below, the 1945 and 1958 versions are the same. But it is not a completely balanced one, since in practice Godelier devotes the greater part of his book to systems of marriage and their associated terminologies rather than look-ing at relationships of filiation or descent. The resulting kinship system “does not consist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity between individuals. GILLIAN GILLISON is an anthropologist residing in New York. The same article, in revised form, appeared as Chapter 11 of Anthropologie structurale (1958). The Institute is a non-profit-making registered charity and is entirely independent, with a Director and a small staff accountable to the Council, which in turn is elected annually from the Fellowship. JSTOR®, the JSTOR logo, JPASS®, Artstor®, Reveal Digital™ and ITHAKA® are registered trademarks of ITHAKA. It is one of the basic social institutions found in every society. In Levi-Strauss' order of things, the basic building block of kinship is not just the nuclear family, as in structural-functionalism, but the so-called kinship atom: the nuclear family together with the wife's brother. This is a great achievement. Thus, he argues, was concerned not only with societies that “define their marriage rules . It has a Royal Patron in the person of HRH The Duke of Gloucester KG, GCVO. The Vagina Gate (compare Klevius' view on Stonehenge) is the key to the understanding of kinship and definition of religion.In short it means that every person's social coordinate is determined by the link/gate of birth, i.e. Kinship is one of the main organizing principles of society. option. In a footnote which appears at pages 105-106 of Anthropologie structurale deux, Lévi-Strauss dismisses with contempt a criticism I had made of his earlier discussions of l'atome de parenté. brother. This term is consistently translated by Claire Jacobson as English descent. In numerous analyses of myth, Levi-Strauss tried to examine the unconscious universal patterning of human thought. All kinship structures are constructed on this “kinship atom,” primarily by the organization of a series of oppositions between attitudes of familiarity and reserve. As in the atom devised by Levi-Strauss, the mother's brother is "initially present"-not primarily as a wife-giver but as ego's original father, as his mother's mythic "first hus-band." by EDMUND LEACH The article entitled "Réflexions sur l'atome de parenté" (Lévi-Strauss 1973) first appeared in L'Homme, 1973, XIII (3), and was reprinted in the same year as Chapter vu of Anthropologie structurale deux. Access supplemental materials and multimedia. Request Permissions. In both French versions of the article the word filiation appears rather frequently. The Atom of Kinship, Filiation and Descent : Error in Translation or Confusion of Ideas ?. For terms and use, please refer to our Terms and Conditions Lévi-Strauss originally introduced the notion of atome de parenté at page 18 of his justly celebrated and highly seminal paper "L'Analyse structurale en linguistique et en anthropologie" {Word, 1945, 1 (2)). This is precisely the point that I wished to convey in my condensed 1970 criticism : Lévi-Strauss' original text confuses under a single term {filiation in the French text and descent in English translation) two quite separate technical anthropological concepts which are, in English, filiation and descent. He accuses me of failing to check my references in that, in alleging that he had confused the concepts of filiation and descent (Leach 1970: 101), I had relied on an erroneous text and had failed to notice that where Lévi-Strauss had originally written filiation his translator (Claire Jacobson) had written descent. The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAI) is the world's longest-established scholarly association dedicated to the furtherance of anthropology (the study of humankind) in its broadest and most inclusive sense. Published By: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Read Online (Free) relies on page scans, which are not currently available to screen readers. DOI : https://doi.org/10.3406/hom.1977.367757, www.persee.fr/doc/hom_0439-4216_1977_num_17_2_367757. I2j-i2g. This institution establishes relationships between individuals and groups. within the ‘atom of kinship’. Chapter 11 of the English language Structural Anthropology (1963) is a translation of the latter. GILLIAN GILLISON. The atom of kinship as conceived by Levi-Strauss (I963a) is a small group consisting ofthe four relations, brother/sister, husband/wife, father/son and mother's brother/sister's son (hereafter labelled as M/U, F/M, F/S and U/S) which express the fundamental relations of consanguinity, affinity (including the exchange of women by men) and filiation in a kinship system.