SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang
SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang
SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
i8z<br />
I Social Theory and Social Action<br />
Naturalization of Convention I 183<br />
ation of natural-law theories which assumed that historically developed rules<br />
were "supposed to have been evolved from the unassisted contemplation of the<br />
conception of Nature" (Maine 1972:59). Rather, for Maine, the momentous invention<br />
that made state-level society (that is, based on territory rather than kinship)<br />
possible is "legal fiction," the artificial and conventional stipulation that a<br />
state of affairs exists when in fact it does not. Early states, for example, were<br />
based on the useful fiction that immigrant groups were genealogically related to<br />
the local population (Maine 1875:69). Legal fictions are more complex versions<br />
of fictions which create "definite social forms" such as the family, the tribe, and<br />
the village community out of "broken hordes, mere miscellanies of men" (Maine<br />
1886:285). Once this convention was acknowledged and consecrated through<br />
common sacrifices, the "permanence and solidity" of the social order was assured.<br />
Thus, "the composition of the state, uniformly assumed to be natural, was<br />
nevertheless known to be in great measure artificial" (Maine 1972:77). This<br />
growth of legal fictions was the model for a constitutive openness which Maine<br />
sees as the distinguishing feature of modern society. Whereas in primitive societies<br />
a person's social position is naturally fixed by the irreversable assignment of<br />
status at birth, civilization developed the mechanism of contractual law through<br />
which a person could alter this natural state of affairs and "create it by himself<br />
by convention" (Maine 1972:183).<br />
Whether in Hobbes's anchoring of the hypothetical original contract in natural<br />
law or in Maine's positive valuation of customary or legal conventions as<br />
diacritic of civilization, civil society is at one remove from bondage in nature,<br />
which is viewed either as the perpetual state of war or as the fixity of status. In<br />
other evolutionary theories, however, these terms are inverted, so that earlier<br />
states of society are explained by standards derived from the natural or practical<br />
logic of contemporary life. Maine's observation that advances in modes of legal<br />
reasoning are grounded in fictitious customs struck many nineteenth-century<br />
thinkers as a call for positivistic reform. The apparent irrationality of many customs,<br />
that is, the evident lack of means-ends appropriateness, should not be glorified<br />
but overcome, so that social conventions perpetuated through force of<br />
habit, while perhaps serving as "way-marks full of meaning" (Tylor 1871:16)<br />
for the expanding enterprise of developmental reconstruction, must in the end<br />
fall to the necessary logic of modern science. In place of Maine's recognition of<br />
the positive contribution of fictions, evolutionists such as E. B. Tylor and Lewis<br />
Henry Morgan endeavored to weed out unnecessary and irrational "survivals,"<br />
that is, customs which have outlived their contextual appropriateness and practical<br />
motivation.<br />
Morgan, for example, discovered an unexpected consistency in consanguineal<br />
kin terms of various American Indian societies. At first Morgan thought that<br />
these instances of the "classificatory system of relationship," that is, systems<br />
which lump under one linguistic label relations which our own system of terminology<br />
distinguishes (e.g., brother and male cousin), were, in the words of his<br />
friend and colleague the Rev. J. S. Mcllvaine, "invented and wholly artificial"<br />
(Morgan in Kuper 1985:12). In contrast, the "descriptive systems" found in<br />
what Morgan and his contemporaries called "civilized" society "evidently follow<br />
the flow of blood" in supposedly providing a natural or objective match-up between<br />
biological and linguistic facts. Thanks to suggestive comments from Mcllvaine,<br />
Morgan soon postulated a natural explanation for what he had earlier considered<br />
entirely artificial: the practice of brothers' having wives in common meant that<br />
no man could in principle distinguish his own from his brothers' children, so<br />
that the resulting classificatory pattern reflects a set of natural—though peculiar—facts.<br />
When J. F. McLennan, another important evolutionary theorist, attacked<br />
Morgan's explanation of classificatory kinship systems on the grounds<br />
that the evidence presented, namely, the extensive lists of kinship terms Morgan<br />
collected from all over the world, were ephemeral conventions of address, Morgan<br />
replied that the classificatory system is not at all "conventional," since it is<br />
based on "actual facts of social condition" and since it appears "identical in minute<br />
details over immense sections of the earth" (Morgan 1974:531).<br />
Morgan assumed that the cultural practices of his own society are the result<br />
of logical, practical reflection on objective conditions of life (Sahlins 19763:60).<br />
This state of self-evident objectivity then becomes the standard to render explicable<br />
diverse cultural practices at other stages on the evolutionary ladder. Moreover,<br />
Morgan is a paradigmatic case of the paradoxical attitude toward convention<br />
noted above. On the one hand, as we have just seen, he reduced artificial or<br />
customary classifications to their natural practicality. On the other hand, he<br />
thought that societies were entities constructed by the willful association of individuals,<br />
whether in the League of the Iroquois he made famous or in the less<br />
well-known Grand Order of the Iroquois, a fraternal order of gentlemen from<br />
western New York he helped found. For Morgan (1962:7) the confederacy was<br />
a clear historical example of convention by agreement: "Iroquois chiefs assembled<br />
in general congress, to agree upon the terms and principles of the compact,<br />
by which their future destinies were to be linked together." In 1845, m<br />
fact,<br />
Morgan and his brothers from the order were eyewitnesses to a ceremony reaffirming<br />
the charter of the Iroquois confederacy during which an Onondaga<br />
leader solemnly repeated, as one of the brothers reports, "the regulations adopted<br />
by the originators of the Confederacy, to render it stable and lasting" (Isaac Hurd<br />
in Bieder 1980:354).<br />
A popular modern variant on Hobbes's reduction to mechanistic principles<br />
and Morgan's reduction to practical rationality is the sociobiological explanation<br />
of social behavior. Not content with dismissing the uniquely cultural content of<br />
institutions such as warfare, religion, and kinship, sociobiology's aim is to show