SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

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