Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

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Murdock 1949; Bohannan and Middleton 1968; Needham 1971; Goody
1973; Keesing 1975). As it was formulated by Robert Lowie (1948: 57),
“… biological relationships merely serve as a starting point for the
development of sociological conceptions of kinship”. After the period of the
late 1960s – early 1970s when many leading anthropologists declared that there
really was no such thing as kinship at all (see Barnes 2006), the wave of
theoretical thought in cultural anthropology seems to have been rolling
backwards, in the direction of recognition of the phenomenon of kinship
accompanied by “rehabilitation” of its biological background, slowly from the
mid-1980s (Schneider 1984) and more and more rapidly nowadays (vide stricto
Carsten 2004). In this respect the contribution to the theory made by
evolutionary biology (sociobiology) from the first steps of the discipline in the
mid-1960s (Hamilton 1964) on can hardly be overestimated. In particular, the
scientists working within this paradigm have shown the primordially biological
nature of kin altruism and favoring, as well as of many other events related to
the problem of kinship and its nature (e.g., Chagnon and Irons 1979: 79–249).
The general view of sociobiologists on this problem may be represented
correctly by the conclusion drawn by Birgit Stцbich (2002: 51): “The stronger
theory is the kin altruism, cultural influence cannot be that strong.” That is, in
the phenomenon of kinship biologically (genetically) predetermined features of
individual behavior dominate socially imposed norms.
Nevertheless, manifestations of kin altruism, favoring and so forth are
important social facts, too. As everyone lives in a society, all the personal
relations are objectified in it and by it. Actually, in this sense in a society
nothing properly completely individual, personal can ever be found. The same
way no relation between people can be purely biological: when relatives live
together, each of them commits social acts every moment – the acts that if not
involve or touch the rest of the association members directly, in any case give
them reasons to add something to their evaluation of that person while the latter
has to take their expectations of his behavior into account. One might say that
biological kinship preexisted the human society, as far as without biological
relations between individuals the very appearance of Homo sapiens of course
could not become possible. However, as it is stressed by sociobiologists, the
ties, truly social by nature, integrate non-human primate associations
(Butovskaya and Fajnberg 1993: 129–148), and hence there are no reasons to
discredit the arguments that biological and social in the phenomenon of kinship
went hand in hand in associations of the humans’ direct ancestors either and
that social objectification of biological relations is also older than the human
species.
What is especially significant with respect to the human society, is that
kinship relations in it are not just objectified but also categorized and
transformed what results in lack of convergence between biological and social
kinship. In archaic societies social categorization as such takes the shape of all-