Kachin' and 'Haka Chin'- A Rejoinder to Levi-Strauss Author(s)- Edmund Leach

'Kachin' and 'Haka Chin': A Rejoinder to Levi-StraussAuthor(s): Edmund LeachSource: Man, New Series, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Jun., 1969), pp. 277-285Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and IrelandStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2799576 .

Accessed: 18/07/2014 00:12

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Man.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Fri, 18 Jul 2014 00:12:30 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rai

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2799576?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


'KACHIN' AND 'HAKA CHIN': A REJOINDER TO LEVI-STRAUSS

EDMUND LEACH

King's College, Cambridge

The first edition of Claude Levi-Strauss's Les structures e'lementaires de la parentet (I949) was notable for the fact that it contained a number of original and highly germinal ideas which were supported by some remarkably inaccurate ethnography. Those of us who have wished to exploit the ideas have felt bound to mention the ethnographical inaccuracies but we have not, I think, dwelt unduly on these defects, most of which were readily excusable in the light of the inadequate quality of the only sources which were at that time readily available. However, in I967, Levi-Strauss brought out a revised edition of this now classic work. The new edition differs from the first principally in that it contains a new preface, which is largely taken up with a polemical attack on the work of his British admirers, and that the sections relating to the Murngin and the Kachin have been substantially modified. On the other hand many of the earlier ethnographical errors have been retained. The result is a pastiche which makes the new book much less satisfactory than the old.

In this note I shall ignore the new preface. The modifications of Levi-Strauss's text which relate to the Murngin (chapter I2) have already become largely obsolete in the light of Barnes's work (I967) which convincingly demonstrates that the available ethnographical evidence is so contradictory that no adequate valida- tion can be provided for any one of the numerous theoretical interpretations which have been suggested. But the revised chapters on the Kachin and their neighbours are now so confusing that some further comment from me seems essential, simply to keep the record more or less straight.

The Kachin material is mostly to be found in chapters I5-I7. The most substantial alteration to these chapters is that the material from pp. 294-6 (middle) of the original edition has been deleted and replaced by pp. 272-80 of the new edition which is mostly a polemic against myself Other sections of the work have been patched up to meet this major modification but with somewhat inconsistent results. The new reader is likely to be even more baffled than before.

The simplest way to comment on the changes in Levi-Strauss's text is to discuss topics rather than deal with each alteration seriatim. In what follows, numbers in round brackets ( ) refer to pages in the first edition and numbers in square brackets [ ] to pages in the second edition of the book.

The structure ofJinghpaw kinship terminology 'Fig. 45. Systeme Katchin (d'apres Leach)' [273] replaces 'Fig. 45. Systeme

Katchin' (295). Levi-Strauss comments that his original fig. 45 was 'very close to



278 EDMUND LEACH

that reported by Leach'. In fact the new diagram, besides including two misprints, identifies seventy-eight relationships as against thirty-five in the original. As the new diagram ignores my glosses the reader's attention is not drawn to the fact which should be of the greatest interest to Levi-Strauss, namely that the relationship between the left hand column and the right hand column is the same as the relationship between the bottom horizontal line and the top horizontal line. It is understandable that Levi-Strauss should have been silent on this point because it shows very clearly that speakers of Jinghpaw do not ordinarily think of their mayu/dama system as one of 'circulating connubium', but imagine it rather as a rank order system senior/junior.

At [280] Levi-Strauss does make an oblique reference to this matter which he somehow twists into a criticism of myself, but I am horrified to discover that he cannot even read his own (or rather my own!) kinship diagrams. Or perhaps I should say that he is so familiar with kinship diagrams that he cannot relate them to the facts on the ground. When a Kachin says he is going to visit his mayu ni he means the household of either his wife's father or his mother's brother. He will not include in that category the wives of his elder brothers even if they are daughters of one of the individuals in question. Similarly when he says he will visit hisji ni ('grandparents') he probably means that he is going to see the mayu of his mayu, that is the wife's brother of his mother's brother or of his wife's father; he will not include his mother's brother's wife, or his wife's mother, or his mother's mother in that category. Contrary to Levi-Strauss's assertion, a normal child has no contact with any member of this affmalji ni category during infancy.

It should be stressed that the new fig. 45 'd'apres Leach' applies only to the Jinghpaw and not to the Kachin. Of other Kachin languages, so far as I am aware, Gauri and Atsi are translatable word for word into Jinghpaw. Tsasen (Hukawng) is only partially translatable; it contains at least one highly significant shift of em- phasis: the Jinghpaw category opposition mayu/dama, where dama may be trans- lated as 'permanent dependants', is replaced by mayu/shayi where shayi means 'the women'. The numerous Maru and Lashi dialects spoken in the area east of the N'mai Hka almost certainly translate very imperfectly into Jinghpaw categories. This is true also of the various Nung and Lisu languages to the east and north-east and of the Naga languages to the west. There is very little correspondence between Jinghpaw and either Shan or Burmese. There are only a few correspondences betweenjinghpaw and Mara, the language spoken by the Lakher, and a number of radical discrepancies. This fact is still ignored by Levi-Strauss (335) [3i5]. Data on Haka Chin kinship terminology remain incomplete (see Lehman I963: I37-8).

Chin and Kachin

In the first edition of the book, data about the Haka Chin are all mixed up with data about the Kachin, a blunder which I then described as 'inexcusable'. It becomes even less excusable now that Levi-Strauss, having admitted his error, goes to great lengths to argue that it is of no consequence [274-5]. His original Haka Chin material was derived from W. R. Head's Handbook on the Haka Chin customs (I9I7), which he described (and still describes) as 'an unrecognised treasury of contemporary ethnography' (3I5) [297]. Suffice to say that this is a pamphlet of



'KACHIN' AND 'HAKA CHIN: A REJOINDER TO LEV1-STRAUSS 279

forty-seven pages, originally priced at eight annas. The author was a Frontier Service administrative officer with no professional competence as an ethnographer. The facts which he records-many of which are of dubious authenticity-are only those which might be of interest to a British magistrate trying a case of Haka Chin civil law. Although there is independent evidence that the 'general culture' of the Haka Chin and of their neighbours the Lakher is broadly similar to that of the Kachin, there are very few facts recorded in Head's handbook which might have been applicable to a Kachin situation. Haka Chin territory and Kachin territory are everywhere separated by a gap of several hundred miles and although Jinghpaw and Haka are both Tibeto-Burman languages the differences between them are very substantial.

When Levi-Strauss published his first edition no evidence was available con- cerning Haka Chin marriage patterns. Head records details of Haka bride-price payments which resemble in some ways those recorded by Parry (I932) for the Lakher; they also resemble those recorded by Parry (I928) for the Lushai and by Stevenson (I943) for the Zahau. Parry's evidence indicated that the Lakher aristocratic lineages have a Kachin type marriage rule (in the sense specified below); the Lushai have no such rule; Stevenson's evidence likewise was that the Zahau and other Central Chin do not have such a rule. Loeffler (I960), on the basis of evidence from Lorrain (I95i), has rejected the thesis that the Lakher engage in 'Kachin type marriage'; Needham (I959) has also expressed scepticism on this point. In I957-8 Lehman carried out original research in the Haka Chin area and, in the process of writing up his materials, became rather thoroughly indoctrinated with the views of Needham, Leach and Levi-Strauss. Lehman's conclusion was that the Haka Chin have a prescriptive Kachin type marriage system similar to tlat of the Lakher (Lehman I963: I23).

Levi-Strauss in his I949 edition of Les structures assumed quite erroneously that the Haka Chin and the Kachin are the same people; an error he now admits. But he now compounds this error by the astounding argument that since Lehman's subsequent investigations seem to indicate that the Haka Chin have a Kachin type marriage system-in Leach's sense-this ethnographical confusion was fully justifiable!

I should emphasise that the expression 'Kachin type marriage' is an expression which I coined to denote a system in which localised patrilineages are related more or less permanently as wife-givers and wife-receivers and in which there is a legal prohibition against marriage between a man of the wife-giver group and a woman of the wife-receiver group. The system does not entail an ideology of circulating connubium, though, in the Kachin case, one well known myth does represent the system as circular. There is no evidence that either the Lakher or the Haka Chin have any kind of ideology of circulating connubium. In Levi-Strauss's concept of 'echange generalise', on the other hand, an ideology of circulating connubium seems to have a central position. Moreover Levi-Strauss fastens his attention on 'preferred marriage with the real or classificatory mother's brother's daughter' and ignores the only rule which is significant in the practical situation, namely the prohibition on marriage with a real or classificatory father's sister's daughter (cf. Lehman I963). Levi-Strauss defends his original error by the argument that, since he was able to deduce correctly the structure of the Haka Chin matrimonial



280 EDMUND LEACH

system from a study of their system of economic prestations (as reported by Head I9I7) he was fullyjustified from the start in confusing the ethnography of the Haka Chin with that of Kachin [275]. But in fact he deduced nothing of the sort. He supposed erroneously that the Haka system of prestations, as described by Head, was part of the same ethnographical complex as the Kachin system of marriage, as described by Gilhodes (I922); that is, he supposed that the Haka system of prestations fits ethnographically with a system of circulating connubium. The Kachin in question do have a system of prestations associated with marriage, but it is a different system and is in fact much less like the Haka system (as described by Head) than that of the Lakher or the Lushai or the Zahau. If we were to take Levi-Strauss's justificatory argument seriously, then any old evidence from any part of the Assam-Burmia-Tibet-Yunnan border area would serve equally well to justify any proposition Levi-Strauss cares to propose, because he has laid it down as a dogma that once upon a time, in an unspecified remote past, circulating connubium and echange generalise prevailed throughout this area! In short all the most notori- ous fallacies of the Frazerian comparative method are being smuggled back into circulation all over again.

In the original edition of Les structures the evidence relating to Kachin and the evidence relating to Haka Chin were inextricably mixed up and all attributed to Kachin. In the new edition the evidence is appropriately distinguished but still mixed up. The bewildered reader needs to remember that there is no real justification for using the Haka evidence in this context at all.

Kachin hypogamy According to Levi-Strauss's original argument a system of echange generalise is

naturally in balance-that is to say, on average, any particular group gives out as many women as it takes in. However, instability is likely to be generated by 'I'accumulation des femmes a telle ou telle etape du circuit' and this must lead to status inequality between wife-givers and wife-receivers. Levi-Strauss argued further that the usual imbalance is for the wife-receivers to be the superior, so that the pattern tends to become hypergamous (325), (336), (587).

In the light of criticism by myself, Lehman and others, he has now come to recognise that, in the Burma-Assam area, the normal imbalance. goes the other way-the status of wife-givers being higher than that of wife-receivers. The critical sentence at (336) has tactfully been omitted-but he now argues vigorously that the question whether the wife-givers or the wife-receivers rate the higher is quite irrelevant. All the same, in order to avoid getting caught out by the ethnography once again, he has coined a new term 'anisogamy 9 to embrace both 'hypergamy' and 'hypogamy' and, in general, he has inserted this new word into his text wherever hypergamy formerly occurred (cf [306] and (325)). However, he has forgotten about [544-5] (587-8), where the argument is still in terms of hypergamy and where we are still assured that the Kachin system exhibits l'echange generalise on the point of breakdown. It exemplifies 'the case, which is the most frequent, where the rule requires marriage with a woman of an immediately inferior status. Where then will the women of the highest class find their husbands?' [544] (587).

Moreover Levi-Strauss has still retained the whole of the fallacious argument



KACHIN AND HAKA CHIN : A REJOINDER TO LEVI-STRAUSS 28I

(325-327) [307-308], which rested on his double error that Haka Chin data apply to Kachin and that among Kachin the dama are of higher status than their mayu.

The thesis of (325) [306], (588) [545] is that the equal status of the participant groups breaks down firstly because those with privilege tend to accumulate an excess of women and then because, once a hypergamous structure has been established, there is a surplus of women in the top rank. Levi-Strauss claims that this state of affairs is well illustrated by the Kachin case because, on the one hand, they have rules which require an individual to marry a member of his own class'- which is consistent with l'echange generalise while, on the other, the Kachin institu- tion of polygamy (implying an accumulation of women within one class) is associated with 'the fantastic development of prestations, and exchanges and " debts", of credits and obligations, which is, in a sense, a pathological symptom' (326) [308].

The only fantasy in all this is in Levi-Strauss's mind. Incidentally, he still retains [307] Gilhodes's fallacious translation of the Kachin proverb:

du num shi, tarat num mali 'chief woman ten, commoner woman four'.

I have previously pointed out that the numbers in this formula refer to bride-price cattle not to wives, but Levi-Strauss, in a footnote, says he is not prepared to judge 'the respective linguistic competence' of Gilhodes and Leach! Oddly enough, although he is usually conscientious in these matters, neither edition specifies where this proverb comes from. It in fact originates in Gilhodes (I922: 225) where the author is at pains to emphasise the infrequency of Kachin polygamy. The next two lines of Levi-Strauss's text [307: lines 24-5] come from the same source but are erroneously attributed to the Haka Chin.

To illustrate the alleged contrariness of Kachin thought Levi-Strauss also cites, without text, another proverb from Gilhodes: 'It is not good to take two wives at the same time.' In fairness to the Kachins I must point out that this is a brutally truncated version of a picturesque original which reads:

Li lahkawng n maijawn Ga lahkawng n mai tsun Num lahkawng n mai la.

Gilhodes translates this as: You cannot get into two boats at the same time You must not have two words Wives two not good to take.

With all deference to Levi-Strauss's view of my linguistic competence, I think I can do better than that, but since this is plainly an example of n chyun ga, the love poetry full of complex hidden obscenities with which young Kachin like to entertain one another, I can only guess at what a Kachin adolescent might make of it, even though some of the puns are fairly obvious. For example: n mai='not good'; n mai= penis' (cf Leach I964: s5).

The complexities of the verb ga tsun as meaning alternatively a) an exchange of words, b) an exchange of gifts and c) an exchange of labour have been discussed by



282 EDMUND LEACH

me elsewhere (Leach I967: ISO-I); num=woman and la=man are 'opposites'; la also means 'take'; num la is the normal expression for 'to marry' where the actor is male: e.g. shigrai n la ai='he has not yet taken a woman', but it refers rather to cohabitation than to connubium in any legal sense. The common sense meaning thus seems to be:

Don't try to sail two boats at once, Don't try to have two conversations at the same time, Don't try to run two love affairs simultaneously.

The reference to polygamy, if any, is distinctly marginal. I have elaborated this point just to make it clear that Levi-Strauss's use of sources

is strikingly like that of Frazer. Any convenient snippet of ethnographical fact can be used to illustrate a logically derived principle. But when the snippets are put back into their context they tend to take on a different coloration.

But to get back to the issue of hypergamy-hypogamy, etc.-the argument of [307] (325) is meaningless unless it is supposed that it is the aristocrats who are the accumulators of women, which must imply that they are somehow in a position to exploit their superiority as wife-receivers. Yet the facts of the case, as I hope to have demonstrated with reasonable clarity (Leach I9 5i; I954), are that the superior status of the chiefs depends on the multiplicity of their obligations to give women away.

In so far as it is supposed to be based on Kachin ethnography, the last paragraph of chapter i6 (326-7) [308] was rubbish when it was first written but it could be excused so long as one supposed that Levi-Strauss was genuinely mistaken in thinking that the Haka Chin were Jinghpaw, that Jinghpaw chiefs are wife- receivers vis-a-vis their followers, that the Jinghpaw kinship terminology was rudimentary as suggested by fig. 45 (295) rather than complex as in fig. 45 [273], and that the Gauri naming customs referred to at (32I) [302-3] indicate the richness of the Kachin 'termes d'appellation'; it is doubly rubbish now that our author insists on reprinting the text unchanged, even when he has been corrected on all the particulars. Incidentally there never was any justification for supposing that the Kachin termes d'appellation are numerous. Gilhodes, who is Levi-Strauss's source on this subject, expressly states that his data do not apply to non-Gauri (Gilhodes I922: I94).

On the wider issue of the relationship between Chin and Kachin culture the following further comments are apposite. Firstly we may concede that Levi- Strauss, if he so chooses, may think of Chin and Kachin as forming one society [274] in much the same sense as Radcliffe-Brown once pointed out that there may be circumstances when we should think of 'the British Empire' as one .society; but in that case we are entitled to ask why, in chapters iS and i6, which are mostly concerned with the Kachin, there should be dozens of references to the Haka Chin but no references to other Chin and Mara speaking groups about whom we know much more, whereas the 'Chin' group which is best documented (the Lakher) is afforded only three paragraphs in chapter I7, where it is mixed up with the Naga? Stevenson's material on the Chin turns up, as before, in chapter 3 [40-I]; but if Haka Chin are 'Kachin' in Levi-Strauss's curious classification, how does he manage to exclude Falam and Tiddim Chin from his all-embracing box?



KACHIN AND HAKA CHIN: A REJOINDER TO LEVI-STRAUSS 283

Is it perhaps simply because Stevenson's material does not fit the magic formula of echange generalise?

Secondly I would suggest that if Levi-Strauss is to go on insisting that 'the fantastic development of prestations', etc., is a cultural characteristic of the whole of his newly extended 'Kachin' category, he should also have drawn the reader's attention to the fact that there is now a reasoned contrary interpretation, which links this 'development of prestations' to the legal permissibility of divorce, and thus discriminates between Lakher, Haka and Gauri on the one hand andjinghpaw on the other (Leach I957; I963).

Levi-Strauss does mention [272] [27$ n.] that new sources have become available since he first wrote his book, but apart from a vehement denunciation of any detail in which Leach appears to be at variance with Le6vi-Strauss, he gives few indications of what these sources are and none of what they contain.

4. Gumsa and gumlao: stability-instability 'The development of rank hypogamy in a system of prescriptive asymmetric

marriage alliance does not necessarily threaten its basic structural arrangements as Levi-Strauss (I949) has suggested' (Lehman I963: I3 I): thus Lehman writing about the Haka Chin; he is repeating a proposition by Leach (i9Si) made with relation to the Kachin. Levi-Strauss now complains that 'after having thus affirmed in I95I that Kachin society was in equilibrium, Leach recognised in I954, that it alternated in constant oscillation between two contradictory forms . . .' [277-8]. But Levi- Strauss has misrepresented me; having been reared as a mathematician I do not, unless I am being exceptionally careless, confuse the notions of equilibrium and stability. What I said in 951i was that 'Levi-Strauss is led to attribute to the Kachin system an instability it does not in fact possess' and I stick by that. An unstable system is one which has a tendency to change into some other system without any tendency to return to the original position. A system in equilibrium may be one in which everything is stationary, but is more likely to be one in which the parts are in oscillatory movement around a central position-the pendulum of a clock is not ordinarily stationary, but it is at all times in equilibrium. My account of the Kachin political system is of a system in long term equilibrium, though in my book (Leach I954) I made it clear that the equilibrium in question was 'as if' (Leach I954: 285). In fact, Kachin society over the past 140 years has undergone radical changes, but these changes have been a response to external pressures, they have not been generated from within the system, as Levi-Strauss's analysis would have suggested they ought to be. Besides which both gumsa and gumlao practise 'Kachin type marriage' as I have defined that concept, and both will on occasion resort to forms of circulating connubium (hkau wang hku).

Moreover Levi-Strauss's scheme would imply that the norm of the Kachin system, being based on echange generalise, should be of the egalitariangumlao type, while the aristocratic gumsa pattern should be anomalous and should itself dis- integrate only in the direction of class or caste hierarchy. But in practice the norm of the Kachin pattern is quite emphatically centred in the gumsa model which is capable of oscillating in two directions. It can move either in the direction of becoming 'more Shan' (i.e. from gumchying gumsa through gumrawng gumsa to



284 EDMUND LEACH

gumsa to Shan in Maran La Raw's (I967) terminology) or it can move from gumchying gumsa to gumlao; but the factors which 'determine' what shall happen are economic and political not structural. Alliances between affinally related lineages break down not because there is no woman available to act as the symbolic re- affirmation of the alliance but because, for one reason or other, the hierarchical status difference implied by the mayu/dama relationship has ceased to correspond to the economic and political facts. It is not the instability of the marriage system which breaks up the political network; it is the instability of economic and political status which breaks up the pattern of marriage relations.

In Levi-Strauss's view, the circulation of women in a system of echange generalise is a system in itself; the circulation of prestations in the other direction is another system in itself: the two should not be confused [276]. But certainly that is not how the Kachin themselves think about it. They are not, of course, specialists in the theory of structuralism but they know very well how their marriage system really works. They know that political power consists in the control of material assets and that women are pawns in the game of politics. Levi-Strauss, as always, has everything back to front.

* * * *

It fills me with regret to have to write in this vein of an author whom I greatly respect, but the fact is that by tinkering with his I949 text in the pretence of bringing it up to date he has made confusion worse confounded. What was formerly a classic (though somewhat dated) work, the defects of which could be tolerated because of its intellectual originality, has become a hybrid monster. It is a real tragedy that the English edition which has now appeared is based on this revised version rather than the original.

NOTE

IAs I have previously made abundantly clear, the rules are wrongly stated by Levi-Strauss's sources. The correct formula is not that an individual must marry into his own social class but that a man must not marry a woman of lower social status than himself and a woman must not marry a man of higher social status than herself.

REFEREN CES

Bames, J. A. I967. Inquest on the Murngin (Occ. Pap. R. anthrop. Inst. 26). London: Royal Anthropological Institute.

Gilhodes, C. I922. The Kachins: religion and customs. Calcutta: Catholic Orphan Press. Head, W. R. I9I7. Handbook on the Haka Chin customs. Rangoon: Government Printer. Leach, E. R. i95i. The structural implications of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage. J. R.

anthrop. Inst. 83, 23-55. I954. Political systems of highland Burma. London: Bell. I957. Aspects of bridewealth and marriage stability among the Kachin and Lakher.

Man 57, 50-5. I963. Alliance and descent among the Lakher: a reconsideration. Ethnos 28, 237-49. I964. Anthropological aspects of language: animal categories and verbal abuse. In New

directions in the study of language (ed.) E. H. Lenneberg. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

I967. The language of Kachin kinship: reflections on a Tikopia model. In Social organization: essays presented to Raymond Firth (ed.) M. Freedman. London: Frank Cass.

Lehman, F. K. I963. The structure of Chin society, Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.



KACHIN AND HAKA CHIN : A REJOINDER TO LEVI-STRAUSS 285

Levi-Strauss, C. I949. Les structures e'l6mentaires de la parente. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

i 967. Les structures etementaires de la parente' (rev. edn). Paris, The Hague: Mouton. Loeffler, L. G. I960. Patrilateral lineation in transition: the kinship system of the Lakher (Mara),

Arakan. Ethnos 25, II9-50. Lorrain, L. G. I95i. Grammar and dictionary of the Lakher or Mara language. Gauhati: Dept of

Historical and Antiquarian Studies. Maran La Raw I967. Towards a basis for understanding the minorities of Burma: the Kachin

example. In Southeast Asian tribes, minorities and nations (ed.) P. Kunstadter. Princeton: Univ. Press; London: Oxford Univ. Press.

Needham, R. I959. Vaiphei social structure. S West. J. Anthrop. 15, 396-406. Parry, N. E. I928. A monograph on Lushai customs and ceremonies. Shillong: Assam Government

Press. - I932. The Lakhers. London: Macmillan.

Stevenson, H. N. C. I943. The economics of the central Chin tribes. Bombay: Times of India Press.



Documents

Kachin' and 'Haka Chin'- A Rejoinder to Levi-Strauss Author(s)- Edmund Leach