Social Origins, by Briffault

[p028] Social Origins “The Mothers. By Robert Briffault. Abridged by Gerdon Rattray Taylor. Allen and Unwin. 36s. Mr. Taylor has reduced to 450 pages Briffault’s original three- volume work of 2,000 very large pages. The main lines of Briffault’s case remain but its main merit in any case wa: the mountain of illustra- tions of the social and sexual life of primitive societies which Briffault gathered together, and so the book suffers much from abridgement. It suffers even more from Taylor’s introduction, which has the merits _of neither accuracy, convincing argu- ment nor factual evidence. On page 10 we find a series of statements which the rest of the volume sug- gest are not just proof-readers’ slips. Thus we are told that Sir A. Maine published his Primitive Law in 1851; perhaps Taylor has unearthed a for- gotten work by an obscure and neglected author, but we do know that Sir Henry Maine published his ANCIENT Law in 1861. McLennan is said to have ‘made the most im- portant restatement of the matri- archal view in 1886; in fact his work of 1886 was preceded by a similar book published in 1865 and again in 1876, and anyway McLennan’s theory was totally at odds with that of Morgan, Briffauit’s inspirer. As for Westermarck’s History of Human Marriage being published in the early 19th century, the actual date was 1891. All this is unfortunate, for Brif- fault’s work is interesting to students of social development. George Thom- - son echoed the sentiments of some Marxists when he wrote of The Mothers as ‘the most important theoretical contribution to social an- thropology since the beginning of the century’. (In this field, incident- ally, comparisons are odious.) How- ever in the view of this reviewer, Briffault’s book has little to do with Marxism beyond the exposition of LABOUR REVIEW — June-July, 1960 human behaviour as distinctively cul- tural, i.e., learned rather than instinc- tive. His argument is that in the original phases of human life matri- archy, mother-right, the organization of society around the mothers, was the universal rule. Only in this way could the values of social co-opera- tion predominate over the individual- istic drives of hunger and sex. The hypothesis is interesting, but how can it be put to the test? Briffautt takes innumerable examples of descent and inheritance in the female line, but these turn out to be very far from mankind’s primeval condi- tion. The Nayars of Malabar, for instance, live in matrilineal house- holds (taravad); but this is probaoly because they are a military caste within a feudal system, and the male members spend their time away from their wives. It is certain that the inhabitants of this area left savagery behind thousands of years ago. Then there are awkward people like the Australian aborigines and many other hunters and gatherers, who are rarely matrilineal and certainly not matriarchal: women among them often have a lower status than in more developed, agricultural societies. Unfortunately this method of un- critically piling up pieces of evidence torn from their historical and en- vironmental context runs through most of Briffault’s book. The separate bits are held together by an inconsistent mixture of psycho- logical and biological speculation on the one hand, and a vague theory of universal social evolution on the other. However fascinating the de- tails, and they certainly are fascina- ting, the picture is not convincing. Taylor’s introductory remarks, in- tended to help straighten us out, are even less so; we are asked to tack on to Briffault’s thesis the theory first put forward (by—guess who? Gordon Rattray Taylor) in 1949, in which ‘sociey is postulated as oscil- lating irregularly between phases in which the mother-figure is dominant and others in which the father is dominant, with the possibility of a balance between the two’. For scientific precision, what more could a man want? Briffault, in my opinion, deserves criticism; but he does not deserve Mr. Taylor as an editor. C. SLAUGHTER. Marriage a la Mode