| Abstract: |
The definition and descriptions of "house" and "house society" introduced by Claude Levi-Strauss are not as straightforward and unproblematic as he might have believed, as subsequent scholarship has shown. His failure to develop this model in any detailed case study left nagging questions unresolved. Furthermore, his intention to utilize the house as a new social structural type alongside clan, lineage, and family reveals a notable flaw in his conception, for in his own discussions he eschews the simple classification of societies according to rules that arrange people into corporate descent groups, and the house is considered too variable a category to serve classification purposes. Nevertheless, aspects of his notions of house and house societies have proved so intriguing as to tempt other ethnographers to develop and clarify them. In the process, his definition of the house as an organizational institution found in some societies at a certain level of political-economic complexity has increasingly been abandoned, while the symbolic or fetishistic portions of his model have been highlighted in studies that see in the house a new means for elucidating social group relations that may have universal applications. These critiques and the subsequent reconceptualizing of the Lévi-Straussian house are reviewed in this chapter, but it concludes with a call to return to his original formulation (although not the static notion of a classificatory type). Lévi-Strausss definition and characterization emphasized the materiality, locality, and duration of the house along with the use of the language of kinship and affinity to bind its members and to perpetuate the estate from which their identity was derived. In addition to focusing on kinship in terms of practice, discourse, and negotiation rather than as rules to be obeyed, and on the long-term outcomes of strategic decisions and actions rather than on idealized characterizations of social groupings, Lévi-Strauss recognized in the house a societal configuration probably common in the past but now on the verge of extinction. This distinction should not be lost
indeed, comparing the role of kinship past and present adds immeasurably to our understanding of social organization.
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