Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994. Chapter 3 Private versus public sphere: the origins of household and kin group.
general, obviously meaning both gathering and hunting, gathering in many circumstances is
the most stable and calculable source of income; in cultures where only men hunted, women
would have performed the lionesses' share in the gathering and so in production and could
therefore, according to Weber's own reasoning, have occupied positions of authority.
In his paragraph on the kin group, however, Weber relativizes this statement on the
'independent household authority' of women: according to him it exists 'only in rare cases
subject to special conditions'.
36
In his view matrilinear descent ('Mutterfolge') does not
guarantee women authority or even freedom, since it is mostly combined with the
'avunculate', which he defines as the authority of the mother's brother over the children.
37
In
Weber-Schnitger's view the avunculate was connected to the low status of women as 'work-
animals'; but this fact is not explained, and therefore it still is not clear why adult women, if
their brothers - in Weber's words - 'protected' and 'disciplined' the children, could not at least
enjoy freedom; their freedom would be greater than it is now. Therefore also the construction
of 'the avunculate' cannot break the circularity of Weber's
argument on the origins of masculine domination.
4. Kinship as a public formation; the establishment by status contract of sister-trading
fraternizations
Although Weber does not view 'the household' as an 'original' social formation, he neither
does view the 'kin group' as such: he can not imagine any kinship organization including
women and men that is autonomous, not dependent on or dominated by masculine military
organizations. In his view the kin group is secondary to the household; it only fulfills the
public functions now performed by the state, while production - the private sector - is
organized by the household.
This view becomes apparent in Weber's treatment of kinship organizations as such, which I
will now discuss, supplementing it with his conceptualization of the 'status contract' and the
'exchange of women' in his chapter on Economy and Law.
As we saw above, Weber wants to treat 'the tribe' as a social form which developed after 'the
household' did; he even gives 'the neighborhood' precedence over it.
38
Thus he deals first
with the sexual relations in the household.
39
In the beginning this household was communist: property was collective, the community
immortal
40
, the head of the household autocratic.
41
According to Weber the first intrusion into
this totalitarian domination was not caused by economic factors, but by the development of
exclusive 'sexual claims 'of the *housepartners over women subjected to their *collective
36
ES p. 367, WG p. 221
37
Ibid., see also EuM p. 26. In his sociology of law Weber mentions the 'age group' as an element of Morgan's
'classificatory kinship' system; he interprets it, however, as a consequence of the institution of the 'men's house',
see Ch. 4,5-6. Schnitger rejects the concept of age groups, see EuM, p. 11.
38
ES p. 360 ff., WG p. 215 ff.
39
Again designated as 'the most *"original" of the externally closed types of social action', ES p. 363 ff., WG p.
218 ff.
40
ES p. 359, WG p. 214.
41
ES p. 364, WG p. 218: 'the autocratic head of the house'; Weber refers 'the father-in-law of an extended
Russian family', and thus to a patriarchal household of his time (presumably to ridicule those socialists who think
that Russian agricultural collectivities could be a foundation for modern communism). See also ES p. 688, WG p.
412, cited below.
59
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