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.
domination'
42
. In the communist household no sexual freedom existed
43
; 'the members of
such a household could adjust to this because their sexual attraction to each other was
minimized by having grown up together'. Nevertheless Weber thinks that normative
measures were needed 'to safeguard solidarity and domestic peace in the face of
jealousies'. Because in his view house exogamy is older than sib exogamy and persisted
next to it, members of the same house had to avoid each other even if they belonged to
different sibs and would be free to engage in sexual relations. Here Weber deals with the
question of the origins of exogamy; his solution, however, is not very clear:
'The beginnings of regulated exogamy can perhaps be found in exchange arrangements of household and of
sibs, which resulted from their division
.'
44
How exogamy has been regulated Weber does not explain here but in his chapter on
economy and law, where he treats the origins of the contract. Only when it had been
developed, men from related groups could exchange their sisters:
'Freedom of contract in sexual affairs is not primitive. Those tribes which are most backward technologically and
are least differentiated economically and socially live in de facto lifelong patriarchal polygamy. The disgustful
rejection of endogamy obviously began in the narrowest circle, within the household community, in connection
with the relative diminution of the sexual urge through common upbringing. The exchange of one's own sister for
the sister of another is probably the oldest kind of sexual contract
.'
45
Weber sees the 'exchange of women' as a 'fraternization contract' 'between exogamous sibs
whose members seem to confront each other in the strange dual role of being partly
comrades and partly *non-comrades. In this confrontation kinship is created while women
come to be 'regarded as a mere object'.
46
The contract of fraternization, according to Weber, is not an instrumental one; it is an older,
indeed the oldest form, of contract: the 'status-contract', which may create all kinds of social
relations:
'The distinction [between the status contract and the modern contract] is based on the fact that all those primitive
contracts by which political or other personal associations, permanent or temporary, or family relations are
created involve a change in what may be called the total legal situation (the universal position) and the social
status of the persons involved. To have this effect these contracts were originally either straightforward magical
acts or at least acts having a magical significance. For a long time their symbolism retained traces of that
42
ES p. 363, WG p. 218.
43
Schnitger also criticized Morgan's use of the term 'group marriage' to indicate the sexual kinship relations with
the cross-cousin group, see Ch. 2,8.
44
Schnitger also considers endogamy as older than exogamy; exogamy takes the form of sister-exchange, EuM
p. 12 ; see further below.
45
ES p. 688, WG p. 412. Schnitger, EuM p. 12, also considered the 'exchange of women' by a generic 'one', the
oldest form of exogamy. The concept reached feminist studies of the seventies by way of Lévy-Strauss , see
Gayle Rubin (1975).
46
ES p. 673, WG p. 402. 'In earliest times, b a r t e r, the archetype of all merely instrumental contracts, would
seem to have been a general phenomenon among the comrades of an economic or political community only in
the noneconomic sphere, particularly as barter of women between exogamous sibs whose members seem to
confront each other in the strange dual role of being partly comrades and partly strangers ('teils Genossen, teils
Ungenossen'). In the state of exogamy barter appears also as an act of fraternization; however much the women
may be regarded as a mere object, there will rarely be missing the concurrent idea of a change of status to be
brought about by magical means.'
It seems that what is described here is the ambiguous relation between the 'cross-cousins': kin and not-kin, which
so intrigued ethnologists and feminists both, since it formalized the opposition of non-sexual and sexual relations
between women and men in one unifying frame of kinship.
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