REPRODUCTIVE REGIMES
In another era, "alliance" theorists jousted with "descent" theorists over competing conceptualizations of social organization. The one envisioned marriage as organizationally crucial. The other conjured an equally Durkheimian
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system of superordinate and self-perpetuating groups in terms of descent principles alone (Barnes 1970). Though both frameworks emphasized the continuity of groups and their relations, neither framework problematized reproduction, which was envisioned either as a structural effect, explicable in terms of detemporalized and objective organizational "principles," or as a natural process that fell beyond the bounds of ethnographic inquiry. As Evans-Pritchard stated in the famous closing pages of
The Nuer, " By social structure we mean relations between groups which have a high degree of consistency and constancy. The groups remain the same irrespective of their specific content of individuals at any particular moment, so that generation after generation of people pass through them. Men are born into them, or enter into them later in life, and move out of them at death; the structure endures. In this definition of structure the family is not considered a structural group, because families have no consistent and constant interrelations as groups and they disappear at the death of their members" (1940, 262). For Lévi-Strauss, marriage linked groups, and in "elementary structures of kinship" these linkages were replicated generation after generation through the operation of prescriptive rules of marriage—if not in reality, then in the model of reality (Lévi-Strauss 1969a, xxx–xxxv). While consanguinity was a "natural fact," alliance was a "cultural fact" (p. 30).
In Elementary Structures of Kinship and The Nuer, French and British structuralism overlooked the body, sex, gender, and reproduction. In Lévi-Strauss's models women circulate as tokens and as gifts, not as wombs. His theory of "elementary structures" is a tale of two women, the sister and the wife, not the crucial third figure, the mother. The same is true of "British structuralism," which defined familial ties, particularly the mother-child bond, as extracultural, biological, and psychological at its root. In this paradigm, while politicojural relations of descent were socially constructed, the "domestic domain was … seen to deal with reproduction as a biological necessity" and "consanguineal relations as such indicated a virtual fact of nature, a universalism in human arrangements" (M. Strathern 1992a, 102 [emphasis added]; see also Barnes 1970 and Collier and Yanagisako 1987). Yet it is just those factors that British and French structuralisms eclipse—sexuality, gender, and the body—that Melanesianists have been compelled, through the very character of the worlds they study, to focus upon (see Brown and Buchbinder 1976; Herdt 1982b; Knauft 1999; and M. Strathern 1988, among others). Indeed, much of the Melanesian materials indicates the biological ambitions of initiation rituals, the fact that their purpose in the first instance is to cultivate the body (Herdt 1982b, 1984; Kelly 1993, 157–174; Knauft 1999; Lutkehaus 1995a).
Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice is famous for its call to understand reciprocity as a practical achievement rather than as an "instantiation" of a prescription, as strategy rather than as structure (1977, Chapter 1). Surely the same can be said of reproduction. Rites such as omatisia or Sambia male initiation—
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indeed, the entire literature on substances and their generation and flow in Melanesia as well as the now burgeoning literature on the Melanesian body (e.g., Biersack 1996; Knauft 1999; A. Strathern 1996; M. Strathern 1988)—suggest that reproduction, variable and fantastical, must be understood, at least in part, as a human achievement. Its various technologies include bamboo tubes, flutes, magically treated plants, and other extraordinary and powerful ritual paraphernalia, as well as semen and menstrual blood. These technologies and practices are metaphysically grounded and infused with ultimate meaning concerning life and death, sex and regeneration (Biersack 1995, in press; Buchbinder and Rappaport 1976; Kelly 1993; see also Bloch 1982, 1986). While marriage and descent are obviously crucial to the organizational side of sexual re-production—accounting for who copulates with whom and how newborns are positioned in grids and networks—they do not exhaust the study of reproduction as a cultural and historical phenomenon. Only consideration of the construction of the body and sexuality in both the semiotic or discursive (e.g., Laqueur 1990; Vance 1991) and the nondiscursive meanings of the word
construction (Foucault 1980, 1988; Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, Chapters 6–8), in regard to "a discipline of the body supported by a discourse on the male and female body" (Ariss 1992, 143), can.
Whether or not the incest taboo is universal (Lévi-Strauss 1969b), every society regulates reproduction. It does so through sexual and gender norms and ideologies and through marriage, which legitimates reproduction. To regulate reproduction is to regulate kinship as well, which flows from heterosexual reproduction (Schneider 1980) and which rests upon rules governing whether kinspeople are or are not marriageable, and if marriageable which ones, even where there is brother-sister incest. Kinship is generated not through males and females but through paters and maters and depends upon the institutionalization of fertility that is marriage.
Focusing on reproduction and its organization and construction (in the various meanings of that word) directs our attention in novel ways, beyond an exclusive concern with descent or alliance, social organization or culture/ symbol/meaning, society or ritual, to a multifaceted and heterogeneous study of what I shall call reproductive regimes. Such regimes center on the body as a natural and social reality and on the institutions, ideologies, cosmologies, and practices that account for its construction, circulation, and maintenance. As a result, sex-gender and age differentials as well as sex-gender politics and symbols become integral to the study of institutions such as kinship, marriage, and descent (see Collier and Yanagisako 1987; Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Peletz 1995; Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974; M. Strathern 1988; and Yanagisako and Delaney 1995).
A reproductive regime is a type of "nature regime" in Escobar's sense of that term: "regimes of articulation of the historical and the biological" (1999, 5), that is, culture and nature. Economistic reasoning presumes the priority
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of those institutional arrangements that serve the body as a producer and consumer. Reproduction and sexuality have the same
biological priority that production and consumption have, for they, too, bear upon the body as a material entity; but they lead us beyond economics narrowly construed toward a
new sociology, one that is sensitive to gender systems and their conceits, artifices, and politics; to society's fractures and historicity; and to naturehuman articulations in all their cultural and historical variety. And they lead us back to economics itself, now "embedded," as the substantivists liked to say, in society, back to a concern with the material conditions of human existence, albeit without reductionism. Studying reproductive regimes requires the analytical strategies and insights of a range of masters, old and new: Victor Turner, but also Foucault (1988); Claude Lévi-Strauss, but also Geertz (1973) and Rubin (1975); E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes, but also Collier and Yanagisako (1987) and M. Strathern (1988).
