This is a blockbuster of a book. Nothing like it has been written since Lévi-Strauss’s Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949) or Meyer Fortes’s Kinship and the Social Order (1969). Yet in the sweep of its evidence and argument, Godelier’s summa is more ambitious and far-reaching than either of these. It is at once a major intervention in the discipline of anthropology, and a work of the widest human interest. Kinship has the reputation of being the most technical department of anthropology, the least accessible to a general public. But while Métamorphoses synthesizes a huge range of complex materials, it is written in an unfailingly lucid style that makes no assumptions of professional familiarity with terms and debates about kinship, but always takes care to explain them in language anyone can understand. The book is both a monument of scholarship and a gripping set of reflections on universal experience. It is certain to be read and discussed for years to come.

Godelier introduces his work with a contemporary paradox. Traditional kinship patterns in the West are in dramatic dissolution today, as heterosexual marriage declines, biological and social parenthood become dissociated, homosexual unions are legalized. Yet in the same period, anthropology—where the study of kinship was once the basis of the discipline, ‘comparable to logic in philosophy and the nude in art’—has all but completely turned its back on it, since the rebellions against Lévi-Strauss of Leach (Rethinking Anthropology in 1961) and Needham (Rethinking Kinship and Marriage in 1971), followed by the clean sweep of Schneider (Critique of the Study of Kinship in 1984), to the point where it is scarcely even referred to by postmoderns like Clifford and Marcus. Can it be that anthropology has nothing to say about the upheavals going on around us? Godelier intends to show the opposite.

To set the scene, and exemplify some of his principal arguments, he first describes his own fieldwork among the Baruya, a little-known tribe in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, where he first arrived in 1967. Over the next two decades, he spent a total of seven years with them, amassing an experience in the field that has been surpassed by few, if any. There was a time when the work of Malinowski and his British-based pupils provided the ultimate in ethnographic achievements while that of anthropologists elsewhere, including France, was regarded as relatively superficial—Lévi-Strauss’s own rather brief forays among the Nambikwara being an example. Godelier has completely reversed the basis of that judgement. Here he develops an excellent summary of the kinship institutions of the Baruya, in a chapter that sets the tone for much of the book. Among his most striking findings was a secret ritual of the fellation of young males by boys, over a period of years, practised in the belief that women are a source of cosmic disorder, and that sexual relations with them ‘represent a permanent threat to men’, who thereby ‘risk losing their strength, their beauty and their superiority’. Hence the drinking of sperm by young men to re-engender themselves prior to marriage—a liquid that is transformed after marriage, in the passage through women, into milk for children. The belief system surrounding this requirement for maturity, he observes, constitutes a formidable ideological basis for masculine domination, whose ramifications in other domains of life he sets out with an intimacy of knowledge that inspires admiration and confidence. His is an ethnography of extraordinary depth.

After this empirical testing-ground, Godelier proceeds to a systematic survey of what he posits as the six fundamental components of any kinship system: filiation and descent; alliance (principally marriage); residence; terminologies; conception; sexual prohibitions (principally incest). Across some three hundred pages, the range of variation in each is explored with a wealth of vivid illustration. Out of this conspectus, and his own experience, Godelier draws several key conclusions. Contrary to common belief, kinship is never the basis of pre-class societies. Their cohesion always rests primarily on religious–political relations. There is no knowing in advance the importance of kinship in any given society, which can vary widely, but it cannot be either a prime mover or a self-standing system. Because they involve a distribution of power, kin relations are typically inscribed by other kinds of relation, but they lack the capacity to modify these. Changes in a kinship system generate only new kin relations, never modifications of caste or class relations. In no society is the function of kinship to organize economic, political or religious life. It is to govern descent and alliance.

What, then, of the prohibition of incest, in whose universal imposition of exogamy Lévi-Strauss—following Tylor’s dictum, ‘either marry out or be killed out’—saw the original passage from nature to culture defining human society as such? A more foundational role for kinship would be difficult to conceive. In two long chapters, Godelier addresses this famous issue. Little is left of Lévi-Strauss’s construction by the time he has finished, and still less of the ideas of Françoise Héritier, who succeeded Lévi-Strauss in his chair at the Collège de France. He notes that the incest taboo is not an invariable feature of all societies. The exchange of women between men is not a universal feature of kinship systems. Exchange itself is not the common basis of all matrimonial, let alone social arrangements: relationships of gift, sale and retention (non-exchange) are equally important. The notion that the origins of humanity are to be found in a ‘Big Bang’, with the ex abrupto invention of language as the exchange of words and marriage as the exchange of women, is a myth. Godelier shows that, when faced with incontrovertible evidence that many of the principal claims of Structures élémentaires de la parenté were untenable, Lévi-Strauss either changed the subject, or attempted to gloss them with inconspicuous rewordings and less than forthright retractions.

Among the discoveries that have made short work of Lévi-Strauss’s story of the foundations of society have been the findings of primate studies, to which Godelier devotes a sensitive and imaginative chapter. What these have shown is that both chimpanzees and bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees in the Congo), our nearest biological relatives, already live in ‘societies’ that exhibit a kind of sketch of human constraints: young females find sexual partners outside their immediate natal group, while young males must wait their turn until adults are willing to yield partners to them. Enforcing at once cooperation and hierarchy, these patterns appear to be the product of mechanisms of natural selection, though they coexist with homosexual pleasures among males and females alike, less obviously attributable to the same functions. The passage from nature to culture with homo sapiens thus cannot have been a sudden, discontinuous transformation, but must have been more evolutionary in nature. The critical novelty in human society, Godelier argues, is that males assume a parental role, something unknown among these primates, where only mothers look after children—fathers being unaware of their connection with them.

Where does this leave the taboo on incest? Rather than insisting that it is ubiquitous—in face of the facts of history, which show that brother–sister, father–daughter and mother–son relations have in some societies, such as Ancient Egypt or Achaemenid Persia, not only not been prohibited, but even enjoined—Godelier suggests that what is actually universal is something simpler. The sexual drive is fundamentally asocial: notoriously no respecter of rules, it even particularly delights in breaking them. Hence for society to be possible at all, it must be constrained. Any society requires therefore the existence of some sexual prohibitions as such. These, however, can take any number of different forms. If taboos on incest are far the most common of these, that is because they guard the door to the parenting unit that distinguishes human from primate societies: