The Nomadic Alternative – Page 165

things. It was E.B. Tyler, the founder of modern anthropology, who first noticed that the words 'kinship' and 'kindness' were in fact synonymous. Exogamy obeys the same principle as the exchange of the Luring[illegible]. No man can war against his sister's husband. Now a tribal name is frequently the same as its definition for 'men' - in the sense of all known human beings. The outsiders are all the beasts. And the compulsion to marry far reflects a man's basic human desire to enmesh all the people he knows into a web of kinship alliances. Through an integrated system of foreign relations he masters his fear of the unknown and lives in peace. The spread of the human species to the uttermost parts of the earth reflects not the outpouring of conquerors but the success of those foreign relations. Let no one forget, it is the mark of a xenophobic, militant and dangerous nation that it brands as treachery the marriage of its subjects to foreign husbands and wives.

Exchange of blood is an idea ingrained in the basal stratum of human consciousness. Nothing can alter it, and in aberrant circumstances it is open to the most literal interpretations, such as the tit for tat killing of the vendetta. Some people take it even more literally. Montaigne reported the song of triumph shouted by an enemy of the Tupinamba, as his captors prepared to roast him alive.

"These muscles, (saith he) this flesh, and these veines, are your own; fond men as you are, know you not that the substance of your forefathers limbes is yet tied to ours? Taste them well, for in them shall you find the relish of your own flesh." Conversely others have understood the true nature of the idea and have realised that human kinship arrangements are extendable to all living men. With Arjuna on the Field of the Kurus they have said "I will not fight" - and stuck to it.

Some anthropologists have suggested that the original medium of exchange was women. This appears to reinforce a commonly-held notion that a woman is a mere chattel - to be bartered, battered, abducted and sold off at the whim of the male. The frequency with which monarchs auctioned off their daughters in the interests of polity