English
This article shows that, just as the psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex tends to reduce woman, and even the mother, to a sexual object, similarly does structural anthropology of kinship systems tend to reduce women to objects of exchange between male lineages. In both cases, the female ability to produce offspring is neglected and virtually denied. In Lévi-Strauss’s “atom of kinship,” the relation between mother and son is purely and simply omitted without any explanation. This article argues that this relation is the very cornerstone of kinship systems.
