THE WEST, THE BROKEN MIRROR - PARTIAL EVA LUATION OF SOCIAL-ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOME COMMENTS

The author questions the theoretical status of social sciences through a partial assessment of one of them, social anthropology. Discipline linked to the colonial expansion of european societies and to their do mination over the rest of the world, but associated also with the need of the Nation-State of Europe to deal with peasant and ethnical local customs resisting to economic and political transformations, social a nthropology is deeply rooted into the history and domination of Europe . However, the discipline achieved ifs first scientific results only w hen it could construct its concepts and analysis beyond and against th e social representations and concepts dominating European culture. Thi s contradiction was present since the beginning as illustrated by the work of Lewis H, Morgan, its founder, who opened the vast field of res earch on kinship, domain par excellence of the ethnologists. Morgan di scovered that all the kinship systems known in his time, included the European ones, were variants of seven basic types never identified bef ore him. But soon he used his remarquable discoveries in order to buil d up an outline of the evolution of mankind in which these forms of ki nship succeeded each other in an order moving from primitive savagery to Anglo-Saxon modern civilization. The West was again the mirror and the measure of the development of mankind. Anthropology after Morgan w as obliged to break with this evolutionism. So, where are we after one century of researches on kinship? Is kinship based mainly on principl es of descent, as stated by Meyer Fortes, or on principles of alliance and marriage, as argue Levi-Strauss and Dumont? Does alliance imply n ecessarily exchange of women between men and universal male domination ? Are classificatory kinship systems mere extensions of intrafamily re lationships? Has the concept of consanguinity still a universal value? What are the relationships between kinship systems and economic or po litical systems? At the end of this critical assessment it seems clear that anthropology, far from being a discipline in deep crisis and clo se to disappear, is well alive and still for a long time indispensable .