| Kinship, Male Bonds, and Masculinity in Comparative Perspective | The American Historical Review, 105.5

AHR Forum

Kinship, Male Bonds, and Masculinity in
Comparative Perspective

ROBERT A. NYE

As Susan Mann explains in her introductory essay to this Forum, the emergence of gender as a subject in Chinese history has been retarded by the real and symbolic power that has inhered in gender relations in China for a couple of millennia. The unbroken periods of dynastic peace that graced that vast and diverse land were the product of a system of political domination and moral orthodoxy that depended on and reinforced patriarchy, patrilineality, and patrimony. In dialectical fashion, historians of China first concerned themselves with the women whose positions at the bottom of the gender hierarchy were determined by sex before they turned their attention to the men who exploited and dominated them. The same order of discovery in North American and European history stimulated a singular interest in women's history and some understandable suspicion that the history of men and masculinity was a trumped-up apology for patriarchy. 1

     The first efforts to find a common ground for the historical analysis of gender began in the 1980s and have continued apace, aided by imaginative work in cultural studies, the social sciences, feminist theory, and gay and lesbian studies.¹ Historians of China have been tapping into much of this work for some time; judging by the excellent essays in this AHR Forum, they are navigating the complexities of gender history with assurance and expertise, despite a still-modest foundation of monographic research. This work demonstrates that the study of the bonds that united men in varying degrees of harmonious rivalry is an excellent way to get purchase on a set of broader themes that illuminate men's relations to women and Neo-Confucian ideals of the family, as well as to assess their responses to the vicissitudes of the economy and state power. My own field of specialization is modern European history, most recently the history of sexuality. What follows is not comparative history in any strict sense but a modest effort to assess these contributions to the history of men and masculinity in China from a Euro-American perspective. 2

     As historians of the West have learned, if one investigates some aspect of gender or sexuality as an isolated phenomenon, one risks distorting its meaning in socio-cultural context. Ironically, this danger is greatest, perhaps, in kinship studies, where the aim is to map kin, property, and power relationships in particular societies in comprehensive, interlocking patterns. As all these essays demonstrate, China's long-lived and ideologically reinforced kinship system seems to make it the locus classicus for investigations of this kind. Mann recounts in her essay the impact of Margery Wolf's Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (1972) on Chinese history, following generations of kinship and family studies that had failed to challenge the masculine prerogatives of China's patriarchal and patrilineal kin system. Important as this initiative has been, the potential weakness of a revisionist approach, as historians and anthropologists have been arguing lately, is that, by detaching the "emotional" domestic realm of women from a wider world of kin relations governed by male "interest," one risks reproducing the ideology of separate spheres as historical description.² 3

     The parental bond or the mother-son dyad are not the only relationships infused with emotion, nor are male-male relations concerned only with exchanges of property and womenfolk from which all emotional commitment has been drained, though, as Pierre Bourdieu has pointed out, it does help to understand the stakes for which the patriarch is playing.³ Rather, as Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean have argued, "centring analysis on a particular moment ignores the roles that other individuals play in the whole process of reproduction; it also places the centre of interest on reproduction in the dynamics of family life to the detriment of other aspects: production and reproduction of everyday life."⁴ This insight has encouraged historians and anthropologists of Western societies to move beyond reconstructing the vertical lines of filiation and reproduction to explore the horizontal boundaries of family and kin relations, particularly siblings, godparents, more distant affines, and various fictive kin relations.⁵ 4

     This literal broadening of kinship studies has spawned queries about the continued utility of distinguishing between kinship, conceived as a rule-bound system that more or less automatically reproduces prescriptive emotions and duties, and voluntary relationships such as, perhaps particularly, friendship. Julian Pitt-Rivers, a distinguished anthropologist of Mediterranean societies, has argued that we would do well to consider all intimate relationships under the sign of "amity," a term he borrows from his teacher Meyer Fortes. He points out that there are forms of ritual kinship that partake of the nature of friendship, with its voluntary assumption of reciprocal rights and duties, and there are ways that non-kin relations can achieve the consubstantiality of kinship in love, fostering, or adoption that is the equivalent of blood itself. Indeed, we are often deceived, he suggests, by the apparent "naturalness" of bloodlines and the derivative imagery of ceremonial blood-brothership; for almost anything consumed collectively in a sacramental spirit can produce the figurative bonds of kinship.⁶ Even though human societies have always believed that "like produces like," they have not always imagined the bond, as we have learned to do, in terms of blood lineage or the union of gametes.⁷ Likewise, "otherness" is a constantly negotiated and negotiable matter, and complementarity is ultimately a feature of the social duality of individuals, placing everyone, as Pitt-Rivers puts it, "between two aspects of his social relations, two personae of the same individual: the baby and the heir, the affine and the sibling, the bond-friend and the clansman, the blood-brother and the agemate, the lover and the spouse, the corpse and the ancestor, the kith and the kin."⁸ 5

     These adaptable approaches to the study of kinship have proven themselves useful in Western historiography in the investigation of a variety of interrelated subjects, including gender, class, economic life, sexuality, and politics, together with the usual fare of historians of kinship: marriage, inheritance, and social reproduction. Kinship cannot be artificially extricated from any of these things but should be regarded as an "'idiom' through which a great many relations are conceptualized and a great many transactions are negotiated."⁹ In a traditional—and until recent times pre-industrial—society like China, there is considerable overlap in all the areas for which kinship is an idiom and therefore, one might imagine, less variability and choice in implementing the social strategies governed by its rules. This should not discourage historians of China from searching for local, temporal, or structural variations that indicate adaptations to transformations ranging from climate and demographic shifts to changes of political regime. 6

     As Sabean has shown in his monumental study of the Württemberg village of Neckarhausen, the kinship system underwent an extraordinary transformation within a few generations to accommodate economic, political, and demographic changes by performing new tasks, forging new obligations and rights, and legitimizing new endogamous alliances. One of his most interesting findings is that if we place less emphasis on the usual "jural" public/private divide in matters of social reproduction and consider instead the more informal role that women played in kinship construction, especially in implementing marital alliances, we obtain a fuller, richer account of kin relations that reunites interest and emotion as equal components in family strategies.¹⁰ 7

     Adrian Davis's study of the miseries of the fraternal bond in late imperial China reveals the complexity and emotional texture of social life that lay beneath the mantle of Neo-Confucian ethical prescription and law. Bound together as the co-inheritors of esteemed parents, brothers were nonetheless unequal in status; the younger, though able to anticipate an equal share in the legacy, was obliged to suffer the authority of his elder(s). The mischief that arose as a consequence of this contradiction was also a feature of the systems of partitive inheritance that flourished in various parts of Europe.¹¹ The demise of the patriarch, who might have favored one brother over another, often marked the beginnings of conflict between (or among) them. 8

     Davis takes the murderous conflicts that arose in the cases he investigates as evidence for the complex and "fragile" bond between brothers in late imperial China. The hierarchical nature of the bond made identity a simple matter of order, but the abuse of authority by the elder created tensions that unsettled the conventional prescriptions of submission and filial respect that the family's emotional economy required. As Davis has found, the violence this tension provoked by younger brothers was not intended to overturn the system; its perpetrator was no rebel, even though he might have made an effort to evade punishment. Rather, the offender sought to defend the system and redress the wrongs done him by his brother's unjust behavior. This seems also to have been the case with fratricidal brothers whose sibling had dishonored the clan, whether by lack of filial respect or some other deviance. Davis effectively demonstrates that the justifications offenders presented at their trials were essentially scripts drawn from the most literal readings of the Neo-Confucian system. 9

     Unlike traditional China, Western societies did not require differential punishments for fratricide. However, special punishments for regicide and patricide were a common feature of Old Regime law codes, and in France the patriarch's authority was inscribed in Napoleonic law in the form of differential punishments for husbands and wives who killed their spouses, women meriting the supreme punishment, men far less. Yet few women were actually put to death for their crime; like the example of the legally disadvantaged younger brother in China, wives in post-Napoleonic France who murdered their husbands justified their action as redress for their husband's abuse of his authority, not as an attack on authority itself.¹² Unlike the situation in China, however, the presence of a jury system in parts of modern Europe permitted acquittals in such cases, which were, in effect, nullifications of what jurors took to be an injustice, whether in the law itself or its arbitrary application. 10

     In contrast to Western systems of partitive inheritance, the Chinese system, at least as it is portrayed here, seems to have manifested less variation and flexibility. In the West, there were a number of strategies the patriarch could employ to minimize the fissioning of his property and still compensate the heirs, males and females alike, in some way. In many places, a father felt free to choose the most competent, or perhaps the most loyal, heir to inherit the bulk of his property. In both instances, brothers might have regarded the division of wealth as an injustice, but on the whole, despite the absence of a legal regime of disproportionate punishments, family solidarity kept open conflict in check. When the patriarch disappeared, the chances for conflict increased; siblings found it difficult at such times to continue living in the same household, although they often continued to offer one another help out of a sense of obligation forged in childhood.¹³ 11

     Even though it is still an underexamined subject, historians and anthropologists of Western societies consider a variety of factors when they appraise the nature of sibling bonds. The closeness of parent-child relations is one important measure, the assumption being that the intensity of sibling relations varies inversely with the emotional aloofness of the parents (this, of course, could ensure greater rather than less violence should love turn to hate).¹⁴ Another is the change in sibling relations through the life cycle. Competitive feelings might peak at the death of a parent or parents but be amicable, even affectionate, both before and after, especially where marital strategies construct a grid of interfamilial or affinal alliances. As was also evidently the case in China, mothers and sisters could mediate the relations of male siblings in various ways, despite their lack of formal authority. Much also depended on age separation in birth order, the number of children, and a host of other accidents of birth, death, and marriage that make generalization difficult.¹⁵ 12

     What we can affirm is that everywhere the fraternal bond acknowledges the possibility of both equivalence and individuation.¹⁶ There are moments when brothers express solidarity against outsiders or paternal authority, other times when their interests and their emotions are at odds. Brothers are always in a hierarchical relation, whether this is a jural relation, as in China, or a simple matter of majority or differential prospects, as in the West. The nominal egalitarianism of brotherhood is perfectly compatible with hierarchy, is surely provoked by it, and reciprocally. Davis's approach to the study of the fraternal bond acknowledges all these possibilities and shows how they operated in China to perpetuate the Neo-Confucian system of equality within hierarchy. 13

Friendship in China seems to have been as ambiguous a relationship as the fraternal bond, equally a refuge and a danger. Providing they were fleeting, served some instrumental function of self-advancement, and did not supersede the more essential bonds of family or state devotion, friendships could flourish and even announce themselves to the world. Norman Kutcher's finely nuanced account of the Confucian and literary prescriptions for friendship suggests that in traditional Chinese society friendship was more tolerable when it arose between men of different ages, educational attainments, or status and more threatening when the emotional attachment was itself the principal connection between them. Because he follows this relationship over some time, Kutcher is able to show that observers believed the dangers of intimate friendships increased in times of intensified competition for scarce positions, when instrumental relationships were more crucial than usual for self-promotion and as a guarantee of the excellence of the system. This pressure, in turn, seems to have increased for many men the attraction of friendship as an authentic refuge, judging from the number of them willing to write openly of its appeals. 14

     Since Aristotle, a similar distinction between "instrumental" and "expressive" friendships has existed in the West; as in China, the tension between them has varied according to circumstance and has changed over time. Though far less celebrated in story and verse, the utilitarian type of friendship has been the dominant bond in male-male relations up to our own era. Kinship bonds have been, once again, the model for both. Until the nineteenth century or so, it was common to speak of kin generally as "friends," but "friend" was also the term used to refer to a patron or dependent to whom one was not related by blood. Such usage suggests that the friendship bond was dominated by vertical ties that served the function of advancing personal and family interest, whether through inheritance or marriage strategies or the cultivation of patronage. By the nineteenth century, it appears that a "friend" was more likely to be a horizontal kin relation or a social peer, a reflection of the gradual democratization of economy and society.¹⁷ 15

     Friendships between relative equals did not erase the utilitarian functions such relationships continued to fulfill, but they certainly possessed the potential for greater intimacy than bonds between men of disparate age or status. It is hard to judge whether intimate male relationships posed a greater threat to the vertical or the horizontal model of utilitarian friendship. What is clear is that Western societies, as has been the case in China, have employed a variety of mechanisms to contain and discourage intimate friendships, while acknowledging them as bonds of great affective power and idealism. In the West, negative associations of male friendship with sodomy or effeminization have proven to be hugely effective disincentives, but equal weight should be given to the construction of affirmative ideals of manhood, virility, and, in the modern era, masculinity.¹⁸ In industrializing societies, the image of the noble soldier-warrior was supplemented by a middle-class ideal of the male breadwinner, whose sacrifices for his family would enable his children, particularly his sons, a proper start in life. Such men could have close friendships with peers (as well as the usual network of utilitarian relations), but these were deemed inferior to the joys of domesticity, which enjoyed cult status throughout much of nineteenth-century middle-class society.¹⁹ 16

     The danger of the intimate male bond is explicitly acknowledged in the expression that one is willing to die for one's friend(s). The ubiquity of this formula, in Chinese and Western society alike, deserves more attention than it has received. When uttered as an oath by warriors, it is an affirmation of the dangers and solidarities of battle. When it is sworn by blood brothers or by members of a secret society, it dramatizes the potential peril of standing in opposition to a corrupt or unenlightened society. When it is promised between friends or honored as an ideal of friendship, it asserts both the depth of the relation and the threat true intimacy poses to every other social bond. 17

     In this connection, Kutcher makes the very interesting point that the husband/wife analogy to friendship was a reference to male same-sex love that did not, if a man fulfilled all his other obligations within the social hierarchy, enjoin special reproach. If same-sex relations were not exclusive, a man could still marry, have heirs, honor his lineage, and preserve his authority in the household. To this day, the Western notion of a homosexual or gay identity or the notion of an exclusive gay culture makes slow headway in China. Manliness is still a matter of marriage and heirs, even among men who engage regularly in same-sex relations.²⁰ This is further evidence, if more were needed, that throughout many domains of Asian culture, modernization is not equivalent to westernization. On the other hand, as Frank Dikötter has pointed out, homosexuality in modern China, as a form of non-procreative sexuality, falls into the realm of medicalized deviance utterly indebted to models adopted from the West that links homosexuality, spermatorrhea, masturbation, and other male sexual disorders to impotence or sterility.²¹ 18

     There are some parallels with same-sex love in the West, but there are differences as well. In a recent book about the sexual culture of eighteenth-century Britain, George Haggerty has written: "Two men having sex threatens no one. Two men in love: that begins to threaten the very foundations of heterosexist culture."²² There is a certain anachronistic quality in this formula, "heterosexist culture" not yet existing in the eighteenth century, but the general sentiment is apt. As in China, providing a man was discreet, he could have sex with another man and preserve his manly reputation, so long as he performed his other obligations adequately, and if the connection was ephemeral, situational, and in the active mode. But a man who exclusively sought the company of other men, placed himself in a dependent position vis-à-vis another, dressed foppishly, displayed effeminate mannerisms, retreated from violence, or otherwise transgressed contemporary canons of manliness, risked having it assumed about him that he was content with the subordinate status and passivity of womankind.²³ 19

     The real danger in men's intimate friendships was the fact of their privacy. Such relationships could not be apprehended within the public hierarchies of a culture of deference, and in modern societies they disappeared into a private space that was gendered feminine. Private conversations, exchanges of letters, voyages in common all aroused suspicions and unease.²⁴ In China, it appears that intimate friendships might divide or divert a man's indispensable social responsibilities to ancestors, family, and emperor. Intimate friendships between European men put these things in question as well, but they also struck at their individual identities as independent men of honor, masters of their domains, however modest. Although the criteria changed over time and varied according to class, Western men could be expected to be judged according to masculine characteristics that were contrasted to their "feminine" counterparts. 20

With sworn brotherhoods, we again rejoin kinship, and not just as an idiom but in a way that reproduces the lived experience of brotherhood itself. Lee McIsaac's essay on "righteous fraternities" in wartime Chongqing examines these extraordinary organizations in demographic and social context. Unlike Kutcher's friends and Davis's brothers, the young men who came to find work in the city's many factories may have abandoned all hope of fulfilling the usual obligations of sons and brothers in their native towns. Nor could they expect to find a bride in Chongqing, given the disadvantageous sex ratios in its rapidly growing population, a situation that simply exaggerated the usual scarcity of marriageable women in Chinese society. Without parents, women, or prospects, one might say these young men experienced the bonds of sworn brotherhood as a regression to a primordial state of kin relations. 21

     We are familiar in the West with primal myths of violent and vengeful brothers, from Cain and Abel to Freud's patricidal sons. As McIsaac shows, Chinese society had its own literary models of brothers using violence for just cause, not to mention the forceful example of a veritable plague of bandit gangs in Republican China, whose members also swore blood oaths and justified their violent deeds as acts of righteousness.²⁵ Sworn brotherhoods seemed to draw directly on the intense emotions inherent in the fraternal bond and displace them outward. Pierre Bourdieu has brilliantly characterized the psychic economy of the brother bond as a negative principle of cohesion based on inevitable insecurity: "'I hate my brother, but I hate the man who hates him.' The negative, forced solidarity created by a shared vulnerability, which is reinforced every time there is a threat to the jointly owned material and symbolic patrimony, rests on the same principle as the divisive tendency which it temporarily thwarts, that of the rivalry between agnates. So, from the undivided family up to the largest political units, the cohesion endlessly exalted by the mythological and genealogical ideology lasts no longer than the power relations capable of holding individual interests together."²⁶ 22

     In Chinese sworn brotherhoods, the volatility of this fraternal bond was partially mitigated by their replication of the patriarchal family, with an "elder" in charge and a hierarchy within the lodge not unlike the differential status of male birth order. Lodges were thus just like the Chinese family—without the women. The absence of sisters and mothers, one must imagine, deprived members of the brotherhoods not only of useful emotional buffers but also of the psychic safety net of beings whose status in the group was lower still than their own. The ready recourse to violence in such circumstances was, if anything, overdetermined. 23

     There are no exact analogues to the sworn brotherhoods in the West. Anarchist rebels, Carbonari, Camorra, or Mafia are either too transitory, too political, or too obviously outside the legal order, despite a number of ritual aspects in common; the French guilds (compagnonnages) of the early modern West practiced their secret rites on behalf of the solidarity of their craft.²⁷ There is surely, as McIsaac acknowledges, a continuum of all-male associations in any society, but the closest thing to "Robed Brothers" and "gold and orchid" brotherhoods in the West may have been the secret societies that originated in eighteenth-century Europe and proliferated during the following century. The first of these groups was Freemasonry, the archetype of all the later fraternal organizations constructed on the model of fictive kin relations. However, Masonry did not thrive because it provided protection or security in an insecure world but because it enabled men of standing or promise to engage in dramatized enactions of equality that were awkward if not impossible to achieve in the world outside. Over the last two centuries, Freemasonry has served as a school for civic virtue, as a masculine refuge from a feminized domestic sphere, and as a gratifying occasion for symbolic ascent through the hierarchy of Masonic degrees.²⁸ 24

     Like Chinese sworn brotherhoods, Masonic temples and their numerous spin-offs combined authority, hierarchy, and brotherly solidarity. Part of the glue that held this combination of features together consisted of arcane rituals, death vows, and the secrecy of the proceedings uniting to produce a conspiratorial frisson for otherwise highly respectable men. For this and still more substantial reasons, governments in Europe and China alike expressed their distrust of secret societies of all kinds by outlawing them, harassing them, or simply refusing them legal identity.²⁹ 25

     But there may have been another glue, one that is more clearly a feature of all-male groups in the West than in China. In the words of Eve Sedgwick, "the fact that what goes on at football games, in fraternities, at the Bohemian Grove, and at climactic moments in war novels can look, with only a slight shift of optic, quite startlingly 'homosexual,' is not most importantly an expression of the psychic origin of these institutions in a repressed or sublimated homosexual genitality. Instead, it is the coming to visibility of the nominally implicit terms of a coercive double bind . . . For a man to be a man's man is separated only by an invisible, carefully-blurred, always-already crossed line from being 'interested in men.'"³⁰ Opponents of secret societies certainly suspected as much, and there is evidence that accusations of "criminal" behavior may have moved some Freemasons to admit women temporarily to their lodges.³¹ 26

     Homosociality has no doubt always possessed this potential for eroticization. In Britain, late Victorian men took flight in increasing numbers from the feminized domestic realm, and perhaps their own feelings of inadequacy, into clubs, sporting activities, imperial service, and other all-male terrains where they might have encountered a spiritualized adult version of their public school sexual experimentation.³² However, when men passed the bulk of their free time in exclusively masculine society, the inverse reaction was possible. In some Mediterranean societies, where the home is most decidedly a feminine realm, men are said to be "extruded" into a macho society where effeminacy in all its forms is brutally ridiculed and repressed.³³ As several scholars have pointed out, the Männerbund of German associational life possessed the potential for both misogyny and homoerotic desire. Building on the traditional exclusionary practices of the German craft guilds, modern labor organizations made the class struggle in Imperial Germany an all-male affair, helping to ensure that the gap between public and private remained unbridgeable for women.³⁴ After the Great War, as Klaus Theweleit has provocatively written, a profound fear and hatred of women became an eroticized sign of intense male bonding and fantasy life.³⁵ Finally, Harry Oosterhuis has recently argued that although the Nazi leadership was suspicious on political grounds of all-male groups such as Hitler's SA, the long tradition of homoerotic tendencies in nationalist and militaristic organizations in the Reich may have encouraged a moral and medical climate that was less fiercely homophobic than is sometimes assumed.³⁶ 27

     Since at least the eighteenth century, the presence in the West of a distinctive, sexualized gender identity seems to provide a point of contrast with male bonds in China. The intimacies of friendship, the collective bonds of secret societies, and a brother bond that challenged hierarchical norms were regarded with suspicion in both China and the West. Such bonds potentially undermined the authority of fathers, kings, and emperors, threatened the smooth transmission of inheritance, or created kinds of solidarity that patterned themselves on kinship relations but weakened their traditional forms. In the West, however, the salient concern about male sexual relations, and the dread of effeminization with which this concern was usually linked, signals the presence of cultural scripts that reflected and helped perpetuate the inferior status of women by scorning femininity in general. All male bonds, including the one between father and son, were situated in a constantly evolving relationship to the practices of masculine domination and women's place in the social and sexual order. 28

     Gender historians in the West have discovered that women's "place" was an endlessly debated and contested subject, but these essays on Chinese male bonds make only nominal efforts to locate them within a constellation of family and kin relationships that surely influenced their emotional valences and orientations. To say nothing of the broader network of living and dead kin, any full account of male bonds must include the relations of parents to male and female children, mother-son, mother-daughter, sister-sister, and brother-sister relations, and the parental bond itself. In truth, kinship historians have only begun trying to reconstruct the complex interactions of emotion and interest in the variety of kinship forms that have appeared in Western societies. Much remains to be done. The one thing about which I think we can be fairly confident is that women and the "woman question" cannot be left out of any story about men. 29

Robert A. Nye is the Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at Oregon State University. He earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin and taught for twenty-five years at the University of Oklahoma. Nye has published The Origins of Crowd Psychology (1975), Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (1984), Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (1998), and Sexuality (1999), the latter an Oxford Reader on the history of sexuality from ancient times to the present. His most recent work has focused on masculine sociability, the professions, and professional ethics.

Notes

¹ Joan W. Scott's book on these issues captures nicely the first moves in this direction during the 1980s. See Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988).
² This is a central assumption of many of the essays in Jane Fishburne Collier and Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, eds., Gender and Kinship: Essays toward a Unified Analysis (Stanford, Calif., 1987).
³ Pierre Bourdieu, "Marriage Strategies as Strategies of Reproduction," in Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, eds., Family and Society: Selections from the Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations (Baltimore, 1976), 117–44.
⁴ Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean, eds., Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship (Cambridge, 1984), 19.
⁵ See for an excellent summary of this point, Leonore Davidoff, "'Where the Stranger Begins': The Question of Siblings in Historical Analysis," in Davidoff, Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (New York, 1995), 206–26.
⁶ Julian Pitt-Rivers, "The Kith and the Kin," in Jack Goody, ed., The Character of Kinship (Cambridge, 1973), 89–106.
⁷ Indeed, Davidoff argues that notions of the primacy of "blood relations" is an early twentieth-century concept. Worlds Between, 108.
⁸ Pitt-Rivers, "Kith and the Kin," 103.
⁹ David Warren Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 1998), 6.
¹⁰ Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen, esp. 449–510. See also his earlier work on Neckarhausen, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 1990); and Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984). By way of exhortation, in his work on the Kabyle people, Pierre Bourdieu found that women employed a "heretical" matrilineal reading of kin relations that operated as a parallel language to official patriline discourse, forging bonds of kin intimacy against the grain. Bourdieu reminds the anthropologist that he or she is free to choose "all possible routes between two points in genealogical space: in practice, the choice of one route rather than another, the male or the female, which orients the marriage towards the other lineage, depends on the power relations within the domestic unit and tends to reinforce, by legitimating it, the balance of power which makes the choice possible." Outline of a Theory of Practice, Richard Nice, trans. (Cambridge, 1977), 43.
¹¹ Jack Goody indicates this parallel (although in theory, partitive inheritance in Northern Europe was participated in by all siblings) in "Inheritance, Property and Women: Some Comparative Considerations," in Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson, eds., Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200–1800 (Cambridge, 1976), 36.
¹² For this phenomenon and its evolution in the nineteenth century, see Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law and Society in the Fin-de-Siècle (Oxford, 1989); Ann-Louise Shapiro, Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Stanford, Calif., 1996).
¹³ There is still relatively little literature on inheritance and sibling relations in European society. For modern Brittany, see Martine Segalen, "'Avoir sa part': Sibling Relations in Partible Inheritance Brittany," in Medick and Sabean, Interest and Emotion, 129–44. For eighteenth-century Haute-Provence, see Alain Collomp, "Family Tensions in Early Modern Haute-Provence," in Medick and Sabean, 145–70.
¹⁴ Segalen, "'Avoir sa part,'" 133–35.
¹⁵ Davidoff discusses these complexities in "Where the Stranger Begins," 209–16.
¹⁶ R. G. Abrahams, "Some Aspects of Levirate," in Goody, Character of Kinship, 168–69.
¹⁷ Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987), 33, 199.
¹⁸ See, on these matters, Robert W. Connell, Masculinities (Oxford, 1995); Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York, 1996); D. M. Hadley, ed., Masculinity in Medieval Europe (New York, 1999); Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1996); Angus McLaren, Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870–1930 (Chicago, 1997); Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Berkeley, Calif., 1998).
¹⁹ On this connection, see Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 198–228; John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, Conn., 1999), 108–16, 137–40.
²⁰ Lisa Rofel, "Qualities of Desire: Imagining Gay Identities in China," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5 (1999): 451–74.
²¹ Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period (Honolulu, 1994), 55–69, 139–41, 165–79. See also Hugh Shapiro, "The Puzzle of Spermatorrhea in Republican China," Positions 6 (1998): 551–96. For a more recent account of the ways that Western medical concepts of pathology have been adapted to traditional Chinese medical ideas, see Frank Dikötter, Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects and Eugenics in China (New York, 1998).
²² George E. Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1999), 20.
²³ The relationship of effeminacy and homosexuality has been explored widely as an aspect of the history of homosexuality. See George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay World (New York, 1994); Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, eds., Homosexuality in Modern France (New York, 1996); Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (London, 1994); and see generally Gilbert Herdt, ed., Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
²⁴ Alan Bray and Michel Rey, "The Body of the Friend: Continuity and Change in Masculine Friendship in the Seventeenth Century," in Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen, eds., English Masculinities, 1660–1800 (London, 1999), 65–84.
²⁵ Phil Billingsley, Bandits in Republican China (Stanford, Calif., 1988), esp. 123–49.
²⁶ Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 65.
²⁷ Cynthia M. Truant, "Solidarity and Symbolism among Journeymen Artisans: The Case of Compagnonnage," Comparative Studies in Society and History 21 (1979): 214–26.
²⁸ There are a number of excellent studies on the long history of Freemasonry. See in particular Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender and Fraternalism (Princeton, N.J., 1989); Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996); Ran Halévi, Les loges maçonniques dans la France d'Ancien Régime aux origines de la sociabilité démocratique (Paris, 1984).
²⁹ For the legal situation of postrevolutionary associations in France, see Carol E. Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability and the Uses of Emulation (Oxford, 1999), 22–48.
³⁰ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), 89.
³¹ Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York, 1991), 121.
³² Tosh, Man's Place, 188–90.
³³ The term is Peter Loizos's, in "A Broken Mirror: Masculine Sexuality in Greek Ethnography," in Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, eds., Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (London, 1994), 77. The literature on this issue is extensive, but see especially Stanley Brandes, Metaphors of Masculinity: Sex and Status in Andalusian Folklore (Philadelphia, 1980); David Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven, Conn., 1990).
³⁴ Nicholas Stargardt, "Male Bonding and the Class Struggle in Imperial Germany," The Historical Journal 38 (1995): 175–93.
³⁵ Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Stephen Conway, trans., 2 vols. (Minneapolis, Minn., 1985–89).
³⁶ Harry Oosterhuis, "Medicine, Male Bonding and Homosexuality in Nazi Germany," Journal of Contemporary History 32 (1997): 187–205. See also George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York, 1996), 155–80.

LOCKSS system has permission to collect, preserve, and serve this Archival Unit

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.