Two sides of story, not one.

“ A probably unilateral analysis of dual organisation has all too often propounded the principle of reciprocity as the main cause and result …. However, we should not forget that a moiety system can express not only a mechanism of reciprocity but also relations of subordination. However, the principle of reciprocity is at play even in these relations of subordination; this is because subordination itself is reciprocal: the moiety which wins the top spot in one plane concedes it to the opposing moiety in another.” (Claude Lévi-Strauss The Elementary Structures of Kinship 1969:268 - emphais added BR)

Cutting straight to the chase – our interest lies with the process by which the ‘horizontal’ arrangement between moieties (in which the top spot on one place for one moiety is balanced by a top spot on another plane to the other) is transformed into a ‘vertical’ arrangement with a supposedly upper and superior part of the life seeking to dominate the supposedly lower and inferior other parts of life.

The attempts to impose and maintain this arrangement provide go a long way to account for much of history – a history written largely from the Upper Moiety perspective.

Life’s history, however, must include a balanced account which removes such self-privileging and provides equal representation, on its own terms, to the acts of resistance to these ‘superior’ types.

Life is best represented by an approach which honours the role of complementary opposition, rather than solely that of vertical arrangements.

In order to tease some of this out, it may be useful to look at some of the issues raised in the debate between Levi-Strauss, Dutch Anthropologists of the Leiden orientation; David Maybury-Lewis; and – his most famous opponent - Jean-Paul Sartre.

That should take us some months into 2012.