Kippered Red Herring
pRIFFAULT was a Communist and The Mothers is, In one way, a gigantic exemplification of the evolutionary theories of Engels's The Origin of the Family; Briffault felt that the monogamous family is an expression of bourgeois individualism. But there is another more personal, less ideologi- cal, theme which, in the original book, develops something like this: It is speech, not reason, which differentiates man from the beast. Speech is potent because it is magical, not because it is useful. The magic power of words, which is the driving force of human society, is akin to femhle intuition; the cold logic of utilitarian (or protestant-capitalist) discourse is a later invention of dominant males; therefore, in the beginning, human society was a matriarchy. . . . Certainly a very odd line of 'argument but one which explains why The Mothers, which in places consists of large chunks of the anthropological writings of McClennan and Morgan slightly revamped, also branches off into a long discourse on Troubadour poetry (complete with footnote obscenities in half a dozen languages) and an even longer ramble around the ritual symbolism of Middle Eastern mother god- desses. Briffault wrote lots of nonsense, but he had lots of ideas and he never hesitated to pursue a red herring to eternity.
The editor must have laboured long and valiantly to reduce Briffault's one and a half million word ?flagman opus (published in 1927) to a modest 400 pages, but his lack of anthropolo- gical qualifications is all too obvious. Mr. Rattray Taylor has his own ideas of what Briffault ought to have written and, although the abridge- ment retains the general shape and proportions of the original, the first two chapters have been mauled about out of all recognition. The first sentence of the new book is: 'Our object in this book will be to trace the origin of human society.' This doesn't appear in Briffault at all and reduces the second half of Mr. Taylor's Table of Contents to total irrelevance. Naturally enough, along with the disappearance of four-fifths of the text, the 100-page bibliography and the footnotes, the red herrings have been emasculated, so we are left with a slab of cold fish, a mere kipper—gutless and two-faced. And this is a pity for Briffault, despite his obsessional craziness, still deserves scholarly attention.
In the grand manner of Frazer's Golden Bough he assembled an enormous number of improb- able facts about the customary role of women in the most diverse kinds of society and in the pro- cess he displayed a very remarkable intelligence. He understood much better than most present-day professional anthropologists the nature of the semantic problems entailed in translation, especially in the translation of kinship terminolo- gies and, unlike his present editor, he had a natural sensibility for sociological issues of enduring interest. Mr. Taylor says that Briffault's discussion of marriage was concerned to. demonstrate 'the universal existence of a primitive matriarchy in the prehistory of all peoples, and . . . to show in various ways that marriage was originally matrilocal.' If this were really the case then the labour of abridgement was certainly a complete waste of time. But Briffault's own formulation is that `marriage originated in a contract between two kinship groups, and only later became a con- tract between individuals' and, among anthropolo- gists, that issue is still very much alive.
EDMUND LEACH
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