The Axiom of Amity (Meyer Fortes)

 

Mise en perspective anthropologique de la notion d'Amitié.

fortes_amity.pdf — Meyer Fortes, Kinship and the Axiom of Amity, dans Meyer Fortes, Kinship and the social order: The legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan, Chicago, Aldine, 1969, Chapter XI, pp. 219–249. En apprendice, les pp. 250–251, dont je reproduis l'essentiel:

(250) To get the perspective right, I digressed to establish the thesis that the domain of familial and kinship relations, institutions and values, is structurally discrete, that is to say, neither subsumable in any other domain of social life nor reducible to extraneous determinants. What I mean is that the realm of custom, belief, and social organization, which we descriptively identify by the overall rubric of kinship, is both analytically distinguishable and empirically specifiable as a relatively discrete domain of social structure founded upon principles and processes that are irreducible.

This is orthodox enough. It is perhaps not so orthodox today, though our nineteenth century predecessors all assumed it, to assert, as I have done, that a critical /251/ feature of this domain, intrinsic to its constitution and distinctive of its manifestations in social life, is a set of normative premises. I have argued that these premises are focused upon a general and fundamental axiom which I call the axiom of prescriptive altruism or, more briefly, of amity. I ascribe this axiom to the realm of moral values, in contraposition to the realm of jural values ordered to the politico-jural domain. But I cannot emphasize too strongly that this is a methodological and analytical distinction. The actualities of kinship relations and kinship behavior are compounded of elements derived from both domains and deployed in words and acts, beliefs and practices, objects and appurtenances that pertain to both of theses and to other domains of social life as well.

We are concerned with relations between persons and with the behavior of persons in accordance with discernible rules; and every person is an agent, actual or potential, in all domains. There is no such entity as a kinship person who is not also invested with politico-jural, economic, ritual, etc., identity and responsibility. And, by extension, if a person who is not a kinsman is metaphorically or figuratively placed in a kinship category, an element, or at least a semblance, of kinship amity goes with this.

It is conceivable—and I for one would accept—that the axiom of amity reflects biological and psychological parameters of human social existence. Maybe there is sucked in with the mother's milk, as Montaigne opined, the orientation on which it ultimately rests.

 

Ce texte est installé dans le dossier ‘Frienship, Friendliness and Amity’. Voir aussi:
fortes_apprenticeship.pdf — Meyer Fortes, An Anthropologist's Apprenticeship, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 7, (1978), pp. 1-30.