ABSTRACT
It is indeed astonishing to observe the extraordinary autonomy of sexual structures relative to economic structures, of modes of reproduction relative to modes of production. The same system of classificatory schemes is found, in its essential features, through the centuries and across economic and social differences. . . . Researchers, almost always schooled in psychoanalysis, discover, in the psychic experience of the men and women of today, processes, for the most part very deeply buried, which, like the work needed to separate the boy from his mother or the symbolic effects of the sexual division of tasks and times in production and reproduction, are seen in the full light of day in ritual practices, which are publicly and collectively performed and are integrated into the symbolic system of a society organized through and through according to the principle of the primacy of masculinity. How can we explain why the uncompromisingly androcentric vision of a world in which ultra-masculine dispositions often find the conditions most favourable to their actualization in the structures of agrarian activity – organized according to the opposition between male working time and female production time – and also in the logic of a fully developed economy of symbolic goods, has been able to survive the profound changes which have occurred in productive activities and in the division of labour, relegating the economy of symbolic goods to a small number of islands, surrounded by the ‘icy waters of self-interest and calculation’? How do we take account of this apparent perennity, which moreover plays a considerable part in giving the appearances of a natural essence to a historical construction, without running the risk of ratifying it by inscribing it in the eternity of a nature?
