The naTure of The insTiTuTion
There is a large measure of homogeneity throughout the Catholic world in that institution of religious sponsorship that is commonly referred to in anthropo-logical literature as compadrazgo.2 The pretext for establishing ties through spon-sorship may vary in accordance with local custom; the duties of the sponsor,
* “ritual kinship in the Mediterranean: spain and the Balkans” was first published in 1976 in the edited volume Mediterranean family structures and is reproduced in this volume with permission from Cambridge university Press.
1. With reference to e. a. hammel (1968).
2. This is no doubt on account of its importance in hispanic society and the volume of anthropological literature devoted to Latin america. i use the term, as others have done before me, to include the whole network of ties initiated by the sponsoring of a child at baptism, or at a subsequent religious ritual such as confirmation or marriage. strictly speaking, of course, the relation between the sponsor and the sponsored should be referred to as padrinazgo and compadrazgo should refer only to the relationship between the spiritual and the physical parent of the same child.
however, it is evident that they are interdependent and form a single system of relationships to be classed as ritual kinship, which may on occasions include the physical children of the compadres. To refer to this institution as spiritual affinity would imply that we were concerned only with the theological concept, whereas it is its social aspect that is the subject of this article.
both towards those he sponsors and their parents or kin, may vary also but, stretched as it may be in one direction or another to cover the exigencies of each society, the compadrazgo is always recognizably the same institution and its rules, despite the variations in detail from place to place, carry the same general sense. only when it departs from its religious pretext, centered on the rite of baptism, do we find it changing its nature and, put to other uses, merging into the structure of political patronage which in colloquial spanish has been called compadrazgo by analogy, or into the simple sponsorship of lay events. These fic-tive forms employ the idiom of compadrazgo, but their sense is not the same and we can no longer recognize in them the same institution; but this is hardly surprising for institutions, once placed in a changed context of ideas, commonly change their function and implications even though they may not change their form. in order, then, to examine an institution in its entirety, in all its transfor-mations and despite its variants, we must decide which of its characteristics are essential and which are contingent; where to draw the line between the “genu-ine” and the “spurious” examples of it.
We take as essential to compadrazgo its connection with baptism (which indeed provided, historically, the pretext for its inauguration), and suggest that its fundamental sense derives from the recognition that a parent cannot stand as sponsor to his own child, that is to say, putting it in theological terms, that spir-itual and physical parenthood are antithetical to one another.3 however, once the compadrazgo severs its roots in the font and the compadres are no longer re-lated as physical parent and sponsor of the same child, the compadrazgo becomes something different which may be regarded as spurious from the viewpoint of the original institution, though of course it is spurious in no other sense, nor is it for that reason any less interesting than the “genuine” form, nor any less important. But the two must be distinguished before we can attempt to explain the relation between them. any general statement must delimit the field of data
3. The commonly repeated explanation of their differentiation, that the early Christians found it advisable to provide the neophyte with a replacement for the parent in case the latter should fall victim to the persecution, is hardly supported by the fact that infant baptism was not yet customary when the persecution ended. saint augustine still assumed that it was normal for a parent to sponsor his own child at baptism.
The prohibition to do so was only established much later and in the course of the development of the concept of spiritual affinity, not for any practical consideration.
explanations on the basis of commonsense are to be mistrusted as much in history as in anthropology.
to which it applies and this is not a task that can be entrusted to the customs of ordinary speech which, in this case, happily class under the same rubric political skullduggery and the spiritual salvation of infants. for ordinary speech lives on analogies and abstracts a given sense from a word in order to extend it to cover phenomena which are quite different in every other sense. already at the start spiritual kinship owed its vocabulary to physical kinship, though its nature is opposed precisely to this, and in the same way the fictive forms of compadrazgo borrow the vocabulary of the literal forms without admitting any adherence to the norms of ritual alliance. Thus the relationship between “political compadres”
is essentially venal and calculated where genuine compadrazgo prohibits venality and calculation, while a man’s fictive comadre, far from being sexually excluded by the incest prohibition deriving from spiritual affinity, becomes in many in-stances simply his illicit sexual partner. not only in the spanish fictive form, co-madre de carnaval,4 but in the colloquial usage of many cities of Latin america,5 the comadre is opposed to the wife, not by the absence of sexual relations but by their illegitimacy. hence, if the passage from physical to spiritual kinship implies a reversal of the sense of the terms, so does the further passage from ritual kinship proper to sexual, social, or political alliance. from godsib to gossip is but one letter’s distance graphically, but in significance the two concepts are so different that the former is not commonly recognized as the etymological origin of the latter. if, as i have written (Pitt-rivers 1968a), ritual kinship is what physical kinship aspires to be but, on account of its social consequences, is always prevented from becoming, so political compadrazgo is what ritual kinship becomes once its spiritual roots have been forgotten. it tends always, however,
4. The comadre de carnaval was the girl with whom a fictive compadrazgo was formed for the duration of carnival. This relationship, established for a period of authorized license, often developed after the fiesta was over into serious courtship and marriage.
5. examples of the colloquial usage of comadre to mean “paramour” may be cited from popular songs:
from Lima:
“Compadre que a la comadre no se le mueve las caderas no es compadre de veras.”
from: Belén, Catamarca, argentine (from field-notes of Dr. esther hesmitte)
“La cabeza me duele y los ojos me arden De tanto menear la tipa
De mi comadre.”
to move in that direction, to “go political,” for the viability of exploiting sacred ties for political advantage is so patent.
Compadrazgo’s roots are embedded in Christian doctrine which validates the prohibition of sponsoring one’s own child by reference to the notion of original sin transmitted in the act of physical generation and washed away by the spiritual regeneration conveyed in the rite of baptism, but the opposition nevertheless recalls the functions of blood-brotherhood and ritualized friend-ship in non-Christian societies which commonly prohibit the choice of ritual kinsmen from among the members of ego’s lineage. it is not my intention here, however, to pursue either the doctrinal aspect of compadrazgo or the parallels to be found in other cultures.6 in compadrazgo only the physical parents are for-mally excluded from the role of godparents and close kin are, on the contrary, frequently recommended for it by the edict of custom.
sponsors are first of all required at baptism when the child is received into the Christian community and given its Christian name by the godparent who takes it from the priest at the font before returning it to its parents. Prior to baptism it was regarded as a “Moor,” an animal or at any rate scarcely human.
at confirmation, according to Catholic doctrine, a child also requires a sponsor, though custom often omits to attach any social importance to the godparent on this occasion or to recognize any relationship of compadrazgo between this sponsor and the parents. on the other hand, much importance is frequently accorded to the sponsors of a marriage, though this has never been a function recognized by Catholic doctrine, which only required witnesses with whom no spiritual affinity was ever created. other occasions concerning the child’s well-being are also in the eyes of custom pretexts for establishing relations of compa-drazgo; curing ceremonies or the sponsorship of a festival in honor of the infant Jesus are commonly found among these in Latin america. in all cases, however, the baptismal godparents are accorded prime importance. The godparent com-monly pays for the ceremony and the baptismal godparents are expected, in ad-dition to their supposed responsibility for the child’s religious education (which in fact is not often taken seriously), to make gifts to the godchild on certain occasions specified by custom which mark its progress towards adulthood: a religious medallion to protect it from the evil eye, for example, or the first pair of shoes or long trousers, or the first long dress. help in the education of the child is often hoped for from the godparent, but there are no further demands 6. i have examined the theoretical problems raised by these in Goody (1973).
on him once it has attained the age of marriage. sponsorship, then, governs the passage of the individual from the family of origin to the family of orientation, a cycle initiated and terminated by the birth of children who bring a new nuclear family into existence and by doing so destroy the unity of the old one. Baptism gives social significance to the physical fact of birth and ushers the newborn member of the physical family into the community. at each stage in the child’s advance towards maturity this function is echoed, for a change in the structure of the family is implied. The reiteration of the notion of sponsorship on the oc-casion of confirmation, its popular extension into the sponsorship of marriage, its evocation whenever rites of passage are to be performed and even the role of the godparent in a child’s funerary rites—he often must pay for the coffin—rub in the essential point: godparents take the place of parents in sponsoring their charges at the crucial points where the individual destiny of the child, rather than the preservation of the familial unit into which he was born, is at issue.
This is most clearly seen in the custom of those parts of andalusia where the parents of a child enter the church neither on the occasion of its baptism nor of its marriage.
in accordance with the theory of the rites of passage a person must be sepa-rated from the unit in which he has a status before re-entering it in a changed status. During this transition he is commonly in the care of someone whose relationship to him is opposed to his ties with the members of the unit in which his status is to change. Thus, in patrilineal societies it is frequently the mother’s brother who plays such a role in the rites of initiation. his concern for his sis-ter’s son is purely for the boy as a person, not as a member of a lineage to which he himself is only allied by marriage. The godparent may be said, then, to be the guardian of the child as an individual person rather than as offspring and therefore to be a kind of “anti-parent” bearing no legal or social responsibility for him, but only the religious duty of ensuring the salvation of his individual soul and if, as it is said to be the purpose of the institution and as occasionally occurs, the godparent replaces the parent in raising the orphaned child, it is only because the godchild’s parents’ nuclear family had vanished before he was old enough to depart from it by founding one of his own. The godparent replaces the parent only in providing care in order to bring him to maturity, he does not replace him socially as he would were he to adopt the child and give it his surname. The godparent, as guardian of his destiny, looks into the future to the day when his charge will become an adult, the parents, who bear responsibil-ity for him in the present, attach him to the past and to the social structure in
which his place is granted to him by virtue of his membership of the unit they have allied themselves to create. hence the notion that compadrazago is “fictive”
kinship, that the godparent is a “fictive” parent (though the clerical label propa-tres has been thought to mean this), is in fact totally misleading, for it ignores the opposition between the physical and ritual (or spiritual) kinship which is the basis of that institution morphologically and historically, and the key to the understanding of the rules that govern it. The godparent is not a surrogate for the parent, but only a substitute for him in the roles from which the parent is excluded on account of his physical and social paternity and where he must be replaced by his contrary. and on the material plane the parent is only replaced by the godparent partially and exceptionally when his premature disappear-ance threatens the child’s chdisappear-ances of attaining the age at which he no longer requires a guardian: i.e. full adulthood, the point at which the role of godparent is effaced anyway. This anti-parental role is, therefore, for the anthropologist as opposed to the theologian, a function of the process of transition from one generation to the next which involves the destruction of the parental family and its replacement by the filial one, an aspect of the developmental cycle of the domestic group. in the rural society of southwestern europe with which we are first of all concerned, the domestic group is no more than the nuclear family and the developmental cycle is uncomplicated by the requirements of the larger kinship unit. This interpretation may raise misgivings in a reader well ac-quainted with the literature of the compadrazgo, because the people themselves so often liken godparent to parent—especially in italy, where the godfather and godmother are said to be a second father and mother (anderson 1957: 32-53).
such statements (which are no different from those often recorded regarding blood-brotherhood) refer only to the sentiments which are thought proper in such a relationship, not to the rights and duties involved which are totally dif-ferent. The constant stressing of the analogy between ritual and literal kinship in the face of the patent differences is in itself an indication of value regarding the nature of the institution of compadrazgo: taken in conjunction with the pro-hibitions attaching to that institution, it should be interpreted as a technique of exorcism, of eliminating from the consciousness of the participants the conflict of aims inherent in the opposition between literal and ritual parent whose func-tion is precisely to assure the continuity of the individual personality through changed statuses, that is to say, the transition from one generation to the next.
The opposition between the person as an individual and as a member of a social unit—in this case, a nuclear family—is perfectly illustrated, in the naming
system of modern times, by the fact that he receives his Christian name from his godparents and his surname from his father (or in the spanish naming sys-tem, his surnames from his father and from his mother’s father). The person as a Christian soul is opposed to the person as a social cipher, an element in the system of descent. as an individual he is differentiated by his Christian name from other individuals and especially from his siblings within the family from whom he is not otherwise differentiated; as a member of that family he is iden-tified with its other members by their common surname. in keeping with this distinction, those who depart from the world into the seclusion of a monastic order leave their surname behind in the world. The king calls people by their surname, but God knows us only by our Christian names.
The naming system of modern western europe marks the opposition with greatest clarity perhaps, but those that preceded it were no less significant in this regard. over-generalizing grossly, one can say that the Christian name defined the man as an individual and to this was appended a descriptive name based either upon his descent, birthplace, profession, or personal characteristics. These were the sources of the modern surname. This name, whatever it was referred to, tended in any case to be inherited by his children, for a child is first of all identi-fied by reference to the family into which it is born before it has acquired any distinct identity of its own. regardless, however, of whether the descriptive ap-pellation by which he was finally known related to his personal characteristics or to those of a forebear, the child as an individual soul, named by a godparent after a saint under whose protection his destiny was placed, was distinguished from the man as he is seen by society which named him by his social characteristics.
it is unfortunate that there is as yet no anthropological account of the his-tory of the naming systems of europe, but it is significant in the context of this essay that the naming systems of eastern europe differ from those of the West.
in particular, the retention of the father’s Christian name in patronymic form in addition to the surname has implications in the realm of sponsorship, for it means that the name given by godparents to the father is retained by the child as a teknonym and passes from defining the father as himself to defining the child by his place in society. it is the destiny of every individual as such to start his life with his future ahead, undetermined as to his social value, and to end it with his past behind him, institutionalized and converted into an ancestor. his
in particular, the retention of the father’s Christian name in patronymic form in addition to the surname has implications in the realm of sponsorship, for it means that the name given by godparents to the father is retained by the child as a teknonym and passes from defining the father as himself to defining the child by his place in society. it is the destiny of every individual as such to start his life with his future ahead, undetermined as to his social value, and to end it with his past behind him, institutionalized and converted into an ancestor. his