In the history of anthropology, kinship occupied a dominant position in the discipline for a long time. Many eminent scholars studied kinship and produced numerous analytical concepts and theories about kinship. However, in the 1960s, anthropologists began to doubt the analytical value of these concepts and the doubt was extended even to the concept of kinship itself. The tendency to explain what had conventionally been understood as kinship in terms of something other than kinship became increasingly popular and a number of anthropologists tried to explain what used to be regarded as kinship in terms of various concepts other than kinship. Among them, the concept of 'house' (maison) proposed by Levi-Strauss in the late 1970s was unique in the sense that it was presented as an analytical concept for crosscultural comparison. While other researchers used their concepts only to explain the society they studied, Levi-Strauss suggested that the societies with 'houses' as constitutive units are found in geographically dispersed areas of the world, so that the concept of 'house' can be used for comparative studies of these 'house societies'. This paper aims at critically testing Levi-Strauss's concept of 'house' and its utility for cross-cultural comparison against the ethnographical evidences drawn from the areas Levi-Strauss referred to as 'house society'. It also tries to prove that the concept is not very useful as an analytical concept, since the concepts of 'house', as well as kinship, are different from society to society; in other words, just like kinship, 'house' is a polithetic concept, and hence it is no more a useful analytical framework in cross-cultural comparison than kinship is. The utility of the concept of 'house' lies not so much in analysis as in description. With this newly produced descriptive tool, we can describe the societies with 'houses' more properly and shed a new light on what used to be in the guise of kinship.
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