92 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Each of these analyses led to commentaries aBod observations which we shall recapitulate here only to the extent that they may be useful for a more general reflection on the social functions of religion in precapitalist societies, and on the effects of these functions on the structures of the religious systems themselves. We must make it clear, however, that it is not our intention to try to establish rigid or absolute relations between social facts and symbolic constructions, as though these 'superstructures' were totally dependent on their 'infrastructures'. For we have shown that, on the contrary, these symbolic constructions were present at every level of social life, including that of the elaboration of the infrastructures. It is therefore necessary to keep in mind the autonomy—relative no doubt, but certainly real—and the shaping character of the symbolic systems if we are to understand the following commentary. We wish first of all to know which are the imperatives in precapitalist societies that necessitate recourse to religion in order to ensure their own reproduction, and which are therefore at the basis of the social functions of religion. For this purpose we shall consider first the simplest cases: societies based on lineage, such as the ones appearing in the early Sangham literature. The Social functions of religion and the lineage-based societies When we examine the objectives of social practices and attempt to penetrate beyond the level of their immediate expressions, we soon realise that the reproduction of these societies requires the continual overcoming of a series of contradictions. There is the contradiction between the physical survival of the members and the threats of an ecological environment which is far from being controlled: the contradiction between the necessity of a collective organisation of the economy on the level of production and distribution ancT individual interests; and the contradiction on the level of social relations formed by kinship relations. Since no local group (as C. Levi-Strauss clearly explains) can escape the obligation of integrating itself into a more or less complex network of relations involved in the exchange of women with other groups, so the kinship structure which results from these exchanges becomes the locus of social unity. It is here that we find the major objective contradiction in these simple societies, since the social unit—in this case the clan—is nothing but the product of relations between otherwise autonomous elements, that is to say the sections or lineages, whose group interests are not necessarily convergent. Now it is precisely on the level of this dialectic and of the need to overcome this contradiction (result of the behaviour of social actors) that we can situate the genesis of the social function of the symbolic systems. The study of these systems, in the case of the Kerala clans,