The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
Let us spend a moment with the Juang, studied by McDougal (1964) and by Parkin in his monographic work on the Munda (1992).5 The Munda descent system is divided into three levels of segmentation. The first consists of eighteen patriclans (bok), which are exogamous, do not hold property in common, are dispersed in various villages but have different individual ‘totems’. These clans are in turn divided into thirty-eight local descent groups, each of which usually resides in its own village. The local groups are exogamous, and it is between these groups that marriages take place. The third level is formed by the lineages, which are of shallow genealogical depth, three or four generations on average, with two or three lineages living in the same village. They cooperate to gather the payment needed for their young men to marry, and redistribute the brideprice received when their daughters marry. Marriage must take place between persons with different totems, and therefore from different clans. Residence after marriage is virilocal. Lands and goods are inherited within the lineage, which also functions as a ritual unit.
MATRILINEAL DESCENT
Among the societies whose mode of descent reckoning is matrilineal, we can mention the Ashanti of Ghana, the Pende of Kasai, the Khasi of northeast India, the Nayar of South India, the Trobriand Islanders, the Maenge of New Britain, the Mnong-Gar and the Rhades of Vietnam, the Tetum of Timor, the Na of China, the Nagovisi of Bougainville, the Iroquois and the Hopi of North America. The Khasi are divided into matriclans (kur).6 The couple’s residence after marriage is uxorilocal, but in the daytime the family is composed of brothers and sisters living together with the sisters’ children. At night, the brothers join their own wives and children while the sisters’ husbands take their place. Na families, too, are composed of brothers and sisters and the sisters’ children. At night the men circulate among the houses and become the temporary lover of one or another of the women living in these houses. Marriage as a ceremony officializing a union exists only for village headmen’s families, and the kinship vocabulary, according to the Chinese ethnologist, Cai Hua, has no word for ‘husband’ or ‘father’.7
DUOLINEAL DESCENT
Duolineal systems are a rarity. We can cite the Yako of Nigeria, the Herrero of South Africa, and the Kondaiyankottai Maravar, a South Indian subcaste. The Kondaiyankottai Maravar have two kinds of clan: patrilineal (kottu) and matrilineal (kilai).8 Children belong to both clans. The patrilineal clans correspond to local, exogamous descent groups. They control inheritance of land and other forms of property, and settle successions. They are religious and ritual units that ensure the worship of family gods. The matrilineal clans are not localized but they too are exogamous. Every marriage must take into account each group member’s double clan affiliation. In duolineal systems, children belong to both clans, regardless of sex; but the continuation of the clan and the transmission of rights and statuses rest on unilineal principles: from the father to his sons for the patrilineal clan and from the mother to her daughters for the matrilineal clan.
BILINEAL DESCENT
Bilineal systems, whether parallel or cross, are even more rare. Examples of the first case are the Orokolo9 and the Omie;10 and of the second, the Mundugumor,11 three New Guinea societies, the first two of which live in the South in the Gulf of Papua, and the third in the North, in the Sepik. In the first case, an individual’s belonging to a lineage is transmitted from same sex to same sex (from father to sons and from mother to daughters), unlike unilineal or duolineal systems, in which children of both sexes belong either to their father’s or to their mother’s clan or to both at once. In cross systems, the clan to which boys and girls belong switches with each generation. Among the Mundugumor, a son belongs to his mother’s kin group, a daughter to the father’s. The son carries the name of his maternal grandfather, the daughter that of her paternal grandmother. This has been called a ‘rope’ system. Land is transmitted from father to son, but the father’s weapons and his group’s sacred flute are transmitted from father to one of his daughters, who will pass them on to her sons.
UNDIFFERENTIATED DESCENT
Examples of societies with an undifferentiated mode of descent are the Maori of New Zealand and a great many Polynesian societies – Samoa, Tonga, etc. At one end of the great axis of the Malayo-Polynesian migrations, we find the Imerina and several other societies of Madagascar. And between the two, the Penan of Borneo and other groups in Indonesia. Among the Maori,12 the descent group (hapu) stems, as its name indicates, from a group of ancestors to which the group members are connected by ties that run indifferently through the male or the female line. These ties can go back as many as ten generations or more. A person can belong to several hapu, but the fact of residing in one of them consolidates the rights to which he is entitled. Marriages very often take place within the same hapu, which is therefore strongly endogamous. Each hapu is under the political and religious authority of a chief, who descends in the male line from the eldest son of the founding ancestor. Each of the family lines that descend from the founding ancestor has a different status, determined by its distance from the family line of the eldest son. This line is a sort of aristocracy within the hapu, whereas younger sons of younger sons were treated as people of inferior status, as commoners. This example shows that in cognatic systems it is also possible to resort to unilineal principles for the purpose of transmitting certain functions and establishing various forms of hierarchy. In addition, real or potential belonging to several hapu offers individuals choices and strategies that are more open and broader than in strictly ‘lineal’ societies. In this case residence plays an important role in consolidating rights and reducing these choices.
HOUSE SYSTEMS
To the various modes of descent reckoning, long known to anthropologists, we will add a mode of constituting groups that calls upon both descent principles and marriage rules. This mode creates kinship groups that we in the West call ‘houses’; however such groups are also found in the aristocratic families of Japan and in the societies on the northwest coast of the United States and Canada characterized by ‘ranks and houses’, such as the Kwakiutl and their neighbours, or in certain politically ranked cognatic societies of Indonesia. In Europe, alongside the ‘royal’ houses and the various minor or great houses that made up the family lines of the feudal aristocracy (vestiges of which still exist) we find various peasant ‘houses’, such as the casa in Catalonia or the ostau of the Lavedan region.
When Lévi-Strauss made a close analysis of the workings of the numayn – the Kwakiutl ‘houses’ whose underlying structure (patrilineal and/or matrilineal principles)13 Boas, who had been the first to describe them, admitted having great difficulties in discovering – he drew anthropologists’ and historians’ attention to this type of institution. A numayn is one of a hierarchy of ‘houses’ each of which has a rank and a seat defined by a name and a crest. According to Lévi-Strauss:
The house is first of all a legal entity, in possession of a domain composed of material and immaterial goods . . . by material [I mean] the possession of a real domain, fishing sites and hunting grounds . . . The immaterial domain includes names, which are owned by houses, legends, the exclusive right to perform certain dances of rituals . . . [A house] perpetuates itself by handing down its name, its wealth and its titles in a direct or fictitious line regarded as legitimate on condition that this continuity can be expressed in the language of kinship or marriage, and most often both at once . . . There is so much freedom in this area that one can say that alliance and descent are interchangeable.14
It is thus not the house that belongs to the people but the people who belong to the house, together with material and immaterial assets which are indivisible and kept to be transmitted to their firstborn male or female descendants in the direct line. Alternatively, other parts of the domain can be temporarily detached and given to the husbands of the daughters of the house, sons-in-law, who then have the duty to transmit them in turn to their firstborn. The first rule in this system, the rule of primogeniture, implies gender equivalence for succession to certain titles and ranks. At this level, the system is cognatic, but skewed to the paternal line. The second principle – by virtue of which certain of the house’s titles are provisionally alienated by giving them to the men who marry the daughters of the house with the obligation to transmit them to their own children, who are therefore the giver’s grandchildren – posits a partial equivalence