Written for Anthro431, 3/2/1999
We shall begin with the four basic principles of kinship according to Robin Fox, which he calls ‘the facts of life’. They are as follows:
1. The women have the children.
2. The men impregnate the women.
3. The men usually exercise control.
4. Primary kin (one’s father, mother, children, and siblings) do not mate with each other.
These four basic principles are the driving force behind all systems of kinship organization. In order for a kinship system to be successful, it must comply with all four principles (although it is my belief that the third principle, while true in most circumstances, does not necessarily need to be true in order for the system to survive).
There are two further concepts which must be explained before we can move on: consanguineal and affinal relations. A consanguine is someone related to you by blood, and an affine is someone related to you by marriage. My sister is a consanguine, and her husband is an affine. The range of people who are considered consanguines differs between societies. In many societies, especially Islamic ones, the woman plays only a passive role in conception, while the man is the creative force. The woman merely nurtures the child, the man creates it. From this point of view, mother would logically not be considered a consanguine. She is merely father’s wife, and therefore an affine. This, of course, is not the case everywhere, and is not even universal in Islam.
With this basis of knowledge we shall now discuss the incest taboo, our principle four. There are many explanations for why this should be: confusion of relationships, inbreeding, problems with authority relations, and the notion that it prevents the formation of large networks of social alliances. The most commonly accepted theory is that our knuckle-dragging ancestors bred out because they had to in order to survive. Sex distribution is not necessarily even within a generation, and so early man might not have been able to mate at all if he hadn’t gone outside the family. The most honest answer is that no one really knows why it started. The inbreeding argument does not seem to be valid: it does not only reinforce negative recessive traits, but also positive ones. The confusion of relationships theory “confuses role with biology”, meaning that it doesn’t matter if the father of a woman’s child is her own father or some random man, her son is still her son. The problem with the social alliances is that it confuses sex with marriage. Just because a father has sexual relations with his daughter does not mean that she cannot later marry out of the group. And the problem with breeding out is this: why should the taboo not have been lifted after the limitations that requires breeding out dissipated? Again, there are many theories but no proofs. It is enough, however, for our purposes here to know that it is prevalent throughout the world, to different extents and definitions.
Why, you ask, do we need kinship groups? And that question, replies your lecturer, begins our discussion of descent groups. One of the most common uses of kinship is recruitment to a social group, on the basis of consanguineal or affinal ties. We shall now, of course, have to introduce some new terms such as the lineage, the clan, unilineal descent, and cognatic descent. A lineage is a group of persons traced back a single, real or imagined, knuckle-dragging (‘apecal’ is our five-dollar word here) ancestor or ancestress. A member of a lineage can tell you the exact way in which he is related to his apecal ancestor, and usually how he is related to every other member of his lineage. A clan is one step up from a lineage: it may contain several lineages who assume a common ancestry to their patron knuckle-dragger, which relationship cannot necessarily be clearly demonstrated. In a descent corporation, the group has control over some resource, whether material or ritual. We shall not be concerned with corporations, merely with groups. We shall assume that you want to belong to this group simply because they seem to be having a good time, not because you might get some large tracts of land out of the deal.
Membership in a lineage, or on a higher level in a clan, may be achieved in various ways. Descent may be traced through the mother (matrilineage) or through the father (patrilineage), or through both (dual descent, in which one will belong to two descent groups). The matrilineal or patrilineal descent, which traces through only one parent, is called unilineal. Membership may also be achieved by cognatic descent: both male and female. For example, if I wished to trace my descent to a certain apecal ancestor, but my father’s father’s father etc. did not trace to him, I might trace my descent through father’s mother’s mother’s father. Descent, then, is not limited by sex, but in fact all the descendants of our apecal ancestor are included in his group. This type of descent will probably give me membership in several different groups, many of them overlapping. Now, the matrilineage does not necessarily violate our third principle, because although descent is traced through the women, the men will still be in control. Because in a matrilineage it is the sisters of male members instead of their wives who are reproducing the group, the mother’s brother or avunculate is the important male kin to his sister’s children, rather than their father.
We shall for a moment discuss the ego-centered group. Here the perspective from which a group is viewed changes: instead of looking at the group of kin as a whole, one looks at an individual (ego) and whom he considers to be kin. Those whom he will consider kin is often fixed to a certain degree of blood relation, for example, one’s first and second cousins, but not one’s third. Often the ego-centered group, when diagrammed, looks the same as a lineage. However, a lineage is viewed from the point of view of the ancestor, while the ego-centered looks from a descendant of that ancestor and how the other members of the lineage are related to him.
Let us suppose that the lineage to which we belong has, over the generations, grown entirely too large, and we no longer wish to play nicely with them. We wish to secede from the group. There are several different methods of segmenting part of the group away, but what it all boils down to is this: picking a new apecal ancestor. In the ‘drift’ method of segmentation, members of lineage A will go off and found their own lineage B, becoming the apecal ancestors of B. In the ‘spinal cord’ method, lineages will split into senior and junior branches, with the heads of those branches becoming new apecal ancestors. Problems arise when the lineage from which one is splitting is a matrilineage. In a patrilineage, all one needs is a wife to start a new lineage, and so, theoretically, any man in a patrilineage can take off and start his own sub-lineage. In a matrilineage, one needs a sister and a husband for her in order to reproduce the new lineage, but since sex ratios are rarely even, this is difficult. Our third segmentation method is called ‘perpetual’ or ‘automatic’ segmentation, wherein the apecal ancestor must be alive, as the patriarch of his clan. For example, A has two sons, B and C, who each have two sons. When A dies, B and C each set up their own new lineages. When B dies, his two sons will each set up their own lineage, further segmenting the original A lineage, and so forth.
Now, in order to fulfill our first two principles without breaking our fourth, we must find spouses outside our group for both the men and the women. There are two basic ways we can go about doing this: we can organize ourselves in an elementary or in a complex system of marriage. Put quite simply for the knuckle-draggers in our audience, an elementary system has rules of whom one should and should not marry, while a complex system only has rules about whom one should not. In a complex marriage system, for example that in the United States, one’s choices for a spouse are limited by one’s circumstances (age, personal preferences, location, etc.), but there is no rule of whom one should marry. The only rule is to marry outside the group. In some societies with complex marriage systems, especially on the British Isles during the Middle Ages, there is a tendency toward forming alliances through marriage. There is, however, no rule stating whom we must marry, only whom we must not.
We decide, in our quest to find a mate, that we dislike the lack of structure inherent in a complex system, and so we choose the elementary system. Now there is another set of choices for us: direct exchange or asymmetrical? In order to choose, we listen quietly to our lecturer, who kindly explains the difference to us.
An asymmetrical system is basically this: we cannot take wives from a group to whom we have given wives. Confusion reigns in the audience, and a further explanation is forthcoming. Let us imagine, then, three clans: A, B, and C, for the sake of simplicity. The most basic way of exchanging wives through the system is circular: A gives women to B, who gives to C, who give to A, and so on. Any number of groups can join in, and the pattern need not be circular, so long as we do not give our women to the groups from whom we take wives. Wife-givers are separated from wife-takers in this system. In most societies, groups who give wives are superior to groups who take wives. And so, returning to our former example, A is superior to B, who is superior to C, who is superior to A. Thus it is not a linear pecking order but a circular pecking order, and so everyone is inferior to some and superior to others.
Direct exchange does not differentiate between wife-givers and wife-takers. At its most basic level, direct exchange is simply swapping women. You give us your women, and we’ll give you ours. We have two lineages, A and B. In each generation, the women of A marry the men of B, and the men of A marry the women of B. If the clan or tribe to which these lineages belong is divided into two groups who exchange women, these two groups are called moieties. One half of the tribe exchanges women with the other half. In these simple direct exchange societies, the classificatory term for a marriageable person is a cross-cousin. A cross-cousin is a child of a sibling of the opposite sex. In other words, father’s sister’s children, or mother’s brother’s children. A parallel cousin would be father’s brother’s children, or mother’s sister’s children. In a unilineal descent group, one set of parallel cousins will belong to ego’s own group and so, with the exogamy (marriage outside the group) rule, not a viable marriage candidate.
Let us simplify this for explanatory purposes: man A exchanges sisters with man B. Both couples have a son and a daughter. A’s son (A1 ) will marry B’s daughter, while B’s son (B1) will marry A’s daughter. Each of these new couples have a further set of children, son and daughter. A1’s son, ego, will marry B1’s daughter, who is both ego’s mother’s brother’s daughter and his father’s sister’s son, and so a cross-cousin on both sides. Hence this system is sometimes called double-cross cousin marriage, which makes it sound a lot more complicated than it is.
When this system operates on a larger scale, one’s marriage partner is often not one’s actual cross-cousin, but is classified as such because that is the proper category for marriage. Thus the term classificatory cross-cousin. The system just described is called immediate direct exchange, meaning that women are exchanged in the same generation: A gives B wives at the same time that B gives A wives. Another way of going about direct exchange is delayed direct exchange: A gives B wives now, and in the next generation B gives A wives. This system requires more than two groups to exchange women, because A must have wives in return now and in the next generation B must have wives in return. So we bring in lineage C to fill in the gap. In the first generation, A gives wives to B who gives them to C who gives them to A. In the next generation this is reversed. And thus we have delayed direct exchange.
And so we have a descent group and a marriage system which we like, and we have now gained wives and begun our own nuclear families. All his well and harmonious in the world, and we praise God for giving us kinship.