10 - Familienpolitik: Alliance in a Closed Corporate Community

Abstract

This chapter discusses the alliance in a closed corporate community. It is an anthropological truism that kinship and political organization have a lot to do with each other, and there is every reason to think that marital ties and political alliances are mutually supportive. The political institutions prevailing within the territory of the Törbel commune are characterized by political principles that seem to have remained constant through the centuries. Balanced bilaterality is enhanced by the affective and voluntary qualities of the affinal relationship, as opposed to the ascribed jural aspects of descent. The marital preferences and avoidances among groups of patrilines appearing in the records are statistical norms rather than the expression of conscious models arising from shared concepts of descent group corporateness or prescriptive alliance. No one avers that party membership has consisted of the same patrilines for generations or that marriage outside the group was sanctioned.