Een lurah-verkiezing in Midden-Java

Abstract

higher than that of an ideal model that embodies rules impossible to follow. To me this is precisely what Turner is doing: choosing a model for a reality by describing social organization from the level where the constraints are minimal: the local group with a patrifillative core. This is what I meant when I said that there is a point of episte mology here on top of the ethnographic facts: Turner does not provide an ideal model wherefrom reality would depart more or less randomly as if through corruption, he introduces corruption in his model from the beginning. And I cannot see why such a move should be regarded as illegitimate, as no aspect of the complex reality is left out: there are possible translations from the patrifiliative groups into the genealo gies and into the classes of varying degrees of inclusion; only the com position of the horde around the patrifiliative core is probably un predictable. An interesting consequence of such an alternative approach is that instead of having marriage systems which are more or less good approx imations of ideal types, one has messy marriage systems in a perma nent state of fluctuation between various messy models. The picture might be desperately blurred but the essentially dynamic nature of the fluctuation is here inescapable. Although Turner's approach will be regarded as unpalatable by the vast majority of anthropologists who are used to ideal models devised at the levels which provide the sharpest pictures, I would like to emphasize that I regard his approach as convincing and, in particular, most probably strictly compatible with one I recently developed on sharp ideal models (P. Jorion & G. De Meur, 'La question Murngin, un artefact de la litt?rature anthropologique', L'Homme XX, 1980 (2), pp. 35-67; M. Verd?n & P. Jorion, 'The Hordes of Discord: Australian Aboriginal Local Organization reconsidered', Man, 1980, forthcoming).