Forms of Huron Kinship and Marriage

Abstract

The topic of Huron marriage and kinship is a hornet's nest for the anthropologist. Since the first reports registered by the Recollet and Jesuit missionaries, authors have cited four different types of filiation-descent groups1 and no less than ten different forms of post-marital residence.2 In 1624 Pere LeCaron wrote: most Huron have several wives and change whenever it pleases them. The Jesuit Brebeuf (1957:25) reported that eleven years later in 1635 one of the major advantages in proselytizing the faith among the Huron was that were already monogamous with a strong incest taboo: they marry into neither their direct nor collateral lines. The exogamy prohibition has been variously applied to the ohwachia (matrilocal extended family) (Tooker 1964), the matrisib or clan (Richards 1957), or the entire tribe (Smith 1970). It is no wonder that anthropologists hesitate to raise the issue for fear of being stung. In this article we attempt to derive a certain order for the elements and relations of precolonial kin groups and marriage customs among the Huron tribes of southern Ontario. We argue that in terms of formal kinship analysis, the Huron system belongs to what Levi-Strauss (1969) has described as complex structures and point to the influence of the ensemble of social relations on the subsequent changes in the rules of filiation and descent. We also present the case for two simultaneous forms of marriage corresponding to two basic residence patterns. Although the data on Huron kinship are no more imperfectly organized than that for any other prehistoric society, there is a particular problem associated with the confluence of the claim for a matrilineal/matrilocal structure?a formal criterion?and the question of sexual relations of dominance/subordination, which is a distinctly sociological issue. The result is a confusing intermingling of theoretical levels which often leads to the following tautological predicament. According to Trigger (1976:136):