Ie and Dozoku: Family and Descent in Japan

Abstract

AKITOSHI SHIMIZU is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at Hiroshima University (Higashisenda-machi, Naka-ku, Hiroshima City, Japan). Born in I942, he was educated at the University of Tokyo (M.A., I967) and has held his present position since I978. He has done fieldwork in Japan and on Ponape, Kosrae, and the Marshalls. His research interests are kinship, respect, and chieftainship in Micronesia. He is one of the coauthors of Nakama (Tokyo, I979) and the author of Chiefdom and the Spatial Classification of the Life-World: Everyday Life, Subsistence, and the Political System on Ponape; in Islanders and the Outside World, edited by M. Aoyagi (Tokyo, i982); The Politics of Encounter: A Semantic Analysis of Guest-receiving Behavior on Ponape, the Eastern Carolines, in I983-84 Cultural Anthropological Research in Micronesia, edited by E. Ishikawa (Tokyo, I985); Feasting as Socio-political Process of Chieftainship on Ponape, Eastern Carolines (Senri Ethnological Studies 2i); and other essays on Micronesia and Japan. This essay is an attempt to answer the question: What do we mean by ie and d6zoku? These two groups were previously identified as the family and the descent group, respectively, in rural areas in Japan. They had been interpreted in terms of patrilineal descent (see, e.g., Oikawa I940, Befu I963) until they were reexamined by Nakane. Using as a basis the theory of the descent system refined by Evans-Pritchard (I 940) and Fortes (I953), among others, she argued that the theory is inappropriate to explain ie and ddzoku and that factors of kinship give way to other factors, such as coresidence and domestic economy, in the structure of these groups (Nakane i962, i964, i967, I970; for a historical review of ie studies in Japan, see Shimizu I985). However, since the appearance of her works the theoretical context has changed so dramatically that ie and dozoku need to be reinterpreted afresh. Not a few anthropologists have reanalyzed ethnographic data on the Nuer, the Tallensi, and the Tiv-the cases on the basis of which the theory of system was formulated-and pointed out that these societies in reality had different structures from that which the theory depicted (Keesing I970, Gough I97I, Holy I979b, Verdon I983). It has even been argued that the theory can no longer retain the status of one of the leading paradigms for kinship studies (Kuper i982; cf. Holy I979a). Those scholars in particular who put more emphasis on cultural factors other than kinship in social organization have examined alleged cases of unilineal systems and described them not as directly structured by certain principles of kinship but as mediated by various symbolic features of land and house, cattle, and ancestor cults (Anglin I979, Verdon i982, Schneider I984, Moore I985). These critical reanalyses opened up new horizons of kinship studies but, while pointing to the symbolic aspect of the observed phenomena, stopped short of examining the correlation between this aspect and kinship. In spite of these reanalyses, it is still true that the object cases which include the Japanese ie and dozoku consist of kins and affines. Although the observed groups are structured by cultural symbols, it should be assumed that they can remain kinship groups. In what follows I shall explore the relationship between the symbolic features and kinship through an examination of the ie based on my fieldwork in Izumo District (Shimizu I970, I972-