Patrilineal Descent and Personal Kindred in Japan

Abstract

S YSTEMS of descent may be conveniently divided into three major categories, following Davenport (1959): unilineal, nonunilineal, and bilateral. The unilineal category includes patrilineal, matrilineal, double, and other less frequently occurring rules of descent.2 Non-unilineal descent is ascription or exclusion through specified kin relationships, but where societal norms provide more than one possibility or where no single alternative rule approaches a frequency of 100 percent (Davenport 1959:558). This descent rule gives rise to the nonunilineal descent group, or Davenport's sept, a permanently organized corporate and often property-owning group in which the members trace their relationship lineally, through either or both sexes, to a common known or unknown ancester. In bilateral descent, a set of kinsmen are related through males and females within a specified degree of collaterality to a particular common relative, and results in non-perpetuating kin groupings, or Davenport's personal kindred, which we shall simply call Davenport maintains (1959:565) that a kindred may be a property-owning, permanent group, a type which he calls stem kindred. Much theoretical literature on kinship commonly assumes that the descent rule of a given society is either unilineal or nonunilineal or bilateral. Consequently, a combination of the bilateral rule with either of the other types has not been given adequate theoretical consideration.3 Logically speaking, the bilateral rule of descent may be combined with patrilineal, matrilineal, double and/or any other rule of unilineal descent, or with the nonunilineal descent rule. Whether all these combinations are represented by empirical cases is a subject reserved for another occasion (Befu 1964). Suffice it to say at this point that many ethnographic examples of such combinations have been reported from various parts of the world. Murdock and his associates list, in the first three installments of their Ethnographic Atlas (1962), more than twenty such societies. Examination of their sources indicates that most ethnographic reporters of these societies are not very explicit concerning the structure and function of the bilateral aspect of the kinship system4 although their analysis of the unilineal rule as practiced in these societies is, on the whole, adequate. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how these two systems of descent, the unilineal (in this case, patrilineal) and the bilateral, operate together in a given society, namely, Japan. That the Japanese practice both patrilineal and bilateral rules of descent is suggested by some writings on Japanese kinship. Beardsley et al. (1959:261275), for example, describe practices centering around patrilineal descent, while others, e.g., Gam6 (1958), discuss functions of the personal kindred.