Abstract
It has been by and large accepted that among the Gilyaks of the Amur region and the island of Sakhalin, who practice a very precisely defined form of prescriptive matrilateral cross cousin marriage, wife takers possess superior status vis-à-vis the wife givers, an apparent exception to the postulate that the giver has a hold over the taker. In this paper it is shown that the patrilineal Gilyak accord superior status to wife givers and not to wife takers. An analysis of a tale supporting this thesis is offered. It is shown that matrilateral cross cousin prescriptive alliance per se does not create status differentiation, but such factors as primacy of residence and form of land tenure play much more decisive roles in the emergence of classstratification.
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