Matrilineal Society Research Articles

Family and kinship over time: Beyond Unilinear models

Holy, Ladislav. Strategies and Norms in a Changing Matrilineal Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. v + 237 pp. including tables, figures, notes to chapters, index. $31.50 cloth. Mann, Kristin. Marrying Well: Marriage, Status and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. vii + 194 pp. including tables, figures, appendix, notes, bibliography and index. $39.50 cloth. Pitkin, Donald S. The House that Giacomo Built. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. vii + 243 pp. including photographs, notes, index. $29.95 cloth. Segalen, Martine. Historical Anthropology of the Family. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. v + 328 pp. including tables, notes, index. Translated by J. C. Whitehouse and Sarah Matthews from the French.

On the bones of the serpent: person, memory, and mortality in Sabarl Island society

Sabarl island created, in myth, from the bones of a serpent is a coral atoll in the Louisiade archipelago of Papua New Guinea. The Sabarl speak of themselves as true islanders: persons separated from the means of both physical and social survival. The Sabarl struggle for continuity of the physical and social person and of social relations, of cultureal values, of paternal influence in a matrilineal society is the subject of Debbora Battaglia's sensitive ethnography of loss and reconstruction: the first major work on cultural responses to mortality in the southern Massim culture area and an important contribution to studies of personhood in Melanesia. The creative focus of Sabarl cultural life is a series of mortuary feasts and rituals known as segaiya. In assembling and disassembling commemorative food and objects in segaiya exchanges, Sabarl also assemble and disassemble the critical social relations such objects stand for. These commemorative acts create a collective memory yet also a collective experience of forgetting social bonds that are of no future use to the living. Sabarl anticipate this disaggregation in patterns of everyday life, which reveal the importance of categorical distinctions mapped in beliefs about the physical and metaphysical person. Using remembrance and forgetting as an analytic lens, Battaglia is able to ask questions critical to understanding Melanesian social process. One of the ethnographies addressing the limits of ethnographic representation and the fragmented nature of knowledge from an indigenous perspective, her finely wrought study explores the dynamics of cultural practices in which decontruction is integral to construction, allowing a new perspective on the ephermeral nature of sociality in Melanesia and new insight into the efficacy of cultural images more generally.

Strategies and Norms in a Changing Matrilineal Society: Descent, Succession and inheritance among the Toka of Zambia. LADISLAV HOLY

Strategies and Norms in a Changing Matrilineal Society: Descent, Succession and inheritance among the Toka of Zambia. LADISLAV HOLY

Strategies and Norms in a Changing Matrilineal Society: Descent, Succession and Inheritance among the Toka of Zambia

List of maps and diagrams List of tanles Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Descent categories and local ties in traditional Toka society 2. Technological development and the restructuring of the relations of production 3. Changing norms of inheritance 4. The structure of local groups 5. The changing concept of the basimukowa 6. Mukowa and ritual 7. The role of the mukowa in succession 8. The role of the mukowa in inheritance 9. Mukowa: representational and operational models 10. Norms as a strategic resource Appendices Notes References Index.

Strategies and Norms in a Changing Matrilineal Society: Descent, Succession and Inheritance among the Toka of Zambia

Strategies and Norms in a Changing Matrilineal Society: Descent, Succession and Inheritance among the Toka of Zambia

Strategies and Norms in a Changing Matrilineal Society: Descent, Succession and Inheritance among the Toka of Zambia

Strategies and Norms in a Changing Matrilineal Society: Descent, Succession and Inheritance among the Toka of Zambia

The Resurgence of Pawning in French West Africa during the Depression of the 1930s

The Depression of the 1930s made itself felt in Africa in 1931 and 1932 with a sharp drop in commodity prices, which threatened the ability of many Africans to sustain and reproduce themselves. It also threatened colonial governments, which saw thin resources strained. Faced with a dramatic decline in revenues, the response of the French regime in West Africa was to tighten tax collection and cut back on staff and services.l This, in turn, placed a heavy burden on individuals and households, who responded in varying ways to the decline in income and the persistent demands for revenue. In cash crop areas, people had difficulty but generally found ways to pay their taxes. In many poor areas, where migrant labor was the major source of revenue for taxes, there were few ways to earn money, and many people were forced to pawn children, usually girls. In some areas, the administration clearly encouraged the practice. Pawning was widespread in pre-colonial Africa, but the functions it filled varied according to the social, economic, and political dynamics of the society in which it was found. Writing about Central Africa, Mary Douglas has argued that pawning offered the men of less differentiated matrilineal societies of Central Africa a special kind of adaptation to the basic residential and authority problem posed by matriliny. Pawning provided men with enduring property in the form of women and eventually dependent lineage segments, which they used to keep hold of their own young men and also to attract young men from outside the lineage group.2 Thus pawning regulated relations between groups and facilitated the accumulation of power. The literature on pawning in West Africa is analytically shallow but indicates that it was widespread. The greater penetration of the market in West Africa clearly shaped a different kind of institution. Most accounts link it to famine, to debt, and to economic inequality. Among the Asante, a matrilineal society more complex than those Douglas studied, pawning reflected two linked processes: the increased importance of control over people and a progressive erosion of lineage based forms of subsistence security through increased market activities.3 For the patrilineal Yoruba, E. A. Oroge has argued that pawning developed in response to monetization and was stimulated by an unequal distribution of wealth. Oroge suggests that it was marginal before the nineteenth century, but expanded dramatically during the Yoruba Civil Wars. Parents pawned children to raise money to redeem kin who had been taken prisoner. Parents also offered their children to Yoruba patrons, usually military leaders, who protected and provided for their pawns while training them.4 Pawning existed in almost all parts of French West Africa. It was particularly widespread in Mande areas and in the Voltaic

Women and property in Guajiro society*

This paper discusses property‐related issues and concepts among the Guajiro—a matrilineal cattle pastoralist society in Colombia and Venezuela—from a women‐oriented perspective, focusing on types of, acquisition and management of property as well as death‐ and compensation‐linked property transactions. Also considered are questions pertaining to female productivity in pastoral societies and women's significance as resources and potential property.

The Origins of the Matrilineal Principle in Rabbinic Law

According to rabbinic law, from the second century to the present, the offspring of a gentile mother and a Jewish father is a gentile, while the offspring of a Jewish mother and a gentile father is a Jew (albeit, according to the Mishnah, amamzer, a Jew of impaired status). Each of these two rulings has its own history, as I shall show below, but it is convenient to group them together under the general heading of the “matrilineal principle.” Anthropologists and sociologists use the termmatrilinealto describe societies in which kinship is determined through the females and not the males. Such societies once existed in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and can still be found in parts of Africa, India, and Polynesia. Although rabbinic society and family law have not yet been studied in the light of modern anthropological and sociological theories, it seems clear that the kinship patterns which characterize matrilineal societies are thoroughly foreign to rabbinic society. With only a few exceptions, rabbinic family law is patrilineal. Status, kinship, and succession are determined through the father. (“The family of the father is considered family, the family of the mother is not considered family,” B.Bava Batra109b.) Why, then, did the rabbis adopt a matrilineal principle for the determination of the status of the offspring of mixed marriages?

Yangshao Burial Customs and Social Organization: A Comment on the Theory of Yangshao Matrilineal Society and Its Methodology

Addressing in part the arguments advanced by Morgan, and depending upon more recent anthropological studies from Madagascar, Sarawak, and elsewhere, it is argued in Part I that the evidence from Yangshao burials resembles that of many modern primitive peoples whose collective secondary burials were not defined by kin unit. The matrilineal view of Yangshao society is also challenged by the widespread existence of single-person burial, which appears to have both pre- and postdated, as well as co-existed with, the practice of collective burial. Similar comparative and contextual criticisms are brought to bear, in Part II, on the argument that Yangshao burial customs reveal the dominance of women. There was evidently no system in which children had to be buried with the mother, there is no evidence that the primary burial of women in multi-person collective burials was either common or prevalent, there is no evidence that single Yangshao female burials were generally more richly furnished with grave goods than those of single males. Finally, in Part III, it is shown that same-sex collective burials were rare; they reflect not social organization but the accident of several contemporary deaths. In short, none of the arguments for Yangshao matriliny are found to be adequate. At present, we lack an effective method for using burial customs to reconstruct social organization. The article ends by raising a series of methodological desiderata for future research.

Food production and income generation in a matrilineal society: rural women in Zomba, Malawi

This article sets out to describe the various food-producing and income generating patterns found in rural households in the Zomba district of Malawi. The study focuses on women but it necessarily links women closely to their own households and the wider family groupings, characterised by matrilineal inheritance and matrilocal marriage, of which they are part. ' Over 90 per cent of Malawians live in the rural areas and the country's people are overwhelmingly dependent on smallholder agriculture for food. Wage employment and exports are also provided very largely by the agricultural sector. People in Zomba, one of the twenty four districts in the country, have perhaps greater access to urban wages and markets as the former colonial and post-colonial capital is situated at the centre of the district and remains a relatively busy market, commercial, administrative and educational centre. But much of the district is rural and it includes a wide range of agricultural environments and cropping patterns. Zomba is not one of the Malawian districts in which smallholders produce a very considerable surplus for export, but local farmers, working intensively on small plots of land, still mainly with hoes, manage to produce and sometimes sell a wide range of crops. As a recent study by Kydd and Christiansen has shown, the economy of Malawi has undergone important structural changes since independence.2 Not least as a result of government policy in the spheres of pricing, loans, land expropriation and protection, marketed output from the estate sector has overtaken that from the

The Evolution of Exchange Structures and Ranking: Some Northwest Coast and Athapaskan Examples

The evolution of the matrilineal societies of the northern Northwest Coast is discussed in terms of a structuralist approach which seeks their antecedent structure. This hypothesized prototype is derived from a synchronic analysis of these societies. Neighboring Athapaskan societies retain this antecedent structure as their dominant structure.

Chisungu: A Girls' Initiation Ceremony Among the Bemba of Zambia

While there have been a number of descriptions and interpretations of boys' initiation rituals, Audrey Richards's classic study of initiation rites among the Bemba remains one of the few studies to deal in detail with the initiation of girls into adult life. Dr Richards observed the entire chisungu or female initiation rite, an almost continuous series of complex ceremonies lasting for a month. Her detailed description of the elements of the ritual, and her analysis of it in terms of the culture of matrilineal society, have made this a classic ethnographic and theoretical text. Celebrating the attainment of sexual and social maturity, the puberty rituals reflect tribal attitudes to sex, fertility, marriage, and the rearing of children. We see how women's ceremonies portray and try to enforce the social obligations of marriage and the setting up of the kinship group, and the conflicts of interest that are involved.

Gifts Again: Complimentary Prestation among the Pastoral Nilotes of the Southern Sudan

Nilotic-speaking peoples of the Southern Sudan possess canoes, though the exchange of valuable property in the process of establishing a marriage rarely sinks one. In this brief essay I review an ethnographically limited body of data relating a variety of prestations accompany marriages among Niloticspeaking pastoralists. Special emphasis is given the practice I interpret as complimentary prestation, or what Radcliffe-Brown (1950) indicated by the phrase reverse bridewealth. What otherwise might be interpreted as an instance of negative reciprocity, and thereby cited as a means of severing social relation? ships, is, in the Nilotic case, precisely the inverse. Two theoretically pertinent themes emerge from this brief discourse. First, it argues complimentary prestation among these peoples marks the total transformation of affines into kin, and has as a result very positive ramifications a wider series of social relationships. Second, on the basis of the data collected here, I argue exchanges are extant over an extended period of time tend be positively associated with a rather low incidence of divorce. Rather than sinking the boat, complimentary prestation in the Nilotic world is more a means of not rocking it. At the outset it can be stated reverse bridewealth or counter payment (Radcliffe-Brown 1950:52) is in no way the logical opposite of service or wealth as is often found in matrilineal societies of Africa and elsewhere. Nash (1978:106) reports the Nagorisi of New Guinea groomprice is first of all an optional transaction, confined in the main established families. In addition garden labor, this entails the Nagorisi prestation of red shell money as well as pigs marriage feasts. The etymology of groom? price, lolai, suggests that the reproductive capacities of men were also being paid for (Nash 1978:106). Since lolai is not an obligatory transaction, its wider social and structural significance is by comparison insignificant when seen in light of the Nilotic data. Closer the ethnographic focus of this essay, Harris (1972:63) refers the Taita custom of service, a situation wherein the groom is required to furnish his own and his male kinsmens' labor in the bride's

An intergenerational transmission model for the cultural evolution of helping behavior

The cultural coefficient of similarity, or probability that two individuals learn the same idea from a common ancestor, is offered as an explanation for patterns of helping behavior in human societies. A cultural-transmission model predicts that when maternal influence in offspring learning is pre-dominant, matrilineality will evolve in a culture. Other predictions about the form of matrilineal and patrilineal societies are made from the model and contrasted to a sociobiological explanation of matrilineality.

Recent Ethnology of the Northwest Coast

As recently as 1970, Erna Gunther (77) apologized for the enormous effort she had made assembling early travelers' accounts of the Northwest Coast, by reminding her readers that there was virtually no time-depth to our knowledge of the area. Given the prevalence of wooden artifacts and the rainy climate, everyone assumed that little could be. unearthed. But the pioneering of wet-site archaeology in the 19608 soon brought the realization that Coast culture, as first seen by Europeans in the eighteenth century, and as described by ethnographers beginning in the nineteenth, had an historical continuity of roughly 5000 years during which time there had been little discernible change (41). In 1975, Knut Fladmark (68) presented a general synthesis in which he argued that the Coast as a whole probably had become habitable about 15,000 BP, though nothing from that date had been then (nor has been now) uncovered. At the depth of 10,000 BP, however, there were two adaptations, with Johnson Straits as the dividing line. Then about 5000 BP, Fladmark argued, the environment became sufficiently stable that people could rely on the runs of anadromous fish as a basic resource of their diet. At this point, the adaptation becomes essentially indistinguishable from the adaptation at the time of first contact with Europeans. It formerly was thought that because of the apparent similarities with Asiatic, Oceanic, and Mesoamerican forms, the great number of languages and dialects recorded, as well as the simultaneous presence at the same level of culture of both matrilineal and patrilineal societies, that only an hypothe­ sis of recent origin could account for such an undigested amalgam of traits. So it was common practice to conjecture a history from the legends of migrations in the oral literature; from the geographical distribution of speakers of the various languages and dialects; and from the patterns of trait

The Namonuito solution to the “matrilineal puzzle”

It has been widely assumed, following Richards and Schneider, that solidarity in the matrilineal descent group is dependent on the male authority within it. In the matrilineal society of Namonuito Atoll, however, it is the authority of certain females rather than that of males that underlies descent group solidarity. [matrilineal descent, kinship, sex roles, Oceania, matrilineal puzzle]

Regional and Village Economic Activities: Prosperity and Stagnation in Luapula, Zambia

In this paper three interrelated topics are examined: First, the conflicts and strains prevalent in a matrilineal society are described. It is argued that these conflicts are the result of a central structural contradiction inherent in matriliny, namely, that between relations of production, which are individualistic in nature, and distribution processes, which involve social relationships that are communalistic in character. The contradiction results primarily from matrilineal inheritance practices which ensure that all wealth accrues to the matrilineage. Since spouses belong to different lineages and since the fruit of their labor cannot be inherited by affines, nuclear and bilateral extended family members do not cooperate nor invest in family or larger cooperative enterprises. As a result, Luapulans have become individual producers. Second, the impact of the industrial-market system on the preexisting tensions is described. Specifically, it is argued that the contradiction in matriliny fosters a rural class structure and a capitalist route to rural development. The wealthy, who find the matrilineal distributive justice (Poewe, 1978) in conflict with their desire to accumulate capital for purposes of reinvestment, have disengaged from matriliny and adopted Protestant ideologies to justify and further their business interests. By contrast, the poor, who find that matrilineal inheritance holds out the hope of receiving initial endowments, continue to support matriliny because they see in it the means to propel them along the path of private enterprise.

Appartenance et dépendance. L'exemple du système de classes d'âge des Aïzi (basse Côte d'Ivoire)

F. Verdeaux—Belonging to/Depending from : the Age-Set System of the Aizi (Lower Ivory Coast). A reconsideration of the age-set and lineage systems and of their combination in a matrilineal society. The network of interpersonal relations of dependence is encoded in the age-set system which ensures the institutionalization of men's status as social seniors or juniors—otherwise exchangers/exchangees. If children, rather than women, are considered as the ultimate object of exchange, the 'wife-giver', in the Aizi example, becomes, so to speak, a descipient of descendants. The momentary dependence on the father under-scores the belonging to the MS's lineage: the two notions cannot be taken apart from each other.

Patrifiliation as Ideology and Practice in a Matrilineal Society

Patrifiliation as Ideology and Practice in a Matrilineal Society