Systems Of Descent

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Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Systems of descent

Descent has been classified according to the way in which relatedness is traced through paternal and maternal ancestors.

Patrilineal descent refers to common kinship traced consistently through male ancestors; the father, father’s father, father’s father’s father, etc. Where male dominance is the norm, as it is traditionally in most societies, and property is mainly controlled by men, patriliny provides an economical arrangement which can be elaborated holistically as a basic organizing principle. The largest human population whose basic social units are so constituted are the Arabs. The discovery of whole societies which lacked chiefs and whose political organizations, and not merely the primary social units, were based on descent led †Evans-Pritchard (1940) to develop the analytical concept of †segmentary lineage organization. Here essentially descent-based groups mobilize situationally in opposition to other comparable, but genealogically remote, lineages. Ancestors and genealogies are the repositories of political identity which is potentially as wide as a person’s ancestry. People interact, in the first place, according to their genealogical closeness or remoteness along the lines of the famous Arab proverb: ‘Myself against my brother; my brother and I against my cousins; my cousins and I against the world’.

Although this genealogical ideology provides an actor’s model of politics in these societies, the reality is of course more complex since there are a variety of other principles of social cohesion and allegiance. In fact, the purest and most extreme example of this type of society so far described are the several million strong Somali pastoralists of the Horn of Africa (Lewis 1994) who represent themselves in this way and conduct their frequent †blood-feuds accordingly. Everyday political allegiance here is actualized at the level of those patrilineal kin who pay and receive damages for death and other injuries collectively, thus constituting a descent group (a ‘dia-paying group’, from Arabic dia=blood-money) which has specific insurance functions. In considering its role in such segmentary lineage systems, it has to be remembered that descent is primarily a socio-political (and economic) resource which can be loaded and manipulated in various ways even within one cultural system. It does not in and of itself actually determine action although in these cases it provides an extremely compelling political ideology.

Descent traced patrilineally through the father does not exclude the complementary importance of ties on the mother’s side. Indeed, extreme patrilineality tends to be associated with a particularly binding relationship between a man and his maternal uncle and the latter’s patrilineage. This is often reinforces by his mother’s brother’s daughter being regarded as a man’s ideal *marriage partner. Where †polygyny is practised, the patrilineal identity of a man’s successive wives becomes, for the descendants, the basis of corresponding divisions amongst the ensuing lineages. The existence of such maternally differentiated segments within a patrilineal descent system has often given non-anthropologists (not least historians) the misleading impression that they have found evidence of †matrilineal descent or even of †‘matriarchy’. Descent is not without effect on marriage, in that marriage between those who are closely related is generally regarded as *incest. Strongly integrated descent groups often observe a rule of exogamy, forbidding internal marriage and forcing their members to seek partners from other descent groups. This is usually combined with an ideology of marriage as an alliance between antagonistic groups and is represented in popular discourse in aphorisms as: ‘We marry our enemies’. In some patrilineal systems marriage incorporates a wife into her husband’s lineage: in others a married woman retains her own lineage identity. In the latter case, marriage is frequently more unstable than in the former. The systematic practice of marriage with *prescribed categories of relative (e.g. cross-cousins), widely elaborated particularly in *Southeast Asia, Aboriginal Australia and South America, and frequently associated with status differences between wife-givers and wife-receivers, produces structures where *alliance eclipses descent as a fundamental social principle.

Tracing descent through maternal ancestors is the basis of matriliny, the other form of unilineal descent (see Schneider and Gough 1961). This is a far cry from matriarchy since men are still in control. Here, however, although still under male authority, the hand that rules does not confer citizenship or rights to the inheritance of property and office. Through the rules of matrilineal citizenship, a man is reproduced not through his wife, but through his sister. He inherits from his mother’s brother and rears children who will belong to his wife’s brother. Matriliny is thus more a matter of ‘brother-right’ than mother-right (matriarchy). The characteristic domestic tensions entailed here were carefully delineated in *Malinowski’s classic study of the Trobriand Islanders referred to, rather colourfully, in W.H. Auden’s poem ‘Heavy Date’: ‘Matrilineal races kill their mothers’ brothers in their dreams, and turn their sisters into wives’. In matrilineal systems, the sibling and crucial mother’s brother-sister’s son relationships are constantly threatened by the marriage bond in a kind of institutionalized ‘tug-of-love’, and marriage is often unstable. In order to exert and maintain authority, a maternal uncle has to be able to control his sister’s sons. Hence, the rules governing where the married couple live in relation to the place of residence of the wife’s brother are crucial considerations. The ideal arrangement here would be for brothers and sisters to live together and allow husbands to visit their wives sufficiently frequently to provide for the perpetuation of the descent group. The Nayars of Kerala in India seem to have come closest to exemplifying this model in their traditional practice before it was disrupted by British colonial influence (Fuller 1976). Other societies require both spouses to regularly alternate periods of residence in their own and their partner’s matrilineal village. Under a rule of †uxorilocal marriage, the women of the matriline live together in their ancestral settlement and their husbands come to join them there. This, however, has the disadvantage of dispersing the men of the matrilineage who control its affairs and also threatens their control over their sisters’ sons who are their heirs. This difficulty can be ameliorated by a rule which requires the sisters’ children, especially the males, to live with their maternal uncle once they have achieved puberty. When marriage disperses both the males and females of the matrilineage in separate communities, the matrilineal system loses much of its force as is the situation generally today in the so-called ‘matrilineal belt’ in Central Africa. Matrilineal ties, may, however, still be important in constituting †cross-cutting ties between local communities.

In the modern setting, where personal wealth becomes available (through commerce or wage earnings), a father tends to try to bypass his traditional obligations to his sisters’ sons in favour of his own son. This may be facilitated by encouraging the latter to marry his father’s sister’s daughter—who has legitimate matrilineal inheritance rights. Under the influence of (patriarchal/ patrilineal) colonialism and *Christianity and increasing involvement in money economies, a general drift has occurred from matriliny towards patriliny or †bilateral descent, which is a kind of half-way house. But there are exceptions and examples of traditionally matrilineal societies which have successfully harnessed this form of descent to the market economy.

†Double or dual descent, first analysed among the Yakö of West Africa by †Daryll Forde (in Radcliffe-Brown and Forde 1950), combines both systems of unilineal descent, allocating different social functions to each. Much more common is bilateral or †cognatic descent in which relationships are traced on both the paternal and maternal sides at each generation. Here genealogies are usually shorter and, in principle, a person belongs to as many cognatic (or †‘ambilineal) descent groups as he has known ancestors. Such overlapping identity does not lend itself to the development of a series of clearly defined descent groups in the fashion of segmentary lineage systems, and group cohesion tends to be weak and uncommitting. Where, as among the Amhara of Christian Ethiopia (Hoben 1973), descent from a particular ancestor is made the basis of landholding and regulates marriage (through a rule obliging descendants to marry outside the group), this can give rise to stronger group solidarity. Here again, as with other systems of descent, the official theory of kinship priorities is supplemented and modified in practice by interests based on other principles of association. With bilateral kinship, and indeed under all rules of descent, people also have the opportunity of forming more ephemeral and individually specific groupings, based on common descent, known technically as ‘egocentred †kindreds’. Such kindreds are specific to the individual and only full siblings (having identical ancestry) share the same kindred. Kindreds tend to provide important social networks in most traditional (and some modern) societies even when unilineal descent is strongly developed.

I.M.LEWIS

Systems Of Descent

Systems of descent

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