Descent theory:
Kinship Structure Study by Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes
In their attempt to explain the social stability of African “primitive” stateless societies where they undertook their fieldwork, Evans-Pritchard (1940) and Meyer Fortes (1945) wrote The Nuer (1940), African Political Systems (1940) respectively argued that the Nuer of south Sudan and Tallensi of Ghana were primarily organized around unilineal descent groups. Such groups are characterized by common purposes, such as administering property or defending against attacks; they form a permanent social structure that persists well beyond the lifespan of their members. In the case of the Tallensi and the Nuer, these corporate groups were based on kinship which in turn fitted into the larger structures of unilineal descent; consequently Evans-Pritchard’s and Fortes’ model is called “descent theory”. Moreover, in this African context territorial divisions were aligned with lineages; descent theory therefore synthesized both blood and soil as the same. Affinal ties with the parent through whom descent is not reckoned, however, are considered to be merely complementary or secondary (Fortes created the concept of “complementary filiation”), with the reckoning of kinship through descent being considered the primary organizing force of social systems. Because of its strong emphasis on unilineal descent, this new kinship theory came to be called “descent theory”.
With no delay, descent theory had found its critics. Many African tribal societies seemed to fit this neat model rather well, although Africanists, such as Paul Richards, also argued that Fortes and Evans-Pritchard had deliberately downplayed internal contradictions and overemphasized the stability of the local lineage systems and their significance for the organization of society. However, in many Asian settings the problems were even more obvious. In Papua New Guinea, the local patrilineal descent groups were fragmented and contained large amounts of non-agnates. Status distinctions did not depend on descent, and genealogies were too short to account for social solidarity through identification with a common ancestor. In particular, the phenomenon of cognatic (or bilateral) kinship posed a serious problem to the proposition that descent groups are the primary element behind the social structures of “primitive” societies.
Leach’s (1966) critique came in the form of the classical Malinowskian argument, pointing out that “in Evans-Pritchard’s studies of the Nuer and also in Fortes’s studies of the Tallensi unilineal descent turns out to be largely an ideal concept to which the empirical facts are only adapted by means of fictions.” People’s self-interest, manoeuvring, manipulation and competition had been ignored. Moreover, descent theory neglected the significance of marriage and affinal ties, which were emphasized by Levi-Strauss’ structural anthropology, at the expense of overemphasizing the role of descent. To quote Leach: “The evident importance attached to matrilateral and affinal kinship connections is not so much explained as explained away.”
R.C Brown for Kinship Structure or Descent Theory.
Ethnography : Radcliffe-Brown carried out extensive fieldwork in the Andaman Islands, Australia, and elsewhere. On the basis of this research, he contributed extensively to the anthropological ideas on kinship, and criticised Lévi-Strauss’s Alliance theory.
In his book , The Social Organization of Australian Tribes , He described social organization of australian tribes. Kurnai, the social organization of the aboriginal tribes of Australia. The basic elements of social structure in Australia are (i) the family, i.e., the group formed by a man and his wife and their children, and (2) the horde, a small group owning and occupying a definite territory or hunting ground. Together with these there is, of course, a grouping for social purposes on the basis of sex and age. It is on the basis of the family and the horde that the somewhat complex kinship organizations of Australia are built.
The horde is a small group of persons owning a certain area of territory, the boundaries of which are known, and possessing in common proprietary rights over the land and its products — mineral, vegetable and animal. It is the primary land-owning or land-holding group. Membership of a horde is determined in the first place by descent, children belonging to the horde of their father. There is normally, in the tribes about which we have adequate information, no provision by which a man could leave his own horde and be ‘adopted’ or ‘naturalized’ in another. Therefore, as a normal thing, male members enter the horde by birth and remain in it till death. In many regions the horde is exogamous. But even where there is not a strict rule against marriage within the horde, the great majority of marriages are outside the horde. The woman, at marriage, leaves her horde and joins that of her husband. The horde, therefore, as an existing group at any moment, consists of (i) male members of all ages whose fathers and fathers’ fathers belonged to the horde, (2) unmarried girls who are the sisters or daughters or son’s daughters of the male members, (3) married women, all of whom, in some regions, and most of whom, in others, belonged originally to other hordes, and have become attached to the horde by marriage.
It may be added that normally throughout Australia each horde is independent and autonomous, managing its own affairs and acting as a unit in its relations with other hordes. Throughout Australia hordes are grouped into larger local or territorial units, which will be spoken of as tribes. The primary mark of a tribe is that it consists of persons speaking one language, or dialects of one language. Its unity is primarily linguistic. The name of the tribe and the name of its language are normally the same. So that the easiest way to ascertain to what tribe an individual belongs is usually to ask him what language he speaks. In addition to this unity that comes from a common language there is also a unity of custom throughout the tribe. A tribe is commonly spoken of as possessing a certain territory, and is regarded as a land-holding group. So far as Australia is concerned, this is not quite accurate. It is true that each tribe may be regarded as occupying a territory, but this is only because it consists of a certain number of hordes, each of which has its territory. The territory of the tribe is the, total of the territories of its component hordes.
Descent Theory – Second Answer
Kinship was regarded as the theoretical and methodological core of social anthropology in the early and middle part of the 20th century. Although comparative studies gradually abandoned an explicit evolutionist agenda, there remained an implicit evolutionary cast to the way in which kinship studies were framed. Indeed, scholarly interest in the cross-cultural comparison of kinship institutions could be traced back to a set of questions deriving from the cultural evolutionists.
The central problem addressed by anthropologists of the early 20th century was directly related to the colonial enterprise and focused on understanding the mechanisms for maintaining political order in stateless societies. Given that such societies lacked centralized administrative and judicial institutions—the bureaucratic machinery of the state—how were rights, duties, status, and property transmitted from one generation to the next? Traditional societies accomplished this task by organizing around kinship relations rather than property. This distinction arose out of the models that had been developed by Maine and Morgan, in which cultural evolution was driven by the transition from status to contract forms of organization and from corporate to individual forms of property ownership.
Prominent British social anthropologists of this period, such as Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, and Fortes, generally advocated a functionalist approach to these questions. The major premises of functionalism were that every aspect of a culture, no matter how seemingly disparate (e.g., kinship terms, technology, food, mythology, artistic motifs), had a substantive purpose and that within a given culture these diverse structures worked together to maintain the group’s viability. For instance, these scholars saw the family as a universal social institution that functioned primarily to rear children. From their perspective this function was to a large degree self-evident and cross-culturally constant. The wider groupings recruited through kinship, which were the basis of political and economic organization, were much more culturally variable and hence of greater interest.
Fortes distinguished between the “private” or “domestic” domain of kinship and what he called the “politico-jural” domain. It was nevertheless true that Fortes in particular gave considerable explanatory weight to the emotional power of kinship. According to Fortes, what gave kinship its moral force was the “axiom of amity”—the idea that in the last analysis it is kin who can always be relied upon to help you out and who are the people you turn to when other help fails. Yet if this emotional content was the source of the power of kinship, it was also an area that lay beyond the province of anthropology. Fortes had been influenced by Freudian psychology, but his approach placed analyses of emotion and the unconscious mind in the domain of psychologists rather than anthropologists. Thus, British social anthropologists explored the ways in which kinship provided a basis for forming the kinds of groups—discrete, bounded, and linked to a particular territory—that were seen as necessary for a stable political order. Their explanations of these mechanisms became known as the descent theory of kinship.
Kinship is always “bilateral”; that is, it consists of relatives on both the mother’s and the father’s sides. Of course the relatives on both sides of any individual overlap with those of others, creating a web of interconnectedness rather than a discrete group. However, the recognition of one line of descent and the exclusion of the other provides the basis of a “unilineal” kinship system. In such systems descent defines bounded groups. The principle operates similarly whether the rule of descent is matrilineal (traced through the mother in the female line) or patrilineal (traced through the father in the male line).
Unilineal kinship systems were seen by British anthropologists of this period as providing a basis for the stable functioning of societies in the absence of state institutions. Generally, unilineal descent groups were exogamous. They also acted as corporations: their members held land in common, acted as a single unit with regard to substantive property, and behaved as one “person” in relation to other similarly constituted groups in legal and political matters such as warfare, feuds, and litigation. That is, the members of a lineage did not act as individuals in the politico-jural domain, instead conceiving themselves to a considerable extent as undifferentiated and continuous with each other. This corporateness was the basis of the stability and structure of a society formed out of unilineal descent groups.
The distinction between matrilineal and patrilineal systems did not have any obvious implications in terms of women’s political status, although it is sometimes assumed that a matrilineal kinship system must imply women’s greater political power. Anthropologists make a clear distinction between matriliny and matriarchy, however: the former denotes a method of reckoning kinship, while the latter denotes a system in which women have overall political control to the exclusion of men. Similarly, patriarchy denotes political control by men to the exclusion of women.
Although women may be more highly valued in matrilineal than patrilineal cultures, the anthropological data clearly indicate that hierarchical political systems (whether matrilineal or patrilineal) tend to be dominated by men and that no period of absolute matriarchy has ever existed. Despite plentiful evidence to the contrary, a notional era of “pure” matriarchy has been invoked as a theme in some very diverse contexts, including not only 19th-century cultural evolutionism but also the more recent discourses of environmentalism (especially ecofeminism), Neo-Paganism, and the so-called Goddess movement.
Personhood, cohesion, and the “matrilineal puzzle”
The differences between matrilineal and patrilineal systems nonetheless drew the nature of personhood to the attention of descent theorists. Studies of matrilineal systems suggested that a particular nexus of problems might arise regarding political continuity in a context where the holders of office (men) did not pass their status to their sons. If a man’s right to inherit an office was determined by who his mother was, then the political cohesion that seemed to be dependent on the father-son bond was potentially jeopardized. A number of solutions to what became known as the “matrilineal puzzle” were described, focusing variously on rules for marriage, residence, and succession. Perhaps the best-known of these is the avunculate, a custom in which men have an unusually close relationship with their sisters’ sons, often including coresidence.
The issues that underlay the so-called matrilineal puzzle were directly related to culturally specific notions about what constitutes a person. It was very clear that, in spite of wielding political authority, men in matrilineal systems occupied a marginal position as lineage members: they belonged by birth to the group of their mother, but on marriage they might be to some extent incorporated into their wife’s group in order to ensure the succession of her children. Because a man’s position as a member of a matrilineage was always to some degree compromised between affiliation to his mother’s group and to that of his wife, the extent to which he achieved full social personhood—that is, an identity altogether within either lineage—was limited. Fortes’s own work among the Tallensi of West Africa demonstrated very clearly that exactly the same argument could be made about women in a patrilineal system: women were always caught between being members of their father’s lineage and that of their husband. Not fully members of either group, they were not considered full social persons. However, the significance of men’s liminality vis-à-vis lineage membership seemed far greater and occupied more analytical space than that of women in mid-century studies, a view that reflected the androcentrism of the era’s researchers.
Critiques of descent theory
Although descent theory dominated early to mid-20th-century British kinship studies, a number of problems soon emerged. It became apparent that the depiction of societies as neatly ordered by unilineal descent into clearly bounded, nested units of different scale was quite far from everyday political reality. Personal experiences of kinship could vary considerably from the normative models described by some anthropologists; Evans-Pritchard, for instance, demonstrated that individuals could not always unequivocally identify the lineage to which they belonged. Furthermore, as scholars from Britain, France, and the United States increasingly undertook fieldwork outside Africa—for example, in Polynesia, Southeast Asia, or New Guinea—it became clear that kinship was not always organized through unilineal descent. Despite Radcliffe-Brown’s assertions to the contrary, bilateral (sometimes called “cognatic”) kinship as well as bilateral descent groups (reckoned in both the mother’s and the father’s lines) were found to be statistically common, even though they did not provide the same kind of clearly demarcated groupings as unilineal versions of kinship.
A further issue of contention was the extent to which descent theory minimized the importance of marriage in the structuring of kinship. Both Evans-Pritchard and Fortes asserted the importance of various links between descent groups. Such links assured the wider integration of kinship groups over a particular territory and could include links formed through marital connections as well as the recognition of kinship ties in the line that was complementary to the principal line of descent (i.e., matrilateral ties in a patrilineal kinship system or patrilateral ones in a matrilineal system). In their opinion, however, the principle of descent remained paramount in assuring the stable functioning of societies without states. Many prominent British anthropologists of this era were soon locked in forceful debate with their colleagues elsewhere over the significance of descent relative to that of marriage.