Clans and marriages

Various authors from around the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the twentieth century write of the complexity of the systems of clans and totems of some of the societies, some of the peoples of the world, and the associated rules about marriages, particularly the first north Americans and the first Australians. I have been struggling to get to grips with this and decided that coming up with my own system might help me to get a grip.

Struggling which included dipping into references 1, 2 and 3.

We suppose our society consists of closed population of people. People who are born, who marry and who die in the ordinary way.

We suppose our society to be illiterate. There is no record, other than that that can be memorised and handed down through the generations. Or perhaps invented.

We suppose the existence of the institution of more or less monogamous marriage, in the ordinary way.

We suppose a set of clans. Every person belongs to exactly one clan. We don’t do sub-clans, common enough in the real world.

Every clan has a totem – often an animal of some kind – but no two clans have the same totem. In some societies the name of the clan is the totem. Depending on the society, there are likely to be rules governing relations between people and their totems. It may, for example, be forbidden for a person to kill his totem animal, let alone eat it. We are not concerned in what follows with this side of things.

A society may be patrilineal, with clan membership being taken from the father, or matrilineal with clan membership being taken from the mother. The former has the merit of pleasing the physically stronger member of the marriage, the latter of being more strongly determined: one can be more sure about the identity of the mother than about that of the father.

The idea being that each clan contains roughly the same number of people: significant and sustained deviance puts the society under stress and would probably result in change.

We suppose that we have a population of names and that every name is associated with exactly one clan. A name may or may not be obviously linked to the clan or its totem, with different societies having different ideas about this. With one complication being that the link between name and clan might be clear enough at the time, certainly for whoever gave the name, but might not be at all clear some time after the event. Any one name might plausibly link to any one of several clans.

Names may be sexed. Possibly just some or most of them.

In a patrilineal society of degree zero, each person takes a name for the clan of the father. In a matrilineal society, it is the clan of the mother.

In a society of degree one, each person takes a name for the clan of each of his two parents. In the case of a patrilineal society, the primary name is that for the clan of the father, in a matrilineal society, the clan of the mother. 

In a society of degree two, each person takes a name for the clan of each of his four grandparents. In the case of a patrilineal society, the primary name is that for the clan of the father’s father, in a matrilineal society, the clan of the mother’s mother. 

Beyond that we do not go; things get too complicated for an illiterate society, even one which places great store on memorizing esoteric knowledge. As it is, complications like creating new clans and merging old clans are going to test the guardians of that esoteric knowledge.

In all three cases, marriage is prohibited in the case that the man and the woman concerned are in or related by name to the same clan. Permitted otherwise.

Depending on the number of clans and the number of names, the absence of reading and writing may mean that the society needs ritual experts to memorise and manage these things. There may be disputes and debates. I shall return to these last in the context of the Iatmul of Papua New Guinea in due course. In the meantime, see reference 4.

A major consequence

This marriage rule is based on clan, on what anthropologists call, or at least used to call, classification. It will not give, for example, the same result as the rules of the Catholic Church.

In particular, a lot of people will not be able to marry, in consequence of their clan membership, who are not related otherwise, who would be allowed to marry by the Church. Contrariwise, some people will be able to marry. who might not be allowed to marry by the Church.

Some details

A society of degree zero must have at least two clans.

In a matrilineal society of degree zero, a father may marry his daughter.

A society of degree one must have at least four clans. Each person has exactly two names and the two names of the person he marries must be not include either of his names.

Then things start to get more complicated. A society of degree two must have at least eight clans. Each person has exactly four names and the four names of the person he marries must not include any of his names.

In the figure above, we started with ego in clan A with additional names b, c and d. This makes a good start to the grand-parents row as we have the four clan names. Then the parents row. But what about all the other names?

But where do we start? We can’t just start at the top and work down as that will fail at the second row. So we have to have a stab at the top two rows and see how working down goes from there. 

In a patrilineal society of degree zero, a man may marry his mother’s brother’s daughter (left) but not his father’s brother’s daughter (right). But in a patrilineal society of degree one, a man may not marry any of his first cousins. 

A creation story

 

It is easy enough to build a tree of all of ego blood ancestors or a tree of all his blood descendants. But it all gets terribly complicated when one tries to do the whole story for a large group of people; quite unmanageable visually.

The snap above is a tree of the first variety, going back to the gods in blue, the names of which were given, as part of the first creation. After that the rules can do their business, remembering that we have left out the business that a clan can have a whole lot of names – a whole lot more to be remembered. Here we simply denote a clan of an individual by an upper case letter and the other three names by lower case letters.

One could model this sort of thing in Excel, giving the model a starting configuration and then rolling it forward, rather in the way of the once popular cellular automatons. With the difference that one would need a good dose of random intervention to generate vital events; births, marriages and deaths. In this way, for example, one could estimate the length of patrilineal lines or the expected life span of a clan.

A tree

I have come across this tree, illustrating our sort of rules, at least twice, with this one being lifted from reference 7, with my copy being a photocopy. But, unusually, Google Images, while it knows all about it, cannot produce a better quality image.

Barnes points me to reference 8 where the original is to be found, reproduced above.

But not the first edition. One wonders how Barnes came across it and whether he flogged through it all, with the Internet Archive copy – of an original to be found in the John Adams Library of Boston – running to 1,200 odd pages. Esoteric knowledge run wild indeed.

For the avoidance of doubt, esoteric (above), is for the inner-circle, while the riff-raff have to make do with the exoteric. A distinction which I needed to be reminded of - a distinction probably confused by cross-over from 'exotic'.

Conclusions

The real societies, mostly in the past, about which I have been reading, did not appear to be organised on the above lines. But hopefully, if I go back to them, I shall now be able to make sense of what they do do – both to regulate incest in marriage and to give the men something to talk about, to argue about in their clubs. To provide an excuse to create priests, the guardians of esoteric knowledge.

From where I associate to the role of football in conversation today.

I have been impressed by how theoretical work on all this seems to be dominated by field work done maybe a hundred years ago or more. Perhaps from a time when clans and totems were much stronger than they are now, even in places like Papua New Guinea. And I have been reminded how much missionaries were mixed up in it all - from where I associate to the rather more recent missionaries of references 5 and 6.

References

Reference 1: Totem and taboo – S. Freud – 1913.

Reference 2: Totemica: A supplement to ‘Totemism and Exogamy’ – J. G. Fraser – 1937.

Reference 3: The Savage Mind – Claude Lévi-Strauss – 1962, 1966. The 1966 translation of the 1962 ‘La Pensée Sauvage’. 

Reference 4: Naven: A survey of the problems suggested by a composite picture of the culture of a New Guinea tribe drawn from three points of view – Gregory Bateson – 1936.

Reference 5: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2016/01/life-among-anacondas.html. 

Reference 6: https://global.sil.org/. ‘The freedom to use our own languages provides an opportunity to unlock our full potential to succeed in education, thrive in society and encounter God in the deepest ways imaginable’.

Reference 7: Genealogies – Barnes, J.A – 1967.

Reference 8: Les lois civiles dans leur ordre naturel; le droit public, et Legum delectus – Domat J – 1777.