A kindred is thus not a descent group, in the sense of a lineage or a clan; it is a collection of people related by various close or distant ties with whom Ego maintains relations and whom, for example, Ego will invite to his wedding or whose funeral he will attend; whereas he will ask only certain ones – a brother-in-law rather than a brother, a maternal uncle rather than his father – for help or advice in certain circumstances. Quite often, the ties with certain kinsmen fade even before these relatives die because they have moved away or their position or social class has changed thereby creating too much distance with respect to Ego, not because of their kin ties, which do not change, but because of their social success or comedown – or even decline (in the eyes of society and/or Ego).
But we must not forget that, in addition to Ego’s kindred, there is another network, formed by his friends, some of whom are neighbours, others, more numerous, having become friends in other contexts – school, workplace, sports, etc. With his friends, the network of Ego’s personal relations with a portion of society’s members – people he will listen to or who will listen to him, people he will help or who will help him – expands.
Nevertheless, in Europe, as in America and Australia, with their myriads of families with short memories, there are a few who conserve (and even cultivate) the memory of ancestors going back several generations, of kin in the direct line but also collaterals. Without belonging to the European aristocracy, now of marginal social importance, these families carry a name that raises them above other families at the local, regional, national or even international level. This can be the name of an industrial dynasty, like the Schneiders in France, or a political dynasty, like the Kennedys or the Bushes in the United States. Because certain members of these families have made a name for themselves through various deeds whereby the family has gained exceptional prestige, their descendants are invited to preserve the memory of their ties with these famous ancestors.
The name becomes an immaterial shared asset that is usually unaccompanied by any other form of shared property – material or other – but which may be used by those who carry it as social capital. Moreover, it is in their interest to do so. Some even feel obliged to show themselves worthy of their name, either by doing as well as their illustrious ancestor in the same area or by excelling in others.
We thus see the spontaneous creation of cognatic pseudo-descent groups strongly skewed to the male line, which bring together all those who have inherited a name and pass it on to their children (men) or who carried the name in childhood but do not transmit it to their children (women) although they teach them that they have a stake in this name through their mother, and so on. Much less visible, and as though dotted, female lines thus grow up alongside the immediately visible male lines. Sometimes these groups, who keep their family tree up to date – including direct descendants and affines – hold family reunions, which everyone or almost everyone attends to get to know each other personally and count their members (like the Monods, whose reunions can number up to 700 persons from several countries in Europe). All that would need to happen is for these groups of families to own in common material wealth – land, factories, banks – or inherit political (or other) functions in order for genuine descent groups to come into being that would adopt rules for distributing the use of these resources among the families and for transmitting the task and honour of carrying out these functions to one or another of their number. It is clear, in this case, that the generalization of private, individual and family-held property, of the means of production and of money, make it difficult for descent groups to come into being, for they would tend to close ranks through the systematic application of a criterion of kinship (perhaps completed by other criteria allowing the inclusion or exclusion of certain types of kin).
Proof that this possibility once existed in Europe can be found by observing the customs of the inhabitants of Karpathos Island in the Aegean Sea. Until sometime in the 1920s, in order to avoid dividing the family assets, the rare farming lands and the houses, only first-born children married: the eldest son of one family with the eldest daughter of another.20 The eldest children bore a name, Kanacares, which distinguished them from their younger siblings. The latter were obliged to emigrate or, if they stayed on, to serve their elder sibling after he or she married. The assets that formed the dowry of each of the spouses were again passed on to the next generation, to the eldest sons and daughters. These marriage rules ultimately ensured the circulation of land, houses and statuses in two parallel lines of descent and inheritance, one male and the other female. The system disappeared sometime between the two World Wars, when the value of land fell and money became the principal form of wealth: the younger siblings who had emigrated to the United States or Australia and had made money came home and were able to marry an eldest daughter. The old logic was broken and did not survive.21 Today Karpathos has roughly the same matrimonial regime as the rest of Greece.
It must be stressed that kindred systems are not restricted to Europe. They are found in Borneo, among the Iban, where the kindred underpins the organization of the ‘long houses’, the Bilek, described by Derek Freeman,22 and in New Guinea among the Garia,23 and so on.
And if we extend a person’s kindred to all those individuals linked to him by cognatic ties, we will find ourselves in the Polynesian or Malagasy systems, where the kindred is a principle that works in tandem with the existence of cognatic descent groups. Taking yet another step, we will point out that the extended kindred, as the collection of Ego’s cognates and affines, exists in all descent systems – unilineal, bilineal and non-lineal. But it is usually pushed into the background, placed in sleep mode, or completely masked by the interplay of rules that assigns an individual to a descent group that is not Ego-centered. The Nuer,24 a society whose patrilineal system stresses agnatic kinship and lineages descending from a common ancestor, a relationship they designate by the term buth, use another word, jimarida, for Ego’s kindred, that is to say not only paternal and maternal kin but also the affines of Ego’s lineage.
The elegant table below, borrowed from Needham,25 shows the various descent modes that have been discussed. The letters m and f stand for ‘male’ and ‘female’.262728
| m → m | patrilineal | Nuer, Tallensi,26 Turk,27 Baruya, Juang, etc. |
| f → f | matrilineal | Trobriand, Khasi, Iroquois, Ashanti, Nagovisi, Hopi, etc. |
| [m → m] + [f → f] | duolineal | Yako, Herrero, Kondaiyankottai Maravar |
| [m → f] + [f → m] | cross bilineal | Mundugumor |
| [m → m] + [f → f] | parallel bilineal | Orokolo, Omie, Apinaye |
| mf → mf | non-lineal | Maori, Imerina,28 Penan |
The formula mf → mf, when it does not function as a rule for constructing cognatic descent groups, as in Polynesia, also represents (European, Euro-American) kindred-based systems, which are cognatic as well but do not give rise to genuine long-lasting descent groups.
DISTRIBUTION OF DESCENT MODES
Although we are far from having even a relatively complete inventory of the descent modes characteristic of the some 10,000 societies or local groups that currently exist on the face of the earth, taking our cue from the figures advanced by Roger Keesing,29 we can suggest the following distribution:
| Patrilineal | Matrilineal | Duo-bilineal | Cognatic |
| 45% | 12% | 4% | 39% |
1. Patrilineal systems predominate in the Chinese zone, in India, in the expansion zone of Islam, in a portion