The Na are a Tibeto-Birman-speaking group, living in the Himalayan foothills of Yunnan and Sichuan provinces in southern China, who are matrilineal and matrilocal. Their residence unit is made up of groups of sisters living with their children of both sexes and with their brothers, the children’s maternal uncles. They do not have marriage. The men leave their sisters at night to visit the women in the neighbouring houses who have accepted them as temporary lovers. Even in the case of a long-lasting liaison, each man or woman can have other amorous relations at the same time and can separate when he or she chooses. Conjugal families are very rare, and if their number has grown in the past decades, it is due to pressure from the Communist rulers, hostile to the ‘furtive visits’ and concerned with imposing monogamy, a mark of civilization and of course of the superiority of socialism. Even in this extreme case, though, where there is no marriage or official direct exchange between families, an indirect exchange occurs and an adelphic family is formed in which it is the women who provide the children with their identity. The man is like the rain, a shower that awakens a seed-child in the woman’s womb, where it then develops. In Na society, then, there is no marriage, and therefore there are no husbands and no fathers. But the family exists, an adelphic family where the incest taboo between brother and sister is primordial and where any sexual allusion within the walls of the home is forbidden. The mothers and the maternal uncles exercise their authority jointly over the children engendered by the women of the house.52 The residence pattern is the same for men and for women: matrilocal.
RESIDENCE MODES
A great diversity of family types is engendered by the conjunction of different descent rules and different residence patterns. In matrilineal societies, residence can be matrilocal (Na, Rhades, Tetum), uxorilocal (Hopi), duolocal (Ashanti and Senufo), avunculocal (the family lives with the wife’s mother’s brother: Trobrianders), virilocal (the wife lives with her husband’s family). Patrilineal societies usually have residence patterns that are patrilocal (the family moves in with the husband’s father: Melpa, Baruya, Tallensi) or virilocal (the family settles on the husband’s land: Wolof,53 Tamil54 or Reunion Island). In Dobu,55 in southeastern New Guinea, a couple alternates residence according to years, sometimes patrilocal, sometimes uxorilocal. Cognatic societies often combine these principles, since one can choose to live with one’s maternal or paternal kin. In Samoa, on the other hand, women leave their village for that of their husband (virilocal residence). Finally, in Western Europe, Japan, the United States, but also among the Inuit, residence is neolocal, the couples choosing their place of residence without reference to their parents. It is easy to see that the various forms of residence have different effects on the children’s socialization, as they live closer to their paternal or their maternal kin, or find themselves surrounded by everyone, seeing their father in the daytime, their maternal uncle at night, or their maternal uncle in the daytime but never at night, etc.
| RESIDENCE PATTERNS Matrilocal Uxorilocal Duolocal Ambilocal Avunculocal Patrivirilocal Virilocal Neolocal Natolocal |
POLYGAMY AND POLYANDRY
Lastly we will mention some other principles that also help determine different family and group structures: polygyny and polyandry (the possibility for a man to have several wives – in Islam he is allowed four, plus concubines – or for a woman to have several husbands). Polygamy is widespread in Africa, among the Muslim populations of Asia, and in Melanesia. However, it is lessening with the Christianization of these populations, which imposes monogamy and restricts (the Orthodox Church) or forbids (the Roman Catholic Church) divorce. Polyandry remains limited to certain regions of the Himalayas, India, Amazonia and Oceania. A very rare and perhaps unique case in North America were the Shoshone, who practised both polygyny and polyandry.56 Polyandry can be adelphic (Tibet57) or not (Guayaki58). In the first instance, a woman marries a group of brothers, and the children are attributed successively to each of the brothers, beginning with the oldest, or are all regarded as descendants of the oldest brother. The main reason for adelphic marriages is to avoid dispersing family assets. In the second case, a woman has several husbands who are unrelated to each other, and the children are attributed to each man in succession.
Let us mention also the importance of the age of the persons getting married. Among the Siberian Chukchee59 a young woman can ‘marry’ a three-year-old boy, whom she will raise along with the children she conceives with her ‘authorized lovers’. The young Arapesh girl60 is betrothed at a very early age, around six or seven, and will go to live with her future husband’s family, where she will be brought up by her in-laws. In Australian Aboriginal society, the age difference may be as much as fifteen years or more, and here, too, the husband may raise his wife as his daughter, as it were. Finally, large differences are introduced in the internal functioning of families, in their members’ behaviours and in the exercise of kinship in general, depending on whether or not divorce is allowed to end the marriage that brought about the family (divorce or separation, since for co-habiting couples divorce is meaningless because there was no marriage to begin with). Whether or not individuals are allowed to remarry after divorce and on what conditions also has an influence. The question arises, too, of the remarriage of a widow or a widower. In the Christian West, because marriage is a sacrament for Catholics and the spouses are supposed to become ‘one flesh’ after their marriage, the bond cannot be dissolved and divorce is forbidden. Divorce was also banned among the Incas,61 and in present-day India it is almost unknown, even if it is permitted by law. The woman who asks for a divorce finds it hard to remarry. And if a man divorces, he runs the risk of having to return his wife’s dowry. Divorce is forbidden in Baruya culture. A man can repudiate his wife, but in this case he gives her to a brother or a parallel cousin, who takes her as a second or third wife.
DIVORCE
Divorce exists in numerous societies and is sometimes practised so intensively that an individual marries and divorces several times, which entails the appearance and disappearance of a succession of more or less reconstituted families. Generally speaking, the fate of the children after their parents’ divorce or separation is decided by custom. Among the Touareg, custom dictates that the sons go with their father and the daughters with their mother. In matrilineal societies, since children belong to the mother’s and not to the father’s lineage, divorce is much more frequent than in patrilineal societies. This is the case with the Trobriand Islanders, the Hopi and so forth.
BACHELORHOOD
A last word on bachelorhood and the status of bachelors in most societies. In many societies, for example the Baruya, it is unthinkable and forbidden not to marry. All individuals, unless they are gravely handicapped, must marry. Among the Inca62 all men having reached twenty-five years of age and all women having reached fourteen were supposed to be married or betrothed. The imperial administration took systematic population censuses and forced those who delayed to marry, sometimes even appointing a spouse. Nevertheless, remaining unmarried is valued in many societies when it is associated with the exercise of an important social function – religious or other – that demands partial renunciation of sexuality and the responsibilities of founding a family. This is the case among the Duna of New Guinea and other groups,63 where the masters of the male initiations remain unmarried for life but secretly marry a spirit-woman, who controls the fertility of the land, the abundance of the game in the forest and who is supposed to be without a vagina. The man is thus a bachelor in his village but a married man in the forest, where he spends most of his time, safe from the pollution and dangers entailed in sexual relations with women. In medieval Western Christendom, after the split between the Roman and Orthodox Catholic Churches, the Roman Church imposed celibacy on priests and monks, who found themselves married with the Church, which was represented as the mystic bride of the crucified Christ. Nuns became the brides of Christ, as attested by the ring on their finger. Like the Duna master of initiations, they were at once virgins among humans and married to a god. This is also the case with the traditional Indian ‘renouncers’.64
As for those bachelors who had no good reason to forego