Basic Terms and Concepts
Kinship:
Kinship is a method of acknowledging a relationship. It is a social bond initiated by genetic or blood ties as well as marriage. Kinship ties are of fundamental importance in every society all over the world. Everywhere, it is the social recognition and expression of family relationships formed on the basis of marriage, procreation or adoption. In fact, social recognition of a relationship is more important than a biological bond. If a relationship is not recognized or accepted socially, then it is not included within the realm of kinship. Before we delve into kinship, we need to understand what kin is. In common usage, people having ‘common blood relation’ and having ‘common ancestor’ are known as kins.
1. According to W. H. R. Rivers, “kinship is the social recognition of biological ties.”
2. According to Robin Fox, “Kinship is simply the relations between ‘kin’ that is persons related by real, putative or fictive consanguinity.”
3. According to John Lewis, kinship is “kinship is a social recognition and expression of genealogical relationships. It is not only actual but may be based on supposed ties of blood.”
4. According to A.R. Radcliffe Brown, Kinship is “a system of dynamic relations between person and person in a community, the behaviour of any two persons in any of these relations being regulated in some way, and to a greater or less extent by social usage.”
Lineage:
Lineage is a group of families having a common ancestor. According to Evan Pritchard (1940), lineage is a group of agnates that descend from the founder of a particular line. Logically it includes dead persons descended from the founder in order to know their genealogical position and to identify the living. He further suggests four stages of lineage segmentation based on their size, position in the segmentary system and functions. They are maximal lineage, major lineage, minor lineage and minimal lineage. The minimal lineage is the smallest unit and has a time depth of three to five generations. Majumdar (1962) discusses the lineage system as an extension of the joint family system in its wide scope. He further extended Evans-Pritchard’s four stage lineage in to six. They are Inter-village, Village, Lineage Group, Lineage, Sub-lineage and family respectively.
1. According to Lowie (1950), “the lineage is made up exclusively of provable blood relatives which denote all members who are demonstrably descended from a common ancestor or ancestress.”
2. Firth (1956) cited that “a lineage, meaning primarily a line of descent, is now taken also to mean a unilineal descent group, all members of which trace their genealogical relationship back to founding ancestor. If the lineage system is patrilineal (organitic), the members consist of men, their children and their sisters and they (the members) trace their descent through male, normally to an original male ancestor. If the system is matrilineal, the members consist of women, their children, and their brothers, tracing descent through female, normally to an original ancestress.”
Clan:
Tribal group is divided into clans. The clan is an important part of tribal social system. Majumdar and Madan (1956) have considered the sibs as clans and according to them, it is often the combination of a few lineages and descent. It is ultimately traced to a mythical ancestor who may be human, human like, animal, plant or even inanimate. According to Vidyarti (1976) clan can be defined as an exogamous division of a tribe, the members of which are held to be related to one another by some common ties, may be belief in descent from common ancestor, possession of a common totem or habitation of a common territory. A clan is constituted by including all the relatives of either her mother’s or the father’s lineage and all the off springs of ancestors in such a lineage. In such a manner, many lineages constitute a clan.
W. H. R. Rivers defined a clan as “an exogamous division of a tribe, the members of which are tied together by a belief in Common descent, Common possession of a totem or habitation of a Common territory.”
For example, a clan among the santal is named as hansda. The members of this clan respect ducks (local name: Hans) and do not eat the flesh of ducks because they believe themselves to be originated from ducks. Similarly, a clan among lodhas is nayek, whose totem is sal-fish. Killing or eating sal-fish is prohibited for this clan. More examples can be cited in this respect. One of the clan among oraon is named lakra which means tiger. The clan members never hunt tigers for showing regard to this ancestral animal.
Moiety:
Moieties are called half tribes. When a tribe is socially divided into only two groups based on its social activities, each group is called a moiety. This organization is known as a dual organization. The main activities of these two groups of the community regulate the social behaviour and acts of the people. Lowie (1950) describes a number of attributes of a moiety. Moiety may be exogamous, agamous or, more rarely, endogamous.
Phratry:
A tribe or sub-tribe is divided into a number of clans that are further grouped into three or more groups or clusters of clans in order to maintain their individuality on a higher order to form a phratry. In other words, a few clans unite to form a group called phratry. According to Lowie (1950), Morgan who conveniently applied the phratry to a group of two or more clans united for certain common objective. Further, he pointed out that phratry is evidently nothing but a convenient term for a kin linkage. According to Majumdar and Madan (1956), when a group of clans merge together for some reasons or the other the emergent grouping is called phratry. Phratry is more common in tribal India among the north eastern Himalayan tribes and a few tribes of Middle India.
Incest Taboo:
An incest taboo is a universal feature in the world, which means a prohibition on intercourse as found in all societies between closely related kins like parents and children or between siblings. Sometimes, it extends to the cousins. Incest is a very ancient belief and widely accepted among the primitive people of the world. The incest ban encouraged marriage outside one’s social group and thus helped the members of different groups to form a larger cooperating group.
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