Descent and the Corporate Group

So far i have considered filiation as the primary credential or set of credentials for activating the initial status relationship of what must necessarily expand into a hierarchy of status relationships for a person to be a complete right-and duty-bearing unit in his society. In contrast to the systems hitherto considered, a system in which simple filiation is the sole and exclusive source of full civic, moral, and ritual status would be one in which no cognizance is taken of ancestry antecedent to the parents for any social purposes. Rights over persons and in property, inheritance and succession, ritual alignments and duties, all such material and institutional representations of status capacities would be determined solely by the recognized relationship of children to their parents. Some features of Australian social systems bear this stamp. Caste membership among the Kandyan Sinhalese and, it would seem, the credentials that determine devolution of property from the parental to the filial generation, seem to fit this pattern. The modern Euro-American family also, in most cases, fits this model, as witness the limitation of the incest taboos and normal intestate inheritance to the nuclear family. The entailed estate, which figures so conspicuously in mid-Victorian novels, is unheard of among ordinary English families today. ¹