ABSTRACT
These considerations point to what has long been recognized in ethnographic description, if not in theory, as the structural nucleus of all kinship systems. I refer to the relationship of filiation to which I have already made frequent allusion in the analysis of our paradigmatic specimens. When I originally proposed the revival of this term (1953a), I stated that "filiation-by contrast with descent-is universally bilateral," but I refrained from closer definition. Later, taking into account subsequent research, I defined filiation as "the relationship created by the fact of being the legitimate child of one's parents."7 Originally I contrasted filiation with descent
6. Cf. Fortes, 1949c: 233-34, and passim. The special significance of firstborn children in Tikopia is discussed in Firth, 1956. This meticulous account of the ceremonies for the social incorporation of a child brings home a point that is apt to be overlooked in describing them as rites de passage, for they begin before the birth of a child and are spaced out over two or three years of the child's infancy, marking successive stages of its physical and social maturation. This singling out of the firstborn is extremely common, perhaps universal. The ritually and mystically sanctioned avoidances between Tallensi firstborns and their like sex parents dramatize strikingly the uniqueness of the filio-parental relationship by contrast, especially, with the joking and familiarity relationships of alternate generations, as I note later. Ashanti, similarly, single out a woman's first born (Fortes, 1950: 273). Cf. the eldest child among the Nuer. Evans-Pritchard writes : "The many peculiar prescriptions which adhere to the status of the eldest child may . . . be connected with his pivotal and ambiguous position between the families of his father and mother" (Evans-Pritchard; 1950: 391).
