ABSTRACT

However, living together and growing up together are important foci for the ordering of kinship relations, and the importance of women as the nucleus of affective ties within the household is projected into the wider kinship system. Radcliffe-Brown has said that '. . . we have to recognize that in many systems the structural unit consists of a woman and her children'. 'It is by the position of this structural unit in the total kinship structure that we can define the contrast between mother-right and father-right. In true motherright the unit group of mother and children is completely incorporated, jurally or legally, in the group of the woman's brothers and sisters. In true father-right the unit group is incorporated for jural purposes in a group consisting of brothers with their wives and children' (2). In the system with which we are dealing, the structural unit clearly consists of a woman and her children, and the difficulty lies not so much in determining where this unit is embedded for jural purposes as in seeing where males fit in relation to it at any particular time. It would perhaps be more correct to say that the significant structural unit is not so much a woman and her children as a woman, her daughters and their young children, for this would then high-light the fact that men do not exercise jural authority over their sisters and sisters' children, nor does the unit of a woman

and her children become attached to a male combination of father and sons, in the status of wife and children. In short we are dealing with neither true mother-right nor father-right. We have already established the fact that a woman with her children accepts the authority of a· male or males during the crucial period of her life when she is bearing children,but that the tendency is for women to assert their autonomy in their status as mothers, deriving their authority from -their control over their children even when they are adult. There is no 'matrilineal' system involved, and the configuration of domestic groups varies according to the differential application of the principles of the autonomy of a short (no more than three generation) matri-line, and the autonomy of a co-residential elemenmry family with nominal control by the husband-father. The latter is the 'ideal type' of the system, and it is by reference to it that the formal pattern of the kinship system is constructed. The system is bi-lateral, or cognatic, and descent is normally recognized to a depth of three generations. That is, to the extent of a contemporaneously-living three-generation group. The significant lines of descent have been experienced by ego sometime during his lifetime. If ego's grandparents died before he was born, or whilst he was very young he will either know nothing of them or be very uncertain about them. If he knew his grandparents then it is unlikely that he will know very much about their parents.