ABSTRACT
Uxoricentric and sibling-based descent groups differ in how and why they come about. The crises that give birth to sibling-based kinship are those of an unpredictable and increasingly hostile niche that threatens the economic and demographic integrity of the domestic group. The relative economic stability of the gynecocratic core's senior household makes uxoricentric formations better able to endure poverty's uncertain niche. The principles along which uxoricentric descent groups are organized contain many of the same structural assumptions that govern sibling-based descent's constructive possibilities. The two forms of kinship differ only in that uxoricentric kinship contains an additional set of structural premises that are located outside lower-class life itself. The antagonistic principles are now experienced by those living in uxoricentric descent groups as the limiting possibilities and extremes of uxoricentrism itself. The logic of uxoricentric kinship transforms the organizational sense of patrilateral and sibling-based descent formations into an emergent set of axioms that are internal to uxoricentrism itself.
