Minimal Communities and Their Organization: Kinship Groups, Families, and Marriage Forms
摘要
A person is born into a social group setting, and is part of some version of such a setting all over one’s life. That constantly changing group guarantees sufficient conditions for the development of all human beings who are involved in the social relations with one another. These relations are simultaneously synchronic—kinship group exists for any person at any given time in some form—and diachronic—the line of inheritance of social relevance of parental gender plays an important role. In each society, we can find moments of patrilineality (transfer of symbolic and economic resources from fathers to sons) interspersed with matrilineality (from mothers to daughters). The two lineages of continuity across generations are woven together in intricate ways in each society,.