CONFIRMING UNILOCAL RESIDENCE IN NATIVE NORTH AMERICA

Abstract

Some scientists have been reluctant to cite the coded entries of the Human Relations Area Files, especially concerning marriage and residence, because the codes are largely based on normative statements rather than empirical data. In this article, HRAF assertions about postmarital residence among Crees and Mvskoke Creeks are tested against empirical databases. For Crees, 97.6 per cent of early historical first marriages were found to be patrilocal, in accordance with tribal law. For Creeks, 94.9 per cent of such marriages were matrilocal, also according to tribal law. (Cree, Creek, postmarital residence, HRAF) ********** Data collected by human geneticists in recent years seem to show regular patterns in the global and regional distributions of human alleles (Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza 1994; Seielstad, Minch, and Cavalli-Sforza 1998; Stoneking 1998; Mesa et al. 2000; Jorde et al. 2000). To understand the mating patterns and social practices that might have produced these regularities, geneticists have followed the example of paleodemographers, ecologists, and epidemiologists in consulting standard ethnographic references such as the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) (Keeley 1988; Sellen and Mace 1999; Flaxman and Sherman 2000). (2) These and related publications provide descriptions of kinship structures and marriage practices, especially among small-scale, non-Western societies. In Murdock's Atlas of World Cultures (1981), for example, many ethnographically known societies have been described and categorized by their definitions of incest, and by patterns of spouse selection and postmarital residence (Barry and Schlegel 1980). (3) An important and long-standing question among ethnologists, however, is whether these characterizations merely represent ideal or normative patterns elicited from native people by ethnographic researchers, or whether they represent the actual practice of each society at the time of the fieldwork, during the so-called ethnographic present (Driver 1973; Moore 1994:363; Bernard 1994). There are many reasons why normative characterizations of social practice were not or sometimes could not be confirmed empirically at the time of the original ethnographic fieldwork, mostly in the early and middle twentieth century. Foremost among these reasons was a lack of time and money, since fieldwork at that time was often restricted to a period of twelve to eighteen months, only enough time to witness one seasonal cycle of cultural events. Another difficulty in collecting data on matters of marriage and kinship was the frequent unwillingness of native people to discuss such sensitive subjects as paternity and adoption (Barnes 1978; Rivers 1968; Dyke and Morrill 1980). Also, genealogical inquiries in some societies were sometimes confounded by native name taboos and complex kinship systems that were frequently difficult for an outsider to penetrate (Amadiume 1993; Chagnon 1974:90-103). In addition, there may have been indifference to empirical data on the part of some sociocultural anthropologists whose main interest was in religion or rituals rather than demography or human biology. It seems significant that ethnographies written from a quantitative perspective, such as those by Birdsell (1993) and Friedlaender (1987), were published by anthropologists who were emphatically biological in orientation, or by teams of fieldworkers that included a biological anthropologist. With them, as with current human geneticists, biological practice was more important than normative culture, and much of their work depended on the quantity and reliability of their genealogical data. And last, with the eclipse of structural functionalism by structuralism in the 1960s and '70s, many kinship analysts have been more concerned with the formal systematics of kinship than with kinship as a charter for role behavior (Peletz 1995:346-51; Fat 1990; Godelier, Trautman, and Fat 1998). …