Bone and flesh, seed and soil: patriliny by father¿s brother¿s daughter marriage

Behind patrilineal descent is an asymmetrical descent structure based on sex, and father's brother's daughter marriage. Because it is a means of constructing the patrilineage, patrilateral parallel cousin marriages continue to exist. The Kurds in eastern and southeastern Turkey illustrate this apparent paradox with the position of women in the patrilineage and their structural relationship with the mother's brother. (FBD marriage, patriliny, Turkey, Kurds) ********** Patrilateral parallel cousin marriages occupy a special place in the study of kinship and marriage. Such marriages are characteristic of Middle East peoples and are referred to as preferred. Thus, "in some social contexts Middle Easterners assert that if a woman and her family choose not to marry a father's brother's son, his consent and that of his family must be obtained" (Eickelman 1998:169). Such consent implies that the father's brother's son has priority of marriage with the father's brother's daughter. The fact that tribal societies (e.g., Arabs and Kurds) where such practices are followed are also patrilineal makes father's brother's daughter (FBD) marriage problematic. Bourdieu (1991:32), for example, points out that "structuralism either ignores or brackets off" this problem, but structural-functionalist theory holds this marriage type provides stability in family and kinship relations. While Barth (1986:396) emphasizes that these marriages enhance in-group solidarity and prevent corporate group fission, Murphy and Kasdan (1959:18), in contrast, claim that the factor underlying segmentation is FBD marriage. These positions are in opposition, yet both attribute to FBD marriage the function of providing homeostasis for social and political organization. By contributing to maintaining harmony within the family (Khuri 1970:597), FBD marriage is credited with having a positive function for social and psychological stability, and economic factors reveal a similar stability. Through FBD marriage, property remains intact within the family (Rosenfeld 1958:1138), thus preserving established property relations. Underlying these arguments is the presumption that "parallel cousin marriage is the only structurally pertinent form of marriage: other forms of alliance do not constitute' normative unions'" (Atran 1985:667). Atran (1985:686) criticizes this presumption because it reduces kinship and marriage forms to "a single mechanical model," when FBD marriage should be understood as "a matter of social strategy." Bourdieu (1991:49) emphasizes that FBD marriage "can never be fully defined in genealogical terms," and separates practical kin, relatives that are present in a relation set by the individual, from official kin, those relatives that are included in the genealogy (Bourdieu 1991:33-35). For him, matrimonial strategies are material and symbolic capital, managed by relatives in practical groups who "rest on a community of dispositions (habitus) and interests which is also the basis of undivided ownership of the material and symbolic patrimony"(Bourdieu 1991:35). He points out that FBD marriage assumes various meanings and functions that differ with context. "Marriages which are identical as regards genealogy ... may thus have different, even opposite, meanings and functions, depending on the strategies in which they are involved [and that] any two marriages between parallel cousins may have nothing in common" (Bourdieu 1991:48). However, patrilineal descent is accepted as a given in these discussions and analyses are based on it. Although researchers (e.g., Eickelman 1998:171; Atran 1985:665) have pointed out that kin relations with both the father's and the mother's sides are equally important with tribal societies in the Middle East, these analyses are based on a presumed patrilineal descent system. That descent system is determined by indications such as to whom property is passed and from whom descent is traced (Patai 1965; Fortes 1971; Keesing 1975). …