Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) is one of the more thorough kinship books written during the late 19th century. It’s worth noting his work because he appears to have been at the cutting of a science of kinship that has basically faded from popular memory.
Morgan had previously done enormous legwork in his Systems of Consanguinity (1871) which contains an exhaustive list of kinship terms from the “Ganowanian” (Native American) family of languages, as well as Asian languages including Southern India. When comparing, for example, the Tamil system of kinship terminology with the Native American systems (which are fairly uniform, save for the Eskimo which come much later through a second freezing of the Bering Strait) there are striking similarities. A man refers to his brother’s children as his own children, but his sister’s children are his nephews and neices. A woman refers to her sister’s children as her own children, but her brother’s children are her neices and nephews. This unique system is apparently shared between the two disparate cultures in India and North America. In China we can see a blend between the Malayan and the Turanian (Mongolian). Morgan also details Aryan kinship terms, which blend with the Tamil system as one moves further north in India. (My details might be spotty, you can see his book for yourself here https://archive.org/details/systemsofconsang00morgrich/systemsofconsang00morgrich/page/n6/mode/1up and you can peruse my lengthy notes here https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/88na10l4pygvvkwzopvx5/Systems-of-Consanguinity-and-Affinity-of-the-Human-Family-Lewis-H-Morgan-EJ-notes.txt?rlkey=v5gt0cxy1fj2vhkn0ye400wa8&dl=0)
This is important research because it demonstrates that, though there is a world of difference between the kinship terms in Southern India compared to those among Native Americans, the kinship systems *themselves* have remarkable staying power. I have previously called this a “kinship mesh network.” We don’t think about kinship today, but it’s every part of our system as it ever was. Dowry, brideprice, blood feud enforcement, inheritance, and clan affiliation are all baked into the family system, without which we don’t have a next generation. It’s worth noting some interesting varieties of kinship systems to show how they are uniquely fitted to their locale.
The Tibetan polyandrous system allows for brothers to have mutual conjugal access to a single wife in a virilocal household (wife moves to husbands(‘) estate), and many of those brothers might remain unmarried as monks in the local temple. Inheritance passes through the brothers’ line, though paternity will likely be ambiguous. Land is kept within the agnatic line. It’s likely that a Tibetan temple-building system could not arise if not for this unique situation: large temples require stockpiling of male labor over generations, and their monasteries will absorb unmarried men (today’s so-called “incels”), which produces a certain system of Tibetan Buddhism. If one brother were to break from this system and, say, become a polygamist to the exclusion of his brothers, then they will have less incentive to invest their labor locally, seeking a wife elsewhere, and the polygamous situation would put excess demands on the female population, which would naturally increase their brideprice. This would rapidly upset the balance, and Tibetan Buddhism would have to either reform or be replaced with some other thing.
In traditional Chinese society, the first born male remains in the estate, and he brings in a bride. Other brothers might do the same but either splinter off to adjacent parts of the estate, or else perhaps move nearby. Moving far away as a male would result in a reduction in status, since one’s ancestor tablets would then be far away. Bride price payments are incredibly high, since the wife will often bring in a dowry which she retains in escrow in the event of abandonment, or perhaps she might use it to help the husband in his business. It’s her bargaining chip in the relationship. She and the husband essentially form a small corporation at the estate, which they conduct as a business, bringing in lower status men as laborers, and sometimes allowing the husband to bring in concubines (the idea of adultery being somewhat “null” among men, but again checked by the wife’s dowry). Her tablet migrates to the husband’s shrine. Other brothers might compete for segments of the estate, but the firstborn’s wife will naturally work against this. The firstborn’s mother will naturally be hostile to his wife, a contentious relationship known to traditional Chinese families, and so her ability to pull the strings in the right directions will determine how peaceful her stay is in her husband’s estate. If the firstborn were to arbitrarily move away instead of taking the family estate, the parents would not have a caretaker in their old age. If the couple were to arbitrarily give their children the female’s name instead of the male’s, then they would have to migrate to another spirit shrine, reducing the tribute given to the family gods and (superstitiously) increasing the chance of famine, infertility, and other calamities. Chinese ancestor worship would have to change (Goody, 1984). It’s difficult to imagine Confucian ancestor worship preceding the Chinese kinship system. Kinship is far more rigid, and the details of the religion will conform to it accordingly.
Matrilineal systems are equally self-enforcing, especially through the blood-feud system. Among the Seneca-Iroquois, a member of phratry 1 (with 4 totem groups headed by Bear) must marry a member of phratry 2 (also 4 totems, headed by Deer) though in later times the clans were free to intermarry within an individual phratry. Descent was reckoned through the female, so children took the mother’s totem, and marriages tended to be uxorilocal (man moves to woman’s clan, unless he marries a captive of course). Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy details restrictions on the individual clan marriages. At any rate, the system produced a web of relations between the Iroqouis clans: feuds were checked by the fact that a clan would have 2-8 different totem groups living together in its territory, bound by marriage and mutually partaking in ceremonies. So when someone from phratry 1 was killed by someone from phratry 2, the two phratries (comprising a tribe) would meet and negotiate the issue, deciding whether to acquit, levy a fine, or issue something drastic like the death penalty. The killer’s phratry 2, by being intermarried into the victim’s phratry 1, was incentivized to seek a solution. For the killer’s phratry to shield him from justice would spell disaster for every inter-phratric marriage, each of which would then feel the politics of one spouse being associated with a killer and the other spouse with a victim. Blood-payment would hopefully be made without a war. As I’ve mentioned before, matrilineal systems with uxorilocal marriages (man moves to wife) have an inheritance transfer issue: any resources that the father earns have to be shipped to his sister (since children inherit through the maternal uncle, not the biological father). It’s physically impossible, then, for a man to build a house and give it to his sister’s children since they’re physically removed in a separate clan, unless they move to his clan later, something his neices’ grandfather will reject since their land is managed through the gens that goes through the female line. Matrilineal systems strike this balance: unfortified cities with wide blood-feud networks to protect against random violence. So if an Iroquois man decided to arbitrarily marry a woman within his own Totem group (which, if big enough, might give him choice over women who are his 2nd or 3rd biological cousins) and thereby pass his Totem to his own sons, maintain land through the male line, and stockpile resources to build a fortified city, then this will drastically upset the blood-feud balance: not only can his offspring now attack different clans without worrying about politics following them back home, they have their own fortifications that are impossible to create in the surrounding matrilineal systems. We can think of this sudden patrilineal system being like a cancer that must be either eradicated by the surrounding matrilineal systems, or else they all have to turn patrilineal themselves to compete, and this is exactly what we see in Rome, Greece, Israel, and Arabia. It’s why the Abraham story is so interesting in the Bible: he is transitioning from the Canaanite matrilineal system to patrilineal, and this is extremely dangerous. Jacob is doing the same thing: marrying into Laban’s matrilineal family, stealing his wives and children away, and creating a patrilineal confederacy called Israel which became one of the most feared militaries in the Levant. So in an anomalous, patrilineal Iroquois system, we might expect it to eventually coalesce into a monotheistic, Great Spirit movement that rejected all past totems. Kinship here again is upstream from the local religion.
Back to Morgan’s work, we see that kinship mesh networks are self-reinforcing, even when the languages themselves continue shifting. It’s hard enough to change a language, but changing a kinship system is nearly impossible and only happens a handful of times in recorded history. We can see a major shift from matrilineal to patrilineal systems during the Catastrophe ~1300 BC. The preponderance of fortified cities during the Bronze Age is evidence that there was most likely already some kind of in nacent patrilineal descent system in place, which would have been necessary to manage copper and tin mining towns, build bronze forges, and construct walls, chariots, and structures that could hold hundreds or thousands of horses, or at least house enough footsoldiers to support contract charioteers who brought their own horse and hardware. Merneptah, the military champion of Egypt’s 19th Dynasty, married Isetnofret II who was possibly his sister, and their son Seti II married his own sister. Egyptian monarchs had this tendency to marry their siblings because 1) if you claim to be a god, then incest laws conveniently don’t apply to you, and 2) this allowed them to maintain land ownership in the male line and build up fortified cities, while the rest of Egypt remained in an exogamous, matrilineal system like ancient Arabia (see Smith’s book on ancient Arab kinship). We might imagine some patrilineal systems could have arisen this way: with a royal family forcing a shift from matrilineal to patrilineal, momentarily engaging in incest in order to consolidate wealth to the male (agnatic) line. Again we see it with Abraham, marrying his own (half-)sister Sarah to make such a transition. The transition might have also come about due to a struggle to power between siblings. The mother of Romulus and Remus was a female wolf, which is evidence of matrilineal totemism, but Romulus’s victory over Remus might have been a victory over matrilineal descent, bringing in a permanent patrilineal system, which Rome codified as the “Patrifamliias” where the father had power of life and death over his family. John McLennan also claimed in his critique of Maine’s Antient Society that patrilineal systems might have also arisen due to bridal capture. All of these might be true. They all share in the tight kinship mesh network that’s created once patrilineal descent takes hold, whatever its origin.
The Bronze Age’s fortifieid cities might have been the earliest patrilineal societies in Eurasia, which hadn’t yet mastered iron, otherwise their war tactics would’ve been sword-and-footsoldier-heavy like Rome’s or Akkad’s. Instead, they were chariot- and bow-and-arrow-focused. The rest of the military supported the chariots. This kind of military was, at first, adequate for repelling barbarians and maintaining control in the fertile plains. The Bible recounts how the Hebrews attacked these fortified cities in the plains of Canaan, which they probably couldn’t have done without iron. There’s a good amount of evidence that the Hebrews were originally matrilineal, and perhaps they were still so when they acquired Iron Age technology, but this weaponry upgrade allowed them to wreak havok against the Bronze Age cities, which they toppled with relative ease (except in the case of Egypt, save for a 100-year Hyksos interregnum), and it was only a matter of time though groups like them adopted a patrilineal system, if they hadn’t already, since this would have allowed for fortifications and the building of large iron forges.
Iron warfare and patrilineal kinship systems were self-reinforcing, just as matrilneal and stone-based systems were self-reinforcing. Bronze appears to have been a transition point between the two. Arbitrarily attempting to change any one’s kinship system would have been disastrous, barring any other major shifts. The Catholic Church planted the seeds for the European bilateral descent (BLD) kinship system by attempting to centralize the marriage institutions of the Roman provinces. Centralization meant roadways, infrastructure, and all the other things necessary for rapid dissemination of information, which paved the way for the sciences and a liberal market system. The discovery of gunpowder and its use in projectiles in the 13th century set the stage for a corporate munitions network that used this same infrastructure to destroy castles and re-invent the mode of government based on guns instead of iron. This would eventually threaten strict patrilineal systems, which persisted in the American plantation south, but ultimately the economic resources of the corporate New England would be unbeatable. The nuclear age that started with Hiroshima is the final death knell to the patrilineal system: when millions can die at the press of a button, politics naturally become global and universal, and keeping money locally can only be an incessant exercise in goodwill. Superhero storylines have no more interest in local issues these days. This isn’t just because of a globalized film market; the film market is globalized because it’s mostly dictated by America which the most nukes. Even though American politics is heavily factionalized between McCarthyists and International Communists, Republicans and Demorats, they operate like binary stars, with a network of interests between them, around which the rest of the world revolves. Even most of America operates on the periphery of these: small-town PLD companies that are being destroyed by the Wal-Marts, inner-city and rural MLD families usually without fathers that feed into criminal networks, and even high-status BLD networks of old money which are under constant attack by the media. One begins to puzzle about what exactly the kinship is at the center anyway. Is it non-lineal (“alineal”) descent where all transactions are handled through corporations, like a Disney corporation that has little or no familial interests? Is it a combination of stock ownership with familial like the Sulzbergers and the NYT? Or Mormons like the Marriotts? Thinking of it this way, it might be less a binary star system and more of a multi-star system.
Conservatives arbitrarily deciding to “return” to a patrilineal descent (PLD) system, or liberals wanting a “return” to a matrilineal descent (MLD) system, would set one’s self as a target of attack, not because people are bad, but because the kinship mesh network is hostile to both of these now. The operating system has gotten too many updates. MLD and PLD are incompatible with nuclear society, which viciously attacks it both linguisitcally and culturally. These kinship modes are so outdated compared to nuclear life that attempting to reintroduce them on some kind of broad, societal level is like a small culture of mold on a crouton attempting a coup inside the stomach of a man at the buffet. At best you might give him some nausea, but most likely he’ll fart you out the next morning without acknowledging you ever existed.
If you’re a romantic and want to maintain your patrilineal or matrilineal values in your family or business or community, then you must thrive as mold on a crouton. So your best bet is to roll off the buffet counter and join the other croutons in the corner where you can make some local difference. You won’t be able to spread to the greater population any sooner than you’ll be able to elect someone who brings back classical liberalism, or the values of the Greatest Generation, or even a 90s liberal. You can’t expect this because, like me, like most of us, you’re crouton mold. You shouldn’t try to be anything else, because you can’t be a zealot in a country which can eradicate you with a shot of Windex. But it’s not bad down here in crouton country. We all know each other by name, and we do fun stuff on the weekend. Lots of us still like to go and try to spread our kind at the buffet but for the most part we’re happy what we’ve got. Inevitably, though, the broom and dustpan of the new kinship system (which I believe is corporo-lineal descent) will f*ck up your housing market or give up on enforcing street crime in your neighborhood, ruin your schools, destroy your businesses, and you might as well agree to be swept up and deposited somewhere else in the world where you’ll have to meet new croutons but at least you’ll survive.
All this is to say, kinship is upstream from almost everything: language, religion, culture, politics, entertainment. To effect a shift in kinship requires a crisis of unprecedented proportions. Therefore, upstream from kinship is the crisis itself, and the only crisis that remains in perpetual flux is recursive, object-based aggression between humans (ROBA). ROBA exists with us wherever we go, whatever we do, because it’s a hardware feature of humans. It’s the ulcer of our society that is perpetually undergoing repair by excreting its oozy, linguistic slime which only momentarily relieves the symptoms but can never heal the wound. As the ooze coalesces and congeals, it forms a scab that alleviates symptoms until a new scab slowly forms underneath it and pushes it aside. This seems to be the nature of kinship systems among us strange humans.