Atlas Trail
How Kinship Holds a Society Together
Marriage is the hinge every kinship system turns on: who inherits, where a bride's payment goes, and whether a household ends at two generations or reaches further. This trail follows patrilineal descent and dowry through the wave's newly minted family entities, from the two competing pictures of a household to the ethnographer whose Nuer fieldwork first described how a kinship system without a government still holds together.
Stop 1 of 6.
Institutions and Social Structures
The institution every stop on this trail attaches to: descent, dowry and household form are all built around marriage, not separate from it.
Stop 2 of 6.
Kinship and Family Systems
Roughly 44 percent of societies in Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas trace lineage and inheritance through the father's line alone. The Nuer, Evans-Pritchard's own subject, are patrilineal.
Stop 3 of 6.
Ethnography and Cultural Practices
A property payment from the bride's family to the groom's, most common in the patrilineal societies of South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa; Jack Goody linked it to plough agriculture and monogamous marriage.
Stop 4 of 6.
Kinship and Family Systems
Two parents and their children under one roof. Whether this or the extended household is humanity's more common family form is a live dispute the atlas leaves open, not a settled classification.
Stop 5 of 6.
Kinship and Family Systems
Parents, children and further kin, most often grandparents, aunts, uncles or cousins, sharing or living near one household; the basic family unit across most of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
Stop 6 of 6.
Social Theorists
The fieldwork underneath the whole trail: his Nuer trilogy is the foundational study of patrilineal segmentary lineage, and his Azande work showed how a kinship-organized society reasons about causation without a government to enforce it.
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