Schemas and Kinship
Probably the favorite topic of social anthropology through its history has been kinship syscems. One reason for the interest in kinship syscems is that they have much more social importance in most non-western societies than they have in western society. But perhaps a more compelling attraccion of kinship systems is "che glimpses they furnish of the operation of general, quasi-mathematical regularities in the patterning of human social forms" ( Edmonson, 1957 ) . These regularities offer an excicing challenge to the social cheorisc who so often has to work with hopelessly irregular and amorphous data. Unfortunately these regularities have proved surprisingly uncractable. The practice of unilinear descent, for example, which is found in che majority of human societies (not in ours), has through the years received numerous explanations, none satisfactory. Some are too limited in scope, like the Greek and Roman explanation of Egyptian matrilineal descent: "that the Egyptian women were so much addicted to adultery that the paternity of their children was always doubtful" (Linton, 1955, p. 4 1 8 ) . The better modern explanations, more subtle and abscract, fail in more subtle and abscract ways. The essential feature of most of them is a "social necessity" argument-ic is argued thac unilinear descent is necessary to fulfill cercain social needs of these societies [for a discussion of such arguments see Murdock (1949) l . In particular, it is noted chac unilinear descent has the effect of dividing the members of a society into non-overlapping lineages or descent groups, a state of affairs considered necessary for the specification of social and jural rights and obligations, such as who will live together, who will defend whom, who can own land jointly, and so on. In this way, unilinear descent is seen as "a sociological means to achieve a sociological resulc" (Levi-Strauss, 1953, p. 543) . Bur this approach has failings. For one rhing, unilinear descent is not a universal problem solver; it introduces social problems while solving others. A man may resent being prohibited from passing on his possessions to his children by his matrilineal kinship system (Firth, 1958, p. 9 7 ) . For another thing, it has recently been made clear that societies thac practice various forms of nonunilinear descenc, including the biologically valid bilateral . descent, manage to sacisfy chese social needs quite nicely one way or another (Davenport, 1959) . Unilinear descent is the preferred way of satisfying them, but by no means the only possible way.