Social topologies (2/3). The House
In a previous post I introduced some considerations about the use of topology as a method in anthropology, and briefly presented a first case study about conceptions of the body in the tattooing process among a minority group in Yunnan province, China. In the meantime, this exploration has become a larger collective project around the idea of “Topology as Method”.
As announced in my first post, this second short essay moves up a scale and takes up the notion of “house” as an analytical category on the basis of an ethnography I carried out in a Tibetan community in a valley called Drapa (Zhaba) on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, and in light of some considerations about regional comparisons of kinship systems.
In this mountainous valley, many households are made up of brothers and sisters, who live with their own mother, maternal aunts, and uncles. Children live with their mothers, and though their fathers/genitors are generally known, they do not cohabit; partners do not marry but maintain their relationship through what is generally called the “visit system” in anthropological parlance. The Na (Mosuo) who live further south across the border with Yunnan province, have become famous in popular media internationally for practicing a similar sexual visit system.
While such a case, as has been argued for the Na, may force us to question some of our assumptions about family, in particular its relationship to marriage, my purpose here is to reframe the question from the perspective of the main identifiable social unit: the house. As an ideal-type, the house is therefore a consanguineal household: a co-residential kinship group that includes no regularly present male in the role of husband-father. (Which does not imply they do not exist.) Its constitutive set of relationships are horizontally that of brother/sister, and vertically that of mother/child and avuncular relation. While the temporal continuity of the house is ensured through the constitution of a matriline, the pair of siblings is a constitutive internal duality of the house. I will return to this point further on.
The organizing principle of a household in relation to the visit system is matrifocal, and for these domestic units a mother and her dependent children are the most significant and sufficient members for ensuring its continuity. A continuity that is not expressed in terms of a shared inherited substance (bone or blood) but through the use of a house name. The tangible and intangible property of the household (that is of a given generation of siblings) is inherited by the subsequent generation of siblings (with no gender distinction). In other words, where there is a predominance of the visit system, we find a matrifocal principle, and for most people the household is their only basic social affiliation.
If we look through the lens of the house as the main social unit, we come to realize that in many cases matrilineal descent is not what is at play here: unilineal descent may not be relevant to describe household characteristics and their variation. There seems to be a great variety of cases, and it is not uncommon for a house to end up with members who have no direct blood relationship with their ancestors. To ensure the continuity of the house, several strategies exist. For a given generation, in the case where the women in the household only have sons and no daughters, for example, one of the sons will marry and a wife will enter the house. Similarly, if there are no sons, it is possible to arrange for a man to marry in. As a result, we see a system whereby the gendered dyad of siblings is transformed and replaced by a married couple (with in one case a woman from outside, and in the other a man from outside) to maintain the unity of the house. The continuity of the house is expressed through the continuity of its name.
This is where I think we can draw on Lévi-Strauss’s notion of “house”, with some potential comparative value for the larger region of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands. What is important for my purpose is not so much to rely on the notion of “house-based” societies per se but to think of the house as a particular kind of space. Let me remind you of Lévi-Strauss’s definition of a “house”:
“a corporate body [a moral person] holding an estate made up of both material and immaterial wealth, which perpetuates itself through the transmission of its name, its goods, and its titles, down a real or imaginary [descent] line, considered legitimate as long as this continuity can express itself in the language of kinship [descent] or affinity [alliance] and [or], most often, of both” (Lévi-Strauss 1982 and [1987], as quoted in Gillespie 2000: 27).
The notion of “house” emphasizes residence as a means of regulating membership, and allows us to escape descent-centered typologies. My point here is to emphasize that the continuity of the house in Drapa should not be regarded as dependent on a rule of matrilineality but as the combination of various factors that together make up the conditions for its reproduction. The “house” as a continuous category, perpetuating itself in spite of the changes caused by endless births and deaths of people living in it, is what interests me here in exploring the socio-symbolic complex of relatedness and belonging.
Contrary to household, house is used as a term that simultaneously refers to a social unit and a physical structure, and should be considered within a more complex set of relations that connect the building, the members of the house, and the forces associated with them, such as fortune, luck, prosperity, etc. Such an approach to the “space” of the house goes back to Henri Lefebvre (among others) who saw the house as permeated streams of energy, a nexus of incoming and outgoing conduits (Lefebvre 1991, 93). It is of particular relevance here to mention, for example, that up to two generations ago residents of Drapa who were known for having exceptional luck (suide si) – which would bring prosperity to the house – would not be taken out of the house after their death. Their body was buried in the ground near a wall of the house, or alternatively some of their bones were kept in a cache within a wall of the house so that their luck remained in the household and continued to benefit its members.
Therefore, the space of the house, considered not only as a building but as the spatial formulation of kinship and other principles is an expression of a social morphology where the inside/outside and other polarities are at play, and where the continuous production of difference in relation to the production of similarity is articulated.
In sum, I argue that rather than being seen as practices dependent upon a particular kinship rule, even if set in the appropriate ecological, political and economic context, several kinds of marital practices (polyandry, uxorilocal marriage and virilocal marriage) and forms of sexual partnerships (the visit system and matrifocality) coexist logically within a particular social organization – with the “house” at its core. In other words, my preliminary analysis of my ethnography in Drapa leads me to consider the “house” as the locus for primary social relations and as being at the center of the web of relatedness and forms of inclusion and exclusion. I do not propose that we use “house” or “house-based” societies as a typological model. I propose that we pay greater attention to more processual and performative forms of sociality (without presupposing that “unilineal descent” or “marriage” and “alliance” are the norm) and their spatial anchoring: the house as a relational space. Perhaps this will allow for a reconsideration of our conceptual vocabulary in our attempts to undertake regional comparisons.
References
Gillespie, Susan D. 2000. “Lévi-Strauss: Maisons and Société à Maisons.” In Beyond Kinship: Social and Material Reproduction in House Societies, edited by R. A. Joyce and S.D. Gillespie, 22-52. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space, translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Stéphane Gros (October 8, 2019). Social topologies (2/3). The House. The Himalayas and beyond. Retrieved December 9, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/pjl9
Est-ce que vous avez publié quelque part le texte que vous avez présenté au dernier IATS à Paris ? Cela m’avait beaucoup intéressé.
Je vous remercie pour votre intérêt. Je prépare actuellement une publication en relation à ce thème évoqué dans le billet et traité, sous un autre angle, à l’occasion de ma présentation au dernier IATS. J’envisageais une enquête de terrain cette année qui a été annulée mais le projet de publication verra néanmoins probablement le jour avant. Je vous tiendrai informé. Je suis pour ma part très intéressé par d’éventuels parallèles et possibles comparaisons dans le monde tibétain et ses périphéries que je connais mal dans leur diversité.
Hi Stéphane, thanks for this inspiring series of posts, and for this one in particular. It may be useful to mention that (as you know very well) numerous anthropological studies of Tibetan societies have started to build up an argument that it may be more accurate to approach many of these societies through the key organizing principle of residence (instead of descent), with ‘houses’ (instead of descent groups/categories) being identified as the central social units. (Some nuance is needed here, as descent seems comparatively more important in Tibetan societies in Himalayan areas for instance, or within certain specific sectors of Tibetan societies, such as among family lineages of tantric priests, ngakpa.) The above-mentioned studies have pointed to the common presence of house names for instance (Aziz 1974), or the importance of the worship of what, if not in vernacular terms, at least analytically, is a house protector deity (Sihlé 2013: 89). Moving to a place like Drapa, on the eastern edge of the Tibetan world, with its (in Tibetan contexts not very common) visit system and matrifocal character, the case for the analytical usefulness of the notion of the ‘house’ seems all the more convincing — and I look very much forward to reading a fully fleshed-out account of this. I just wonder how you would place a case like Drapa with regard to the other Tibetan contexts that have prompted interest in thinking about the ‘house’ — do you see primarily continuity beyond the differences between marriage/alliance vs. visit systems?
References:
Aziz, Barbara N. 1974. Some Notions about Descent and Residence in Tibetan Society. In Contributions to the Anthropology of Nepal. Ed. C. von Fürer-Haimendorf. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, pp. 23‑39.
Sihlé, Nicolas. 2013. Rituels bouddhiques de pouvoir et de violence : La figure du tantriste tibétain. Turnhout: Brepols (Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études – Sciences religieuses).
Hi Nicolas,
Your comment raised some very important questions that I felt required a substantial response – perhaps out of scale for an exchange on this blog… I apologize for leaving it hanging for so long. But the task of responding properly is now greatly facilitated by Heidi Fjeld’s book, The Return of Polyandry, which has just been published (and announced here in the blog). She very ably reviews recent scholarship in kinship studies and in particular the use of the notion of ‘house’ in the field of Tibetan studies. I am very much in agreement with the way she frames the problem, so I can limit myself here to a few important points in relation to the question you ask at the end of your comment.
My research in Drapa (Ch. Zhaba) takes as its starting point two bodies of anthropological literature: that of research conducted in Tibetan regions which, to put it simply, attest to the importance of the house as a social unit and demonstrate the relevance of using the notion of ‘house’ (as an analytical concept derived from Lévi-Strauss’ initial intuition) on the one hand, and that of the research carried out among the Tibeto-Burman speaking groups of Yunnan and Sichuan and in particular the Na/Moso/Naxi and various aspects of kinship practices (notably that of the ‘visit’ among the Na) on the other hand.
In both cases, the social relevance of the ‘house’ is linked to long-debated topics in the field of ‘kinship’ broadly defined, such as cognatic vs unilineal systems, residence vs filiation, notions of bone and flesh, various matrimonial practices, etc. But also, and most importantly, this relevance manifests itself in relation to land tenure, inheritance, religious and economic determinations (for subsistence economy or trade), the tax system, as well as political constraints.
I certainly see Drapa as an interesting case that can bring together these two sets of regional anthropological literature, and help raise the question of the continuity between the various practices that allow the reproduction of social units, including the practice of the so-called ‘visit system’, which does not exist in isolation but always in combination with other marriage/alliance choices. This is not only a continuity that can be defended in terms of the socio-cultural logic of these matrimonial practices (albeit in a diverse and changing historical context), but also a continuity that can help us think beyond the usual ‘ethnic’ boundaries. This is why I find the eastern edge of the plateau (the ‘Sino-Tibetan borderlands’) so interesting: a zone of intense contact and exchange where cultural dynamics, continuities and discontinuities, often cross those ethnic boundaries.
In short, I (like many others) have always doubted the ‘exceptionalism’ of the Na case and its (allegedly unique) ‘visit system’, and I think that a growing body of ethnographic evidence can shed new light on how it can be reinterpreted in relation to other kinship practices. In this comparative effort, I think Drapa fits in along with other cases such as the Pumi/Premi, Rgyalrong, among others, to help build a broader picture of regional diversity – what Heidi Fjeld calls the ‘pool of possibilities’ of flexible kinship relations, or what in a structuralist vein, one would be tempted to call a ‘system of transformations’.