Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Property

Citizenship

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

Abstract:

What is citizenship? The word itself is now used in a wide range of arenas, from citizenship education in schools to development agencies’ programmes of good governance, and public statements from multinationals about their ‘corporate citizenship’. It is being used, it seems, to evoke virtues such as equality in rights, respectful engagement between citizen (individual or corporate) and wider national society, participation in and knowledge about institutions of government, the right to vote and be elected, etc. Yet at its most fundamental, citizenship names political belonging, and here I argue that to study citizenship is to study how we live with others in a political community.

Introduction

The sociologist T.H. Marshall gave the following definition of citizenship in 1950:

Citizenship is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed (Marshall 1983 [1950]: 253).

He equated community with the nation, and viewed membership of that community as primarily an individual ownership of a set of rights and corresponding duties. His version of citizenship has a distinguished pedigree: from Locke onwards, liberal citizenship has been seen as a status of the individual. The rights associated with this status in theory allow individuals to pursue their own conceptions of the good life, as long as they do not hinder other’s similar pursuits, and the state protects this status quo. In return, citizens have minimal responsibilities, which revolve primarily around keeping the state running, such as paying taxes, or participating in military service.

However, liberal citizenship is not the only form of citizenship that we can find globally. Indeed, insights from ethnography complicate this normative picture of liberal citizenship, as anthropologists have insisted on the specificity of citizenship in different contexts. Alternative possibilities might be civic republican or communitarian forms of citizenship. This is because political membership is related in complex ways to day-to-day practices of politics, and citizenship is a mechanism for making claims on different political communities, of which the state is just one. One important consequence of this is that anthropologists denaturalize liberal citizenship and ask questions about the actual constitution of political membership and subjectivity in a given context. In the move from political philosophy to anthropology, we see an important analytical shift take place from the normative to the descriptive: from what citizenship and citizens should be to a critical analysis of what they are.

The political community

The concept of citizenship has a long trajectory within political philosophy. Like anthropologists, political philosophers ask: how should we live with others in a political community? Here I trace some key moments in this enduring debate within political philosophy, a debate which informs most anthropological discussions of citizenship today. Aristotle (2013) is my starting point, as the most celebrated proponent of a civic republican tradition of citizenship that began in the early Greek city states. In the Politics, he discusses three very important issues: first, the question of how precisely to constitute membership – and exclusion; second, the nature of the citizen as person; and third, the nature of politics itself. The first question of membership was a particular problem in early Greek philosophical thought because of the presence of slaves, often in important bureaucratic positions in the government of the city. Aristotle’s assertion in the Politics that ‘man is a political animal’ was not an inclusive one, but referred only to certain men, those who were not slaves (women were quickly dismissed and then ignored, along with children). He described the citizen: a member of the political community (polis) who participates in government in the sense that he ‘gives judgement and holds office’. Secondly, Aristotle discussed in great depth the development of the citizen as a particular kind of man capable of living in the collectivity, who held and cultivated the associated virtues, such as respect for law and for others and a passion for politics. Finally, politics itself was intimately linked with speech in Aristotle’s thought. Discussion and debate were absolutely central to Athenian politics and personhood. So, citizenship was constituted through political practice, and political practice was constituted through speech and deliberation.

The key points here are, first, that citizenship is more than simply a status denoting membership of a polity but is constituted through a set of practices associated with participation in politics. Second, political subjectivity is something that cannot be assumed to exist but that must be created. For Aristotle, political subjects – citizens – are inherently collective and also eminently moral.

The second set of foundational philosophical texts I want to highlight are those of the social contract philosophers and the Liberal tradition. For Rousseau and Locke, social order can only be achieved through the acceptance of all to live via the agreement of the majority for the benefit of all. This is principally in order to protect property rights, as in the state of ‘natural freedom’ (Rousseau 1971) prior to the establishment of a state, property is always subject to the threat of what Locke called ‘the Invasion of others’. To overcome this danger each individual ‘puts into the community his person and all his powers under the supreme direction of the general will’, thus creating ‘civil freedom’ (Rousseau 1971). The political community therefore comes into being when individuals voluntarily subject themselves to the collectivity (meaning the state and the rule of law). As with Aristotle, political subjectivity is not to be assumed, but is created, and is intimately linked to moral questions of personal virtue. The American Declaration of Independence^[1] (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man^[2] (1789) were more radical, in their willingness to question the inevitability of the existing regime of state power and sovereignty; and then to claim sovereignty for ‘the people’. They did so by claiming the equality of men (sic.) in the name of individual rights, especially those to ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ and ‘liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression’. The political context meant that they needed to claim liberty so that they could change sovereign power, but liberty could also be interpreted in the light of Rousseau and Locke’s position that true freedom comes through the respect for the rule of law, not through the absence of law (for Locke, see his Two Treatises of Government, 2003).

The question of property was also fundamental for the authors of these Declarations, and the role of the state as guarantor of individual property rights became a central question of citizenship in Republican and Liberal regimes from the late eighteenth century on. In the first place, property was a fundamental criterion for membership, as only male property holders were defined as citizens. But also questions of property-holding often created practical difficulties for the implementation of individual, universal ideals of citizenship. For example, Latin American constitutions and legislation of the nineteenth century often attempted to abolish collective land-holding in favour of individual property rights, but this proved very unpopular, especially for indigenous communities in the region. For example, Andean communities were less keen on equal individual rights as defined by their rules, than they were on retaining customary forms of land-holding that protected their members and shared out access to resources (Platt 1984). Anthropologists have done a great deal to illuminate our understanding of the complexities of these processes in the contemporary world, giving due import to their historical, economic, and political background.

In the dominant Liberal narrative of the nineteenth century, liberty of one’s own person would be achieved through citizenship based on individual rights, which superseded institutions perceived as backward, such as slavery or collective property-holding. However, in practice, citizenship was continually negotiated, and collective traditions were not peculiar only to indigenous communities. In fact, the historical development of citizenship is linked to the coalescing of modern nation-states (which often took liberal forms) out of earlier city-state formations built on civic republican traditions. But even the most radical of modern nation-states mixed the two traditions of citizenship together.

One common aspect of both traditions has been the inherent connection of citizenship to exclusion from membership. The exclusion of women from liberal citizenship was denounced from its beginnings by early feminists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft or Olympe de Gouges. Contemporary feminist political philosophers, historians, and other social theorists also point out that the ‘abstract’ individual citizen of Liberal ideals turns out to be in fact a very particular kind of white male property-holding individual citizen.

The debate about the abstract individual of contemporary Liberalism has provoked responses from communitarian political philosophers as well as from feminists. Both emphasize the embedding of subjects within collectivities; they recognize that in real life we are not merely individual subjects or ‘unencumbered selves’ (Sandel 1984). Rather, and now I use more anthropological language, we are part of a whole network of social relations of care, obligation, rights, kinship, and so on.

However, as anthropologists are only too well aware, a community is not always welcoming and egalitarian. Feminist and queer political theorists, among others, have pointed out how the notion of community often leaves little space for individual variability. More importantly, it hides from view the internal power relations that constrain the ability to define what ‘a community’ is and what ‘it’ thinks best. Who speaks for ‘a’ community? Are any communities so homogeneous as to suppress difference within them, and what does that mean for their members?

For anthropologists, this is a crucial point, which has come out in debates as varied as those centred on individual or collective notions of the self, the interplay between ‘indigenous’ or ‘customary’ legal jurisdictions and national ones, human rights and property rights, and the practice of ‘development’. While many anthropologists have felt an affinity with subaltern groups and so have defended group rights from a perspective of cultural relativism, it has long been acknowledged that societal and legal recognition of group rights may inhibit individual claims to justice. Anthropological study takes the discussion beyond abstract principles, not least through the recognition that conflicts between group rights and legal regimes that are based upon Liberal notions of individual rights often happen in grey zones imbued with complex power relations. Examples of these grey zones are issues of land rights and the exploitation of natural resources.

In a classically liberal approach, individual rights constitute citizenship of the national political community and group rights undermine that civic belonging; while in political thought more influenced by communitarianism, smaller communities define their members. Contemporary liberals have modified the first position, to argue for liberal versions of community membership that protect both individual and group rights. Yet the tension remains largely unresolved. Anthropology’s distinctive disciplinary history and methodological approach, relying as it does on comparisons between different kinds of cultural, social, and economic practices, means that anthropologists are well placed to explore these contrasting notions of political community in both urban and rural spaces.

Anthropological approaches: (i) citizenship as subject formation

When we study how citizenship operates in different contexts, we see that political subject formation is a key element. Ethnographic work shows that political subject formation happens through both top-down and bottom-up processes. Aihwa Ong summed up this insight in an important early article, when she suggested that citizenship is a ‘process of self-making and being-made’ (1996: 737).

One prominent thread in the anthropology of citizenship uses a Foucauldian analysis to examine how states and other entities make citizens under various citizenship regimes. To research this, we can examine encounters between people and state officials or policy, and one area where a considerable amount of work of this type has been done is in immigration. Immigration is perhaps where boundaries between citizen and non-citizen are most contested, but immigration encounters are not solely punitive and exclusionary: governments also put in a lot of work to ‘assimilate’ different groups of migrants and refugees.

The interaction between assimilation and respect for difference was investigated early on through the concept of ‘cultural citizenship’, first brought to an anthropological audience by Renato Rosaldo. For Rosaldo, cultural citizenship ‘refers to the right to be different (in terms of race, ethnicity or native language) with respect to the norms of the dominant national community, without compromising one’s right to belong, in the sense of participating in the nation-state’s democratic processes’ (1994: 57). In a series of research and activist projects with Latino immigrants to the US, he and his collaborators discussed immigrants’ experiences of second-class citizenship, and their struggles for better citizenship quality, which they often defined in terms of respect and dignity. He firmly located the struggle for cultural citizenship within a political struggle for rights in the face of exclusionary definitions of national identity.

State policies towards immigrants are not the only form of cultural citizenship regime in operation today. By citizenship regime, I refer to legal, bureaucratic, ideological, and material frameworks that condition practices of, and ideas about, government and participation in politics. States and NGOs all attempt to construct particular kinds of citizen, in policy areas such as development intervention globally and welfare policy at home.

One of the most important ways that states create citizens is education – or, better, schooling. National schooling systems have long been recognised as central to the development of national identity and civic commitment. Although so closely associated with nation-building projects, today education is transnational, and a key area for development intervention: from provision of universal primary education to human rights education programmes, for example. Still, the virtues promoted through schooling vary from country to county, valuing different languages, bodily and emotional dispositions. Schooling may create specific kinds of citizens explicitly through civics classes but also in the ways that pupil–teacher relationships are constructed and students’ bodies disciplined. They may promote certain gender roles, a hierarchical relationship with authority or a commitment to democracy as a value in itself. Schooling is always a moral project, even when that moral quality is hidden behind seemingly technocratic language as with the example of ‘human capital’. However, schools may not always succeed in producing the kinds of citizens envisaged by dominant ideologies, and anthropological analysis is very good at exposing the unintended consequences of educational policies.

Education continues to be inherent to citizenship, whether implemented through schooling or political participation, participation in local voluntary projects, or citizenship classes for immigrants. Other cultural and moral projects of citizenship construction include those that produce the citizen as consumer – of public services, goods, lifestyles; as knowledge worker in the information economy; as auditor of transparent government; as soldier or ex-soldier. These projects work in the interface between people, policy, markets, and the state.

Importantly, though, the processes of subject construction are not only top-down. Ordinary people frame and make claims of the state – for example, for disability benefits for those affected by the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor (Petryna 2002), or for regularization of land titles in the peripheral neighbourhoods of São Paulo (Holston 2008). These studies bring out the complex relationships between people and state bureaucracy, and between people and law. The room for manoeuvre that citizens enjoy is not completely free, but constrained by legal and political regimes.

Citizen action is also shaped by the languages of political action available to actors. In some spaces, the processes of claims-making are articulated through a local language of citizenship, as in South Africa, where HIV/AIDS activists have successfully mobilized using the language of citizenship to demand antiretroviral treatment from the state. The language of citizenship as a means of articulating claims usually names a claim to rights: rights to medical treatment, to legalization of property, to self-government, etc. As a result, for many theorists of citizenship, including anthropologists, the link between citizenship claims-making and rights is irrefutable and exclusive.

However, although the connection between citizenship and rights is often assumed, citizenship is in fact linked to languages of rights in quite specific political contexts. Indeed, political claims and talk of membership (i.e. citizenship) can also be articulated through different languages, such as obligations, or the naturalized membership of a collectivity. This may reflect a non-liberal vision of citizenship. The recognition of languages of citizenship other than that of rights opens up analytical space for research into non-normative citizenship formations themselves.

Anthropological approaches: (ii) where are our political communities?

People are members of varying political communities, not just those governed by national or even local states, and they are subject to forms of government that originate from different entities. Therefore, although citizenship is classically considered as related to the state, anthropological study reveals that this applies under particular political conditions of belonging, but is not always the case. This is especially evident when we take globalization into account. Given the contemporary importance of transnational and sometimes global political entities such as corporations or religious networks in the government of citizens of different nation-states, can we argue that citizenship is merely the relationship between the individual and the state? If we wish to argue that citizenship is participation in government, in the taking of decisions that affect our lives, then the citizen’s position regarding a range of governing entities becomes crucial in an assessment of the quality of his or her citizenship under a given political regime.

For most citizens, the dominant political community is the nation-state. In practice, though, there is no reason to yoke citizenship solely to the nation-state, and indeed we should question the scale at which we perceive a given political community.

In early modern Europe, the dominant political community was the city, and today some of the most relevant political communities of advanced capitalism operate on a supra-national scale. This may be global, as in the ideas of cosmopolitanism, world citizenship and human rights, but also transnational as for activist groups, citizen-migrants, diasporic groups and religious networks. Work on transnational migrants links many of the questions of citizenship discussed here, including membership, nationality, identity, cultural citizenship, and political practice.

As with the transnational dimension, local citizenship of the city is of equal theoretical importance to citizenship of the nation. David Harvey (2012) has argued that claiming the right to define the city is a crucial contemporary site for resistance to capital. Such action may not simply be urban protest or social movements, but may also be citizens making a life for themselves in the city. Urban public spheres include the streets, where people demonstrate and work, but also the many forms of association where citizens negotiate the building and defining of society, even act violently towards one another. Thus, the location for the practices of citizenship is a key question for the analysis of citizenship. The logical realm for political action for most citizens has always been their local area, and people are often suspicious of those who choose to extend their political action beyond that, and become professional politicians rather than citizens. Through ethnography we can examine which political collectivities are important in citizens’ lives at any given time and place.

Anthropological approaches: (iii) membership and exclusion

However we define the political community, though, it is clear that citizenship as a language names membership. It is also a means of claiming membership, and commenting on the quality (or content, extent) of membership, as we can see when people make distinctions between full- and second-class citizenship or formal and substantive citizenship.^[3] Liberal citizenship has held out the promise of universal equality achieved through universal formal citizenship, at least for particular categories of persons; but despite this promise, citizenship regimes have developed differently in different historical contexts.

Holston (2008) shows how Brazilian citizenship developed historically as differentiated, but suggests that occupants of peripheral settlements of São Paulo have challenged their differential treatment from the mid-twentieth century onwards by claiming citizenship rights to property. They do so by struggling to legalize their homes, which have been built on land that was first occupied illegally. Holston calls this an ‘insurgent citizenship’, and their demand to legalize property ownership is a claim to hold rights just like elite citizens do. There is an irony here, since land-holding has been one of the most important aspects of citizen inequality in Brazil throughout its history.

Rights claims have been a feature of campaigns by other, more organized, social movements in Brazil and Latin America, especially since the 1990s. Specifically, the concept of citizenship has been used in campaigns by indigenous, feminist, urban, and LGBTQ+^[4] social movement activists, who demand that they be recognized as active social subjects with the right to have rights and – crucially – the right to define what those rights are. This is a claim to participate in government and decision-making; to participate in political processes too often closed to these groups.

As non-citizens claim citizenship, or second-class citizens claim full citizenship, the nature of citizenship itself changes. Indeed, often the struggle for inclusion (or against exclusion) is what changes the nature of the political system. This could be by creating new laws or constitutions, new categories of people and political subjects, or by changing public opinion. Social and political practices of membership are a crucial part of this dynamic.

But if citizenship is a means of claiming membership or better quality membership, it is also a means of excluding others from that membership or shaping them in contrast to the normative citizen. Citizenship is constituted by both the virtue of the individual citizen as political actor and the nature of political practice. Recognising that non-citizens are excluded from the political community can lead to a positive politics of dissent and resistance and to the broadening of citizenship, but the ‘othering’ can also be highly restrictive, not to say violent.

The archetypal non-citizen is the foreign migrant, but ‘migrant’ is in practice not a simple identity category, not least because migration is often constituted within the force field of colonial and neo-colonial relations. The transformation from colonial subject to imperial citizen and then immigrant other is the outcome of a set of political choices that have a history. Most migrants have travelled to their host country for reasons of labour, and restrictions on their citizenship status that keep them as resident aliens often enable exploitation in the form of low wages and poor working conditions. They are especially vulnerable to abuse by state officials and, where migrants are kept wholly illegal, they are subject to the insecurity of constant risk of deportation. Culturally, the presence of ‘outsiders’ within an imagined ‘national body’ is often not constituted as a problem for the dominant group of citizens, but for the non-citizens themselves. They become ciphers, representing threat, hypersexuality, cultural backwardness, or diversity and multiculturalism (e.g., Partridge 2008). They are marked out, subject to discrimination and racism, which persists even when they have become fully legal citizens, over generations.

Such operations of sovereignty are the other side of the coin to the operations of top-down subject creation discussed earlier. They may become violent, as when groups use languages of native belonging to justify attacks on others, who are seen as migrant interlopers regardless of long-standing histories of mobility and transnationalism. Thus, as boundaries are drawn between citizens and non-citizens, and legal frameworks mobilized to emphasize one group’s otherness, the status of citizen and non-citizen can become hardened, and citizenship restricted not amplified.

Taking a fresh look at citizenship

One of the results of recent developments in the anthropology of citizenship has been a proliferation of new concepts which work by adding a qualifying adjective to the term citizenship. Scholars have studied biological citizenship, flexible citizenship, agrarian citizenship, insurgent citizenship, therapeutic citizenship, urban citizenship, pharmaceutical citizenship, formal and substantive citizenship, etc. The qualifying adjective is important, because it recognises the diversity of citizenship today and acknowledges that liberal citizenship is one form among many. However, in the proliferation of adjectives we still risk assuming that we know what citizenship itself is, that the key is the ‘biological’, ‘urban’, ‘differentiated’ aspect, and that citizenship does not require explanation as a concept in its own right. Indeed, we should be wary of all essentialisms and acknowledge that ‘liberal citizenship’ must itself be plural, as attested by the varieties of liberalism both in historical reality and political thought.

At its most elemental, a focus on citizenship is a way of approaching the political, and one of the most exciting anthropological contributions to the debate is the way that we come to put into question the normative formulations of citizenship and explore the languages and practices of political membership, agency, and constitution of varied political communities, without assuming Liberal parameters for either. However, we must be careful, for two reasons. First, although it is important to take a critical position to normative understandings of citizenship, we do risk ending up in an enclave of cultural relativism where the only argument we can make is that citizenship there is different from citizenship here. While this is undoubtedly an important argument, anthropology has significantly more to contribute to our understanding of citizenship. Second, we should not lose sight of the political implications of such a strategy. Studying citizenship as political practice often obliges us to take a political stand, whether that be alongside those advocating for rights at individual or group level, or critical of mainstream (or even counter-hegemonic) notions of citizenship.

Nonetheless, if we recognize that from time to time our view of what citizenship is can be heavily coloured by a normative assumption about what it should be, we are then better placed to see how citizenship is configured in practice, and to explore the historical, material, and cultural reasons for that configuration.

References

Aristotle, 2013 [1984]. Politics (trans. C. Lord). Chicago: University Press.

Harvey, D. 2012. Rebel cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution. London: Verso.

Holston, J. 2008. Insurgent citizenship: disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton: University Press.

Locke, J. 2003. Two treatises of government and a letter concerning toleration. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Marshall, T.H. 1983 [1950]. Citizenship and social class. In States and societies (ed.) D. Held, 248-60. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Ong, A. 1996. Cultural citizenship as subject-making: immigrants negotiate racial and cultural boundaries in the United States [and Comments and Reply]. Current Anthropology 37, 737-62.

Partridge, D. 2008. We were dancing in the club, not on the Berlin Wall: black bodies, street bureaucrats, and exclusionary incorporation into the New Europe. Cultural Anthropology 23, 660-87.

Petryna, A. 2002. Life exposed: biological citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton: University Press.

Platt, T. 1984. Liberalism and ethnocide in the Southern Andes. History Workshop Journal 17, 3-18.

Rosaldo, R. 1994. Cultural citizenship in San Jose, California, PoLAR 17, 57-63.

Rousseau, J.J. 1971 [1782] The Social Contract (trans. M. Cranston). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Sandel, M. 1984. The procedural republic and the unencumbered self. Political Theory 12, 81-96.

Note on contributor

Sian Lazar is author of El Alto, rebel city: self and citizenship in Andean Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2008) and editor of The anthropology of citizenship: a reader (Wiley, 2013). She works on social movements, political activism, and citizenship in Bolivia and Argentina.

Dr Sian Lazar, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. sl360@cam.ac.uk

[1] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration

[2] http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rightsof.asp

[3] Substantive citizenship is the ability that citizens have in reality to claim rights that they possess through their formal status as citizen: ‘formal membership, based on principles of incorporation in to the nation-state’ contrasts with ‘the substantive distribution of the rights, meanings, institutions, and practices that membership entails to those deemed citizens’ (Holston 2008: 7).

[4] LGBTQ+ is an umbrella term for a wide spectrum of gender identities, sexual orientations and romantic orientations that experience discrimination.

Matriliny

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Jessica Johnson

University of Birmingham

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16matriliny

Abstract:

Matriliny is a way of reckoning kinship descent and belonging through the female line. This entry discusses some of the forms matrilineal kinship may take in practice before considering how anthropologists have understood matriliny since the mid-twentieth century. It looks in turn at three dominant (mis)understandings of matriliny, namely: (1) that matriliny is simply another way of structuring male authority and thus of no meaningful consequence for women; (2) that matriliny is inherently ‘puzzling’; and (3) that matriliny is doomed by its inevitable fragility in the face of economic change. In the light of more recent anthropological approaches to kinship, and increasingly nuanced attention to gender relations, all three of these approaches can be understood as very much ‘of their time’. The entry concludes by briefly introducing two more recent ethnographic accounts that signal the ongoing relevance of matriliny to the lives of men and women in parts of post-colonial Africa. While matriliny is found in many different areas of the world, this entry focuses on what has been called south-central Africa’s ‘matrilineal belt’, which extends from western Congo, through northern Zambia, central and southern Malawi, and northern Mozambique.

Introduction

‘Matriliny as a topic in anthropology is as dead as a dodo, one would think’ (Peters 1997a: 125). Thus Pauline Peters opens her Introduction to a journal special issue entitled ‘Revisiting the puzzle of matriliny in South-Central Africa’. Peters makes the case for looking again at matriliny; she is correct in identifying it as a topic that has fallen out of anthropological fashion having once been prominent within the pages of classic ethnographic works (e.g. Malinowski 2002 [1922]; Richards 1982 [1956]). Nevertheless, matriliny remains relevant to the understanding of many contemporary societies, as we shall see.

Early studies of matrilineal kinship were published in the structural-functionalist vein, when descent and lineage were key features of kinship studies and taken for granted as central organising principles. These studies include a paper by Audrey Richards (1950), an edited volume titled Matrilineal kinship (Schneider & Gough 1961), and a later contribution by Mary Douglas, printed in 1969, by which point structural-functionalist approaches were under attack. Following a lull, interest in matriliny was revived in the 1970s and 1980s as feminist anthropologists began to ask questions about gender construction, women’s roles, and family forms in different societies (see, e.g., Holy 1986; Lancaster 1974, 1976, 1981; Poewe 1981). Since then, occasional interest has been paid to matriliny within regional literatures (see, e.g., Atkinson & Errington 1990; Davison 1997; Flinn 1986). Indeed, examples of matrilineal kinship can be found on almost every continent: in parts of Asia (see, e.g., Agarwal 1994; Kelkar, Nathan & Walter 2003; Tanner & Thomas 1985), Melanesia (see, e.g., Battaglia 1990; Bolyanatz 2000; Weiner 1976, 1992), West Africa (see, e.g., Fortes 1969; Goody 1959; Oppong 1974), and the Americas (see, e.g., Brown 1975; Lévi-Strauss 1963; MacLeitch 2011; Maybury-Lewis 1979). Much of the focus of this entry, however, will be on what has been called south-central Africa’s ‘matrilineal belt’, which extends across western Congo, northern Zambia, central and southern Malawi, and northern Mozambique. It is here, specifically in Malawi, that Peters herself has worked, and from where she makes the case for reopening debates about matriliny in anthropology; it was also the locus of much of the classic anthropological work on the topic.

What is matriliny?

Matriliny is a way of reckoning descent and belonging through the female line. It is generally contrasted with patriliny, where descent and belonging are traced through the male line. Matriliny and patriliny are both referred to as unilineal kinship systems, since in both cases descent and belonging are traced through a single line. Broadly speaking, in European contexts, kinship descent and belonging are reckoned cognatically (bi-laterally), by looking to what might be called ‘both sides’ of a family. To take myself as an example, when I think about my own family and belonging, I trace it out in two directions, through my mother and my father. That gives me two parents who are of equal significance, and four grandparents (I am talking in abstract terms here, so I am leaving aside any divorces and re-marriages that may well complicate this picture, as well as the behaviour of the incumbents of these roles that might qualify them as closer or more distant in social terms, but not in terms of their position in my family tree). In abstract terms I wouldn’t distinguish between my two grandfathers or my two grandmothers as more or less related to me, and nor would I consider myself any more or less the heir of my mother or father in the case of inheritance. Similarly for my various aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces (and so on), I reckon my relatedness to them through both ‘sides’ of my family, and consider none of them more or less closely related to me on the basis that we are related through one or the other of my parents or siblings. This is obviously a simplification of actual family forms, but my point here is that it can be helpful to reflect on our own assumptions about kinship and family belonging in order to highlight what it is that is different when we look at other ways of reckoning descent and belonging.

To return to matrilineal kinship, I have said that descent and belonging are traced through the female line. This means that you trace your belonging to a larger family unit through what might otherwise be considered to be ‘one side’ of your family. Your mother, her mother, and their respective siblings are key figures in your matrilineage. While your father and his parents and siblings may play important roles in your life, they do not belong to the same matrilineage as you do. This does not mean that you are not considered ‘related’ in some way, but simply that you belong to different groups. Matrilineal belonging may affect such things as who would be involved in arrangements for your marriage, from whom you might claim access to land or resources, where you might consider your true ‘home’ to be, and where you would expect your body to be buried upon your death. David Schneider encapsulates unilineal kinship well when he explains that in a patrilineal kinship system, you are ‘related to females but not through females’ (1961: 3, original emphasis). In matrilineal kinship it is the other way around: you are related to both male and female kin, but matrilineal kinship only continues through females. Fathers thus belong to different lineages from their children, and if they hold property or titles such as chieftaincies, their likely heirs are the children of their sisters (who belong to the same matrilineage as they do). Thus, the relationship between a mother’s brother and his sister’s children is particularly significant.

Importantly, matrilineal societies are not all the same in every respect. Peters thus argues that it is more ‘useful to consider matriliny as a set of characteristics rather than a totality or “system”’ (1997a: 137). In this vein, Edmund Leach posited that for anthropologists the category of ‘matrilineal societies’ is about as useful as the classification of ‘blue butterflies’ is to biologists (1961: 4). We will come back to the issue of conceiving of kinship systems as bounded totalities or coherent types later, but here I want to stress the diversity of norms and practices that can be subsumed under the category of matriliny. With respect to inheritance, for example, in some cases only women hold agricultural land and they pass it on to their daughters (and not their sons); in other places men may hold property and pass it on to their sisters’ sons (i.e. their maternal nephews, but perhaps not their maternal nieces); elsewhere, both men and women may hold land and property, in which case male and female children might inherit from both their mothers and their mothers’ brothers. Quite commonly, different kinds of property and titles may be inherited in different ways, so a young woman may inherit land from her mother, for instance, while her brother inherits a chieftaincy from their maternal uncle. And clearly, such norms and practices are subject to historical change.

Matrilineal societies also differ with respect to residence patterns. The designation ‘matrilocal’ or ‘uxorilocal’ refers to post-marriage residence patterns in which men move to live with their wives upon marriage. ‘Patrilocal’ and ‘virilocal’ are terms referring to residence patterns in which wives join their husbands upon marriage. Matrilocality (uxorilocality) is often, but not always, associated with matrilineal kinship, though some degree of variation in residence patterns ought to be expected in any given locale.

Having looked at what matriliny is, I will now turn to how matriliny has been understood, and indeed misunderstood, by anthropologists since the mid-twentieth century.

Anthropological (mis)understandings of matriliny

1. Matriliny is male authority (patriarchy) in another guise

One might imagine that if matrilineal societies are distinguished by the transmission of descent and belonging through women, then women in matrilineal societies might enjoy considerable authority. However, this has not been the dominant interpretation in anthropological writings on matriliny. The view that matriliny is, at its core, a different configuration of male authority is associated with David Schneider and Kathleen Gough, and strongly articulated in their edited volume Matrilineal kinship (1961). In the introduction to the volume, Schneider writes:

The role of women as women has been defined as that of responsibility for the care of children ... the role of men as men is defined as that of having authority over women and children … Positions of highest authority within the matrilineal decent group will, therefore, ordinarily be vested in statuses occupied by men (1961: 6).

Schneider effectively reassures his readers that matrilineal societies do not entail significant female authority, it is simply that male authority rests in the hands of men as brothers and uncles, as opposed to men in their roles as fathers and husbands.

Such understandings share much with the earlier work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In his book The elementary structures of kinship (1969), originally published in French in 1949, Lévi-Strauss places the exchange of women by men at the heart of what kinship means. Marriage is the key institution, because it is by means of marriage that men exchange women and thereby form alliances. Lévi-Strauss wrote:

The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, where each owes and receives something, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners between whom the exchange takes place (1969: 115).

If this is how marriage works, and how societies are held together, matriliny, and especially matrilineal kinship systems that favour matrilocal residence, could be seen as posing a fundamental threat to understandings of kinship, marriage, and alliance. Lévi-Strauss tackled this problem directly in his writing, insisting that: ‘the number of matrilineal systems which are also matrilocal is extremely small. Behind the variations in type of descent, the permanence of patrilocal residence attests to the basic asymmetrical relationship between the sexes which is characteristic of human society’ (1969: 117).

Despite the authoritative tone, however, it is not in fact the case that matrilocality is rare among matrilineal groups, and nor has the idea of necessary and universal male authority stood the test of time (see, e.g., Amadiume 1987; Butler 1990; MacCormack & Strathern 1980; Oyěwùmí 1997). It is worth noting that early understandings of matriliny in this mode were somewhat haunted by a concern with whether matriliny meant matriarchy, or rule by women. This anxiety stemmed largely from nineteenth- and early twentieth century evolutionary thinking which had suggested that matriarchy represented an early stage in social evolution. Peters argues that such fears led anthropologists to downplay the implications of matriliny for women (1997a: 133). Since the 1970s, gender relations have been looked at in a more nuanced fashion, and scholars have returned to questions about matrilineal kinship. Importantly, this work has revealed significant scope for women’s authority in matrilineal settings (see, e.g., Arnfred 2011).

2. Matriliny is puzzling

The phrase ‘the matrilineal puzzle’ comes from Audrey Richards’ contribution to the edited volume African systems of kinship and marriage (1950). Richards focused on the issue of exogamous marriage, i.e. the requirement that lineage members marry outside of their own group. As we have seen, one consequence of exogamous marriage is that men in matrilineal societies marry women from other matrilineages and thus fathers do not belong to the same lineages as the children born of their marriages. In Richards’ words:

The problem … is the difficulty of combining recognition of descent through a woman with the rule of exogamous marriage. Descent is reckoned through the mother, but by the rule of exogamy a woman who has to produce children for her matrikin must marry a man from another group. If she leaves her own group to join that of her husband, her matrikin have to contrive … to keep control of the children … The brothers must divide authority with the husband who is living elsewhere. If, on the other hand, the woman remains with her parents and her husband joins her there, she and her children remain under the control of her family, but her brothers are lost to the group since they marry brides elsewhere and they are separated from the village where they have rights of succession (1950: 246).

The problem for Richards then – and the heart of the so-called matrilineal puzzle – was that men were torn between their roles as fathers and as mothers’ brothers. By contrast, the assumption was that there was no such contradiction in patrilineal kinship where the father had authority over his children both as their father and as their lineage elder. Women’s position within patrilineal groups was given much less consideration than men’s position in matrilineal groups, seemingly because women’s authority was not of concern, and because they were thought to integrate more easily with their husbands’ kin, shedding their attachments to their own patrilineages (i.e. their fathers’ descent groups). There was never any suggestion of a ‘patrilineal puzzle’ that would have addressed the contradictions for women entailed in their dual roles as members of their fathers’ patrilineages and as mothers to children who belonged to their husbands’ patrilineages.

Why was the matrilineal puzzle so puzzling? One reason, Peters argues, is that for anthropologists influenced by the structural-functionalist tradition, it was important to identify bounded social structures, so anything that seemed ‘to divide a person’s identification with one group was assumed to create problems’ (1997a: 128). In the period since the heyday of structural functionalism, however, kinship has come to be understood in more flexible terms, open to considerable variation even within a single society. Although early writers did recognise variation between matrilineal societies, their will to construct typologies, and their concern with bounded groups, encouraged a view of matriliny as a totality, rather than a variable set of characteristics.

Another factor that made the matrilineal puzzle so puzzling was the implicit assumption that the nuclear family, based on the marital relationship, constitutes the essential building block of society. As we have seen, this premise in turn relates to ‘the privileging of the male’ (Peters 1997a: 128). Thus, Audrey Richards suggested that matriliny posed a problem for the ‘sentiment attaching father to son’ (1934: 277), and invoked Bronislaw Malinowski’s work on matrilineal Trobriand Islanders, who were said to face a conflict between their legal responsibilities towards their maternal nephews and their ‘natural desire’ (1934) to favour their own sons (see Malinowski 2002 [1922]: 71–2). Strikingly, this focus on the marital relationship and the father–child bond endured despite the fact that ethnographers repeatedly noted the relative fragility of marriages in matrilineal settings, where divorce rates were often high, as well as the greater significance of relationships between siblings and between children and their maternal uncles. Alternative central foci for kinship studies, such as relationships between same or opposite sex siblings, were not given much attention. It can thus be argued that the emphasis on descent in structural-functionalist anthropology obscured the significance of siblingship for the ways in which matrilineal kinship bonds were understood and valued. This is something that anthropologists working in matrilineal areas of Southeast Asia have also pointed out; see, for example, Peletz (1988).

The above discussion suggests the significance of the assumptions brought to bear on studies of matrilineal societies. There is a pertinent quotation from an Ashanti male elder in Ghana, who, when asked by R.S. Rattray (a colonial official and anthropologist) why he had not been aware of women’s significance in Ashanti political life, replied: ‘The white man never asked us this; you have dealings with and recognise only the men; we supposed the European considered women of no account, and we know you do not recognise them as we have always done’ (1923: 84; cited by Peters 1997a: 135). There are countless other examples of early observers, more familiar with patrilineal or cognatic kinship organisation, struggling to understand matrilineal gender relations (see, e.g., Colson 1958; Mitchell 1956, 1959 [1951]; Read 1942; Rowley 1867). Surveying a number of them, Peters concludes: ‘the matrilineal puzzle was not in fact that at all but a gender puzzle’ (1997a: 141): a gender puzzle precipitated by the seeming incomprehensibility of kinship norms and practices that gave ‘greater social and political space to women’ (1997a: 133).

3. Matriliny is doomed

The question ‘is matriliny doomed?’ comes from the title of Mary Douglas’ (1971 [1969]) article in which she attempts to assess what she calls matriliny’s ‘prospects for survival in the modern world’ (1971[1969]: 123). The idea that matriliny might be doomed emerged largely from a sense that it was fragile in the face of economic change. Douglas cites several authors who argued that ‘power, property, and prestige spell doom to the matrilocal principle’ (Murdock 1949: 206-7; cited by Douglas 1971 [1969]: 123) and matrilineal descent, including the work of Jack Goody, who had suggested that ‘disparity of incomes weakens the principle of matrilineal descent’ (Douglas 1971 [1969]: 124).^{^[1]}

Indeed, over the years a range of voices has predicted matriliny’s demise. In the face of growing market economies, increasing differentiation in wealth, and the acquisition of more significant personal property, anthropologists, and other observers, expected matrilineal kinship norms to weaken and a shift towards patrilineal or cognatic kinship organisation to occur.^{^[2]} The idea was that men would strive to overcome the ‘matrilineal puzzle’ by avoiding matrilocal marriage and associated bride service (the work they might be expected to do for their wives’ kin), and favouring bridewealth (involving payment(s) on the husband’s behalf to his wife’s kin so as to secure her residence and rights to their children), all of which would enable them to favour their own sons as heirs rather than their sisters’ sons.

In this vein, Kathleen Gough titled a chapter for the 1961 volume Matrilineal kinship: ‘The modern disintegration of matrilineal descent groups’. Gough lends support to the view that matriliny is vulnerable in the face of economic advancement:

Recent literature has accumulated evidence to show that under economic changes brought about by contact with Western industrial nations, matrilineal descent groups gradually disintegrate. In their place, the elementary family eventually emerges as the key kinship group with respect to residence, economic cooperation, legal responsibility, and socialisation, with a narrow range of interpersonal kinship relationships spreading outward from it bilaterally and linking it with other elementary families … There is … great variation in the degree of change at present experienced both within and between matrilineal societies. Nevertheless, given continued exposure to the same kinds of economic processes, the directions and end products of the change seem to be essentially the same (1961: 631).

Gough was confident that this was a general trend, inevitable given the conditions of global capitalist expansion.

Douglas’ answer to the question ‘is matriliny doomed?’ is slightly different, however. In talking of situations in which matriliny is likely to give way to patriliny, she highlights not wealth inequality but scarcity of resources, arguing that ‘competition in a restricted field causes men to draw in their horns and to concentrate their responsibilities on their nearest kin’, that is, ‘to favour their sons’ (1971 [1969]: 130). It is possible to recognise some of the same assumptions that led to the ‘matrilineal puzzle’ at work in both Douglas’ and Gough’s analyses: namely, the assumption that a man’s closest kin are his children, and that there is something fundamentally salient, even ‘natural’, about the connection between fathers and sons that matrilineal norms of kinship deny.

I have already referred to Peters’ argument that we ought to consider matriliny more as an assemblage of characteristics than a totality or ‘system’. One corollary of that point is that it makes little sense to consider ‘matriliny’ – as a totality – to be more vulnerable to economic change than ‘patriliny’ or ‘cognatic’ kinship, or to consider matriliny and patriliny as bounded systems that come into contact as wholes that must clash and confront one another in such a way that one would inevitably triumph over the other.

Indeed, recent work has demonstrated the limitations that conceptions of kinship ‘systems’ as bounded wholes place on analysis. Thus, Cynthia Brantley (1997), for example, looks back at the published and unpublished work of Margaret Read from the 1930s and 1940s. Read studied patrilineal Ngoni in Northern and Central Nyasaland, now Malawi, before turning her attention to matrilineal Chewa people in neighbouring parts of the same country. Brantley is able to show the effect that Read’s earlier work with patrilineal Ngoni informants had upon the ways in which she conceived of matrilineal kinship organisation. Her article is titled ‘Through Ngoni eyes’, which succinctly sums up the way in which she argues Read was blinkered by her prior experiences.

Read argued that a slow but sure takeover of matriliny by patriliny was occurring in central Malawi as Ngoni norms and practices prevailed over matrilineal Chewa ways. Reassessing Read’s material, Brantley suggests that ‘Read’s evidence, when set in relation to other information, shows a much more complex situation of interaction and modification to mutual benefit … [people] were accommodating and borrowing from the practices of “patriliny” and “matriliny”’ (1997: 165). She concludes that Read was wrong to identify a shift from matrilineal to patrilineal marriage practices. Instead, she points to the development of what were called chitengwa marriages, whereby women moved to live with their husbands in patrilocal marriage, more typical of patrilineal societies, but their children still belonged to their matrilineages. In these marriages men tended to give token gifts to the women’s kin (something relatively new), but they did not pay significant bridewealth as per patrilineal norms. It is such examples of ‘partial accommodation and blending’ (Peters 1997a: 138) that Brantley concludes were invisible ‘through Ngoni eyes’ and, more broadly, were obscured by the pervasive master narrative of matriliny’s inevitable demise.

Contemporary ethnography

Peters has argued for the need to understand how heavily the odds have tended to be stacked against matrilineal norms and practices:

[M]atrilineal groups have been and continue to be a minority in a sea of patriliny and patriarchy. Most groups in all the African regions where matriliny is found follow patrilineal, dual or cognatic descent, and all the major influences entering over the past 200 years and more have been from strongly patrilineal or bilateral, and patriarchal groups. These include, for the Malawi case … Islamic groups, Christian missions, British colonial over-rule and plantation agriculture. The ideas and practices brought by all the former are reinforced in this ‘global’ world because major players (America, Britain, Russia, Japan, China …) all favour patrilineal or bilateral modes of organisation (1997b: 191).

She thus argues that matrilineal norms and practices ought to be seen as ‘remarkably resilient’ (Peters 1997b: 189).

Indeed, while matriliny is not a subject that has received a great deal of attention from anthropologists in recent years, the ethnographic record does allow some insight into the ways in which matrilineal kinship organisation continues to affect the texture of life in post-colonial Africa. On the basis of fieldwork in Malawi carried out in 2009–2010, Jessica Johnson (2012) has written of the significance of matriliny in shaping HIV-positive women’s efforts to rebuild their lives following the roll-out of anti-retroviral therapies. Crucially, Johnson argues that the generally high rates of divorce, and the related social acceptability of female-headed households, coupled with women’s custodianship of land inherited through the female line, profoundly shaped the options available to them as they regained their health and set about re-establishing themselves as productive members of their rural communities. Many HIV-positive women (divorced or widowed) chose, at least temporarily, to remain unmarried and to focus on providing for their children through their agricultural endeavours. They thus drew upon longstanding ‘traditional’ strategies of relative female independence, while explaining their decisions in relation to their desire to safeguard their health and exercise caution as they adjusted to the radically new possibility of living with, as opposed to dying from, HIV/AIDS.

A final example comes from James Ferguson’s Expectations of modernity (1999), a study of the Zambian Copperbelt at a time in which the copper industry had seen enormous decline. Ferguson refers to the 1989 passing of a new inheritance law, which, for the first time, gave the nuclear family legal recognition in matters of inheritance by providing for a man’s wife and children to receive a share of his property. According to Ferguson, the new law was ineffective because the belief that a man’s rightful heirs were his matrilineal relatives – as opposed to his wife and children – meant that the law was largely disregarded. Similarly, pensions awarded to the wives of deceased miners could be a source of tension: wives could be mistreated by their husbands’ matrilineal kin who believed themselves entitled to the payments. As a result, some widows requested that their payments be discontinued, while a number of living men questioned why their wives and children were the automatic beneficiaries and not their sisters’ children. For at least some workers, Ferguson points out, ‘it was not obvious that one’s primary attachment and responsibility was to one’s “own” children’ (1999: 185). He thus refers directly to Mary Douglas’ question: ‘Is matriliny doomed in Africa?”, concluding that apparently, the answer ‘is no’ (Ferguson 1999: 185).

In conclusion, this entry has introduced matriliny as an important topic in the anthropology of kinship. We have come to understand matriliny as a unilineal system of reckoning descent and belonging through the female line, and learnt that the category ‘matriliny’ contains within it significant variation in terms of, for example, patterns of residence and inheritance. The entry has surveyed three dominant anthropological approaches to the understanding of matriliny: namely, that it is simply an alternative configuration of male authority, that it is inherently puzzling, and that it is doomed. I have suggested that all three approaches are problematic, containing within them a number of unfounded, gendered assumptions. Two more recent ethnographic examples from Malawi and Zambia have signalled the ongoing significance of matrilineal norms and practices, as well as the relevance of kinship organisation to other aspects of social life, from health and wellbeing to property and pensions.

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Douglas, M. 1971 [1969]. Is matriliny doomed in Africa? In Man in Africa (eds) M. Douglas & P.M. Kaberry, 123-37. New York: Anchor Books.

Ferguson, J. 1999. Expectations of modernity: myths and meanings of urban life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Flinn, J. 1986. Matriliny without conflict: the case of Pulap. Journal of Polynesian Society 95, 221-38.

Fortes, M. 1969. Kinship and the social order: the legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Goody, J. 1956. The social organization of the LoWiili. London: HMSO.

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Johnson, J. 2012. Life with HIV: ‘stigma’ and hope in Malawi’s era of ARVs. Africa 82, 632-53.

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Note on contributor

Jessica Johnson is a Lecturer in the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. Between 2013 and 2016 she was a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her doctorate. Since 2009, Jessica has conducted more than two years of fieldwork in a matrilineal area of Malawi. Her doctoral research focused on aspirations for justice in the context of gender and martial relations, and her new project looks at 'everyday justice' in Malawi's magistrates' courts.

Jessica Johnson, Department of African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, United Kingdom. j.johnson.5@bham.ac.uk

[1] The reference is to Goody (1956: 110).

[2] See, for example, Elizabeth Colson’s (1958) work on the Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia).

Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Property

Citizenship

Introduction

The political community

Anthropological approaches: (i) citizenship as subject formation

Anthropological approaches: (ii) where are our political communities?

Anthropological approaches: (iii) membership and exclusion

Taking a fresh look at citizenship

Further reading

References

Note on contributor

Matriliny

Introduction

What is matriliny?

Anthropological (mis)understandings of matriliny

Contemporary ethnography

References

Note on contributor