Genealogy

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GENEALOGY

GENEALOGY . As formal structure, genealogy is foremost an intellectual discipline. Its concern is with recording and putting into systematic order the histories of families, differentiating them by rules of descent and allocating to each a share of those enduring human valuables that consist of privileges and honors, titles and powers. Although grounded in myth and circumscribed by tradition and, thus, seemingly a rote and rigid subject, genealogy is to be understood rather as a product of informed speculative reasoning about metaphysical, specifically ontological, matters. Its subject matter goes beyond the listing of pedigrees. It identifies and differentiates the forces and generative sources that give shape to and regulate the entire universe of life. From its cosmological concepts, it draws implications for human conduct and for the structure of the social order. Most directly, genealogies connect human families with their mythical origins, joining them as kinfolk within the universal community of gods, spirits, and other forms of life.

Principles of Genealogy

The genealogical discipline exercises a controlling influence upon everyday life, for it is the source of the morality and of the principles of systematic order that bind systems of descent into clans, lineages, and similar groupings. Among tribal societies especially, the genealogical order frequently dictates all social relations. In early and more complex traditional societies, where only royalty and related families come within its scope, the genealogical system acts as the focus of authority. In sum, for preindustrial societies the genealogical discipline is unitary and unifying, joining the social and the religious forms by demonstrating that society is an extension of the mythical era of original creations. From this unitary perspective, the gods, spirits, and ancestral beings who brought human beings into existence are themselves drawn into the human sphere. In more recent times, genealogical interest has been reduced. Stripped of its religious and cosmological associations, genealogy serves, at most, the general purpose of celebrating ethnicity.

The general model for making genealogical distinctions is drawn from nature. This is most clearly exemplified in totemic systems, whose family lines are represented as descended from animals or other distinctive natural forms. Each line of descent appears as a species and therefore stands as one among all the other natural varieties of life. In nontotemic systems, the special qualities attributed to particular human ancestors serve the same purpose of distinguishing the lines of descent. Thus, human founders of clans and lineages are held to be the primary sources of the vigor and continuity of their descendants, as are totemic ancestors. In both systems, the natural species exemplify the traits of continuity and social immortality that human societies seek through their own genealogies.

As a process, differentiation appears as the signifier of forces that promote growth and development. The natural evolution commonly depicted in creation myths begins with relatively amorphous beings and proceeds systematically to final stages of specificity. This understanding of the natural direction of life underlies the metaphoric assumption that takes the contrast between the chaotic and the structured in ritual and myth to be analogous to the contrast between the deathlike and the vigorous in social life. Accordingly, genealogical systems—the primary promulgators of differentiation—are impelled to drive toward singularity, to single out families and persons for special distinction as principal bearers of vital powers.

Essentially, all the systematic modes of differentiation upon which genealogical systems are constructed express some concept of generative powers. The rules of primogeniture and of relative seniority of descent generally concern the special nature of powers presumed to lie in primacy, that is, in the original conditions that generated forms and natural processes. The rules of descent by gender (matriliny, patriliny, bilaterality) stem from the distinctive generative powers of femininity and masculinity. The rules governing direct and collateral lines reflect closeness to the central sources, and those that differentiate between long and short genealogies involve issues of inherent longevity. Each mode of descent has the added significance of being the appropriate mode of transmission of powers, and each member of a genealogical chain has stature as a designated and graded conveyor.

In substance, the characteristic modes of genealogical transmission impose a powerful order upon social structures. They regulate marriage and other social relations, and they determine the formal lines of social divisions and the character of dependency in subordinate branches. In keeping with the general idea of a genealogical system as an organism that grows and branches, lineages are quite commonly envisioned as vegetative.

The social and cosmological implications of genealogical differentiation are realized most fully in lineage structures. In contrast to clans, which only imply and therefore generalize their putative connections to founders, lineages depend upon true pedigrees, upon the real chain of names and their sequences, and often upon the sequences of outstanding events that demonstrate the potency and special quality of the names. Genealogical traditions and related rituals evoke, reanimate, and, in some sense, reincarnate ancestors. Remembering the long line of ancestors by name (in Polynesia, as far back as ninety-nine generations) is an act of piety that, even in tribal societies, imposes the technical requirement of creating the scholarly and priestly craft of official genealogist for royal and noble lines.

Aristocracy, understood as a social system in which a singular descent line has come forward as the focus of generative powers, may take shape among clans as well as among lineages, drawing upon their common genealogical rules. But it is the specificity of the lineage and its greater adeptness for drawing fine distinctions that endow royalty with the extra degree of moral authority for governing. The lineage is so much the social instrument of royalty that it readily becomes its own characteristic form of organization. Even among tribal societies, among whom organic unities are the common norm, it is not exceptional for chiefly lines to be the exclusive protagonists of the lineage system, and for all others to fall into a binlike category of relatively generalized descent. The Kwakiutl and some Polynesians, who are discussed below, illustrate what are, in effect, the social fractures in a system of descent.

It may seem paradoxical that lineages, although they are buttressed by deeply held human convictions about the binding powers of common descent, should, in fact, promote, as a matter of principle, countertenets of antagonisms, oppositions, and structural divisions. Yet, these forms of divisiveness are not accidental but are the complements of systems that transmit singular powers. Powers must demonstrate efficacy; efficacy invites contention. As a consequence, aristocratic lineages must sustain themselves, not by their genealogical authority alone, but by the abilities of their actual rulers to balance sometimes conflicting claims of birth and force.

Systems of Genealogy

Thus, their orderly premises notwithstanding, genealogical systems are variable. They are subject to the vicissitudes of history that ultimately erode the most formidable structures, as well as to the variability that is allowed by their rules and to the ambiguities of situation that disturb any social order. One cannot hope to describe the varieties of genealogical systems encyclopedically. The following examples from tribal societies and from ancient and more recent civilizations are not necessarily the most characteristic, but they call attention to special features that pertain to the general nature of genealogies.

The Cubeo

The Cubeo, tropical forest Indians of the Colombian Vaupés, exemplify genealogical aristocracy as developed within the constraints of a subsistence economy. Even within the meager material setting of slash-burn root horticulture, supplemented by fishing and hunting, the rudimentary form of aristocracy exhibited by the Cubeo resembles, in many formal respects, the hierarchical structures and the patterns of dominance and subordination of the more complex civilizations, indicating that aristocracy may be less a product of material than of genealogical factors. Cubeo society is an organization of ranked, exogamic, and patrilineal sibs (clans), who are joined together in a confraternity (phratry) for what are largely ritual purposes. The sibs exchange wives with those of similar rank in a corresponding phratry. The rank of the sibs was preordained and revealed in the order of birth from an underground dwelling that brought into being the first set of fraternal ancestors, the founders of sibs. The names of their descendants have entered into the genealogies of the sibs, to be inherited in alternate generations by the grandchildren. The personal names, like "souls," carry the immortality of the descent lines and, the Cubeo believe, promote the growth of the children who bear them.

The names are but one of four elements that enter into the substance of the genealogies. The others are sacred trumpets and flutes that bear the names and represent the original ancestors; the life souls that are apportioned to each of the sibs; and, finally, the figure of a sacred anaconda, in whose elongated form the sibs are imagined as ranked segments extending from the head to the tail. The anaconda symbolizes the animal nature of human beings and their kinship with the animal world. These four elements characterize the Cubeo genealogical structure as a complex conveyor of vital forces that ensure their ethnic continuity and are therefore central to their religious and ritual purposes, namely, to maintain connections with founding ancestors. "When we remember our ancestors," the Cubeo proclaim, "we bring them to life." For them, the act of re-creating the ancestors in memory is comparable to the original creation, when the Creator willed people into existence by means of his own imaginative thought.

The correspondence of the hierarchical order of the sibs to the order in which the first ancestors emerged is also, in essential respects, a memorial to the circumstances of their origins; they are designated by genealogical relations as older brother/younger brother, and as grandparent/grandchild; by an original distribution of ritual powers, as chiefs, priests, shamans, warriors, and servants; and, by their place as segments of the body of the sacred anaconda, they are assigned a fixed order of residence along the rivers they occupy. The highest ranks, corresponding to the head of the anaconda, live toward the mouth of the river; the servants, toward the source. Thus the genealogical system—recapitulating in each generation the generative conditions of origins as an action of creative remembering—encompasses the main areas of Cubeo social and religious existence.

The Kwakiutl

A similar genealogical system, but one notable for the unusual significance it attaches to hereditary personal names, prevails among the Kwakiutl Indians of Vancouver Island. The qualities commonly attributed to personal names imply the presence in them of spiritual or magical powers, a "name soul," as, for example, among the Inuit (Eskimo). The Kwakiutl seem to have elevated the concept of name soul to a high level of concreteness, thereby bringing to the surface a mystical attribute of names that in other cases exists only by implication. Their treatment of names suggests how pedigrees may indeed constitute a great chain of being.

In Kwakiutl genealogies, each personal name stands for a desirable attribute of being, ordinarily a special power, and the ensemble of ancestral names covers the range of attributes and powers that govern life and death and control valued possessions. Even as it is a specified segment of the patterned mosaic of life forces, each name also has existence as a being, as a spiritual personage who is attached to and yet may have an existence apart from its bearer. The bearer is no ordinary being either, having been set apart and sanctified in having met the genealogical qualifications of seniority. Among the Kwakiutl tribes, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, only a very small number of personal names are of this type; all others are scorned as "made-up." The real names are the exclusive property of a nobility of chiefs, the secular and religious leaders. The remainder are the names of commoners, people who cannot claim descent from mythical an-cestors.

The chiefly or spiritual names possess an autonomy congruent with their character as ancestral incarnations, and, as such, they impose their natures upon those who bear them. Under certain circumstances they stand apart entirely. Thus, a chief who possesses several names, some belonging to different divisions of the tribe, might engage in ritual transactions with his distant name as though it were another person. He might present this name with gifts, or, under other circumstances, go through a sham marriage with a name attached for this purpose to his arm, for example. Kwakiutl genealogies are histories of the acquisition and descent of all such names and of their intrinsic properties. Chanted at all important ceremonial events, the family history is a repository of its accumulated powers and capacities.

Polynesian societies

Cubeo and Kwakiutl genealogical systems are noteworthy examples of aristocracy that is deeply enlaced in mythological and shamanistic conceptions and, therefore, politically undeveloped. Polynesian societies offer contrasting examples. Perhaps because their religions are more fully theistic and relatively free of these other associations, the Polynesians were able to move in another direction. Upon similar genealogical principles, and upon an equally undifferentiated economy, Polynesian societies produced such relatively modern institutions as socioeconomic stratification and centralized territorial states. Thus, the capability of a genealogical system to evolve or to elaborate a new social order is never a function of rules of descent alone. New patterns emerge when genealogical rules are joined to an appropriate religious doctrine. In Polynesia, that doctrine has been based upon a concept of mana, a force that animates all of nature and characterizes the energetic properties of all substance. In principle, mana descends from the gods to the human generations in measured proportions as defined by the genealogical rules. Senior lines are richly endowed with mana and are energized and hence ennobled by it; the junior descent lines are left behind as the weakly endowed commoners.

Conceptualized as an efficient force manifested objectively in results—on the battlefield, in the fields of production, in the perfection of craft skills, in personal charisma, in the efficacious management of religious rituals—mana is not automatically and indisputably the gift of inheritance. Its possessor has also to demonstrate worthiness by standing up to challenge. Nevertheless, although the conviction that the powers that animate and bestow efficacy move by the generative forces of genealogical rules may yield to the acid test of actual events, it is never abondoned. When lower ranks win royal power by force, as they occasionally do, from time to time, they are still obliged to discover genealogical authority for their new office. Genealogical guilds guard the sanctity of royal and noble pedigrees.

Polynesian societies differ in the way each has managed to sustain the shifting balances between the genealogical and the pragmatic. The Maori of New Zealand exemplify relatively close adherence to traditional genealogical criteria. The Samoans, the Easter Islanders, and the Mangaians demonstrate a greater flexibility in following the traditional rules of descent. The emergent states and stratified societies of Tonga, Tahiti, and Hawaii, for example, reveal a seemingly typical developmental cycle that moves from traditionalism to greater openness and, finally, to the consolidation of hereditary rule, but within the framework of a markedly restructured social order.

Major civilizations

The histories of major civilizations—those of classical Greece, Japan, or England, to take but three examples—show their genealogical life as comparable, in many respects, with that in tribal societies. Hesiod assembled from the body of Homeric mythology a genealogical order of the gods that allotted to each of them appropriate honors, titles, and cosmological functions, and described "how the gods and men sprang from one source." Theogony emerges as one aspect of cosmogony. The gods, humans, and the fully differentiated natural order evolve in these genealogical tales within a turbulent atmosphere, in a setting of disputes for power among contending forces, very much as they do in tribal creation myths. The patterns set by the gods, the immortals, in their evolution define the courses of human history.

The genealogists of archaic and preliterate Japan assembled from ancient myths a comparable cosmogony. Heaven and Earth, initially formed from Chaos, after several generations produced the god Izanagi and the goddess Izanami, who gave birth first to the islands of Japan, then to other gods, and, finally, after many generations and much social disorder, to humans. The first mikado was granted sovereignty by the sun goddess and, as a link in the succession of the gods, became the center of the national religious cult. Similarly, each distinguished family or clan also claimed its derived divinity from other gods and from ancestral association with emperors. The Japanese chronicles of hereditary titles authenticated the social and religious organization.

Christianity, in principle, breaks with the tenet of the traditional genealogical order that claims divine descent, but it leaves essentially untouched the issues of sanctity and an even deeper concern with singularity and inequality. Even the egalitarian Quakers in England succumbed to the temptation of differentiating major from minor family lines. As for English royalty, it had found in the Roman Catholic church, itself the heir to the political institutions of the Roman Empire, the questionable but powerful bases for claiming the "divine right of kings" as an authority for absolute power. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 set that thesis to rest, and later monarchs settled for the moderate option of divine approval.

Through the long course of English history, the constant principle of monarchy, starting with the Celtic rule of the fourth century bce, is one of singular descent from divinely graced or otherwise extraordinary leaders. Except for kinship with the royal house, no other fixed principles for succession to the throne, as for example primogeniture, were established in England before the thirteenth century. As is common in such systems, genealogical authority fostered social unity when it was strong and wars for succession when it was weak. Social and cultural unity has been the aim and, to a considerable extent, the accomplishment of the genealogical order—which achieved its apotheosis in aristocracy—until relatively recent times.

Nongenealogical Succession

Tibetan Buddhism, or Lamaism, illustrates the contrary qualities of a dynastic order from which genealogical succession has been totally banished. In the fifteenth century, the monastery of Dge lugs pa (Geluk pa), a celibate order and the original seat of the Dalai Lama dynasty, promulgated a doctrine of successive reincarnations as the mode of accession to divine authority. They believed that the Dalai Lama would be reborn in some infant unrelated and unknown to him, and that through this reincarnation, he would continue his work of enlightenment. Discovered after an exhaustive search that brought to light his divine traits and evidence of an earlier existence, the new Dalai Lama was trained for his post during an interim regency. The Tibetan doctrine set aside traditional considerations of individuality and family distinction so that the divine presence, a manifestation of the Buddha, would appear directly, albeit in human form. However, whatever forcefulness this system gained through directness of access to the religious source was at least partly dissipated by the dispersal of its constituencies. Unaffiliated to a systematic line of succession, Lamaist adherents were free to join any one of numerous monasteries, each of which was headed by an abbot, himself the incarnation of a lesser lama.

Bibliography

Meyer Fortes was perhaps the most original and perceptive of anthropological authorities on genealogical issues. His Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan (Chicago, 1969), a central work on the subject, is a most useful summary and refinement of his position with a rich bibliography of theoretical and ethnographic sources. For the Cubeo, the only work thus far is my The Cubeo: Indians of the Northwest Amazon, rev. ed. (Urbana, Ill., 1979), based on field work. Two exceptional studies on Barasana Indians, also of the Colombian Vaupés, that examine genealogical conceptions from structuralist and symbolist perspectives are Christine Hugh-Jones's From the Milk River: Spatial and Temporal Processes in Northwest Amazonia (Cambridge, U.K., 1979) and Stephen Hugh-Jones's The Palm and the Pleiades: Initiation and Cosmology in Northwest Amazonia (Cambridge, U.K., 1979). Taken together, the bibliographies in these three works are close to all-inclusive for this region. The best single-volume access to the very extensive literature on the Kwakiutl from the writings of Franz Boas and his native collaborator, George Hunt, is Boas's difficult but authoritative study, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1895; reprint, New York, 1970). A recent and useful interpretation of Kwakiutl culture and society that draws upon much of the Boas and Hunt texts is my The Mouth of Heaven: An Introduction to Kwakiutl Religious Thought (New York, 1975), which includes a bibliography of the published Boas field studies. There is no better introduction to the nature of Polynesian societies than the writings of one of Polynesia's native sons, Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck), of Maori descent and one-time director of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum at Honolulu. His greatest work is The Coming of the Maori (Wellington, 1952), an intimate yet anthropologically professional study. My Ancient Polynesian Society (Chicago, 1970) focuses more directly on genealogical issues because it is a study of variations in the forms of Polynesian aristocracy.

On the subject of the genealogies of the Greek gods, the principal sources are Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, conveniently available in the English translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White in his The Homeric Hymns and Homerica (Cambridge, Mass., 1967). As background on the ancient period, M. I. Finley's The Ancient Greeks (New York, 1977) is both authoritative and succinct. For Japanese sources, the general work of choice is George B. Sansom's familiar classic, Japan: A Short Cultural History, rev. ed. (New York, 1962), to be used, however, in conjunction with the source book on the Japanese genealogical and historical chronicles, as compiled by Ryusaku Tsunoda, Wm. Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition, 2 vols. (New York, 1958). On the genealogies of the royal lines of England, G. M. Trevelyan's History of England, new illust. ed. (London, 1973), the Oxford History of England, especially volume 3, and Austin Lane Poole's Domesday Book to Magna Carta, 1087–1216 (Oxford, 1955), are particularly noteworthy for their historical insights.