In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

14 Crow-Omaha, in Thickness and in Thin Thomas R. Trautmann and Peter M. Whiteley Morgan’s astonishment in finding that among some peoples the son of an uncle is equally an uncle inaugurated a discussion that this book continues. Since Morgan, the discussion of the Crow-Omaha problem, understood in the simple sense of the problem of explaining skewing, did not have an even forward trajectory. Insofar as explanation of skewing focused only on descent the phenomenon seemed easily understood. We could say that in those narrow terms it had reached a certain kind of resolution in the time of Radcliffe-Brown. But analysis of skewing has also prompted the study of the forms of marriage with which it is associated, since at least the times of Rivers (1914) and Gifford (1916) and continuing with Lowie (1934), Murdock (1949), Lane and Lane (1959), Eyde and Postal (1961), and Lévi-Strauss (1966, 1969). In this wider field of vision Crow-Omaha was and remains a tough nut. In hindsight we can see why this should have been so. Evidently if the son of an uncle is an uncle, a kinship category is being transmitted to a descendant; it did not take long to discover that skewing had two varieties as the statuses in question were being transmitted unilineally, either matrilineally (Crow) or patrilineally (Omaha). This was a solid gain, even though the exact nature of the transmission was debated. The gain is not lost but it is substantially obscured when the focal point shifts from descent to marriage alliance. Skewing is associated with at least two different regimes of marriage, the one, which we can call dispersed alliance (McKinley 1971b), prohibiting marriage within the clan of the father and the mother and perhaps others, and the other, prescribing asymmetrical cross-cousin marriage. Lévi-Strauss, in the Elementary Structures, devoted a great deal of attention to asymmetrical prescriptive marriage, following the extensive work of Marcel Granet, but scarcely mentioned skewing. When he did address Crow-Omaha, in the 1965 Huxley Lecture, his strategy was to identify it exclusively with dispersed alliance, which he theorized as semi-complex marriage 282 Trautmann and Whiteley alliance midway between elementary and complex forms, and vigorously separated this from asymmetric-prescriptive alliance as whales from fish. Now undoubtedly the concept of semi-complex marriage has been very fruitful for anthropology, as we shall explain further shortly, though attended by much debate and skepticism, not least by Godelier who declines to consider Crow-Omaha kinship as a transition to something else. But with the benefit of all the work done since then, we have to conclude that this move by Lévi-Strauss put the unitary explanation of skewing beyond reach. Marriage alliance being the focus, the explanatory principle came in two very different kinds, so that explanations of skewing based on semi-complex marriage alliance would necessarily cancel those based on asymmetrical prescriptive marriage and vice versa. The Crow-Omaha problem became more complicated, paradoxically , by cutting the phenomenon in half and throwing away one of the halves. Recognizing that this turning may lead to an impasse is a step forward , for it serves to reopen the question of the relation of descent and marriage to skewing. But not to solve it, for we cannot simply return to the formulations of Radcliffe-Brown and others in his line of ex­ planation and evade the association of skewing with specific types of marriage. Of course, the field of discussion has changed its shape and enlarged its dimensions since Lévi-Strauss because of subsequent theoretical advances and the thickening and widening of the ethnographic record. We have tracked some of the steps that have gotten us from then to now in chapter 1. Let us now draw the balance of these pages and state how a classic problem appears to us at their end. We begin with the object of study: Crow-Omaha something-orother . Across the chapters of this book, the search for the right something -or-other has moved in a definite direction. What is the substantive to which the Crow-Omaha modifier attaches ? Is it a kinship system? A terminology type? A dimension of kinship terminology, namely, skewing? Moving across the options from left to right we go from a rich, complex, more thing-like object to the thinnest of abstractions. The tendency of the chapters herein has been toward the right end of this series, impelled not so much by a...

Share