Crafting Prehispanic Maya Kinship

2. Implications of the Kinship Models

2 Implications of the Kinship Models This chapter has two objectives. The first is to highlight the importance of kinship to the study of past societies in general terms. The second is to describe the major competing models that have been proposed for the ancient Maya and to discuss their implications. Keeping in mind that many readers, particularly most archaeologists,may not be as familiar with the study of kinship as are social anthropologists,the case that kinship is important and clarifications on the fundamental principles in each model are warranted. The chapter is relevant to the theme and perspectives throughout the book read by kinship experts and nonexperts alike. Therefore, the following must bridge a vast divide in audiences, which often sets the stage for satisfying nobody. In the end, I chose to address a nonexpert readership. In particular, the chapter addresses an archaeological audience, which does not have the same data, perspectives, or potential interests in kinship as do many ethnographers and ethnologists.To the latter, I must beg indulgence for the following presentation may appear untraditional, as we shift focus to make kinship relevant to an audience with different concerns and entry points. In the first section, I describe kinship in a way that is relevant to archaeological data and theory, which also provides an opportunity to address some common misconceptions. some critical points about social organization (from postmarital residential groups to larger descent groups), descent, inheritance/succession,marriage systems,and kin terminological systems are made as these are also relevant to the major hypotheses on the ancient Maya. The major models include patrilineal kinship (including omaha and segmentary lineage versions), cognatic kinship (with either bilateral or ambilineal versions),double descent,Kariera kinship,and house societies.I provide a lengthier description of patrilineal kinship, in part to ease the less-familiar 30 / Chapter 2 reader into the principles and in part because it is the leading hypothesis for the prehispanic Maya. This chapter does not address all major kinship categories , only those that have been proposed for the ancient Maya.This information is essential to understand the subsequent discussions on problems, methods, and the case study. The categories are described in simplistic and ideal terms. readers less familiar with kinship literature should be warned that there is some degree of cross-cultural variation in the ways that the principles in each type category are expressed. The Importance of Kinship Major themes in archaeology today include, but are not limited to, social organization ,socioeconomic dynamics,agency/negotiation,gender,and identity .This section outlines the ways that kinship principles and models are important to understanding each of these themes. It focuses on the elements of kinship that are most meaningful to archaeology and to the concepts used in forming the various hypotheses for the prehispanic Maya in the next sections of the chapter. Social Organization For archaeologists, the best starting point is social organization: the ways that groups are formed, their social functions, and their interrelationships. In part, this is because some of the most relevant archaeological data are restricted to material evidence on social groups left behind from patterned social behavior; they cannot observe descent, inheritance, or kin terminology without textual sources.But the importance of social organization in archaeology is also due to theoretical orientations, which, with the exception of postmodern/postprocessualist approaches,are traditionally more materialistoriented , rather than cognitively oriented.Through social organization, the importance of kinship to socioeconomic dynamics,negotiation,gender,and identity can be demonstrated. The makeup of households is related to resource ownership and postmarital residence strategies. In most known societies, households (not necessarily represented by individual dwellings or domestic structures per se) are the domestic locations for the smallest resource-owning social groups. Major categories of households can be defined in terms of the outcomes of postmarital residence (strategies to form residential groups and recruit members ).adults are retained or passed to other households through matrilocality, patrilocality, bilocality/ambilocality, or neolocality (among other strategies Implications of the Kinship Models / 31 not entertained in this book).Whichever system is used, it has implications on the nature of household membership,access to resources,the strategies for recruitment, residential identity, and postmarital engendered mobility. an important distinction to make is between the members residing in and working with the resources of the household and the social group that belongs to the household and owns the resources of the household.With matrilocality, for example...