Sideways or Downwards? Lateral and Vertical Succession, Inheritance and Descent in Africa and Eurasia

Bibliographic Data

ID7915758
AuthorsJack Goody (corresponding author)
Year1970
Volume5
Issue4
Pages627
Publication date1970-12-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMan (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0025-1496 • E-ISSN: 2397-2548
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2799107
OpenAlexW2279957730
LanguageEN
Citations received16

Much of the discussion of inheritance that has come from the pens of European scholars has turned on the question of partibility among the children, whether the property is divided among them all (gavelkind) or transmitted to a single member of the group by unigeniture-either by primogeniture (Borough French) or by ultimogeniture (Borough English). The concern of writers like Kenny in his treatise on primogeniture (i878) is to trace the emergence of the Norman system of favouring the eldest son out of the earlier, Celtic, method of partition, a process he attributes to the military duties required of feudal tenants (I878: I8). Kenny distinguishes Welsh gavelkind (division among the family) from the 'more primitive' form of Irish gavelkind, which promoted division among the clan (I878:4). Another theme of major concern, one that affects succession to office more than inheritance to property, had to do with the inclusion or exclusion of daughters from the enjoyment of some or all of the father's estate; by the Celtic law, for example, they were excluded from the inheritance of military lands. The emphasis on the way in which property is transmitted to the children has led writers to pay too little attention to another major difference between systems of inheritance and succession, that is, whether the property or office in question passes laterally to siblings or lineally to offspring. In an earlier analysis of inheritance I argued that since property had eventually to drop a generation, we could for many purposes reduce systems of inheritance to their inter-generational component, that is, to the question of whether property passed 'directly' to children (agnatically) or indirectly to sister's children (in a uterine manner). For some purposes this approach is adequate, but for others it neglects the very important implications of the sideways or downwards movement of exclusive rights. In this paper I want to explore the distribution of these different modes of transmission and to examine some of the concomitants. The distribution of modes of succession, inheritance and descent displays major differences in the two great continental areas of the Old World. The first of these turns upon sex. Africa is characterised by homogeneous transmission (that is, from male to male and female to female), whether of property (Goody i969a) or of office (Goody I969b). Whereas in the major societies of Europe and Asia property, and even office often pass between members of both sexes by the process which I have called 'diverging devolution'. 'Diverging devolution' is always an inter-generational process, since property is channelled to a person's children of both sexes. It is a form of vertical transmission

Biology · Descent (aeronautics · Ecological succession · Economic geography · Geography · Inheritance (genetic algorithm · Ecology · Genetics · Geology · Medieval Literature and History

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