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House Society (house + society)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Beyond Kinship: Social and Material Reproduction in House Societies

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 4 2001
Stephen Hugh-Jones
Beyond Kinship: Social and Material Reproduction in House Societies Rosemary A. Joyce and Susan D. Gillespie, eds. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2000. 280 pp., maps, figures, notes, references, index. [source]

Rethinking Ancient Maya Social Organization: Replacing "Lineage" with "House"

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 3 2000
Susan D. Gillespie
Long-standing disagreements concerning prehispanic Maya kinship and social organization have focused on the nature of their corporate groups, generally presumed to have been lineages. Specific debates center on whether the lineages were patrilineal or incorporated some kind of double-descent reckoning, how descent was combined with locality to define a group, and the status of lineage-outsiders within a group. It is argued here that Maya social organization is better approached within the contemporary critique of kinship, replacing "lineage" with Lévi-Strauss's model of the "house",a corporate group maintaining an estate perpetuated by the recruitment of members whose relationships are expressed "in the language" of kinship and affinity and affirmed by purposeful actions. In this perspective, the operation of corporate groups is the primary concern, and relationships construed in terms of consanguinity and affinity are seen as strategies pursued to enhance and perpetuate the group, [ancestor veneration, house society, kinship, Maya, social organization] [source]

Building a house society: the reorganization of Maori communities around meeting houses

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 2 2010
Jeffrey Sissons
In this article I seek to re-conceptualize New Zealand Maori society as a house society and describe the way in which meeting houses participated in the transformation of this society during the period 1880-1950. After noting some central confusions in the anthropological literature on Maori descent groups, I consider the value of Lévi-Strauss's notion of the ,house' for understanding Maori social organization. Then, drawing upon the results of my fieldwork in one Maori community and published surveys of meeting house construction more generally, I describe a process through which Maori society became progressively more house-based. I conclude by noting that the centrality of the house as an ideological form in Maori society assumes an association between hosting and social worth, an association that may well be fundamental to house societies in general. Résumé L'auteur cherche ici à reconceptualiser la société maorie de Nouvelle-Zélande comme une sociétéà maisons et à décrire la manière dont les maisons de réunion ont participéà la transformation de cette société dans la période comprise entre 1880 et 1950. Après avoir relevé quelques confusions importantes sur les groupes de descendance maoris dans la littérature anthropologique, il examine la valeur de la notion de « maison » selon Lévi-Strauss pour la compréhension de l'organisation sociale des Maoris. Il décrit ensuite, à partir des résultats d'un travail de terrain dans une communauté maorie et d'études publiées sur la construction de maisons de réunion en général, un processus au fil duquel la société maorie s'est progressivement attachée davantage à ces maisons. Pour finir, il note que le rôle central de la maison comme forme idéologique dans la société maorie suppose une association entre hébergement et valeur sociale, association qui est peut-être fondamentale dans les sociétés à maisons en général. [source]