> > My model uses a celtic-style inheritance, where private property is
shared
> > equally among all eligible heirs. My reasons stem from ethnographic
models,
>
> I believe this is *not* the Heortling model -- one reason being that
> I believe this is the Alakoring model.
>
> Of course, if you define eligible heirs more narrowly than the Irish,
> you can at least preserve some difference. But I suspect the
> Heortlings designate their primary heirs.
Remember that dad doesn't decide who gets the next generation of rights to fields and pastures, its the clan ring, and de facto in most cases the bloodline elders. Personal possessions (mainly herds) may be passed on by either method, but they're not the most important aspect here.
Women get their 'inheritance' as they get married (this is essentially what dowry is).
Primogeniture would mean Arni gets the rights to the prime pastures while
younger brothers Braggi, Colydal and Deric essentially have to develop their
own from scratch, and in most cases set up new households. This makes for
competitive siblings, and goes against the essential communalism of
Heortling society. Sharing rights develops close cooperative bonds between
close kin, especially between brothers, and allows for more orderly
expansion and development of resources. For this reason I favour distributed
inheritance. Extended Heortling families are based around a senior male and
his brothers - so they must have a reason to continue living and working
together.
>
> > I
> > believe that bloodline membership is by nature fairly fluid and
flexible:
> > people argue, get jealous, move closer to their cult teachers or are
forced
> > to move because of changing populations or the variability of field and
> > pasture resources.
>
> Sounds a little more like stead or household to me.
Agreed. It works for both. There's overlap in the descriptive terminology, and people (including myself) have been using various terms in a confused fashion to date, which hasn't helped the exploration. Both David and Ian have made helpful comments here.
What I mean when I say...
A CLAN is a descent group based on links to a common founding ancestor. It is the default, enduring descent category, and the most important subcategory of your kin.
(Given the varied nature of marriage contracts, I don't see affines as being too important to males in Heortling kinship. Affines are usually of another clan, and physically distant. Continuing ritual and ceremonial ties would be important however. The situation is different for women of course - but this is all straying into another (big) topic.
A BLOODLINE is a descent group, a conceptual category, based around known links to a common (and usually recent) ancestor. It links together a subset of your kin within the clan. It has a certain flexibility, and bloodlines tend to split off over time. The common ancestor is often the stead founder.
A HOUSEHOLD or HEARTH is a domestic group living in a communal dwelling, typically twenty to forty people - and the practical focus of everyday life and labour. A hearth comprises three or four generations of an extended family, based around a senior male and his brothers. But a household is different to a stead!
A STEAD, now here's the rub. A stead is as big as a stead need be, and here I see a wide range of variation. A 'typical' stead probably comprises three or four households of the same bloodline, or three or four households from two or three different bloodlines working in close cooperation. But the range of variation is large - Tovtaros 'Fort Apache' fortress-steads on the edge of Snakepipe might comprise most of a clan (twenty hearths, four bloodlines!) , while long-established Colymar vineyard steads are very small, a single hearth, single bloodline: the closest Sartar gives us to a westernised nuclear family. I think that in this this there's been a lot of confusion.
One stead = one bloodline = one household is in most cases far too simplistic. There's tremendous variation.
I believe people change hearths/households as a matter of course, its part of everyday life that children go to spend a season with uncle Braggi and aunty Theya, or that a significant proportiion of a stead moves up the valley to the Twin Maple Hearth to help with the shearing.
People may also move more permanently to a different stead of the same bloodline. And less commonly, people may also *permanently* change bloodlines *and* steads for a variety of pressing reasons, some of which I mentioned - jealousy, violence, cult differences. An entire bloodline is as likely to convert to the Lunar way as an individual, and in fact the Lunar strategy is consciously 'top down' - convert the kings, the chiefs and elders, and the clans will follow. In such cases, a loyal Orlanthi hearth may want OUT.
In changing bloodlines, they rely on the normative nature of kinship and the ability to emphasise different ancestral connections according to the situation at hand. Such situations are very common in the ethnographic data of tribal societies
Cheers
John
Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology there. As it was, they took inventory.
Powered by hypermail