Wa-hay, and there will be more rejoicing in heaven... I think the operative phrase here is "in tribes". Marriage customs are very much a function of tribal formation, since that's a large part of what drives them, and one of the first thing you'd iron out when they're founded. If you're not in a tribe at all, marriage will necessarily be catch-as-catch-can, and exogamy will be more like the exception than the rule. (If you have other clans you routinely intermarry with, you're at least on the way to having a tribe, even if you haven't formalised it yet.) A triaty is a conveniently extreme example of this, but in many tribes the patterns will be both more complex, less strict, and less formalised, with 'clusters' occurring between near-neighbours, and some clans in more of a back-eddy...
> The vexed issue is how odal is odal property. Ian Cooper has pointed out how
> the term has been mutated by Greg from its original meaning, and seems from
> KOS to mean essentially communal property. Obviously not *all* property is
> communal: it entails severe mental gymnastics to make your HW Wealth rating
> meaningful if anything else.
To trade HWisms though, clans have Wealth ratings too, odal property revisionists. ;-)
> If we understand a dowry to be essentially a
> woman's share of her inheritance given out upon marriage (a common enough
> understanding in the tribal world), then her own herds would go with her to
> her husband's clan in the 'default' marriage model. And they would have to
> remain *hers* for the system to make any sense at all. This would also
> provide her with a measure of economic security and social power among her
> new family.
Sounds about right to me. Whether this is personal property or not isn't really key, since after all, the clan agrees to (if not actually initiates) the marriage 'deal', and are explicitly a party to it, so odal property can and will be tossed in there too.
End of The Glorantha Digest V8 #9
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