> I'd happily start talking about that recurrent villian of mine, Pinfeather
> One-pinion, but then I'd find it necessary to take this to herowars_at_yg
> (and we've only just got here).
Quackbeth the Hueymakt looks forward to the encounter, and will meet you at the crossroads. (Small silver coin donation required).
> The non-canon is the truckload of fan material (e.g. Tales 18, to take
> but one example) based on the more natural reading of ROTO, which in
> one passage explicitly talks about exogamous _bloodlines_. (I don't
> have the exact source to hand.)
Tales 18, while a beefy issue not wanting in the gravy department, is hardly a truckload of fan material. ROTO indeed states that "Bloodlines are exogamous, which means that members of the same bloodlines can never marry or have sex with each other. (250) Further on (254) we are told that "Clans are exogamous."
We've been over this before at length. The issue of exogamy not being about sex aside, these statements are not in contradiction unless you take a particular isolated proof-text innerancy approach to the issue. If a clan is exogamous then of course the bloodlines are exogamous.
Marriage in the tribal world is always as much about forging sociality between groups as about personal romance: if you're already sharing a stead with another bloodline there's very little a marriage contract can add to in terms of sociality. Clans are already unified; it is the bonds between clans that require constant re-strengthening through marriage alliance. This is pretty much a human universal in the tribal world, and the basic of an influential though flawed stream within anthropology pioneered by Claude Levi-Strauss that is called 'alliance theory'.
> > This clan exogamy/clan incest taboo is the official position, expanded
> > upon carefully in TR.
>
> i.e. the naff retcon. ;-)
Why tank ye. Much less than a retcon I'd have thought, though your razor sharp dissections were very much in my mind when I wrote it. TR softens the blow somewhat, simply stating that "Tradition states that members of a clan will not intermarry." It is silent on sexual mores and taboos, except within marriage.
> > ROTO explicitly spells out just such a taboo on sexual
> > intercourse with other clan members.
>
> It does? Where? This I don't recall at all.
This is the rub. The second quote above, "clans are exogamous". It has previously defined exogamy as being about both sex and marriage. This is of course *not* the usual meaning of the term - exogamy is about marriage, not sex - but by its own logic and definitions it is quite clear. And of course, it leaves a gap wide enough to gore an entire herd of sacred oxen if you have the mind to.
> And why would such pregnancies be ipso facto "unwanted"? (Other than
> by assumption.) Even if marriage were legally impossible (which seems
> entirely unrealistic and unnecessary to me, but no matter), why would this
> rule out an informal union (aka, "shacking up"), or in the manner
discussed
> below? Why are these "undesirable" outcomes from any given perspective
> -- either the individuals concerned, or the clan?
You're right that none of the obstacles are absolute. And it certainly doesn't rule out 'invisible' or informal relationships, something I've advocated myself in the past when discussing homosexual and other unusual relationships.
> If anyone could quote me a remotely comparable RW example of a society
> which is anything like this restrictive about _either_ sex or marriage
> (i.e., none of either within 1000 people and several kilometers) I'd
> be most pleased and enlightened. (Once again one is forced to raise
> the "what did they breed with, rocks?", in periods such as the early
> resettlement era, and in certain regions where supra-clan structures
> are effectively non-existant.) Certainly it makes no sense with respect
> to the usual Nordo-Celt "analogues".
Fine and cenel? Arranged marriage persisted for nearly a thousand years in Europe beyond the dissolution of the tribes into state-like formations. Granted, it was usually among close kin, for in Christian Europe the marriage of nobility alone replaced what all marriage was used for in the tribal world: the purposes of alliance and sociality. Cash economies tend to destroy clan-based prescriptive marriage, for they give young men more power and leeway than is good for them. :) Exogamy allows a growing clan to keep itself compact and surrounded by friends - the alliances built by exogamy can overmatch any number of small, inter-marrying groups. It was Tyler who first suggested, insightfully, that savage tribes had only two practical alternatives: marry out or be killed out. The Heortling background reflects this well.
Some form of incest taboo is a human universal, though the fact that is it a biological imperative among many species, yet takes an incredible diversity of different cultural forms among humans has been tying theorists in knots for over a hundred years, from Tyler and Freud onwards to Levi-Strauss and Robin Fox. Exchange is also a dominant organising principle in human society, and marriage is the foremost example of exchange.
Strict historicity isn't necessarily a good design feature when it comes to kinship: Heortling systems are versatile and encompass just about every variation possible, so the narrator has plenty of fiat. And as I've noted before, Heortling kinship has features that I know of in *no other* human society, contemporary or historical: the existence of brideprice and dowry simultaneously. Recently however, I was reading a prime Gloranthan inspirational epic that mentions both these customs as coexisting, a product no doubt of the method of its composition. (That source also mentions iron and bronze technologies interchangeably). Care to guess what it is?
Kinship systems are of course highly adaptive in both time and in space, and closely tied to social organisation and material means of production. (So much for, 'our clan was this way even before the Dawn'.) There should never be easy universalising without regard to local conditions.
There is always a wide gulf between the ideal conceptual models and ideologies central in people's thought world and real people competing, choosing, manipulating, and looking the other way. Appreciating this contradiction is absolutely central to understanding kinship. Heortlings, like us, live in a world of ecological pressures, economic and political striving, individual variability and the vagaries of wyrd. These all impact on kinship. How much of this needs to be highlighted is always going to be a decision of the individual narrator.
John
nysalor_at_iprimus.com.au John HughesQuestlines: http://home.iprimus.com.au/pipnjim/questlines/
Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work.
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