John Hughes responding (evidently painedly) to me on whether TR marriage statements rise to the level of "a greg":
> > 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.
No, it was an _example_ (or several) from said truckload. (Hence the latinate abbreviation denoting said exemplification, and the (admittedly redundant) use of the phrase "to take but one example".) Before I start searching and citing though, how many examples would constitute a truckload, and would a truckload make any difference?
> 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.
i.e., the subsumption argument. The two "contradict" in that if your interpretation was what was consistently intended in each case, the former would be a bizarrely obfuscated statement. Assuming the author didn't intend to be deliberately misleading, it's not unfair to say that one or other is in error (leaving us with the question of which).
> 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.
A good deal too much like a retcon, and too little mindful, for my personal taste. Following Karallan's example would have been greatly preferable. "Softening" seems to be entirely absent.
> > > 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 that's not even the sense of the ROTO quotes, so it's a little perverse to read them that way, and then bemoan its "non-standard" terminology. The first quote does not "define" exogamy -- it throws the term in, preparatory to saying precisely what it means to describe, it seems to me.
The second explicitly mentions marriage, and _not_ sex: how can this be read as "explicitly" making the latter taboo? If the first is read as "defining" exogamy, then why do you not read the second in the same spirit -- it goes on to make remarks in much the same style as the first quote, except confined _entirely_ to marriage.
> > 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.
More than a little minimising, but the "informal" (if not the 'invisible' or 'unusual') I can live with. Unions can have no effective legal status while being socially and ritually entirely present, normal and acceptable.
> > 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. [...]
> Fine and cenel?
Can we we clear about which of these two institutions you are nominating as being 1000-strong, prescriptively exogamous social units?
> Cash economies tend to destroy clan-based prescriptive marriage, for they
> give young men more power and leeway than is good for them. :)
Prescriptive clan-based marriage is the very _opposite_ of the subject. No one has ever floated such an idea in this context, to my knowledge, so either we're digressing off the point entirely, or this is a red herring.
> 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.
The political incentives for (clan-)exogamous marriages is not disputed. Of course these exist. In some cases they may indeed be located between the customary and the obligatory (the infamous triatries). What I find unlikely is that formal marriage is in all clans (or frankly even "all" clans) _restricted_ to such cases; and what I find bonkers in the extreme is any implication that the alternative is "incestuous".
> Some form of incest taboo is a human universal [...]
This is a subliminal straw man. I'm not arguing "there is no Orlanth incest taboo", as should be clear from the fact that I've proferred _definitions_ of "incest". I'm arguing that TR, misconstruing ROTO as slim precedent, has the _wrong_ definition of "incest".
> 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'.)
As I always say, Sufficiently Deep Heroquesting is in any event indistinguishable from Always Was.
> There should
> never be easy universalising without regard to local conditions.
Is this a critique of my position, or your own, published one?
Lengthily,
Alex.
--__--__--
Powered by hypermail