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SOME MODELS IN A MUDDLE: Lineage and house in Classic Maya social organization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2004

John M. Watanabe
John M. Watanabe
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, 6047 Silsby Hall, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755-3547, USA
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Abstract

This commentary addresses ethnographic and theoretical problems in the recent debate over lineages and houses in Classic Maya society. On the one hand, proponents of segmentary lineage models miss ambiguities between filiation and descent, residential and corporate groups in the Maya ethnographies they use for their analogies. On the other hand, supporters of Lévi-Strauss's house model fail to appreciate the relative instead of absolute differences between descent theory and alliance theory that underlie lineage and house models and make it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between them archaeologically. Both look to descriptive, largely static types derived from elsewhere and then argue which best fits Classic Maya society rather than build models that define the relevant components of social organization—filiation, descent, alliance, residence—and then theorize how differently patterned relations between these components might yield the institutional groupings we find on (or in the case of archaeology, in) the ground.

Type
SPECIAL SECTION: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON ANCIENT LOWLAND MAYA SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
Information
Ancient Mesoamerica , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , January 2004 , pp. 159 - 166
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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