A Structural Analysis of Purum Society Rodney Needham American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 60, No. 1, Part 1 (Feb., 1958), 75-101. Stable URL hitp:/flinks,jstor-org/sicisici=0002-7294% 28 195802%292%3A60% 3A 1%3C7TS%3AASAOPS%3E2.0,CO%3B2-5 American Anthropologist is currently published by American Anthropological Association. Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hup:/www,jstororglabout/terms.hml. ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hutp:/wwwjstor.org/jounals/anthro. html ch copy of any part of'a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, ISTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @ jstor.org. hupulwww jstor.org/ Wed Dee 7 06:20:54 2005A Structural Analysis of Purum Society RODNEY NEEDHAM University of Oford ‘HIS analysis is based on publications about the Purum of the Indo- Burma border. It is part of a comparative study of societies practicing ‘matrilateral cross-cousin marriage and is intended primarily to contribute to the theory of prescriptive marriage systems. It is not limited to a technical topic, however, but is a “total structural analysis” of a system of values, social relations, symbols, and prestations. 1 Rules governing the acquisition of a wife from among kin can be either prescriptive or preferential. Societies are of quite different structural types according to whether their rules are of the former or the latter sort. Prescrip- tive rules have certain structural entailments, and societies with such rules can be classified according to the particular entailments of the different pre- scriptions. An important feature of such societies is that the prescriptions are related to marriage prohibitions in such a coherent fashion as to present sys- tems of positive and negative rules which can be studied as wholes. The system ‘of marriage relations is commonly coherent with the structure of the other institutions of which the society is composed, and these institutions may ‘exhibit the same structural principles as the marriage system. Marriage prefer~ ‘ences, on the other hand, have no structural entailments in the total social system comparable to those of a prescriptive system, and are not systemat- ically integrated with the marriage prohibitions. This radical distinction be- tween prescriptive and nonprescriptive systems is essential to any general the- ‘ory of incest. Its recognition is fundamentally important in problems concern- ing such diverse matters as the stability of marriage, the effects of marriage payments, the solidary consequences of marriages between members of dif- ferent groups, and many other problems of social relations in which the nature of the marriage tie is a factor. More generally, it will be found relevant to a very wide range of issues in the comparative study of descent systems. Prescriptive marriage rules entail enduring affinal ties between groups. ‘The relation between a wife-giving group and a wife-taking group has been referred to (e.g. Wehrli 1904:26) as connubium, a term which in this technical sense has long been in use by Dutch anthropologists (e.g., van Wouden 1935). ‘A bounded set of such relationships created and maintained by matrilateral cross-cousin marriage (the only type of prescription that I am concerned with here) may be termed a system of matrilateral connubium. In this the ties are formed by the unilateral transference of women from group to group, thus: 1516 American Anthropologist (60, 1958 ‘Three groups satisfy the structural requirements of such a system, and in this ‘model it logically follows that the transference of women is cyclic, so that C gives wives to A. Itis obvious that marriage with the patrilateral cross-cousin would reverse the direction of the circulation of women, and it can easily be appreciated that in societies based on matrilateral connubium such marriage is reckoned an offense of a grave kind—incest. tis necessary to distinguish clearly between three kinds of groups which ‘may be represented in different contexts by the descent lines of the figure. The structurally necessary number of groups to enable such a system to work is three—Ego-group, wife-givers, and wife-takers: these are structural groups. In reality, each of these structural groups may comprise a number of corporate unilineal groups as defined by the particular society: these are descent groups. ‘A descent group of any order may comprise a number of dispersed local groups. Something of the significance of these distinctions will appear later. c B A ro ro ; : | Soke b b= Sb |e In 1949 Lévi-Strauss published Les siructures élémentaires de la parenté, a ‘work of classical merits and proportions, in which he examined the various types of prescriptive cross-cousin marriage as different modes of exchange of women, He had ample material for the discussion of direct exchange in Aus- tralian section-systems. His discussion of patrilateral cross-cousin marriage was entirely a priori. His examination of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage —which occupies a large part of his book—was in part a priori and in part based on certain incomplete and sometimes misleading descriptions in the literature. His central thesis was not thereby invalidated, but a knowledge of how a matrilateral system really works could have shown even better how profitable his notion was. It is particularly to be regretted that he was not acquainted with the considerable work on this form of society done by Dutch scholars. In another place I have drawn attention to one such source in the Dutch literature, and by a new analysis incidentally brought out features of the society for which the ethnographer was looking but of which he was not aware (Needham 1957). In the present article I wish to make a similar analysis ‘of another society of the same type, but from a source which is rather fuller and allows deeper analysis. I examine this particular society partly because of the merits of the ethnography and partly because it has figured in a theoretical rejoinder to one of Lévi-Strauss's main themes. €