Dan Budin's List: Ethnology Project

• he Kurds are a linguistic and ethnic group, nearly exclusively Moslem by religion, totalling some three million people.  6    
• They occupy a semi-continuous territory along the hills and mountains east and north of the Fertile Crescent, divided between the modern states of Persia, iraq, Turkey, the U.S.S.R., and Syria.
• Some few groups of Kurds have remained nomadic till the present day, following their herds of sheep, goats, and large cattle into the mountains in the summer and down on the plains in the winter. The great majority are today subsistence farmers, many of whom practice a pattern of localized transhumance. The present discussion relates to the southern districts of Iraq Kurdi-stan, where material was collected in the field from February to August, 1951.

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• Kurdish, an Indo-European language, is most closely related to Persian. It consists of four main dialects (northern, middle, and southern Kurmanji, and Gorani), which in turn include several local dialects.

• The Republic of Haiti is the second-oldest independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, and it is the only one with a French-Creole background and an overwhelmingly African culture. Large communities of Haitians exist outside Haiti, especially in the Dominican Republic, on other Caribbean islands, in Central America and northern South America, and in North America.
• The language spoken by all Haitians is usually referred to as Haitian Creole. For most of modern history, however, the official language of government, business, and education has been French.
• With 60 percent of the population living in a rural setting in 2003, the majority of Haitians are farmers. They live in dispersed villages loosely connected by trade routes. Scattered within these villages are huts of wattle and daub surrounded by gardens, fields, and out-buildings. Regional centers once had considerable cultural and commercial importance, but since the first U.S. occupation, Port-au-Prince has become disproportionately dominant.
• Although the majority of the population is nominally Roman Catholic and although Protestant missionaries have won a number of converts in the poorer rural areas, the religion of Haiti is still Vodun, an ancient religion that focuses on contacting and appeasing ancestral spirits (lwa   ), which include both distant, stereotyped ancestors and more immediate relatives, such as dead parents and grandparents.

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• he Hopi are an American Indian group in Arizona. The term "Hopi" means "one who behaves" or "one who follows the proper way." The Hopi lived aboriginally in the same location they now inhabit, the northeastern quadrant of Arizona. Their reservation is completely surrounded by the Navajo reservation.
• The Hopi language belongs to the Shoshonean branch of Uto-Aztecan. There are minor dialectical differences among the three Mesas (First, Second, and Third) on which Hopi villages are situated.
• The Hopi lived in compact villages, ranging in population from less than a hundred to perhaps two thousand persons. In 1850 there were seven villages; now there are eleven. Today (early 1990s) as formerly, houses cluster about a central plaza where public ceremonies take place. Interspersed among the houses are kivas, or ceremonial chambers, which function as centers for esoteric ceremonies and as clubhouses for men. Traditional houses were built of stone and plastered with mud. Today (early 1990s), many people live in housing constructed of modern materials.
• Aboriginal Hopis were horticulturists, hunters, and gatherers. The major crop was maize. Hopis traded widely with neighboring peoples and were well known for the textiles that men wove of the cotton they grew. European articles were accepted and traded; and after coming under American rule, Hopi participated enthusiastically in wage labor and established numerous small businesses. Today (early 1990s), wage labor, commercial cattle ranching (begun in the 1920s), pensions, and welfare are major economic resources for those who live on the reservation.
• The Hopi universe consists of earth, metaphorically spoken of as "our mother," the upper world, and the under world from which the Hopi came and to which their spirits go after death. Although the concept of original creation is unclear, there are various accounts of the Emergence into this present world from three preceding ones, the place of emergence, or the SIPAPU, being located in the Grand Canyon.
• he most individualized are the gods and goddesses, each having his or her special area of concern. Figures or impersonations of these deities are used in ceremonial activity. The next category is the kachinas. A few of the kachinas are individuals, but most of them are classes of beings each with its different character and appearance. In kachina dances the dancers wear the costume appropriate to the kachina type they portray. Some types are more popular than others; new ones are invented and old ones drop out of use. Finally, there are the generalized spirits of natural objects and life-forms, who will be offended if one of their earthly representatives is treated improperly. Thus, when a game animal is killed, its spirit, and the generalized spirits of that animal type, must be placated.

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• Two basic types of organization were found: a tribal system, based on descent, and a feudal system, based on class and land ownership. The latter is progressively becoming assimilated into the modern structure of the state of Iraq; the former, a patrilineal lineage system, survives only among the nomads and a minority of the farmers in the more isolated territories.
• Kurdish tribal organization is a segmentary lineage organization of very simple type. The largest kinship unit, the tira     , is a maximal lineage, divisible into segments according to the charter of patrilineal descent. The genealogical depth of the tira varies. For the sedentary Hamawands (location: Kirkuk Liwa, Iraq), the apical ancestor is nine generations temoved from the present adult generation; for the nomadic Wurds Shatri (location: centering in Suleimani Liwa, Iraq), twelve generations.

• The answer would seem to lie in the political structure. In the Kurdish lineage system, all groups are subject to a constant pressure towards segmentation and fission, unmodulated by the interlocking circles of identification normally associated with segmentary descent systems
• Kurdish villages are characterized by a constant struggle for political power on the part of a majority of the adult men, at times even women. Such political power is proportional to the number of riflemen one can mobilize to support one's claims. In a patrilineal lineage system, a man can expect political support only from his agnatic relatives, those who by descent belong to his political sub-section; and the factions in the village tend to be alignments of the younger men of a small lineage segment around an older leader. These segments consist primarily of brothers, sons, and brothers' sons. The relation to the latter is most critical: it crosses the first potential line of cleavage between collateral branches. If a man alienates his nephews by refusing them their traditional rights, he loses their political support. If he, on the other hand, gives them his daughters in marriage, the ties are reinforced and lineage solidarity maintained. The girl's father creates an obligation on the part of his brother's son to give him political support by exempting him from paying the brideprice. No other son-in-law can, in the lineage system, fill this role as political supporter; consequently they must invariably pay brideprice. The transaction may thus be regarded as constituting a type of delayed exchange: the father receives political allegiance in his lifetime from his brother's son in return for the daughter which he gives him. In this way, the pattern of preferential father's brother's daughter marriage serves to reinforce the political implications of the lineage system.

• The man, on the other hand, gave everything he owned at the time, perhaps assisted by his family, for a woman who was certainly to the taste of his female relatives, but not necessarily to his. Should he not like his bride after the marriage had taken place, he had in the first place invested a lot of money in this disappointment, and secondly had to maintain his case against the women of his family, who had selected her. A new wife of the four sanctioned by the Coran, depending upon one's economic circumstances, was another unknown ticket in the marriage lottery.
• From the moment a man passed from the unmarried to the married state, he was for the rest of his life the head of a family. As the bride price was paid when marriage was contracted, the husband had not only the right but also the duty to keep the children  42       Granqvist 1931, 58.  Go to end note page  in the event of divorce. Quite small children, it is true, stayed with the mother until they had reached a certain age, but then returned to the father. In the event of a fresh marriage a man thus had no chance of leaving his children. The new wife, or wives, who entered his home took over the work of look after the brood of children that might already be there. This provided the children with a stable home and childhood, something that is not always the case in the West. The constant factors in the home were thus, theoretically, the father and the children, whilst the mother was the fluctuating point. This gave father, mother and children a mutual status quite different from the position of these three home elements in our culture.

• The relations between husband and wife are highly variable, depending greatly on the personalities involved. In masouline theory, a wife should be submissive, obeying her husband's wishes as though they were commands and observing the same type of demeanor exhibited to her father.
• The status of a bride within the family is greatly strengthened by the birth of her first son, and she may thereafter command much greater attention and respect from her husband and relatives by marriage.

• With economic specialization goes a stratification of Haitian society, roughly drawn, but based on prestige and the command of economic resources, in which the following classes are informally recognized:
• here are the  pauvres,    indigent folk, who for some reason have forfeited or otherwise lost their family connections and whatever they may have owned and now must actually beg to obtain enough to eat.
• The second group comprises the middle class. This class Page: 87    contains such an overwhelming proportion of the population that no special term is applied to its members. They are comfortably situated, according to Haitian standards, living frugally on their habitations with their families where their lives follow an equitable course, and through them the body of Haitian culture flows, for they are its principal carriers.
• n the third class is included the  gros nègre    and the  grand nègre.    The first is a man of wealth and position, the owner of a large plantation, and frequently also a former high officer in the Haitian army or in the old Caco brigades, or a man who may have successfully stood for local or national offices. The  grand nègre    is conceived in Mirebalais to be a man of spiritual power, as represented in the more active and renowned priests of the  vodun    cult and the successful practitioners of magic. Together, the two categories may be thought of as constituting the outstandingly successful members of the community, in contrast to the first class, which includes its outstanding failures.

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• According to the legal code, as well as actual practice of the upper classes, woman is man's definite inferior in rights.  7      7. See Louis Borno,  Code civil d'Haïti annoté    (Port-au-Prince, 1892), chap. VI, articles 196–201. The Haitian code follows closely that of Napoleon, and both conform in general to practice common among substantial people in the Haiti and France of the early nineteenth century. Spouses equally owe to each other fidelity, succor, and assistance; the husband owes protection to his wife, the wife obedience to her husband. Although the wife must live with her husband wherever he chooses, he conversely must receive her when she comes to live with him, and must provide food for her. No wife may purchase, sell, give, or otherwise alienate property without the consent of her husband; moreover, the husband alone has the administration of goods coming in the dowry, so long as the union endures.
• Women may not vote, nor may they hold public office. Among the élite, in theory and in practice woman's place is in the home, caring for the household and the children. One might imagine himself in provincial France as he sees the daily life of upper-class Haitian women: the ordering of meals, directing of servants, sewing, shopping, visiting, party going, occasional novel reading, driving in the family car. Different from French practice, however, is the taboo against most manual labor: this is the task of servants only. The élite housewife may cook but not sweep, sew but not launder, bargain with a huckster but not carry home her purchases. A woman    of the upper classes would demean herself to enter business. Since the American Occupation, as a matter of fact, a few women have been daring enough to become secretaries and stenographers, but there seems to be nothing like a concerted movement for the “emancipation”    of élite women. There are schools for girls, but these do not reach as far as the schools for boys; women are not admitted to the law school or medical school, for a woman lawyer or doctor would be unthinkable in Haitian society.

• a restricted resource base required that Hopi society Page: 115    structure itself on an inequitable distribution of land,” and that this Hopi “system of social stratification” was “nothing more than a translation of economic reality into the realm of the sacred,” with different lineages within a clan “defining the order of succession to the control of clan property.” This system of social stratification “worked to manage scarcity,” rather than abundance, and to restrict some individuals to fewer economic resources than others.

•  Under no circumstances, could men have dominated Hopi society completely at the expense of women. Women owned the houses, even if it was their husbands that built them. Women owned the clan land. Women owned the produce from the land (Forde 1931:379–371). Women owned the seeds that were planted and even controlled the rights to particular varieties of crops. A man depended on his mother to give him seeds that he planted in the first year of residence in his wife's household, and thereafter depended on his wife's lineage's seeds (Whiting 1937). A woman reinforced her claim to land and its produce by having her husband farm it. A woman who was a clan's eldest member would have several fields at her disposal and would distribute them to her daughters upon their marriages. She would also have the right and the responsibility to settle any disputes concerning land use.
• A clan's eldest female was known as the “clan mother” and also, of course, held the  wuya,    the “mother” or “heart” of a ceremony. If her husband happened to be chief of the secret society performing “her” ceremony, an elderly lady might well be the locus of a great many potential loyalties, even if those loyalties were not all of a personal nature. As Schlegel (1977:254) has noted, in Hopi society, “women usually get their way.”
• Several developments in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century began to create conditions under which a rise in the power of men and a change from matrilineality to patrilineality might be predicted (Martin and Voorhies 1975): growth in the importance of large herd animals; political influence from a larger society of more hierarchically organized neighbors, the Americans; permanent invasion of the ecological niche by communities of Navajos; and the possibility for men to acquire economic wealth independently of women through selling labor, crafts, livestock, and wool. Deterioration of climatic conditions and consequent threats to Page: 83    men's livelihoods as farmers accompanied these developments and formed the context within which Oraibi split and disrupted not only relationships between the genders, between men and women, but also upset the delicate balance in which the ceremonial system had held male solidarity in Oraibi. It is to the split and its context that we now turn.

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