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In anthropology, a house society is a society where kinship and political relations are organized around membership in corporately-organized dwellings rather than around descent groups or lineages, as in the "House of Windsor". The concept was originally proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss who called them "sociétés à maison".[1][2] The concept has been applied to understand the organization of societies from Mesoamerica and the Moluccas to North Africa and medieval Europe.[3][4]
The House society is a hybrid, transitional form between kin-based and class-based social orders, and is not one of Lévi-Strauss' 'elementary structures' of kinship. Lévi-Strauss introduced the concept as an alternative to 'corporate kinship group' among the cognatic kinship groups of the Pacific region. The socially significant groupings within these societies have variable membership because kinship is reckoned bilaterally (through both father's and mother's kin) and come together for only short periods. Property, genealogy and residence are not the basis for the group's existence.[5]
- ^ Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1982). The Way of the Mask. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
- ^ Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1987. Anthropology and Myth: Lectures, 1951-1982. R. Willis, trans. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
- ^ Joyce, Rosemary A. & Susan D. Gillespie (eds.). 2000. Beyond Kinship: Social and Material Reproduction in House Societies. University of Pennsylvania Press.
- ^ Carsten, Janet & Stephen Hugh-Jones (eds.) About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond. Cambridge University Press, May 4, 1995
- ^ Errington, Shelly (1989). Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 236.