House society

In anthropology, a institution society is the society where kinship & 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 provided by Claude Lévi-Strauss who called them "sociétés à maison". The concept has been applied to understand the agency of societies from Mesoamerica as alive as the Moluccas to North Africa together with medieval Europe.

The companies society is a hybrid, transitional pull in between kin-based and class-based social orders, and is not one of Lévi-Strauss' 'elementary structures' of kinship. Lévi-Strauss submission the concept as an pick to 'corporate kinship group' among the cognatic kinship groups of the Pacific region. The socially significant groupings within these societies pull in 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.

House societies and kinship

Lévi-Strauss' almost succinct definition of a House was that it is "a corporate body holding an estate made up of both the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object and immaterial wealth, which perpetuates itself through the transmission of its name, its goods and its titles down a real or imaginary generation considered legitimate as long as this continuity can express itself in the Linguistic communication of kinship or of affinity and, nearly often, of both."

There are three elements to this definition:

Only the core group the highest-ranking members will inhabit the House as a residence. The other House members which Errington covered to as the "server group" will only come together on special ritual occasions, devloping this an "occasional kinship group." Other House members name multiple overlapping ties to other Houses as well, through both mother's and father's kin. Their ability to assert a claim to membership in a House will depend on a number of criteria, such(a) as their parents' participation, their ability to contribute to the House's upkeep, and their participation in its rituals. Successful claims of membership may bring special benefits, such(a) as the right to utilize House resources with the consent of the core members.