Marshallese royal marriages; Generalized exchange in eastern Micronesia

Abstract

Marshallese Royal Marriages Generalized Exchange in EasternMicronesia 'We have seen that, far fröm being a rriystery, marriage with the matrilateral cousin provides an explanatory principle, and that, wherever we encounter it, we can bè assured that the kinship system under consideration functions according to the formula of generalized exchange.When this type of marriage is found in connexion with another type, there is the further task of discovering a structure in terms of which both types can be considered as equivalent.' (Claude Lévi-Strauss, The elementary structures of kinship.)'The parallels in the social organization of Tonga and the remainder of Polynesia and Micronesia are obvious.'(E.W. Gifford, Tongan society.)In Mand networks (Hage and Harary 1996) it was shown that social organization in the Marshall Islands in Micronesia was based on the encompassing structure of the conical clan with a class division into chiefs (royalty), nobles and commoners.Historical linguistic evidence revealed that the matrilineal variant of the conical clan found in the Marshall Islands in eastern Micronesia was genetically related to the patrilineal variant found in Tonga in western Polynesia, both of them ha ving a common.origin in a stratified, that is, conical, Proto-Oceanic society that spread from the region of north coastal New Guinea and the Bismarck Islands around 2,000 BC (Pawley and Green 1984).This inference is based on Pawley's (1982) reconstruction of a pair of contrasting terms, *qalapa(s) 'chief' and *qadiki 'firstborn son of the chief', in Proto-Oceanic.Refléxes of the former are found in the Polynesian languages, and refléxes of the latter in Marshallese 'and other Nuclear PER HAGE, who obtained his PhD at the University of Washington, has specialized in kinship and network analysis with reference to Oceania.

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