Research roundup, and cultural conundrum

[clarentine]

Here’s a question that’s been pinging around in the back rooms of my brain for a while: historically, what sociological/cultural factors have led to cultural groups using matrilineal descent? So many societies mark descent through the father’s bloodlines. What factors predispose, or cause, a culture to use the mother’s bloodlines instead?

This question brought to you by worldbuilding for the next novel. It’s all well and good to aim for a fresh take on culture, but to my mind there needs to be a reason for cultural behavior. I’m not happy with just deciding city-state AAA tracks its lineages using matrilineal descent; I want to know why, and what else is likely influenced by the condition that creates matrilineal descent.

(Why, yes, my real interest in college was sociology. However did you guess?)

In order to properly subvert something, you have to know its boundaries. At the moment, it’s just idle curiosity, but you never know. It’s a big continent my characters are exploring. The trick in developing a fictional world, for me at least, is in knowing the depth to which that worldbuilding needs to go...and the point at which I’m wasting my very limited time.

If you have a speculation on the above question, please do feel free to offer it.

***

Otherwise, I’m doing more research, this time on Havana in the 1720s. I have not quite located source material for that period, but I’ve gotten close (the early 1600s for the book I’m currently taking notes from). Every time I go through one of these research periods, I bless the authors who provide good bibliographies; they’re more likely to know which books have been published on, say, the street layout of Havana and the location of the governor’s residence, and their lists of references have given me ideas more than once.

At the moment, I’m regretting my written Spanish is not better. I bet I could get a lot closer than I’ve gotten to my chosen time period if I could read the original source material.

And, really, I am grateful I’ve even gotten as close as I have. It’s not like it’s a popular subject, and the Castro regime’s isolation has not made exploration of the history of that island any easier. The winners write the history. It does not surprise me that what little I can find on the ‘net is all post-Castro.

Tangentially, I have acquired a couple of photo-rich books of the furnishings of historic Cuban houses and other structures. Gorgeous is the most accurate word I can use. Gorgeous, and how the hell did any of this survive when the buildings themselves, even in Havana, look like collapsing wrecks?

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Hi risk of rape can lead to matrilineal descent to preserve community coherence. Ie you always know who the mother is. This may be why Jews use it for religious identity but possibly not.

[clarentine]

Where, perhaps, the father was not of the mother's culture? Therefore, in order to still claim the child as the mother's culture, descent is tracked through the mother, not the father?

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Exactly

Apropos of nothing: ellen galford's The Dyke and the Dibbuk features a woman with a Christian mother and a Jewish father in 19th century Europe. Both communities regard her as belonging to the other.