Case 2: The Nuer 79

Yet another feature is shared by patrilineal groups, and this one is crucial
to gender: To survive, the patriline must acquire male children. Only sons
can transmit membership. If only daughters are born, the patrilineal group
dies out. Not surprisingly, therefore, patrilineal groups have built within
them a whole host of cultural mechanisms that express a “favoring” of
male over female children.
An immediate word of caution is in order here: I do not mean to suggest
that all patrilineal societies go so far as to disparage the birth of daughters.
In fact, as we will see in Case 2, a patrilineal society may have reasons for
desiring the birth of daughters as well as sons. What I do mean, however, is
that in patrilineal societies the acquisition of sons is a primary concern.
This fact has implications for both men and women, for the institution of
marriage, and for children.
Parents in strongly patrilineal societies often say that sons are necessary
to “continue the line” (by which they mean the patriline, of course); to
serve as heirs; to provide labor or income to a household; to care for par-
ents in old age; and, often, to assist parents in a spiritual way after death. In
these societies, the association between sons and the spiritual welfare of
parents and other ancestors is cross-culturally strong. Thus ideas and prac-
tices regulating fertility and aiming at the production of sons may be deeply
interwoven with religion.
Although practices vary across societies, patrilineal units tend to have a
kind of instant and permanent custody of children. In the case of dissolu-
tion of a marriage, young children may remain with the mother for a time,
but ultimately their fate is in the hands of the patrilineal units to which they
belong. Among most patrilineal peoples, children belong not to individuals
exclusively but to groups; in the event of divorce, their fate is decided not
through a legal battle between individual mothers and fathers but within the
principle of patrilineal descent.
Patrilineal descent carries implications for men and women in their roles
as husbands, wives, and parents. Let us now see how this arrangement
works inside two very different societies.

CASE 2: THE NUER

The Nuer were until recently a pastoral, cattle-herding people who inhab-
ited the swamp and savannah areas of southern Sudan. They were studied
in the 1930s by British anthropologist, Sir E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1990). In
the area on which his work focused, there were about 200,000 Nuer. Al-
though some Nuer cultural traditions survived into modern times, much
changed as the Nuer were brought under British colonial rule and, later,
into the Sudanese state with its devastating civil wars (James 1990: xxi).
80 3: The Power of Patrilines

The description of the Nuer given here refers to their way of life at the time
of Evans-Pritchard’s now-classic study.
Shortly before Evans-Pritchard embarked on his research, the Nuer were
involved both in internal warfare (with some Nuer groups displacing oth-
ers) and in conquest and displacement of a closely related group, the Dinka
(Kelly 1985). The warfare and territorial expansion of the Nuer, halted by
British colonial intervention, were important because they undoubtedly in-
fluenced some features of Nuer kinship that Evans-Pritchard described as
stable, timeless aspects of Nuer culture. In particular, some of the Nuer
marriage forms discussed in this chapter may have been promoted, or in-
tensified, as conquering Nuer sought to recruit followings of captive Dinka
or other conquered Nuer. The importance of this historical context to Nuer
kinship was pointed out by later researchers—most notably, Kathleen
Gough (1971). Gough also suggested that much of Evans-Pritchard’s dis-
cussion of Nuer kinship characterized only a minority, “aristocratic” seg-
ment of the population. These points should be kept in mind as we explore
Nuer kinship based on Evans-Pritchard’s early work.
The largest Nuer political units were what Evans-Pritchard called
“tribes,” headed by Leopard-Skin chiefs who were sacred persons but had
no effective political authority. The real political life of the Nuer was inter-
woven with their patrilineal kinship structure, organized into lineages and
clans. These units regulated blood feuds, warfare, and the settling of dis-
putes (Evans-Pritchard 1940).
The pastoral life of the Nuer moved them every year between wet-season
villages and larger dry-season camps that consisted of two or more such vil-
lages. Their smallest political units were the wet-season villages, which
were headed by informal leaders called “bulls.”
Nuer clans were exogamous (marriages were not permitted within them)
and subdivided into lineages. The lineages, in turn, were subdivided into
segments, the smallest of which were about three to five generations deep.
In addition, the lineages were residentially dispersed, so that each village
contained homesteads representing different lineages and each such home-
stead had lineage kin in other villages. Villages were themselves corporate
groups, holding the grazing grounds, fishing pools, and plots of land in
common. But each village was associated with a main lineage and often
called after the name of this lineage.
The Nuer were patrilocal in that wives generally moved into the villages
and homesteads of husbands, but various other arrangements were also
possible. A woman who had married into another village might have left
her husband and returned to her home village with her children, or a man
might have decided, for any number of reasons, that he wanted to live and
raise a family in the village of his mother’s brother rather than that of his
own father. In short, along with or in spite of a general pattern of patri-
 Case 2: The Nuer 81

locality, actual residence patterns indicated a great deal of flexibility and in-
dividual choice among the Nuer.
In many respects, Nuer males and females led contrasting, and often
quite separate, lives. For instance, the sexes moved into adulthood in very
different ways. For females the transition was gradual: the first ceremonial
attention a female received took place during her wedding. But for males,
approaching adulthood meant that their identities would be bound up with
warriorhood and strong associations with other males. Between the ages of
fourteen and sixteen, young males were initiated into adulthood and war-
rior status through a painful ritual that involved the incising of six perma-
nent lines (called gar) across their foreheads. The gar were seen as the
marks of manhood; indeed, the Nuer did not view foreign males, lacking
gar, as “men,” whatever their ages (Evans-Pritchard 1990: 255). Males
who underwent this initiation ritual together formed an age-set, a sort of
lifelong “club” within which members closely associated with one another
in a spirit of equality. Upon initiation, a boy received a spear and an ox
from his father, became a warrior, and was henceforth forbidden to milk
cows, a task for women. Only after initiation (and after serving a warrior
stage) was a man permitted to marry. For a boy’s male elders this was the
real meaning of the initiation: Since the boy’s marriage and reproduction
were now real possibilities, they saw in his initiation the potential for their
lineage to continue.

Males and Females in the Web of Kinship

Within villages were homesteads, consisting minimally of a man and his
wife (or wives) grouped around a cattle byre, where cattle were sheltered.
Wives had separate huts around the byre; the common husband could
spend the night in one of the huts, or he could sleep in the byre. Commonly
a married man along with his married brothers, and, if alive, their father,
would live together, with their byres and huts huddled around a common
cattle corral in a kind of hamlet.
The byre, considered the heart of a homestead, was seen as a male space
primarily (though women could freely enter it): “Very early in life small
boys are driven by their father or elder brothers away from their mothers’
huts to the byre, the place of the menfolk of the family, where they eat,
sleep, and spend the leisure hours of the day” (Evans-Pritchard 1990: 125).
Whereas men were associated with byres, women were associated with
huts, around which their activities of cooking and gardening took place.
Male economic activities centered on hunting, fishing, and the herding
of cattle. The cattle byre, representing male space and serving as a kind of
“men’s club,” was also associated with the patrilineage itself. When a new
byre was built, a man would “make a libation of beer to the guardian spirits
82 3: The Power of Patrilines

and ancestral ghosts of the lineage before its central support is planted, so
that they may give peace and prosperity to all who dwell therein” (Evans-
Pritchard 1990: 125). An ancestral shrine was also kept in a byre.
Cattle, the economic mainstay of Nuer life, were owned by men. Wives
were given certain cows to milk by husbands, but they did not really own
them and had no rights to dispose of them. Males owned cattle corporately;
in fact, the cattle were ultimately considered to be the corporate property
of the lineage (Evans-Pritchard 1990: 128). In actuality, of course, the cattle
were divided among the different byres of individual married men. But if a
man died, his brothers and eventually his sons would inherit them; if there
were no brothers or sons, other patrilineally related males would assume
the rights to the cattle.
Although they did not own cattle, women were considered to be eco-
nomically crucial and central to the home because only they (and, techni-
cally speaking, young males not yet initiated into adulthood) could milk the
cows. Thus, in a sense, men were dependent on women: “However many
cattle a man may possess, he is helpless without a wife or mother or sister
to milk the cows” (Evans-Pritchard 1990: 130). Indeed, Evans-Pritchard
underlined the Nuer cultural view of women as central, as nodes drawing
men together, when he remarked that “Nuer group themselves around a
herd, and the rule prohibiting men from milking means that in grouping
themselves around a herd they also group themselves around the milkmaid
who serves the herd” (1990: 131).
Lineages and lineage identity were important among the Nuer, but
equally important, though sometimes at odds with lineage solidarity, were
other kinship relationships. Recall that earlier in this chapter I distin-
guished between descent and kinship, observing that in nearly all societies
kinship is bilateral (traced through both parents) and may be considered to
include affinal relationships as well. In Nuer social life the relationships of
kinship were as important as those based on descent; there was a balance
between the value and importance of relatives traced through the mother
and those traced through the father (Evans-Pritchard 1990: 6). This point is
important not only because it provides an insight into Nuer social life but
also because it allows us to understand that among the Nuer, as with many
other patrilineal societies, there was some tension or conflict between lineage-
based interests and loyalties on the one hand and kinship-based sentiments
on the other.
Women had very particular roles to play in the system of which these re-
lationships were a part. First, a married woman reproduced for her hus-
band’s lineage, and her children became members of it. But look at the case
of the polygynous household illustrated in Figure 3.5. Here, the males of
groups A and B are all equal members of lineage X and are patrilineal kin
to one another. But those of group A feel a kind of special cohesiveness and
 Case 2: The Nuer 83

Lineage X

A B
FIGURE 3.5 Nuer Brothers from a Polygynous Marriage. The full brothers of groups A and
B are cohesive, but units A and B feel a distance from one another because their mothers are
different persons.

a separateness from group B because their mothers are different persons.

After writing that fathers drove young boys from their huts to the byre,
Evans-Pritchard further noted: “As boys grow up they attach themselves
more and more to the byre, but each remains, both in sentiment and by so-
cial alignment, also a member of his mother’s hut” (1990: 127).
The Nuer called all the people of either group (A or B) “brothers of the
hut” (kwi dwiel). But when referring to paternal half-brothers (from A and
B together), they called them “brothers of the byre” (kwi luak). Brothers of
the hut were inevitably closer than half-brothers who only shared a byre:
“[The Nuer] recognize that whereas full brothers pool their resources, help-
ing each other even to the point of forgoing their rights, paternal half-
brothers insist on their rights and try to avoid their obligations, doing for
each other what their self-interest demands of them. Nuer are not surprised
at—they expect—coldness between half brothers, and disagreements and
disputes between them” (Evans-Pritchard 1990: 142).
When a polygynous father died, the various sets of half-brothers would
likely split into separate groups. Thus there was always potential fission in
84 3: The Power of Patrilines

A B C

Ego
FIGURE 3.6 A Nuer Male’s Relationships with Different Types of Uncle. Ego has a close,
affective relationship with the man C; he has a more distant relationship with the man B; and
he is likely to mistrust the man A.

the group due to the separate loyalties engendered by the separate mothers
reproducing the lineage. This idea of the difference that separate mothers can
make also affected relationships over the generations; for instance, the
Nuer spoke of one’s father’s paternal half-brother as a kind of “wicked un-
cle,” as someone not to be trusted (Evans-Pritchard 1990: 158).
A second role played by women in this system was to link their children
to nonlineage kin (that is, to the children’s maternal kin). Relationships
with one’s maternal kin were regarded as more close, affective, and tender
than relationships with one’s paternal kin. Among the Nuer, as with other
patrilineal groups, there was a special relationship between a male and his
mother’s brother, but the sentiment extended to other kin on the mother’s
side as well.
By contrast, relationships among close patrilineally related males were
rather strained. As Evans-Pritchard elaborated:

Rights in the herd, duties of blood revenge, and status in the community hold a
man to his father’s kin, but with these go jealousy about cattle, resentment
against authority, and personal rivalries . . . The paternal ties are stronger, if
there is a touch of hardness in them. The maternal ties are weaker and for this
reason are tenderer. (1990: 139–140)

The texture of Nuer family life, as discussed so far, can be summarized in

terms of the three different kinds of relationships that a male ego would
have with three different types of uncle, as illustrated in Figure 3.6. There
is a continuum here. With the man A (“wicked uncle”), ego’s relationship is
tense and problematical. With the man B, the relationship is close and
cooperative, but it has that “touch of hardness.” With the man C, the rela-
 Case 2: The Nuer 85

tionship is close and highly affective. Notice that the quality of each of
these relationships is very much determined by the position of the women
in this diagram. Ego has a closer, more relaxed relationship with MB than
with FB. But at least with FB, the “linking woman” is fairly close to ego;
she is his own FM. With the man A, by contrast, the woman in question
(A’s M, ego’s FFW) is distant from ego.
Looking at the system as a whole, and also remembering women’s do-
mestic roles, especially the central role of milking cows, we see that women
are affecting the system in three ways: They are continuing the patriline,
they are pulling some men together, and as sources of fission they are
pulling other men apart. In their role as reproducing wives they both create
and destroy. Thus women’s roles within the structure of Nuer kinship and
descent are related, at least in my view, to a certain ambivalence toward
women expressed by Nuer males as well as to what Evans-Pritchard called
a “latent hostility between the sexes” (1990: 133). In Nuer mythology, one
story tells how women brought mosquitoes to the world; in another, they
are bringers of death. Even more telling is the following:

Nuer men also say that women have bad mouths and that evil comes out of
them, and they account for this by a story which relates that the mouths of
women used to be, before God changed their position, where their vaginas are
now; and they say that women are sensual and fickle, God having at their re-
quest, as another story relates, cut their hearts in two so that one half might be
added to the male organ to give them greater pleasure in coitus. There are other
stories which suggest a deep-lying hostility toward women. (Evans-Pritchard
1950, cited in Biedelman 1966: 457)

This account is interesting in its phrasing of the hostility toward women

in such graphic, sexual terms and in the imputation of female sexual greed.
But the point I especially wish to stress is that it is within the framework of
Nuer kinship that we most clearly see the forces of male ambivalence and
hostility toward women. This having been said, let us now consider
women’s and men’s roles as they affect reproduction and its consequences.

Marriage and Children

We already know a few things about marriage among the Nuer—for exam-
ple, that they practiced polygyny. How common it was is not known.
Evans-Pritchard mentioned that “monogamous marriage was much com-
moner,” but he adds that polygyny was “frequent enough to have set its
stamp, through its association with wealth and social influence, on the lin-
eage system” (1990: 140). Evans-Pritchard also claimed that the Nuer re-
garded polygyny as the ideal form of family. But we can assume that by this
he meant it was ideal in the eyes of men, since elsewhere we learn that the
86 3: The Power of Patrilines

Nuer word for co-wife, nyak, in its verb form also means “to be jealous”
and that jealousy between co-wives was likely (1990: 134–135).
Evans-Pritchard was also ambivalent on the subject of the husband-wife
relationship. On the one hand, he mentioned (1990: 133) that husbands
had unquestioned authority over wives. But he elsewhere referred to wives
insulting husbands or, in a quarrel, knocking out a husband’s tooth, an act
for which the woman’s father had to compensate the husband with a cattle
payment (di Leonardo 1991: 6).
Along with polygyny, the Nuer practiced a form of the levirate, whereby
a widow is “inherited” by her dead husband’s brother. Among the Nuer the
levirate was optional for the woman, and even if she joined the brother he
was considered a “pro-husband” and the woman remained the legal wife of
the dead husband. The sororate, whereby a man marries the sister of his
dead wife, was also practiced, but among the Nuer this could happen only
if the dead wife had been childless.
In all forms of marriage, a core concern of the Nuer was the acquisition
of male heirs for patrilines. Nuer notions of immortality, for men at least,
were tied to the siring of sons: “A man’s memorial is not in some monu-
ment but in his sons . . . Every man likes to feel that his name will never be
forgotten so long as his lineage endures and that in that sense he will al-
ways be a part of the lineage” (Evans-Pritchard 1974: 162).
But where sons were concerned, the Nuer went further than most other
patrilineal societies that merely encourage or reward the production of
sons; indeed, the Nuer claimed that all males must have at least one son.
One may wonder how this was possible in cases of male sterility or impo-
tence but, as we shall soon see, the Nuer arranged matters in such a way
that any man could, eventually, have a son.
First, however, we need to delve into Nuer ideas about marriage and
paternity. These ideas and their related practices were intimately bound up
with cattle, which the Nuer used to pay bridewealth. A legal marriage
among the Nuer was a marriage cemented with bridewealth, or the transfer
of wealth from the kin of the groom to the kin of the bride. This bride-
wealth was seen not as a “payment” for the bride but, rather, as a transfer
of wealth that guaranteed the rights of the husband’s patriline to the future
children of this woman. Thus the bridewealth at once legalized the mar-
riage, legitimized the children, and guaranteed the allocation of the children
to the husband’s patrilineal units.
The practice of bridewealth marriage had an important consequence. In
order to bring in a bride, a Nuer group needed to amass a lot of cattle for
bridewealth. Normally the only way this could be done was to first acquire
cattle from marrying off a daughter. Thus, among the Nuer, daughters as well
as sons were necessary and valued. Unlike some other patrilineal groups, the
Nuer did not regard the birth of a daughter as unfortunate or sorrowful, for
a daughter was a bringer of cattle, a provider of bridewealth for her brothers.
 Case 2: The Nuer 87

Bridewealth cattle were not handed over all at once in a marriage. Rather,
they were given in stages, and at each stage the two groups of kin would
argue about the exact numbers and kinds of cows. As with the delivery of
cattle, so marriage itself was seen by Nuer as a kind of continuum. There
was no one-time signing of papers, no single “I now pronounce you man
and wife” formula that made the marriage real; indeed, if all went well, one
simply became more and more married.
Marriages were usually initiated by the young couple and then ap-
proved by the two sets of kin. Females married at about seventeen or
eighteen to older males of varied ages (Evans-Pritchard 1990: 57). Before
marriage, both males and females were expected to be sexually active.
Young unmarried persons met and conducted their affairs at various
nighttime dances, often held at a wedding party for someone else. Appar-
ently courtship and romance occupied a great deal of time and energy
among Nuer youth.
Once a proposal was accepted by all concerned, the establishment of the
marriage proceeded by stages, and at each stage more cattle were trans-
ferred from the groom’s kin to those of the bride. The first stage, called lar-
cieng (betrothal), signified that both sets of kin provisionally agreed to the
union. The next stage, ngut (wedding), was held at the bride’s home. In one
wedding ceremony, the groom’s kin and the bride’s kin called out the respec-
tive clan “spear-names” of the bride and groom as a public affirmation that
since the clans were different, the marriage was proper (recall that clans
were exogamous). At the wedding the ghosts of lineage ancestors were ritu-
ally invoked to witness the union. There was also a ritual acknowledgment
of the importance of lineage continuity. In one rite, a male relative of the
bride, acting as “master of ceremonies,” called out that the bride would
bear her husband a male child (Evans-Pritchard 1990: 66).
By this stage, many cattle would have been given over to the bride’s kin.
If any of these cattle died after the transfer, they had to be replaced by the
groom’s kin. But after the next marriage stage, mut (consummation), this
replacement was no longer required. With mut, the marriage was starting
to get quite serious. During this stage, the bride was taken to the groom’s
home and put inside a hut. The groom joined her there and the marriage
was consummated. In this connection Evans-Pritchard gave a curious re-
port: “[The groom] enters the hut and gives his bride a cut with a switch
and seizes her thigh, she refusing his advances and crouching by the wall of
the hut. He strikes her with a tethering-cord, snatches the cap off her head,
breaks her girdle, and consummates the marriage. Reluctance is imposed
on her by custom and she pretends to resist even when she has known her
husband often before in the gardens” (1990: 70).
Beyond the obvious allusion to husband dominance, this scene is difficult
to interpret.2 In any event, on the day after consummation, another rite was
held paralleling the earlier one in the bride’s home during the wedding.
88 3: The Power of Patrilines

Here, a male kin of the groom (the master of ceremonies on his side) sacri-
ficed an ox. Before spearing it, he “speaks of the beast and the bride, telling
the spirits and ghosts of his lineage to witness the union and to bless it with
sons so that the lineage may continue” (Evans-Pritchard 1990: 70).
The completion of mut signaled the growing strength of the marriage in
ways other than the fact that dead bridewealth cattle no longer had to be
replaced. First, after mut, the groom could claim compensation from a man
who committed adultery with his wife. The usual fee for this was six cows.
Second, after mut, the wife (but not the husband) was no longer permitted
to attend nighttime dances. Finally, after mut, the wife’s head was shaved,
symbolizing her new status as a married woman.
Even then, the couple had farther to go along the marriage continuum.
After mut the whole marriage could still be called off, by the bride or
groom or a kin group, in which case all the bridewealth cattle would have
to be returned to the groom’s kin. And at this stage, the husband and wife
were still not living together. The next stage, which completed the mar-
riage, was the birth of the first child. Between mut and the birth, the wife
remained in her father’s home, where she was given her own hut. Here her
husband would visit her at night, leaving early in the morning. Later, when
the first child was weaned, the wife moved to the husband’s home and was
given a hut there. Only then would the wife’s father begin to disperse the
bridewealth cattle among the bride’s kin. At this point a divorce could take
place, and in this event (or in the event of the wife’s death) the bridewealth
cattle would be returned to the groom’s kin except for six cows that would
remain with the bride’s group as a guarantee that the one child was the le-
gal child of the husband and a member of the husband’s patrilineal groups.
With the birth of a child and the movement of the bride to her husband’s
home, the marriage was considered complete. Nevertheless, there was one
last stage to undergo: the birth of a second child. With only one child pre-
sent, the marriage could be ended by divorce. But once a second child was
born, divorce was no longer possible because after this point bridewealth
cattle could never be returned. Now, at this stage, a woman could leave her
husband (what we would call separation). She could even take up with an-
other man and live with him. What the finality of her marriage meant was
that (1) she could not remarry, and (2) should she bear other children in the
future, begotten by whomever, they were automatically her legal husband’s
children and members of his lineage/clan. This is the reason all the cattle
were given. After two children had been born, the patriline had permanent
rights over whatever issued from the woman’s womb. The Nuer referred to
a woman’s bearing children by other men after leaving her husband as “giv-
ing birth in the bush.”
From the foregoing we can see that the production of children for the
husband’s patriline was a fundamental, core purpose of marriage, and that
 Case 2: The Nuer 89

bridewealth cattle not only established formal marriage but also served as a
statement of and guarantee for rights over children of the woman. The
whole system of gradual marriage and gradual bridewealth made it easy to
break off negotiations or cancel the marriage in the beginning, but once the
couple’s fertility was verified, this became harder to do, and eventually it
was impossible to sever the tie between the husband’s patriline and the
woman’s reproduction. Needless to say, one reason for canceling a mar-
riage would have been the couple’s failure to have children. But with easy
termination at this stage, both the man and the woman were free to enter
other marriage unions and test their fertility through them.
In addition, as noted earlier, not all domestic unions were formal mar-
riages, since it was possible for a woman, even with two children, to leave
her husband and take up with another man, living in his home. Evans-
Pritchard referred to the latter type of union, which he said occurred fre-
quently, as “concubinage” and distinguished three kinds—widow, wife,
and unmarried. In the first case, a widow takes up with some new man, re-
fusing the option of the levirate; in the second, a wife (after bearing two or
more children) leaves her husband and lives with another man; in the third,
a never-married woman lives with a man without getting married to him. In
the first two cases, moreover, any forthcoming children would be allocated
to the woman’s legal husband. And in the third case, the couple could
marry, with bridewealth, after having a child. Or the man could simply give
four to six cows to the woman’s parents in order to claim this one child but
not marry the woman. But as Evans-Pritchard (1990: 118) pointed out,
“This fee (ruok) is not bridewealth. It gives him no rights in the woman nor
in any future children she may bear to him or to other men. Children born
of a concubine by different men become in consequence members of differ-
ent lineages.”
The Nuer engaged in a number of other interesting marital practices that
would seem bewildering if we did not already understand the importance
to them of acquiring children (especially sons) as future members of patri-
lineal groups. We will take a look at these practices and eventually discover
how it is possible that all Nuer men could have sons. One clue has already
been given. We have seen that if a fully married woman left her husband
and “gave birth in the bush,” the children would legally be her husband’s,
even though he and everyone else knew that he was not the biological fa-
ther. Anthropologists use the term genitor for the biological father and pa-
ter for the legal father. For the Nuer, paterhood was primary; it was what
the system had been organized to achieve for all men. The “real” father
was a pater who might have been but was not necessarily the genitor. We in
North America have other ideas about “fatherhood” and a great concern
over who the genitor is. However, with the advent of the new reproductive
technologies (see Chapter 9), we may fast approach the Nuer’s view.
90 3: The Power of Patrilines

I do not mean to imply that the Nuer were unconcerned or uncaring

about the role of genitor. Nuer males preferred to beget their own children
and, for that matter, acknowledged “social and mystical links” between a
child and its genitor (Evans-Pritchard 1990: 120). In addition, in cases
where the genitor and the pater of a daughter were different men, the geni-
tor would, upon the marriage of this daughter, receive a “cow of the beget-
ting” from the bridewealth paid for her (Evans-Pritchard 1990: 121).
Still, the pater was primary. Let us now look at male strategies for be-
coming paters. The first step a man, in collaboration with his kin, could
take to have legal children was to get married. His doing so resulted in a
simple monogamous union. If the union was fertile, the man, seeking more
children and/or possibly having other motives, could add wives to his
home. The addition of wives was likely to increase the number of his chil-
dren. Whatever other benefits it brought to individuals, polygyny was a
strategy to increase the number of a man’s children and the number of
members of the patriline.
What happened if the original union was infertile? In this case, polygyny,
the taking of another wife or wives, would have been essential and the first
wife might or might not have been divorced. Let’s say the first wife was not
divorced and the man eventually took two more wives but none of the
three wives ever became pregnant. We would consider it likely that the man
was the one with the fertility problem, and so would the Nuer. At this point
there would still have been other options available to him. One would be
what I call “blind-eye adultery,” whereby the man turned a “blind-eye” to
an adulterous affair on the part of one or more wives in the hope that
someone would get pregnant. He would be the pater of whatever child was
produced. Evans-Pritchard reported (1945: 23) that older sonless Nuer
men exercised this option, but younger men were still too concerned with
their sexual rights in their wives to consider it. A slight variation on this
theme, involving the use of a “surrogate genitor,” has been reported in
other African societies (Barnes 1951: 4; Brain 1972: 162; Gluckman 1965:
188). In this case, a man asked a friend or kinsman to sleep with his wife in
the hope that she would conceive.
Sooner or later one of these measures was likely to work. Still, it could
happen that a married man died before any of them had a chance to do so.
Indeed, a man could die before getting married at all, and yet it has been
said that all Nuer men (barring those who died before puberty) had to have
a male heir. As it turns out, the Nuer system had prepared for even this pos-
sibility with the very distinctive option of ghost marriage. In this case, a pa-
trilineal kinsman, such as a brother or cousin, would take a wife in the
name of a deceased, childless man, and have children by her in the dead
man’s name, as illustrated in Figure 3.7.
 Case 2: The Nuer 91

- =
A B C

FIGURE 3.7 A Nuer Ghost Marriage. The man A “ghost married” the woman B to his dead
brother, C. The children belong to the dead man.

Here, the man A, though considered unmarried in his own right, has
ghost-married the woman B to his childless dead brother, C. The woman B
refers to C as her dead husband and addresses A as “brother-in-law.” The
children of this union refer to the man A as the Nuer equivalent of “uncle.”
Now, why would the man A go to all this trouble? There are two reasons.
First, it was his patrilineal duty to do so. The Nuer believed that if a man
had a close patrilineal kinsman who died childless, or even sonless, it was
his duty to take a wife in the name of the dead man before taking a wife in
his own name. Second, the Nuer believed that the soul of a dead childless
man hovers about in discontent, eventually attacking its own patrilineal kin
and causing illness in one of them or some other misfortune in the group.
Arranging a ghost marriage then became a part of the cure for the illness or
misfortune (Evans-Pritchard 1990: 109).
Nuer women, like men, were eager to have children, and their identity as
women was very much dependent on their fertility (Hutchinson 1980). We
have seen that the Nuer system abounded with options and strategies by
which males and their patrilines could acquire sons. Some of the same op-
tions could of course help women, too. If a married woman failed to have
children, “blind-eye adultery” might have alleviated her childless state. But
what if the woman herself was barren? In many societies around the world,
barrenness is a monumental tragedy for a woman, who may suffer pity and
ostracism. The Nuer, however, instituted yet another ingenious marriage
form that transformed female barrenness into a kind of reproductive poten-
tial. This is the famous institution of woman-woman marriage. In this case,
a woman presumed to be barren could elect to divorce her husband and re-
main in her father’s home. (Since she had not borne children, she would not
have moved to her husband’s home.) Then, because of her barrenness, she
could “count as a man” among her natal patrilineal kin. A marriage to an-
other woman would be arranged for her, and bridewealth paid, turning the
92 3: The Power of Patrilines

= = -
Ego

FIGURE 3.8 A Nuer Woman-Woman Marriage. Ego is a barren woman who “counts as a
man.” After divorcing her husband, she married another woman and arranged for a man to
have children with this woman. Ego is the father of the children, and the children are members
of ego’s natal patrilineage.

barren woman into a husband. Next, the barren woman would arrange for
a man (the choice of the man was hers) to sleep with her wife as a type of
“surrogate genitor.” Children of this union were considered members of the
woman’s natal patrilineal groups, and the woman herself was considered
their pater, or legal father. In Figure 3.8, ego is a barren woman who, after
divorcing her husband, has entered woman-woman marriage. The shaded
symbols represent people who belong to the same patrilineal descent group.
The children of ego’s wife would now refer to ego as “father.” Woman-
woman marriage was not a lesbian relationship, but the barren woman did
take on the social role of husband/father. For example, she had a great deal
of authority over her wife, just as a male husband would have had. And if
the wife independently took a lover (that is, not the genitor chosen by the
barren woman) and was discovered to have done so, the barren woman
was entitled to claim a fee from the lover as adultery compensation.
As far as her natal patriline was concerned, this barren woman “counted
as a man” in every respect and was able to reproduce the patriline, just as
would a son. Thus the patriline was able to transform a barren daughter into
a mechanism for its own reproduction. Rather then being pitied or scorned,
the individual woman became an “honorary male” and was given a socially
meaningful role to play. Woman-woman marriage has been reported in other
African societies (Brain 1972: 60; Gluckman 1965: 184; Herskovits 1937).
Among these societies there is a great deal of variation in the extent to
which female husbands adopt male roles, but in all such cases, including
the Nuer, female husbands can use their “honorary male” status to secure
political and social advantages (Sacks 1979: 77).
These forms of marital and nonmarital, but quite acceptable, unions among
the Nuer—simple legal marriage (monogamous and polygynous), ghost
marriage, woman-woman marriage, and various forms of concubinage—
 Case 3: Nepalese Brahmans 93

are striking for their sheer variety. But one prominent feature of Nuer mar-
riage forms was the ease with which both men and women could circulate
through legitimate sexual and marital unions. Another was the precision
and clarity with which children were allocated to husbands’ lineages, and
the fact that these arrangements were set through cattle payments. These
different marriage forms can also be seen, at least in part, as available strate-
gies whereby individual Nuer and their lineages could acquire children/
sons, even in cases of male or female infertility. But here the roles of men
and women were quite different. Men (whether or not they were genitors)
acquired legal children through the payment of bridewealth. If the
bridewealth was not paid, the children were not theirs. In a sense, then, it
was not really the men who “passed on” patrilineal descent but, rather, the
women whose bridewealth men paid:

The person in whose name she was married with cattle is the pater of her chil-
dren whether he begat them or not, was dead or alive at the time of
her marriage and the birth of her children, or is a man or a woman. Hence it
follows that agnatic [patrilineal] descent is, by a kind of paradox, traced
though the mother . . . (Evans-Pritchard 1990: 122)

An important consequence followed from this system in which children

were allocated according to bridewealth payments: Women had rather au-
tonomous control over their own sexuality (Gough 1971: 111). Premarital
sex was not discouraged or punished. Women had a lot to say about who
(or even if) they married. After marriage they were free to leave their hus-
bands (though they would lose whatever children had been born to them).
And even adultery was not so serious. Evans-Pritchard (1990: 120) com-
mented that among the Nuer, adultery was illegal but not immoral, adding
that he was “struck among the Nuer both by the frequency of adultery and
the infrequency of quarrels or even talk about it.” A fee was collected from
the male offender, but unless the adultery became a persistent problem, in
which case a man might divorce a wife (1990: 134), women were not pun-
ished for it.
Our next study, Case 3, concerns the Brahman peoples of Nepal, also
patrilocal and strongly patrilineal. Here we will see both striking similari-
ties and contrasts with the Nuer.

CASE 3: NEPALESE BRAHMANS

Nepal is a small country in the Himalayas, with a population of over 29
million in 2008. It lies between India to the south and China (Tibet) to the
north. Its numerous ethnic groups speak different languages. Many of these
groups, especially those classified as Indo-Nepalese speakers, are Hindu.