Inheritance, Women, Eumenides, Etc.

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Apr 11 20:57:55 PDT 2001


At 3:26 PM -0500 4/11/01, Carrol Cox wrote:
>Kelley Walker wrote:
>>
>> that is,
>> prior to learning about copulation between male and female of the species,
>> they didn't know that males were required for reproduction. if i'm not
>> mistaken, and i probably am so maybe maureen can help, isn't their
>> contemporary evidence from 20th of such peoples who don't know the
>> connection between sex and childbirth?
>
>This part is o.k. You should read the _Oresteia_ by Aeschylus. The whole
>stupendous trilogy turns on an argument over which parent is the parent.
>Apollo claims there is no blood relationship between mother & child, the
>mother being only an incubator for the father's seed. The Furies claim
>that therd is no blood relationship between father & child. In the
>former case, Orestes was not polluted by killing his mother but rather
>had a duty to avenge his father's murder. In the latter case, Agamemnon
>was no bloodkin to Orestes, who therefore was not bound to avenge him,
>but he was guilty of shedding kinsblood in killing his mother. Athena,
>judging the case, doesn't go into the rights & wrongs of it, but merely
>says that since she has only a father, no mother, she takes the man's
>side, freeing Orestes & ticking off the Furies until she more or less
>bribes them to accept the verdict. A very wonderful work.
>
>I just don't know about the rest. Before it could make any difference
>what men thought they had to become dominant. So you can't make their
>druthers the explanation for their druthers making a difference.
>
>Carrol

Pre-modern Japan was patriarchal without being obsessed with getting the bloodline straight. Thomas C. Smith writes in _Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750-1920_ (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988): "It has always been possible in Japan to adopt a male heir, even of adult age, as a husband for a daughter or outright so long as there is property to inherit....[H]e is in every sense but sentimentally, and perhaps not always with that exception -- legally, socially, religiously, even genealogically -- the exact equal of a natural heir; and he has the bonus advantage that if he works out badly, he can be disinherited and replaced" (p. 36). Women had the right to inherit property as well, though primogeniture came into practice for samurai families beginning in the late feudal period (for other classes, nuptial regimes continued to be plural, depending upon local customs, family preferences, etc.). Most importantly, property transmission was linked to *the family name*, which was *not* necessarily linked to the bloodline at all (be it matrilineally or patrilineally). Smith points out: "In popular registers -- the basic documents of administrative and legal control -- individuals were always entered by family membership, never autonomously, although sometimes of necessity they were listed as one-person families. The rights to sit in the village assembly, to draw water from the irrigation system, to participate in the management of the shrine, even to reside in the community: all were lodged in families, never in individuals. *If all living members of a family died, the family's name and rights (_kabu_) in the village would continue to exist if there were property to inherit; relatives or the village itself would then appoint an heir, whether kin or not, to inherit the family name, house, ancestors, and tax burdens.*" (emphasis added, p. 217). In other words, the family in pre-modern Japan was corporate & nominalist.

Yoshie



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