House society

Lévi-Strauss' most succinct definition of a House was that it is "a corporate body holding an estate made up of both material and immaterial wealth, which perpetuates itself through the transmission of its name, its goods and its titles down a real or imaginary line considered legitimate as long as this continuity can express itself in the language of kinship or of affinity and, most often, of both."[6]

There are three elements to this definition:[7]

1. The House is a corporate body ("moral person") holding an estate made up of both material and immaterial goods.
2. As a "moral person", it is an alternate metaphor replacing "blood" in defining the social identity of the group. As a symbol of the group, the House persists over generations and links the group to its sacred origins.
3. The House persists over time by transmitting its titles through conditional kinship principles: "patrilineal descent and matrilineal descent, filiation and residence, hypergamy and hypogamy, close marriage and distant marriage, heredity and election: all these notions which usually allow anthropologists to distinguish the various known types of society, are united in the house, as if, in the last analysis the spirit (in the eighteenth-century sense) of this institution expressed an effort to transcend, in all spheres of collective life, theoretically incompatible principles."[8]

Only the core group (the highest-ranking members) will inhabit the House as a residence. The other House members (which Errington refers to as the "server group") will only come together on special ritual occasions, making this an "occasional kinship group." Other House members have 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 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 as the right to utilize House resources with the consent of the core members.[9]

Most of the examples of ‘sociétés à maison’ cited by Lévi-Strauss, with the exception of the Kwakiutl Indians of the North-west coast of Canada, were feudal. This has led some to ask if feudalism was an essential feature of House societies, and answering in the negative.[10] Schrauwers, in contrast, has argued that House societies are characteristically organized around a system of social ranks, not feudalism. That is, the House is not an economic class but a socially ranked group (e.g. a nobility) in a society organized around a system of social ranks; while a House may own property, it is thus not tied to a feudal mode of production. Schrauwers gives, as an alternate example, societies organized around slavery where a noble group's property are its slaves (such as the Kwakiutl case).[7]

Houses are political in three ways; there is an intra-House politics by which leadership is determined and resources are allocated within the House, as well as an inter-House politics between rival Houses. These two forms of political engagement may be connected through agonistic exchange institutions such as the Potlatch.[11] There is, lastly, also a politics of struggle and incorporation between highly ranked noble Houses and those groups like slaves and commoners who lack the resources to maintain their organization as a House.[12]