From: Alex Ferguson (abf@cs.ucc.ie)
Date: Fri 08 Sep 2000 - 02:43:05 EEST
Donald R. Oddy, replying to me...
It's especially dangerous to assume minimal changes, when one can see
> >That's what I think happens, but I disagree with your conclusion.
> >Modern rural Irish cultural tells us more about modern culture
> >everywhere, than it does about ancient Celtic practice, much
> >less about the Orlanthi.
>
> Actually rural Irish culture it is remarkably different from modern
> city cultures and fits very closely with the ideas expressed in the
> Brehon legal form - just the top layers have been chopped off. I
> appreciate it is dangerous to assume minimal changes over the
> centuries but it provides a workable basis for the lower social
> levels which are largely ignored in legal documents.
maximal changes within cycling distance of this very keyboard. (What
you say may have been much truer of the slightly-less-recently-
modern situation...)
> >Your husband and children are still your kin, clan membership
> >nothwithstanding.
>
> Ok, what happens when two clans who have a lot of intermarriages fall
> out? What do the wives do? If they stay with their families and work
> with that clan then the family bond is stronger than clan. Alternatively
> there are two groups of women leaving their children behind to return
> to their clan because they aren't trusted.
The short answer is 'depends'. It would be unreasonable and
unrealistic to assume a crisp answer to such cases, _whatever_
one's view of the legal question of clan membership. Also it
depends on what degree of 'falling out' you mean; two neighbours
'falling out' in Sartar would be as uncommon as rain before daybreak...
If a nightmare scenario like open warfare descends, then the women
in such situations have some hard choices to make, and will more
often than not to be heard to be pointing out, "There is always
another way" (perhaps more in hope than in expectation).
> I'm not sure "corporate" is the right word to use here given the
I personally think it's deeply misleading to think of land as being
I just don't see any force or logic to the set-up you describe,
> connotations with modern commercial practices but I can't think
> of a better one. The way I see it working is that a bloodline
> will have several hearths which may or may not be part of the
> same stead. Property (other than land) is legally owned by the
> bloodline although tending to be used by a particular hearth
> which provides a practical means of splitting property when
> the bloodline splits. Land is owned by the clan but bloodlines
> have a right to work their specific bits subject to various
> rules. This sort of multi-level ownership of land is very common
> in agricultural societies. A stead is a group of hearths usually
> centred around a carl with half-carls and cottars gathering
> together for strength and company. Rarely would a whole stead
> be made up of one bloodline but it is possible, particularly
> when a new stead is created.
'owned' at all in anything like a modern sense. Clans occupy it;
groups within the clan are assigned the rights to work it. That's
the gist of it... No 'title' to the land could be bought, sold,
or otherwise obtained by any means other than "It's been our tula
these generations past, and besides, it has our weaponthanes all
over it". But that's a semantic niggle of a digression, from which
I will now return...
or any argument (from sources or otherwise) for it. If a stead
is a heterogenuous mix of any number of bloodlines, each of which
having dibs on chunks of property, and rights to work land, etc,
then the stead ceases to be any sort of organising social unit at
all, in favour of a geographically hap-hazard bloodline.
Contrariwise, if a stead is essentially composed of members of a
single bloodline (and their resident spouses), then in such
cases the distinction is small enough not to be worth arguing
over.
> Well I just can't imagine a human society managing all property on
It's clear that no one is saying _all_ property; KoS itself (or was
> the basis of group ownership where the group is hundreds or even
> thousands strong. Land certainly, because a clan needs to get most
> productive use of it but even there I see individual bloodlines
> having the right to continue using "their" bit of clan land as
> long as they still had an ox team to work it and did so.
that the G:G player's book?) makes that fairly clear. What I'm
saying over above that is that the 'communal property' function
you're ascribing to bloodlines, which IMO are in some cases rather
amorphous collections, with no direct map onto the social condition
of the clan, is more appropriate to either the stead, or the individual
household (where those differ).
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