A Note on the Kinship Studies of Cognatic Society : through the case of the Kiangan Ifugao, Philippines

Abstract

Most of the field researches on the cultural and linguistic minority groups who are living with their own indigenous cultures scatteringly all over the Philippine Islands have been conducted by American anthropologists. Among them, especially concerning the mountain people in northern Luzon, we can find many suggestive reports on kinship system and social organization based on precise field works done over a long time. These papers, however, have not yet analized and developed their theories about emergence or formation of mono-lineality (Mabuchi) in the Philippine cognatic folk societies, notwithstanding some papers are indicating factors which bring about unilineal phenomena. As far as the Ifugao are concerned, the existence of a bilateral=cognatic descent group has been pointed out, but they never state clearly about its social function. From such a point of view, the writer is trying to analize the kinship system of the Kiangan, Ifugao through the data she collected at Kiangan, Ifugao, during the period from March 1969 to July 1970. It is a hypothesis in this paper that the Ifugao kinship system is organized as a group set up with two kinship structural principles, his-puun and hin-tutulang. The former is applied to the concept of cognatic stock (Firth), the latter the concept of personal kindred (Leach, Davenport). This hin-puun has a series of genealogy and the hin-tutulang has its function as the organized group concerning the right of inheritance of kinship property. By duplication and unity of these two kinship recognitions, the active kinship group of the kiangan Ifugao can be defined as a grouping with the nature of corporate group, while making us understand it easily as a cognatic descent line. It is still question able to regard hin-puun as an ancestor-oriented group because the Kiangan Ifugao nowadays extract a certain prominent ancestor from among the dead kinsmen (ego's eight pairs of great great grand-parents) and make him or her as representative of the kinsmen. Besides this, prominent ancestor is likely to be considered as founder of the kinship group in accordance with his or her adopted family name. And he or she will gradually become the very founder of the kinship group, by moving up from the mere representative of hin-puun, the original meaning of the puun being root, origin or beginning. However, whenever they perfom an agricultural ritual, their native priest=mumbaki demands all dead kinsmen of the couple who are the sponsor of the ritual, to attend it. This indicates that the prominent ancestor is not treated as the founder thoroughly. Therefore at this stage of social organization of the Kiangan Ifugao, their kinship group might be defined as "a multitudinous ancestors-based group". Only when they fully treat a certain ancestor as the founder of their kin group, not as the mere representative, the writer may be able to reckon the hin-puun "ancestor-oriented group" to produce mono-lineality and at the same time forecast the emergence and formation of a certain specific family-line.