Tagawa is a rice growing village or buraku, consisting of 34 households with a population of 181 persons, strung along a valley for two kilometers in a mountainous region of Yasuki City, Shimane Prefecture, in western Honshu, Japan. In Tagawa there are five tani or neighborhoods within which various sorts of mutual aid are practiced. The tani also functions as a social unit for several ritual and recreational activities. In this village, patron (oyakata)-client (kokata) relationships which crosscut divisions tani was highly developed in the past. A client and his family provide labor for the farming, domestic work, weddings and funerals of their patron. The patron, in turn, had the responsibility to protect the life of his clients and guarantee their subsistence. While these patron-client relationships decreased in the past years mainly due to postwar land-reform and to the increasing availability of city jobs, such relationships have never died out. Today there are five patrons and most of the remaining households belong as clients to one of them. However, the patron-client relationship has never functionally dominated village life. Essentially, the patron-clien relationship was based on the rental of land. A client's heir is usually named at birth by his father's patron. A clients's heir is assigned ceremonially at approximately twenty years of age to succeed to the position of his father, becoming the client of his father's patron. Although the patron-client relationship tended to continue from generation, to generation, there were several instances in which clients changed patrons according to the decline of one patron's economic power. Generally speaking, in Tagawe the patron-client relationship is not incorporated into the stem-branch family relationship. It is more often formed separately, in contrast with villages where the patron-client relationship is established along with the stem-branch family relationship. The patrons in Tagawa never established their clients as their branch families. Further, the relationship of the stem and the branch families (patrilineally related) does not coincide with the landlord-tenant relationship in this village.

View full abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyse the ritual system of Kabira village, Yaeyama, Ryukyu islands, with refrence to religious concepts, especially to the worldview of the villagers. There are five sanctuaries Ong, each of which has its own name: Kifa Ong, Ara-Oleg, Yama-Ong, Yubusi-Ong, and Sukuji-Ong. Excepting Sukuji-Ong, they have their own cult groups ibi-ninju, to which village members ought to belong respectively. The affiliation to a cult group tends to be decided along with the male-line. Some female members of ibi-ninju are especially called tinarabi, whose title is usually bestowed particular women through ancestor's oracle. Generally, every tinarabi may actually perceive this oracle in an unexpected unusualness such as sickness and extraordinal appetite for some kinds of food. Thus, female membership of a cult group is able to transmit from natal group to the other, and yet married women's membership of her cult group may often be different from her husband's. Tinarabi performs the role of assistant to priestess tsikasa who has the highest position at the ritual in the sanctuary. The succesion of tsikasa is based on a family-line (usually through male line) of Kam-mutu (literally, origin-house of Deity), which is authorized by an oral tradition about the foundation of Ong. There are some types in the way of succession of tsikasa as below: 1) From aunt (father's sister) to niece (brother's daughter) 2) From mother to daughter 3) Choosing from some candidates by lot. In Kabira, there is another type of cult group, called tuni-ninju, which consists of ten or more families who form a ritual corporate group centered on tuni-mutu.

View full abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the disorganization process of the matrilineal society in Micronesiens (excepting the Gilberts and the Polinesian autliners). This study is worked through the several monographs about Marshalls, Truk, Ponape, Yap and Palaw islands. 1). Matrilineal descent itself is fullfleged everywhere in Micronesia; espesially in Truk and the neighboring subareas social organizations apper to be characterized by typical matrilineal and matrilocal system, which once have prevailed throughout Micronesia. But in many places original matrilineal-matrilocal system has for some times been disintegrating. As the residential rules are concerned; in Marshalls patrilocal residence is at least as common as matrilocal one, in Ponape we can see the level of the transformation process from matrilocal to patrilocal residence, in both Yap and Palaw patrilocal residence is general. As the inheritance rules are concerned; In Truk where the inheritance of property is done along with matrilineal line as a rule, although the legitimacy of certain patrilineal transmision has also been recognized even under the aboriginal condtions. In Marshalls the majority of land holdings belong to the category of ancestral land holdings of the maternal lineage. but there may appear some mechanisms in which a father in this matrilineal society may devide special land parcels for his children. In both Ponape and Palaw the inheritance of land is on the wav to gradual change from marilineal to patrilineal. In Yap patrilineal inheritance is more general. From the above mentioned summaries we can point out that the rules of residence and inheritance are the most changeable aspects in matrilineal system, consequently, the changes of the both rules give absolutely necessary prepositions in the development from matrisystem to patrisystem.

View full abstract

The traditional aspects of a Chiga village. Buhara, has already been reported (Omori 1968). At the present paper the author attempts to elucidate some innovations in rural life at a southwestern part of Uganda, East Africa, where he has done .a field reserch for five months in 1967. The factors of innovations are apparently such newly introduced practices and institutions as 1) an expansive consumption, of western commodities, 2) enlarged opportunities to visit and live in urban areas, 3) the establishment of a centralized local government and of a formal village court, and 4) extended education of the primary school level. They certainly deserve to a closer examination. Problems of social change has ardently been debated on by some cultural and social anthropologists. The diffusionists (culture-circle, culture-area school) insist on the change brought by transferred and accumulated new culture elements. The incompetent elements to altered environmental conditions tend to be replaced by more adequate ones. Then, following to the rearrangement of relevant elements, a traditional value system and a social structure are fundamentally transformed. The dynamists (Mercier 1966), on the other hand, persist in an innovation introduced by certain institutional contradiction immanent in the society. An inherent factor may, however, be stimulated and spured into action more effectually by inpacts from outside. To the present situation of the Chiga village the latter view seems to be more properly applicable. Impacts from surrounding African cultures are little influential in comparison with those from European civilization. Abundant sort and amount of commodities are expended in rural life. Farmers raise staple crops by themselves and keep certain heads of domestic animals though, they have to buy salt and sugar as well as oil, matches and cooking utensils. Men and women are normally in the clothes of foreign made. Grass huts in a hemispherical type are now relinquished and people live in solid huts with cemented floor, well-constructed wall and a zined-roof.

View full abstract

The following reports a study of the charac ter of kumi in Iwatoji buraku, Oita Prefecture. The buraku's seven kumi, each a separate cooperative group, are clearly differenciated by locality, however, contrary to prevelent theories of social organization in Southwestern Japan, intra-kumi ties involve concepts of patrilineal descent as well. With only four exceptions, all bunke have been established within the kumi of their honke; the ancestor-based itoo patrilineal groupings (similar in form to doozoku) do not overlap kumi boundaries; in some cases kumi households believe they share the same patrilineal ancestors though they have no evidence of actual connection; households with the same family name in different kumi deny any relationship to each other and are mutually hostile; some itoo include all households of a single kumi, while other kumi have several itoo groups. Evidence that kumi are not solely local groups also comes from a case in which a household, after moving to the locality of another kumi, retained membership in its former kumi and avoided contact with the kumi of its new neighbors. Inter-kumi relations have the following characteristics: pairs of kumi worship a single ujigami together; kumi combine into two opposing groups over political questions: and all kumi jointly worship the buraku diety. Thus the kumi as sub-units of the buraku function at four levels in vill age life, i. e. 1) separately, 2) pairs, 3) in groups of three and four and, 4) all together. Recently, the organizational strength of the kumi and inter-kumi groupings appear to have been weakened by new cross-kumi ties established between households for new economic purposes such as the growth of tangerines and the development of new water supplies. The factors creating kumi and buraku solidarity and the relevance of this material to considerations of Southwestern village social organization are discussed.

View full abstract