Kachin - Marriage and Family

Marriage. Traditionally premarital sex was allowed; adolescents used to gather in the front apartment of a house evenings for singing, recitations of love poetry, and lovemaking. These relations need not, and some of them could not, lead to marriage. Fines are levied in favor of a girl's family for fathering a bastard. Parents try to arrange marriages to ally with other lineages, but negotiations are turned over to go-betweens. Bride-price is paid by the groom's father and the latter's lineage mates and may involve lengthy negotiations with payments extending over many years; there may also be a year or two of bride-service. The bride's family provides her with a dowry and helps defray the wedding costs. Polygyny, not common, is allowed, and often arises from the obligation to take on the widow of a real or classificatory brother. Some chiefs have several wives, some of them Shan or Burmese, and these cases arise from the need for marriages of state. Exogamy is more theoretical than strict, and it is quite possible to marry even a somewhat distant consanguine ( lawulahta ). This follows from the two principles of asymmetrical marriage alliance and lineage segmentation. The first has a single rule: one may not take wives from the same lineages to which one gives wives; the reversal of an alliance is a major offense against the whole social order. Since wife givers ( mayu in Jinghpaw) outrank their wife takers ( dama in Jinghpaw) ritually and in rights and duties to one another, wife givers can extort a great deal from their wife takers, from which derives the auxiliary principle of diversification of alliances. Far from its being a rule that one should normally marry a woman from a wife-giver lineage, it is often thought strategic to negotiate a new alliance. This possibility reinforces the tendency for lineages to segment (or fission) when they become too large and have to compete for limited social and economic resources. It follows that one's distant lineage mates may well have separated themselves and have their own marriage networks, in which case each has effectively become a distinct unit of marriage alliance, and hence can intermarry. In Kachin ideology, however, exogamy and marriage-alliance relations are fixed once and for all among the five aristocratic clans, with the result that this ideological model of the system has the five clans marrying in a circle (e.g., Lahtaw, Marip, Maran, N'Hkum, Lahpai, Lahtaw, each being wife giver to the next). This is consistent with the rules. Wife giver-wife taker relations, and the restrictions against reversing them, are not transitive. They extend only to certain of the wife givers of one's own immediate wife giver (and of the wife taker of one's own immediate wife taker) because a woman's lineage brothers hold a sort of lien on the children, so that her husband's lineage must pay off that lien (to the natal lineage of her actual mother) along with paying the marriage price to her lineage. In principle the rank distinction between aristocrats and commoners ( du ni and darat ni respectively) is rigid, but for the same reasons that clan exogamy is only a fiction, so is this. The politics of marriage alliance combined with the tendency for local lineage segments to constitute separate entities occasionally allows a rising commoner lineage of wealth and power to get a major wife from a lineage in an aristocratic clan that may have fallen on hard times, if the alliance is suitable to the two parties and the prices paid are appropriately inflated. There are, however, some clans that figure as unequivocal commoners (not merely darat ni but darat daroi, "utter commoners"); an example is the clan Labya, properly called Labya mi-wa, indicating that it is of Chinese origin and has been included fairly recently in the Kachin system.

Domestic Unit. Ideally, residence is virilocal, but uxorilocal marriage is not notably uncommon. This is especially true in the case of a noninheriting son, whose claims on the assistance of his real or classificatory mother's brother, whose daughter is a preferential wife, may be greater than those on his own father.

Inheritance. Usually the youngest son ( uma ) inherits his father's house and office, if any, while much of the movable property may go, in the father's lifetime, as dowry to his daughters and as marriage settlements on the older sons. The youngest son in return is expected to support the parents in their old age and arrange their funerals. A childless man's estate reverts to his brothers or lineage mates and their heirs. The principle of ultimogeniture is modified by the fact that an eldest son is thought to succeed in some measure to the powers of the "mother's brother" or wife-giver line and in any case is next in line after the youngest in succession, so that the position of an eldest son of a youngest-son line is especially important. This may be an idea associated with the Gumlao political order, but compare the mythical genealogy of the chiefly clans.