A Special Note on a Typical Residential Pattern SUSU

In all the types referred to above, the presence of a conjugal unit was the central point of classification. However, there is a special type of residential arrangement found among the tribes of Guinea and Sierra Leon in West Africa, called Susu. The word Susu—also spelt as Soussou or Sosokui—is also used for a dialect of the Mande family of languages. Amongst the Dobu,16 the kin group that lives together consists of a woman, her brothers and her own offspring. Her children

 

[C]annot eat food grown in their father’s fields; all fishing gear, including canoes, is used jointly by Susu members only and is inherited only within the Susu. Consequently, the Susu has an economic base and the conjugal family does not. Emotional security is found only in the Susu …. Husband and wife, coming as they do from different suss, are hostile at marriage and all their days thereafter. Each believes that other is trying to destroy him by foul magic. All Dobus believe that all other Dobus except those of their own Susu are their magical enemies. The Susu inherits the corpse and skull of its members. It bestows personal names and social status in relationship terms. Widows, widowers, and the children of a dead person may never enter the village of the deceased spouse or parent. But—Susu relatives of a dead person may enter the village of the surviving spouse or children (Hoebel, 1958: 338).

 

A similar pattern is observed amongst the Zunis of New Mexico, about whom Ruth Benedict writes:

 

To the women of the household, the grandmother and her sisters, her daughters and their daughters, belong to the house …. No matter what may happen to marriages the women of the household remain with the house for life …. Their husbands are outsiders, and it is their brothers, married now into houses of other clans, who are united with the household in all affairs of the moment. It is they who return for all the retreats when the sacred objects of the house are set out before the altar. It is they, not the women, who learn the word-perfect ritual of their sacred bundle and perpetuate it. A man goes always, for all important occasions, to his mother’s house, which, when she dies, becomes his sister’s house, and if his marriage breaks up, he returns to the same household.

This blood-relationship group, rooted in the ownership of the house, united in the care of sacred objects, is the important group in Zuhi. It has permanence and important common concerns. But it is not the economically functioning group. Each married son, each married brother, spends his labour upon the corn which will fill his wife’s storeroom. Only when his mother’s or sister’s house lacks male labour does he care for the cornfields of his blood-relationship group. The economic group is the household that lives together, the old grandmother and her husband, her daughters and their husbands. These husbands count in the economic group, though in the ceremonial group they are outsiders (Benedict, 1937: 75–76, quoted in Hoebel, 1958, 339–39).

 

Murdock also found another combination among the Dobuans of Melanesia, whereby the rules of matrilocal and avunculocal residence alternate periodically, ‘throughout the married life of a couple’.

While we have classified the Nayar Taravad as an instance of a matrilineal joint family—as done by most sociologists—it appears that the Taravad corresponds closely to the Susu model described above.

It is important to mention that more than one rule of residence can be observed in the same society. In India, for example, the joint family is mentioned as a special characteristic, particularly of the Hindu society. The dissolution of the joint family occurs with couples moving into neolocal residences after a few years of patrilocal residence. In fact, the tradition of dowry provides clues to this phenomenon. Traditionally, the family of the bride gave such items as parting gifts as are needed for setting up a new household, for instance kitchenware, bedroom furnishings and personal clothing. Similarly, the groom’s parents included in the preparations for marriage the construction of a separate room—usually within the same family compound—for the new couple to reside in. In due course of time, separation would take place. In villages, the family compound symbolized ‘jointness’, but lineally connected families gradually became joint-in-production but separate-in-consumption. Residence is also affected by adoption. A childless family adopts one of its kinsmen’s children; usually it is BrSo or SiSo in a patrilineal society. Adopting the SiSo makes the residence avunculocal for the adoptee, as it is the SiSo who goes to stay with his MoBr. Similarly, in a patrilineal society, a son-less family may adopt the husband of its daughter—a practice known in India as Ghar Jamai, literally son-in-law in-residence.

A sociological study of the family requires an analysis of the types of family found in the society being investigated.


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