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INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY— PUBLICATION NO. 



group. Formerly, one of her sisters, likewise an 

 elderly widow, also lived with her. Another elderly 

 widowed sister, however, is not on speaking terms 

 with her, and a public feud is known to exist between 

 them. 



Old people, particularly parents, are always treated 

 with respect and gentleness, which together with the 

 prominent position of the woman in the household, 

 to some extent accounts for the influence of old 

 women, such as those mentioned above. However, 

 the cases in which they have succeeded in holding a 

 group together under their orders or influence are 

 the result of personality factors rather than social 

 status. 



F.\MILY X.\MES 



Detailed discussion of the facts emerging from a 

 study of the genealogical material must be postponed 

 to another publication, but we may note that the 

 family name identifies individuals in a limited way, 

 i. e., only with the immediate family and closer rela- 

 tives, not with an extended group. For example, 

 there are manv immediate families named Asmat. 

 but all the Asmats do not consider them.selves a 

 group. Although the chances are that all individuals 

 named Asmat are blood relatives (actually or puta- 

 tively), it is typically impossible for a niemlier of 

 Asmat family No. I to tell one how he is related to 

 Asmat family No. X. Usually he will not suggest 

 spontaneously that he is related to family No. X, 

 family No. XII, or whatnot. It is only after one 

 says, "You must be related, you have the same 

 name," t'nat h.e will say, "Yes, I suppose we are." 



There are two reasons for this state of affairs. 

 ( 1 ) Without written records the people have diffi- 

 culty in remembering the names of relatives beyond 

 the grandparents' generation, so that many collateral 

 lines of relationship, the junctures of which must be 

 sought several generations back, are lost. (2) The 

 extended family or group of relatives has no impor- 

 tance in the social system, so that there is no drive 

 to keep a reckoning of distant relationships in mind, 

 even in the absence of records. 



What are found, then, are loose informal groups, 

 each composed of several immediate families, within 

 the larger aggregation of those bearing the same 

 family name. These are immediate families de- 

 scended from a known, identified ancestor. Thus, 

 we may speak of group A of the Asmats, all of whom 

 are Asmats descended from a man still living or 

 recently dead, named Asmat i. Then there is the 



group B of Asmats, all descended from Asmat 2, and 

 so on. The same will be found in the cases of all the 

 other widespread family names. Even these groups 

 are not socially recognized as discrete entities; we 

 call them groups merely because they usually define 

 the limits within which an individual can accurately 

 describe his blood relationships. 



The inheritance of names theoretically follows the 

 .Spanish pattern, i. e., one inherits his father's and 

 his mother's family names, but one passes on to the 

 next generation only his father's name. The mother's 

 name is commonly used only on documents and 

 formal occasions, not in conversation. Thus a man 

 might be named Jose Federico Fiilano y Sutano -/'^ 

 Fulano is his father's name, Sutano, his mother's. 

 He may marry a girl named Maria Cristina Mengano 

 (father's name) y Piedra (mother's name). After 

 her marriage, her full name is Maria Cristina Men- 

 gano y Piedra de Fulano. And after her husband's 

 death, her full name is Maria Cristina Mengano y 

 Piedra viuda de Fulano. Her son might have the j 

 baptismal name of Juan, and would be Juan Fulano ' 

 y Mengano ; her daughter, Juanita, would be Juanita 

 Fulano y Mengano. It is thus clear that this system 

 is patronymic and that family names persist for more 

 than two generations only through the male line. 

 The principal surface difference between this system 

 and the "Anglo-Saxon" North American system, is 

 that the mother's maiden family name is added to ' 

 the official cognomen of the child, and that the hus- 

 band's family name is added to the wife's maiden 

 family names. 



In Moche, a woman does not add her husband's 

 family name to her own unless she is formally 

 married to him. She may have lived with a man 

 for 30 years and have 11 children by him, but will 

 still call herself Maria Cristina Mengano, without 

 adding her husband's name of Fulano. This, of 

 course, adds to the difficulty of genealogical reckon- 

 ing. There is a simple legal process whereby a 

 father may "recognize" his children, even though he 

 is not married to the mother, in which case the 

 children carry his family name without that of the 

 mother. If the father does not recognize the children 

 either by marrying the mother or by the other type 

 of recognition, they carry their mother's family name 

 only. 



Perhaps because relatively so many mothers are 



" As most readers will know, Fulano, Sut.ino, Mengano are words 

 used in Spanish in tlie same sense as "Doe, Roe, and Poe," "Smith, 

 Jones, and Brown," or "Tom, Dick, and Harry." No one in Moche, 

 or anywhere else, actually has such names. 



