| Abstract: |
Alan Sandstrom begins with the cogent observation that most studies of house societies have failed to examine the pragmatic factors that underlie this form of social organization. Amatlan, Mexico, does not constitute a house society, although its Nahua inhabitants were, until recently, spatially distributed among various toponymic groupings they called houses, which played a significant role in their social identities. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research that allowed him to track the domestic cycles of Amatlan households, Sandstrom highlights the salient features of these embryonic houses and discusses the economic factors, primarily the scarcity of agricultural land, that precluded the maintenance and intact transmittal of house estates. His main concern is to demonstrate how understanding social relationships in terms of the house, as a relatively bounded group of individuals tied to a locus in space because of their common investment in land for subsistence needs, is superior to older ideas about kinship as the principal determinant of social organization, in that it allows for the interaction of economic, residential, kinship, and religious concerns to define a pragmatic unit that includes kin and non-kin. Furthermore, Nahua kinship relations are inherently contradictory because basic kin principles are subverted by the material conditions of life. The agricultural labor that house members agree to undertake cooperatively is the principal determinant of house membership. Sandstrom ultimately suggests replacing the currency of descent (shared substance) with the currency of interaction as the basis for house or house-like groups. He also cautions that, when considering the architectural dimensions of house societies, the house as a spatial locus may encompass more than a single structure, and in this case it refers better to a cleared space in the forest than to any building.
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