Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 464
As pointed out, the pattern of intergenerational inheritance among a set of family thaghaya as
genealogical descendants of full brothers from the same 'kitchen' five or more generations ago
would only have worked as long as none of the relevant thaghaya branches had been
interrupted. Such interruptions would either have been caused by death or if a candidate had
left Dghweɗe. Our model is of course very generalised, and we do not see all the collateral
family links that would have come about after five generations of patrilineal family
expansion, which would have meant massive population growth with very complex social
relationships along the way in how the Dghweɗe managed reproduction. Finding wives was
very important in this context, and marriage was the key not only for human but also any
other form of socio-economic reproduction. Managing the transmission of land resources was
as important as controlling patrilineal reproduction.
Even though land was privately owned, it was seen as ancestral land that had been passed
down through a system of patrilineal descent consistimg of many generations of seventh-born
sons leading back to the ones who had originally started farming and fertilising the land. We
think that this led to cultivated farmland apart from infields becoming particularly segregated
in terms of individual ownership. We recommend the reader to go back to Chapter 3.10 and
consult Figure 17 showing the general model of the Dghweɗe farm layout, to re-familiarise
themselves with the different types of farmland which the Dghweɗe generally referred to as
gwiye. The term gwiye included the infields (vde) which were always inherited by the seventh
born and thus became possibly less segregated than the outer cultivated terraced fields (kla
pana), but fallow land (siye), as well as areas of uncultivated bushland (susiye), presumably
became significantly more geographically fragmented in terms of private ownership.
Figure 28b: Examples of the inheritance of farmland (gwiye) in Dghweɗe
Figure
28b
shows
five
examples of the
inheritance of
farmland
(gwiye) which I
published
in
1996. We see in
the key of the
illustration the
reference
to
'other fields' as
distinct
from
the infields, but
unfortunately
we cannot be
certain whether
they refer only
to plots
of
cultivated
terraced fields
(kla pana) and
fallow
land
(siye), or also to
uncultivated
bushland. We
are aware that
this would be an important distinction, but the five examples still demonstrate that it was
always the seventh-born son who inherited the lion’s share. We also need to note that the
description of the illustration from 1996 treats all infields (house fields) as one plot, which
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