International records / OpenAlex research

The Political Significance of Double Unilineal Descent

MURDOCK HAS REFERRED To a large number of societies characterized by double unilineal descent of various kinds (Murdock I940); but as this article has arisen out of attempts to analyse the social structure of the Mbembe peoples of the Cross River, south-eastern Nigeria,2 I shall be concerned only with those societies which, like the Mbembe, have systems of double descent in which the patrilineal groups form the residential units, and the matrilineages although necessarily dispersed yet form corporate groups in the sense used by Radcliffe-Brown (I950, p. 41). Such combinations of descent groups…