The Boundaries of Blackness

Chapter 5 examines struggles over inductees’ “proper” racial classification and placement in the segregated World War II–era US military. In millions of cases, classification was routine and uncontroversial. But in hundreds of cases—involving people who identified as everything from American Indian to Moorish American to white—men challenged their official race classification, or their placement in the segregated military, or both. The most heated and consequential of these challenges revolved around the meaning and membership of “colored” (a synonym for “Negro” or black)—not white. “Colored” people were by far the most thoroughly segregated and subjugated descent group in the US military, which meant that their race classification involved not just classification itself, but also assignment to “colored” outfits. Since membership in these outfits carried so many acute disadvantages, the stakes related to the “colored” category were unquestionably highest.

KINSHIP PRACTICE OF TOBA BATAK MOSLEM AS A LAND CONTROL STRATEGY IN ASAHAN

<p><strong>Abstrak:</strong> <strong>Praktik Kekerabatan Batak Toba Muslim sebagai Strategi Pengendalian Lahan di Asahan.</strong> Studi ini menunjukkan pemakaian relasi kekerabatan Batak Toba Muslim sebagai strategi penghidupan bagi penguasaan tanah dalam ruang penguasaan yang ganti berganti sejak era Melayu-Islam di Asahan melalui perspektif teori praktik dari Bourdieu. Penelitian dilakukan dengan metode etnografi. Satuan analisis ditetapkan secara berjenjang mulai keluarga, kelompok keturunan, perkumpulan marga, serta komunitas Batak Toba pada wilayah perkampungan pedalaman Bandar Pulau, Bandar Pasir Mandoge dan Buntu Pane. Studi menemukan siasat-siasat adaptasi telah memperluas aliansi dan meningkatkan fungsi praktis kekerabatan Batak Toba dalam upaya penguasaan tanah sebagai sumber daya penghidupan terpenting sebagai satuan kekerabatan berkorporasi. Kontestasi terhadap lahan semakin rumit seiring masuknya pengaruh modal korporasi perkebunan dan kekuatan negara di perkampungan. Ketika berhadapan dengan kepentingan institusi lain yang lebih besar seperti perusahaan perkebunan dan negara dalam hal sengketa lahan, tampak siasat penggunaan jaringan marga atau kelompok keturunan menjadi terbatas fungsinya, jika dibandingkan dengan persaingan sumber daya di antara sesama keluarga Batak Toba. </p><p><strong>Kata Kunci: </strong>praktik kekerabatan, strategi mata pencaharian, migrasi, Muslim Batak Toba<br /><strong></strong></p><p><strong>Abstract</strong>: This study shows the use of Toba Batak Moslem kinship relations as a livelihood strategy for land control in the changing space of power since the Malay-Islamic era in Asahan through the perspective of Bourdieu's theory of practice. The research was conducted using ethnographic methods. The analysis units are determined in stages starting from the family, descent group, clan association, and the Toba Batak community in the hinterland areas of Bandar Pulau, Bandar Pasir Mandoge and Buntu Pane. The results of the study found that adaptation strategies have expanded alliances and increased the practical function of the Toba Batak kinship in an effort to control land as the most important source of livelihood as a corporate kinship unit. Contestation of land is getting more complicated as the influence of plantation corporate capital and state power enters the village. When dealing with the interests of other larger institutions such as plantation companies and the state in terms of land disputes, it appears that the use of clan networks or descent groups is limited in function, when compared with the competition for resources among Toba Batak families. <br /><strong> </strong><br /><strong>Keywords:</strong> kinship practices, livelihood strategies, migration, Toba Batak Moslem</p>

Legal Compromises: Imperial Contexts of the Pentateuch

The “hexateuchal” imagination (the six-book story stretching from Genesis to Joshua) located the center of Israel’s life in Shechem, in the north. How that story was cut back to a Pentateuch is not explicitly told, but we can assume that it entailed negotiation and compromise well into the fourth century BCE. Instead of the earlier Priestly internationalism, a renewed “Deuteronomic” vision could see Abraham as the founder of a single descent group and a single, great nation (gôy gādôl). Read from the perspective of the completed Pentateuch, the ancestors in Genesis were promised a “Torah republic” with a homeland that could nourish communal identity even from afar. This theocracy was envisaged more in national terms, but communal obligations included the broader range of both Priestly and Deuteronomic provisions now collected within the Pentateuch’s common law, and renegotiated especially within the book of Numbers.

From matrimonial practices to genetic diversity in Southeast Asian populations: the signature of the matrilineal puzzle

In matrilineal populations, the descent group affiliation is transmitted by women whereas the socio-political power frequently remains in the hands of men. This situation, named the ‘matrilineal puzzle’, is expected to promote local endogamy as a coping mechanism allowing men to maintain their decision-making power over their natal descent group. In this paper, we revisit this ‘matrilineal puzzle’ from a population genetics' point of view. Indeed, such tendency for local endogamy in matrilineal populations is expected to increase their genetic inbreeding and generate isolation-by-distance patterns between villages. To test this hypothesis, we collected ethno-demographic data for 3261 couples and high-density genetic data for 675 individuals from 11 Southeast Asian populations with a wide range of social organizations: matrilineal and matrilocal populations (M), patrilineal and patrilocal populations (P) or cognatic populations with predominant matrilocal residence (C). We observed that M and C populations have higher levels of village endogamy than P populations, and that such higher village endogamy leads to higher genetic inbreeding. M populations also exhibit isolation-by-distance patterns between villages. We interpret such genetic patterns as the signature of the ‘matrilineal puzzle’. Notably, our results suggest that any form of matrilocal marriage (whatever the descent rule is) increases village endogamy. These findings suggest that male dominance, when combined with matrilocality, constrains inter-village migrations, and constitutes an underexplored cultural process shaping genetic patterns in human populations. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The evolution of female-biased kinship in humans and other mammals’.

A Genealogy of Dissent

This book seeks a better understanding of the politics, society, and culture of early-modern Korea by tracing and narrating the history of the descendants of the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392). Decades after persecution that virtually exterminated the former royals, the Kaesŏng Wang, the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) sought to bolster its legitimacy as the successor of Koryŏ. Emulating Chinese historical precedents, by the mid-fifteenth century, Chosŏn had rehabilitated the surviving Wangs. Contrary to the popular assumption that the Wangs remained politically marginalized, many fared well. The most privileged among them won the patronage of the Chosŏn court for which they performed ancestral rites in honor of certain Koryŏ rulers as selected by Chosŏn, passed government service examinations, attained prestigious offices, commanded armies, and constituted elite lineages throughout Korea. As members of a revived aristocratic descent group, the Kaesŏng Wang were committed to Confucian cultural and moral norms, at the heart of which was a subject’s loyalty to the ruler—the Chosŏn monarch. At the same time, Chosŏn increasingly honored Koryŏ loyalists and legacies. An emerging body of subversive narratives, both written and oral, articulated sympathy toward the Wangs as victims of the tumultuous politics of the Koryŏ-Chosŏn dynastic change, although the Wangs themselves steered clear of this discourse until after Japan’s abolition of the Chosŏn monarchy in 1910. Forces of modernity such as imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, urbanization, industrialization, and immigration transformed the Kaesŏng Wang as the progeny of fallen royals to individuals from all walks of life.

The Court and Society, 1589–1724

Covering the mid-Chosŏn period, chapter 3 analyzes the segmentation of the Kaesŏng Wang as a descent group. While successive members of a third new line of ritual heirs, the Majŏn lineage, performed their duties at the Sungŭijŏn, the Wangs as a whole became geographically dispersed and even more socially diverse. Descent from an early Chosŏn scholar-official without any illegitimate children in the intervening generations became the unquestioned marker of one’s aristocratic status. Among various Wang descent lines, the Kaesŏng lineage began eclipsing the Kwach’ŏn lineage in terms of examination success and office holding.

Search for a Ritual Heir, 1450–1589

Chapter 2 focuses on the Chosŏn state’s effort to maintain a line of ritual heirs of Koryŏ and the reemergence of the Kaesŏng Wang as an aristocratic descent group. Disproving a widespread assumption, this chapter demonstrates that a number of Wangs, especially the members of the Kwach’ŏn lineage, passed government service examinations and received offices—even attaining significant, prestigious civil posts. By the mid-sixteenth century, the advantage of being a Kaesŏng Wang was such that Wang-surnamed individuals of varying shades of social status claimed Koryŏ royal descent. Accordingly, the court had to scrutinize competing claims when, on two occasions, it had to secure a new line of ritual heirs.

KINSHIP AND COMMUNITY IN THE NORTHERN SOUTHWEST: CHACO AND BEYOND

Archaeogenomic studies of a burial crypt in Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, have demonstrated the presence of an elite matrilineal descent group that spanned most of the 300+ years the great house was occupied, confirming, among other things, the deep antiquity of matrilineal ideologies among the Ancestral Pueblos of the northern Southwest. This article explores the sociopolitical implications of matrilineal descent, matrilocal residence, and Iroquois-Crow alliance structures among the Ancestral Pueblos of Chaco and elsewhere. It argues that matrilineal ideologies helped shape community forms and intercommunity relations throughout the Pueblo Southwest. It argues further that kinship provides insights into Chaco's eleventh-century expansion that dispersed “outlier” great houses over much of the southeastern Colorado Plateau. The article concludes with a call for archaeologists and cultural historians to pay more attention to kinship, the principal idiom of social, economic, and political relations in nonstate societies.