PARADOXES OF SINGULARITY AND MULTIPLICITY

Evans-Pritchard may have been the first to formulate the problem as a paradox – for the Nuer, the paradox of a patrilineal principle so unchallenged as to allow for the realization of practically everything except patrilineality (1951: 28; cf. Sahlins 1965). Yet, in part because of the force of his own rhetoric, he has hardly been the last. Moyer, for instance, has recently rephrased the Nuer paradox to fit an Indonesian context. Speaking of south Sumatra, he has asserted that the ‘paradox of unilineality’ implies that ‘the more unilineal a system is or becomes the less likely it is to remain unilineal’ (1983: 257). The situation, however, is not unique to the Nuer or to south Sumatra. Across the ethnographic spectrum – from Africa to Indonesia – the multiplicity of the forms of affiliation and residence found within societies has confounded ethnographers and defied the simple exclusivity of their analytic categories.

In Indonesia, the problem has been further compounded by the multiplicity of the forms of marriage that are found both within and between societies. Describing the aim of his book Types of Social Structure in Eastern Indonesia (1968 (1935)), van Wouden noted, some years later, that he had