Alliance & Descent | Anthropology Optional for UPSC PDF Download

Alliance & Descent
Alliance system connotes a set of affinal or marriage rules through which descent groups are linked. The importance of alliance in kinship systems and its invaluable information for anthropological inquiry was for the first time highlighted by French anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss.
According to Levi Strauss it is the universality of incest taboo that gives rise to alliance system all over the world. It is because people cannot marry or mate with people within their own descent group (which is a set of people related to each other by blood or consanguineal relationships), they enter into alliance or marriage contracts, thereby enabling themselves to get mates from outside their own descent groups or other descent groups.
To put it very simply, since men are prohibited to mate with women from within their own descent groups , they are forced to "exchange " women with other descent groups. This situation results in marital alliances. These marital alliances are social forces which promote wider alliances between different groups. (Read our discussion on prohibition of incest taboo in the chapter on Marriage).