From Fields to Territories to the Planet Social Patterns in Multicultural Environments Matrimonial patterns and trans-ethnic entities
Résumé
Despite the complexity of their object of study, i.e. human society and culture, anthropologists seldom address complexity per se. In this paper I would like to briefly suggest approaches to deal with certain complex issues involved in the modelisation of social relations within a naturalistic paradigm. What I want to show primarily is how anthropological knowledge might be markedly enhanced by truly confronting the complexity of anthropological phenomena, i.e. by putting culture and social structures back into the natural/physical world, to understand how " it really works ". And the condition for performing such an enterprise is close cooperation with other disciplines dealing with the study of complexity. The topic at hand is modelling the origin of a system of surname equivalences in tribal India. But the work being done might have a much broader range, by helping the studies of matrimonial systems to adopt more naturalistic approaches. Georg Simmel wrote about "large systems", formed of "immediate interactions that occur among men constantly…that have become crystalized…attaining their own laws" (Simmel 1950, 10). The present study aims at understanding how one of these systems evolves "by itself", beside or in conjunction with what the actors say and think about it. Among several tribal societies of NorthEast India people recognize that some of their neighbours, belonging to altogether different cultures and ethnicities, and speaking different languages, are actually " similar " because of their surname. " Similar " people are identified by their surnames being " the same ". We might translate without too much risk " similar " by " synonymous " or " equivalent " , as such surnames refer to clans (" descent groups " in the anthropological parlance), the immediate
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