239 It IS clear that kinship in Sweden over the centuries has been reckoned through both sexes, that is to say it has been cognatic, and that the egocentred kindred has been of basic significance. But there are also certain submissions which are not covered by this statement. When one studies the court records from the 16th and 17th century there are things which point to something else. A person could make a claimon land which way back belonged to an ancestor; actual descent froma certain person gave one a right to the land. In order to be able to prove this right it was necessary to go back through generations of ancestors. In disputes regarding bördsrätt and inheritance both the plaintiff and the defendant (the seller or the holder of the land under dispute) belonged to a kin group which can be defined by descent froma common origin, often very distant. And it IS )ust this that characterizes a lineage or a descent group. Largely (but with certain exceptions, among other things the setting aside of the rulepaterna paternis, materna rnaternis 1651) both bördsrätt and the strictly regulated inheritance right (it was forbidden to bequeath inherited land) contributed to keeping land within the kin group. Thus, we are dealing with a kin group which was both a lineage and a kinship reckoned through both sexes, i.e. a cognatic lineage. In the above discussion (Chapter 2) we have only looked at two out of four possible combinations of the kinship system. How then are cognatic lineages constituted? A person always belongs to at least two lineages (see figure 10, page 143, Overlapping cognatic lineages). In principle he or she can belong to an infinite number if one goes back through a sufficient number of generations. The lineages are not exclusive but overlap in an unlimited network. If the kin group is the “owner” of land, it is not in the same clear way that is possible within a unilinear system but in a much vaguer and much more undefined. There have to be special rules in order to make the whole thing manageable. In cultural anthropological literature there is a detailed description of land tenure in a system of cognatic descent, that of Allan Hoben on the Amhara of Ethiopia m the 1960s (see Hoben 1973, particularly pp 11—25). There are a great number of striking similarities between what is to be found in the Swedish court records of the 16th and 17th century and what Hoben found among the Amhara. The Swedish word börd with its double meaning of both actual and potential right of ownership is the equivalent of the word rist in the Amharan language. Neither börd nor rist alluded to any definite piece of land that had belongeci to a kin group for a long period of time, but rather to a quantity of land. The family trees which the peasants of Amhara produced in order to strengthen their claim was the exact equivalent of those presented at Swedish lawsuits on inheritance or bördsrätt (compare figures 4, 6 in this book with Hoben 1973 pp 107, 109, 134). Since in a systemof cognatic descent “everybody is related to everyone else”.
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