Elementary Structures in the Nepal Himalaya: Reciprocity and the Politics of Hierarchy in Ghale-Tamang Marriage

The relationships organized by marriage and kinship in small scale societies have long been a mainstay of anthropological approaches to society. These approaches have, however, varied in contentious ways through the years. Some have stressed adherence to positive rules of marriage and behavior embedded in kinship terminologies (Levi-Strauss 1969 [1949]); others have stressed social organization as an outcome of statistical patterns of behavior (Murdock 1949). Still others have discussed social organization in terms of decision-making models, themselves structured by an embedded hierarchy of rules available to the conscious repertoire of social actors (Keesing 1967). More recent and promising analyses have attempted to join the improvisations of human agency with accounts that recognize the role of structured historical relationships and their strategic recreation (Bourdieu 1977). These are largely subsumed under the heading of practice approaches (Ortner 1984, 1989:11-18) and themselves encompass applications to various sets of data from historical (Bourdieu 1976) and secondary ethnographic sources (Collier 1988) to actual analyses of process among contemporary groups (Bradburd 1984). Among the advantages of practice approaches is an explicit concern with individual strategic behavior conducted within particular contexts of meaning and prestige rather than in response to an integrated, highly structured set of rules (Bourdieu 1976:119-120). This stress on defining particular local contexts does not exclude economic considerations from the understanding of practice although they are not given a priori analytic prominence. Moreover, where other approaches have stressed logical coherence, either in parallels between behavior and terminology or in normative systems, the practice perspective allows for the simultaneous existence of apparently contradictory motivations. Indeed, these points of tension provide actors with the alternatives that give flexibility to social systems. Leach recognized the importance of these inconsistencies in his work on the Kachin, suggesting that the "overall process of structural change comes about through the manipulation of these alternatives as a means of social advancement" (1977:8). Recent work demonstrates the pivotal position of marriage in recreating and extending political and domestic statuses in classless societies. Much of this work, however, seems to imply that any particular society will be defined by highly integrated ideal models which define the differences along which inequalities are structured. Jane Collier's (1988) three models of social inequality defined by marriage, for example, take social inequality as a necessary condition in all societies, but appear to assume single discourses of social interaction within any particular setting. Even Leach's recognition of