From Horizontal Coalitions to Vertical Lineages? Organizational Reproduction, Kin-Channel Competition, and the Persistence of Matriliny

Abstract

Why can substantial paternal continuity develop inside societies whose principal corporate institutions remain matrilineal? Existing explanations of matrilineal change have emphasized property, production, residence, political complexity, paternity, and changing incentives to invest in sons or other relatives. Political and organizational theory identifies another recurrent process: offices and institutions recruited on non-hereditary criteria may become subject to kin-based appropriation or repatrimonialization. Yet when such processes occur inside a matrilineal society, “kin capture” does not determine which kin channel will reproduce the resulting advantages. This paper integrates classic kinship theory, complementary and double descent, male associations, organizational reproduction, repatrimonialization, and wealth-based inheritance change into a common historical framework. It distinguishes three dimensions of intergenerational transmission: channel—which successor pool receives the resource; domain—what is transmitted; and durability—whether the advantage survives the incumbent’s death or exit and becomes recursively reproducible. It further distinguishes recursive social reproduction from formal hereditary entitlement: a family or kin group may reproduce skills, access, or influence across generations while the office itself remains appointive. The relevant successor pools are broader than a simple contrast between sons and sisters’ sons. A paternal-descendant channel may compete with a matrilineal corporate successor set—which may itself include brothers, sisters’ sons, and more remote matrilineal candidates—and with extra-corporate recruits such as dependants, clients, affines, slaves, protégés, or non-kin. These sources of claim can also overlap within the same candidate. Comparative cases illustrate why channel, domain, and durability must be separated. In the Trobriand Islands, fathers could transmit valuable relationships, magic, gifts, and lifetime use rights to sons while underlying matrilineal corporate claims could reassert themselves after the father's death and chiefly succession remained maternal. Among the Fante, patrifiliative asafo political-military companies coexisted with broader matrilineal institutions and included both male and female members. In Asante, matrilineal corporate organization coexisted with paternal affiliation, use of sons as dependent personal agents, patri-kin transmission of administrative skill, and groups that repeatedly supplied officials; yet rulers also converted hereditary offices into appointive ones and constrained bureaucratic hereditarization. At the Minangkabau lineage level, male penghulu/datuk headship can reproduce through matrilineal eligibility; this claim is deliberately bounded to lineage/adat office rather than generalized to every level of Minangkabau political organization (Sanday 2002; Drakard 1999). Himba, by contrast, illustrate a double-descent system in directional disequilibrium, with strong contemporary pressure toward greater paternal inheritance (Scelza, Prall, and Levine 2019). These cases suggest that paternal preference, paternal transmission, durable paternal social reproduction, hereditary paternal office, and corporate patriliny are analytically distinct. Horizontal organizations create arenas in which vertical transmission channels compete, but the result depends on resource control, corporate legitimacy, residence and training, existing paternal institutions, lapse or persistence of granted use rights, reset, state constraints on hereditary capture, and the durability of the transmitted advantage. The framework is offered as a descriptive-comparative synthesis rather than a validated causal model: its incremental value depends on whether independent coders can apply its categories reliably and whether the distinctions alter historical classification beyond classic kinship concepts. That discriminating value remains to be demonstrated. The transition from horizontal coalition to vertical lineage, where it occurs, is therefore not a single universal mechanism but one possible outcome within a plural field of intergenerational transmission.