Week 4 - Social Structure Writeup

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WEEK 4 - SOCIAL STRUCTURE WRITEUP

Week 4 is the week we want you to write up a preliminary draft of your social organization and structure chapter.. This will be a chapter in your ethnography on the social structure and the social organization of your village. "Social structure" is a technical term in anthropology that refers to the way people are organized conceptually in a given place. It is the way people think about the categories in their heads. In this case it includes the structure of groups in the village and the way people conceptualize their kinship ties. You will have already collected and written up much of this material last week in your kinship assignment. You should use this week to collect the remaining information and to add this to your kinship analysis. "Social organization," by contrast, refers to how people are actually organized on the ground. You will be able to get a lot of this information from your census. This would be the number of people in the village, the numbers of people in the mataqalis, the number of mataqalis in the yavusas, etc. You should also include here things like marriage and residence patterns: are most people's spouses from this area or do they come from other parts of the country? Do people usually live with the husband's father's family as the social structure dictates or are many people living with the wife's family and/or with their mother's family? We suspect that you will find many families in those categories so it would be a good idea to ask people why they are living with the wife's/mother's family to see if there are any general patterns here (e.g. perhaps people from small outer islands like the Lau group prefer to live on VitiLevu). We realize that you will not be able to make definitive statements on the size of mataqalis, yavusas and the village on the basis of censusing ten households so you should ask people to estimate these numbers for your. Technically, the social structure of Fijian villages should be basically the same in your different places. The social organization, on the other hand, will vary considerably from place to place. You would expect, for example, for mataqalis to vary in size, and there should also be variation in how many are in the yavusa etc.

Here are the things you'll want to include in your chapter:

As parts of the SOCIAL STRUCTURE (from kinship assignment, mapping assingment and other interviews):

the chiefly arrangement of lineages (hierarchy)
how people define membership to groups (patrilineal descent, primogeniture, etc.)
how lineages (mataqali) are organized into yavusas
the kin term system
the various formal relationships among kin (avoidance relationships, joking relationships, etc.). Also the attitudes of respect. Be systematic here, going through all the different types of expected behaviors that you know about.

As parts of the SOCIAL ORGANIZATION (from census):

size of village (see if people can tell you)
history of village, how settled, stories about this
names of mataqalis, size of mataqalis in census, number of mataqalis in yavusas, in villages
proportion of women married in from other villages, a general sense of the distance they've gone to come here
extent of schooling, with some sense of how this has changed over time
religious affiliations, proportion of people who are Methodist and other religions in census population

Include any other information you consider to be relevant to this chapter. It's hard to tell you just how long this first draft should be, but as a chapter in your ethnography it will likely be some 15-20 pages long by the term's end. Consider what you hand in next week to be a rough draft of the chapter. We'll give you comments for revision.

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