talking about talking about residence: an Akamba case

STEPHEN M. F JE L LM AN -Harvard University

There are a number of ways to describe residence patterns. The traditional approach begins by coding the people of a sample in terms of categories given by general ethnological theory (neolocal, patrilocal, etc.). The numbers in each category are totaled, and various simple statistics (mean, mode, median) are drawn from the data. A descriptive statement about residence is then made, and the ethnographer i s able to use this residence pattern in formulating his hypotheses about social organization.

A second method, associated especially with the names of Fortes and Stenning, adds change over time to the description. People are assigned to categories of residence so that each household may be typed in terms of composition. Then statements can be made about the domestic cycle and patterns of change in household composition and residence. This second approach has certain obvious advantages over the mere enumeration of the first method. Knowing, for example, that household type B generally develops from household type A through some change in membership, one can attempt to isolate the structural or behavioral strains implicit in the latter and the ways in which a change to type B may resolve these strains.

Both of these approaches make use of residence categories drawn from general ethnological theory. They account for residence as seen by someone outside the social group under consideration. They are not complete, however, because they tell us nothing about how the individuals of that group understand the system they (literally) live in.

The description presented here differs from those mentioned above in that the categories used are elicited from the people under study themselves. It was inspired by Geoghegan’s path-breaking work on decision making and residence among the Semal of Tagtabon Island in the southern Philippines (Geoghegan 1971, n.d.). Using information about personal status, Geoghegan constructs a set of ordered decision criteria which predict, with a very high degree of accuracy, mode of residence among a group of 285 Semal. The emphasis in this study differs from Geoghegan’s in i t s explicit focus on a technique for eliciting the relevant ethnographic information on personal status and residence categories.

People of a particular community have ways of describing how their neighbors reside. “He lives alone.. .She lives with her mother.” If someone lives in a bizarre manner, people can te l l you why it is bizarre. Moreover, they can usually explain why an

The data-collection procedures described here elicit culturally relevant categories and the personal characteristics that are correlated with them. They permit the construction of a decision model which represents the organization of native knowledge about what kinds of people live in different domestic situations.

Akarnba residence 671

individual resides in one way or another. This explanation consists of particular facts about that person’s status, e.g., “She’s divorced and couldn’t get a job, so she’s back with her parents.” If a group has a residence pattern, that should mean that people with the same status characteristics will, for the most part, be living in the same mode. People ought to be able, when told what characteristics an individual of their cultural group has, to place him or her in the right category. The remainder of this paper will consist of a description of the Akamba of the southern portion of Kilaloni Location, Machakos District, and what they talk about when they talk about residence.

The purpose of my model i s not to duplicate actual cognitive processes. What it does do i s to organize indigenous ideas in such a way that an outsider could predict Kilanloni Akamba residence categories from social status characteristics and could do so in the most efficient manner possible.

the people

The 480 Akamba whose comings and goings are reported in this study live in forty compounds. These form a continuous block of habitation, separated from the northern portion of Kilaloni sub-location by the Kingagi River.

Kilaloni Location, which i s only forty-two miles from Nairobi, is reputed to be a very progressive area for Ukambani. Over 90 percent of the children between the ages of eight and twenty have been in school at ont: time or another. The sub-location has two nursery schools. 75 percent of the compounds have at least one building with a sheet metal roof. None of the girls in this area have attended circumcision ceremonies since 1960.

Although 59 percent of the male household heads earn income from other sources, every compound engages in agriculture, growing crops for both subsistence and market. All families grow coffee and belong to one of two nearby cooperatives. 38 percent of the compounds keep some cattle in the location, but Kilaloni i s sufficiently well provided with rainfall that there is very l i t t le unplanted land le f t for grazing. Thus people either keep very few cattle or graze them outside the sub-location.

the data

The basic data for this description of residence came from the census material collected for the Child Development Research Unit. Each of the forty compounds in the area was surveyed during an average of about eight visits apiece. Information was gathered on household composition, present place of residence of all people considered to be household members (some clan and lineage members live and work outside Kilaloni, returning at varying intervals), marital status and history, education, religion, health, residence and employment history, and so forth.

With this information as background, I began talking to my informants about residence. My method was to choose an individual from the sample, and, without revealing the identity of that person, ask my informants to decide how that person was residing by asking me questions about him. I instructed my informants that I would only answer questions “yes” or “no” and that they could ask no direct questions about residence. When they had made a decision about that person, I would pick another and repeat the process until I had covered what seemed to me to be a fair range of residential circumstances.’

These question and answer sessions gave me three bodie!; of information: (1) a l i s t of descriptive phrases in Kikamba about residence conditions; (2) a series of questions about

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personal status characteristics; (3) an ordering of those questions such that my informants could use the answers efficiently to assign the individual in question to a residence category.

The residence categories are as follows:

Kikamba Phrase English Gloss

1. men

1 A. ekalaa no asyai make ‘stays with his parents’

1 B. ekalaa nu nyinyia ‘stays with mother’

This phrase is used when Ego’s mother is widowed or divorced, or when Ego is an illegitimate son. The connective nu (‘with’) implies that the mother i s supporting the son and is used with reference to unmarried males. If the son were married, according to m y informants, he would be supporting his mother and the nu would be replaced by kwa (‘at’) to convey the correct implication (cf. 1 F).

1C. ekalaa + place name ‘stays (or lives) at’ + place name

This phrase describes the people who are considered ful l members of the households in the sample, bu t who are staying elsewhere for one reason or another, returning home when free. It i s not necessary to specify what males are doing if they live outside the sample, although the following phrases are used for greater precision:

athiikiimaa . . . asomeaa . . . If it i s known that an individual stays with a relative, this phrase will be included.

‘works a t . . . ’ ‘is schooling at . . . ’

1 D. ekalaa nu aka make ‘stays with his wives’

1 E. ekalaa nu ana make ‘stays with his sons’

The implication here is that at least one o f the sons is married. If only one of these sons is married, it i s expected that it will be the youngest married son, who traditionally remains behind when his older brothers move out o f the compound. In this case the correct phrase is ekalaa no mwanae, ‘stays with his last son.’

1 F. ekalaa nu miika kwa nyinyia

Here the kwa suggests that the son i s supporting his mother after the death o f his father (cf. 1 B).

1 G . ekalaa k wa asyai make

The kwa here implies that the son is married. It is opposed to the nu in 16, which i s used for an unmarried son.

‘stays with wife a t [his] mother’s’

‘stays at [his] parents’ place’

1 H. ekalaa nu muka ‘stays with his wife’

This phrase implies the presence of unmarried children, although nu syana syake (‘and his children’) may be added for precision.

1 I. ekalaa nu mwana wake ‘lives with his son’

This phrase means that a man lives with only one o f his sons, and not necessarily the youngest married one.

1 J . ekalaa kwake, ni‘ngijnzi ‘he lives a t his own place, i s a man without a wife’

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or ekalaa kwake, ni:walhngilye kiveti kyake his wife’

‘he lives at his own place, he chased away

2. women

2A. ekalaa nu asyai make

2B. ekalaa nu nyinyia

2C. eka/ua + place name

‘stays with her parents’

‘stays with mother’

‘stays at . . . ’ + phrase See 1B.

followed by a descriptive phrase stating what the female is doing

As in the case of males, this phrase is applied to a girl or woman who is considered a full member o f the household, but who is presently living elsewhere. In order to suggest that the female in question i s behaving in the proper manner, it i s necessary to specify what she i s ostensibly doing away from home.

Each of the next four categories are split in two. A married woman’s domestic situation differs for any category of residence depending on whether or not her husband lives at home. This distinction is made by adding the phrase hdTmhhme athhkhmaa + place name (‘but [her] husband works a t . . . ’) to the residence description that applies to her.

2Di. ekalaa no mwive or ekalaaa nu mwive nu muume ekalaa o nao

athhkhmaa . . .

‘stays with co-wife’ ‘stays with co-wife, and husband stays together with them’

2Dii.ekalaa no mwive, hdi‘ mhhme ‘stays with lco-wife, but husband works at . . . ’

2Ei. ekalaa no mhume ‘stays with husband’

2Eii.ekalaa nu mhfime i;?d; mfihme ‘stays with husband but husband works at . . . I

2Fi. ekalaa nu muime nu asyai moo ‘stays with husband and their parents’

2Fii. ekalaa no muime no asyai moo, hdi‘ ‘stays with husband and their parents, but husband works at . . . ’

2Gi. ekalaa no mhhme kwa nyinyia ‘stays with husband and [his] mother’

athhkumaa . . .

m Z m e athhkhmaa . . .

Again the kwa is used, because a married son supports his mother after his father dies.

‘stays with husband and [his] mother, miume anthikhmaa . . . but husband works at . . . ’

‘stays with her sons’

ZGii.eka/aa nu mZme kwa nyinyia ind;

2H. ekalaa nu anae

The no implies that there i s at least one married son and that this son supports his mother.

21. ni‘ndi‘wa, ekalaa nu syana syake ‘she is a widow, she stays with her

In this phrase, the use of syanu syake (‘her children’) rather than anae (‘her sons’) suggests that these children are not married. However, to a Kilaloni Mukamba, the phrase also implies that the woman had been married to her husband and living in

children’

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his compound for a long time before his death. Otherwise, she would be placed in category 2), below. Therefore, she will probably be an old woman, and her children, despite the fact that they are now unmarried, will be supporting her.

2J. njrnwlkzyoko ‘[she] i s someone who has returned’

This is said of a woman who was married but has come back to her father’s place. Such a woman may have been separated, divorced, or widowed before she had been living with her husband long enough to be completely absorbed into his extended family.

the questions

In order for my informants to assign whichever person I had in mind to his or her proper residence category, they needed certain information. Requiring them to ask me questions that could only be answered with “yes” or “no” served two purposes. It gave me the l i s t o f social status characteristics that my informants needed to know in order to be able t o describe an individual’s residence situation. It also gave me the order in which these characteristics were considered in establishing that person’s social identity.

The reasoning behind this procedure is found in information theory. I will explain this reasoning with an analogy, taking the game o f Twenty Questions as an example. My contention i s that the process involved in playing this game i s the same process that we use in gathering information we need in order to make many of our daily decisions, including, possibly, how to assign people to residence categories. Suppose we have to guess what single object in the world another person has in mind in Twenty Questions. If we ask a very specific question, such as, “ Is it Charlie’s Aunt’s nose?” we may win on the first try. If our opponent answers “no,” however, all we have done is to eliminate Charlie’s Aunt’s nose from contention, and we only have nineteen questions left. The most efficient way to play the game is to begin with a very general question, the answer to which will eliminate the greatest number o f objects possible from consideration. The best question we could ask would always eliminate exactly half the alternatives, although this i s not initially possible in Twenty Questions unless we ask a disjunctive question-a question with “or” in it-such as “ Is it animal or vegetable as opposed to mineral?” If the answer i s “no,” we have eliminated two-thirds of the possibilities, if “yes,” only one third. Once our first question has narrowed down the field, we should ideally try to cut the remaining portion in half with another general question. Thus we keep splitting the field in half until we zero in on the answer. The answers to any question, moreover, limits the type of question that i s appropriate to ask next. For instance, if we know that the object to be guessed is vegetable, we should probably not ask, “Does it f ly?”

A question which has a yes or no answer i s called a binary question, and in information theory, the answer to any binary question provides one “bit” of information about the field of inquiry. For example, given the following paradigm, it takes three binary questions, or three bits o f information, to specify any one o f the English kin terms on the lowest level3 (Figure 1).

If everyone’s mind worked according to the tenets o f information theory, this would obviously be the most efficient of all possible worlds. Although all of t h e questions used in the model came from my informants, they did not always use the most efficient ordering. Invariably, the first questions were the most general ones (either a question about the individual’s sex or his marital status). The questions would become

Akamba residence 675

RELATIVES

mother- father- daughter- son- in-law in-law in-law in-law

1. Q. “Is it an affine?” A. “Yes,” 2. Q. “Is it in the ascending generation?” A. “Yes.”

3. Q. “Is it male?” A. “No,” thus narrowing it down to mother-in-law.

Figure 1. Some American English kin terms.

progressively more specific, but often an informant would make a very inefficient choice. If the answer to the question was “no,” he did not learn much.

Actual measurement o f efficiency i s difficult. If 1 ask one informant to discover how a particular person resides, I can match the number of questions he uses against the fewest number of questions needed to specify that person’s residential category. If I ask two informants about the same person, they may need the same number of questions, but may ask different ones, or ask the same ones in a different order. The model I have constructed is based on all my informants’ queries about a number of people. It i s a composite model, constructed by the ethnographer out of indigenous material. In light of the full model, some sequences of questions rhar are very efficient in pursuit of a particular residence category may not be very helpful in getting to others. I do not claim that any inhabitant of Kilaloni holds the entire model in his or her conscious mind. I do, however, claim that he or she i s cognizant o f a t least part of it and would recognize the rest as a valid description o f residence in the community. The model does not duplicate actual cognitive processes, but it is based on them.

The questions elicited are for the most part self-explanatory (see decision tree below). The following, however, do need some explanation.

(1) /s the person in question ayoungest married son? (or with a female in mind, i s her husband a youngest married son?) Traditionally, when a group o f brothers marry successively, they are free to move out of the family calmpound and build their own homes nearby, providing that there i s enough land. It i s the responsibility of the youngest married son, however, to remain behind in the family homestead and take care of his aging parents. Thus if my informants find out that a particular person is a last married son, they will predict that he and his wife live with the son’s parents.

(2) Is the male in question (or is a woman married fo) a true member of Muka or Kivati lineages (mbaa)? This turns out to be a clever way of asking, “Is the man an oldtimer in Kilaloni?” There are eight Akamba clans with male members living in the

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sample area. Two o f these clans, A i h i and AmGmonT, are represented in twenty-seven out of forty compounds. The others are represented by a few each. Moreover, o f the A i h i compounds, all belong to one lineage, mbaa Muka, and all but one AmGumon‘Lcompound belongs to mbaa Kivati. The remaining Amiihnoni household culis i tsel f mbaa Kivati, but it i s well known that Kivati was not one of the household head’s direct ancestors. Thus he i s not considered a “true” mern ber of the lineage.

Ancestors of what are now mbaa Muka and mbaa Kivati migrated to Kilaloni many years ago and were able to take charge of most of the land. Members of the other clans have arrived only within the last thirty or forty years and thus do not control a great deal of land. There is more land available for married sons o f the big lineages to build their compounds on than i s available for the sons o f later arrivals. It i s likely, then, that most of the married sons of a member of one of the smaller lineages would live in the father’s compound. In fact, 77 percent of those men who are not last married sons, but are s t i l l living in their father’s compound, are from either the smaller clans (which comprise 33 percent of the sample) or from the “pseudo” Kivati family (1).

(3) Asked about a widow-Was she married to her husband for a long time? As stated in the explanation of residence category 21 above, a woman who has been married to one man for a long period of time will probably have lost most o f her ties with her own family. Thus, if she has children, she i s expected to remain in her husband’s compound after his death.

the model

If Kilaloni Akamba with the same social status characteristics do, in fact, reside in the same manner, then the status characteristics suggested by my informants ought to put individuals into the correct indigenous residence categories. To test the theory, I first recorded my data in terms o f the residence categories I had elicited. I then made use of a tree structure. As an example o f such a model, I will refer back to my simple paradigm of kin terms above (see Figure 2).

Given this set of eight English kin terms, the tree specifies what proportion of the set is made up by each kin term. The tree is read from l e f t to right defining the terms as it goes along. Each diamond shape, or node, is a decision point. A t the leftmost node, a question is asked about the entire set in an attempt to split the set in half. The information given by the answer tells which node to proceed to next. The number in parentheses along a path i s the proportion of those terms considered in the previous question which take that particular path’s value (i.e., yes or no). For example, the first node asks if Ego (the individual in question) i s an affine. Suppose Ego is not an affine. The questioner then takes the path marked “no” to the next node. One-half ( S O O ) of the terms in the set are not affinal terms. The next question inquires whether Ego or not is a member o f an ascending generation. If not, the path marked “no” i s again taken. The proportion here means that SO0 of those terms in the set that are not affinal terms are also not terms for members o f an ascending generation. The proportion of terms lef t , then, after two questions are answered is .250 (SO0 x S O O ) . The next question again cuts the number in half (.250 x S O O ) leaving each defined term as .I25 of the set. By multiplying the final proportion at the end state, or rectangular-shaped form, (e.g., for son) by the total number of terms in the set (8), we find that the tree predicts that one term will be at the end of the path taken. The actual number is one, so the chain of proportions has been accurate for that path. As we move through the tree gathering information, the definitions become progressively more precise and the number of cases

Akamba residence 677

Fig. 2. PREDICTED TRUE NO. NO.

son .I25 1 1

daughter .I25 1 1

father .125 1 1

mother .I25 1 1

law .I25 1 1

daughter- .125 1

son-in-

in- law father- .125 in - law mother - in- law

1

.125 1 1

Figure 2. Tree diagram of ordered question specifying some American English kin terms.

that fit the definition at any particular moment becomes smaller and smaller. By the time all the end states have been reached, the definitions and proportions have been allocated as accurately as the ordered questions allow.

The tree diagrams which follow work according to the same principles. The structure of the semantic domain, however, i s a bit different. In the English kin term example, the domain i s a paradigm. The distinctive features used to define the domain are independent of one another. Thus the questions may be asked in any order without any loss in information or efficiency. The distinctive features expressed in the questions on the residence tree are not independent of each other. An answer to one question automatically rules out other questions. Many of the questions are path-specific. Thus the probabilities shown in the residence tree are conditional probabilities.

The proportions in the diagrams are taken from my census data. The topmost path on the figure for Males (Figure 3) may be read as follows:

91:

92:

Q3:

Q4:

Q5 :

I s Ego male?

Has Ego ever been married?

Is Ego schooling outside 143: No .9415 of all males who have never mar- Kilaloni location? ried are not being schooled outside the

location.

Is Ego working outside ,44: No .955 of all males, never married, not Kilaloni? being schooled outside the location, do

not work outside Kilaloni.

A5: Yes .864 of all males, never married, neither working or being schooled outside the location have married mothers.

A1 : Yes

A2: No

.525 of the whole sample of 484 is male.

.746 of all males have not been married a t one time.

I s Ego’s mother married?

The tree then suggests that the proportion of people in the sample who reside in category 1A (edalaa no asyui make, ‘stays with his parents’) i s .3041 ( S 2 5 x .746 x .9415 x .955 x .864). .3041 of total sample i s 146. There are actually 139

678 american ethnologist

Fig.

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males in the sample who may be described as residing in category 1A. The rest o f the figures are read in the same way.

The model makes three kinds o f errors: (1) There are some people in Kilaloni who actually reside in ways not covered by the elicited residence categories (i.e., children living with their mother’s brother or with their father’s mother, if he and his wife are both away). Although all these situations make sense to my informants and can be explained in an ad hoc fashion, they do not seem to be “usual” enough to have been originally elicited. These people invariably share all o f the social status characteristics associated with one o f the residence categories in the model. The problem i s that they have additional ones and so are put in that category by mistake. (2) There are some mistakes that the model counts twice. Suppose that we have twenty men and two residence categories and, further these men are actually divided evenly between the two categories. Now suppose that the end state o f the model looks like this:

Predicted Actual

11

9

10

10

The numbers show an absolute value discrepancy of two, one in each case. What has happened, however, i s that only one man from category B has been misassigned to category B. The model makes only one mistake rather than two. (3) The third type o f error misplaces four men. It i s like the second error, but it does not show up in the final figures. Two men who are actually in category Y are put by the model into category Z, while two men from Z are put into Y. As far as the final assignments are concerned, these moves cancel each other. These errors have to be added to the error total.

When a count o f mistakes i s made and adjusted for double-counting and cancellation, it turns out that the model correctly assigns 94.8 percent o f the people to their actual residence categories. In other words, one can pick any o f the 480 individuals in the sample, feed him into the system, and nineteen out o f twenty times he will end up in the right residence category. Moreover, the fact that different paths may lead to the same category takes into account the possibility that people may be residing in a particular way for more than one reason.

ruminations

No claims are being made that the model has been shown to be successfully predictive. In order to make such a claim, one would have to take the ordered sets of questions to another Akamba community and see if they correctly assign a new group o f people to the proper residence categories. This i s a purely descriptive model. It suggest that concatenations o f personal status characteristics are associated with indigenous residence categories in a patterned way.

Describing the residence patterns o f a group o f people in terms of their own categories offers some insights into social organization that are not necessarily available when traditional ethnological categories are used. Moreover, the accuracy with which the model can utilize the information Kilaloni Akamba consider necessary to describe how particular people ought to be living is a mark both of the cohesion of the system and of their ability to understand it, and talk about it.

Akarnba residence 681

notes

'An earlier draft o f this paper was presented at University College, Nairobi, December 1969, when the author was a participant in the University o f East Africa Social Sciences Council Conference. My fieldwork at that time was being supported by the Child Development Research Unit, Harvard University and University College, Nairobi, as well as by N lMH Grant M H 12039-01 CUAN.

I would like to thank George Collier, Roy D'Andrade, Charles Frake, Naomi Quinn, Janet Shepherd, Thomas Weisner, and John Whiting for aid and commentary.

2Three informants were interviewed using this procedure. Each one was asked to discover the residential circumstances o f twelve people in Kilaloni. A fourth individual was used as a check on the elicitation. He was presented with bundles o f personal status characteristics derived from the interviews and asked t o describe how a person with these characteristics might reside.

3Essentially, information theory i s brought in here more as a metaphor than as a rigorous mathematical structure. The mathematical machinery o f information theory is somewhat more complicated than this presentation would have one believe. For instance, the question o f subjective probabilities i s begged here. In order to use information, an individual brings with him or her some personal sense of what the real world looks like. In the kin term tree, the universe consists of eight labels, each o f which, as a label, i s equiprobable in the domain. If we present someone with the task o f choosing one o f the labels through questioning, we can probably assume that that person's subjective probabilities about the distribution o f the labels is the same as the objective probabilities.

If we are interested in the actual people in an informant's l i f e referred to by these labels, however, we cannot know how much a given piece o f information is worth unless we know the informant's own notions about the distribution o f real relatives in the real world.

references cited

Geoghegan, William 1971 Information Processing Systems in Culture. In Explorations in Mathematical Anthropology.

n.d. Decision-Making and Residence on Tagtabon Island. Journal o f Anthropological Research (in Paul Kay, Ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 4-1 5.

press).

Date of Submission: March 18, 1975 Date o f Acceptance: May 19, 1975

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