Joking Relationships, Kin Categories, and Clanship among the Gogo

Abstract

Opening ParagraphInstitutionalized ‘joking relationships’ occur between several different categories of kin and affines, and between groups or categories of varying inclusiveness. Thus brothers-in-law, mother's brothers and sister's sons, and kinsmen of alternate generations are frequent categories between whom joking relationships exist; and localities, villages, clans, and peoples or ‘tribes’ may have joking relationships with one another, variously or simultaneously. Radcliffe-Brown (1952, p. 95) rightly points out that if such behaviour is to be adequately explained, all of the contexts in which it occurs must be taken into account. He also indicates the further ramifications of the problem by placing it in the wider context of ‘alliances’. Thus ‘alliance by the joking relationship may exist separately or combined in several different ways’ with alliances ‘(1) through inter-marriage, (2) by exchange of goods or services, (3) by blood-brotherhood or exchanges of names or sacra’, and so on (1952, p. 102).