Descent is the principle by which societies trace relationship across generations and allocate membership, name, property and ritual obligation. It is the backbone of kinship organisation, and a firm grasp of its types and units — lineage, clan, kindred — is indispensable. The topic also carries a major theoretical strand: the descent theory developed by British social anthropologists, which competes with the alliance theory of the French tradition.

Descent and its types

Descent is the socially recognised link between a person and their ancestors that determines group membership. Four principal types are distinguished.

  • Patrilineal (agnatic) descent traces relationship through the male line. Membership, surname and property pass from father to son. It is the most widespread rule globally and dominant across most of India.
  • Matrilineal (uterine) descent traces relationship through the female line. Children belong to the mother's group and inherit through it, though authority is often exercised by the mother's brother rather than the father — as among the Khasi, Garo and the traditional Nayar.
  • Bilateral (cognatic) descent reckons relationship equally through both parents. There are no unilineal descent groups; instead, each individual stands at the centre of an overlapping network. This is characteristic of modern Western and urban families.
  • Double (duolineal) descent combines two unilineal principles: some rights and statuses descend patrilineally, others matrilineally. Daryll Forde's study of the Yakö of Nigeria is the classic illustration, where movable property passed through the mother's line and land through the father's.

Unilineal rules — patrilineal and matrilineal — are analytically powerful because they produce clearly bounded, perpetual groups, unlike the ego-centred bilateral network.

Lineage, clan and kindred

These are the corporate units that descent generates, and precision about their differences is often tested.

  • A lineage is a descent group whose members can actually trace their genealogical links, step by step, to a common known ancestor. A patrilineage traces through males, a matrilineage through females. Lineages are typically corporate — holding property, regulating marriage and acting as ritual and jural units.
  • A clan (sib) is a larger group whose members believe they descend from a common ancestor but cannot demonstrate the exact genealogical connections. The bond is often expressed through a totem — an animal, plant or object — as among many tribal societies. Clans are usually exogamous.
  • A phratry is a grouping of two or more clans, and a moiety exists where a society is divided into two such halves.
  • A kindred is different in kind: it is the ego-centred network of all a person's relatives on both sides. Unlike a lineage or clan, it is not a corporate, perpetual group — it shifts with each individual and dissolves at their death. Kindreds are typical of bilateral societies.

The key contrast for the exam: lineages and clans are ancestor-focused and enduring; kindreds are ego-focused and transient.

The descent theory of kinship

Descent theory emerged from British structural-functionalist anthropology, above all in the work of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and his followers Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Building on the sociological legacy of Émile Durkheim, it treats unilineal descent groups as the load-bearing structures of society. In societies without centralised states — the segmentary lineage systems Evans-Pritchard described among the Nuer — descent groups perform the functions of government: they order political allegiance, regulate feud through segmentary opposition, and hold land and cattle corporately.

The theory stresses that the individual's rights and duties flow from membership in a perpetual corporate group, which outlives its members and secures social continuity. Fortes' concept of the developmental cycle of domestic groups refined this by showing how households form, expand and dissolve over time.

Descent theory is best understood against its rival, alliance theory, associated with Claude Lévi-Strauss, which holds that marriage exchange — not descent — is the elementary structure of kinship. Where descent theorists see groups perpetuating themselves through the line, alliance theorists see groups bound to one another through the reciprocal exchange of spouses. The debate is a productive one to stage in an answer.

How to use this in the exam

Define descent crisply, then run the four types with a named example for each — the Yakö for double descent is a reliable discriminator. Nail the lineage-clan-kindred distinction in a single tight paragraph; examiners often set this precise contrast. For 15- and 20-mark questions, frame the descent-versus-alliance debate, anchoring descent theory in Radcliffe-Brown, Fortes and Evans-Pritchard's Nuer, and setting it against Lévi-Strauss. That theoretical staging lifts an answer from descriptive to analytical.