Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Part three | 10
holdings seven were of non-agnates, not stemming from a set of brothers. The
details are considered later. At issue here is the overall pattern, the way individuals
were bound into larger units and groups. In Bait Ra’s we noted that in the first
tapu register householdings and shareholdings were constituted in the same way, on
the model of inheritance. In Hawwara, by contrast, distribution of shares between
Na’il Gharaiba’s siblings was not formalized in the tapu registers until 1921, land
having been registered in his name alone ‘as head of the family’. In Kufr ‘Awan,
on the other hand, we may discern a different principle of holding in each of the
four lists. The holdings of plough land reflect the principle of mobilization to
make up a viable agricultural unit, in the idiom of zalama. Householdings reflect
the actual division of families according to demography and serial or multiple
marriages. Kufr ‘Awan had no large compounds as in Hawwara, left undivided over
one or two generations until the survival and success of offspring were assured;
the highest value of a house was 3,000 guruş. Sons split off from the parental
household to form their own households when they married. The third form of
holding, of individual plots not subject to reallotment, whether arable fields (tarla),
gardens, orchards or olive groves, reflects the principle of inheritance since in Kufr
‘Awan they were usually left undivided among a set of heirs. Finally the fourth
form of holding, of plantings of trees (fruit or olives) on some of the individual
plots, may sometimes also reflect marriage settlements. In 1884 in Kufr ‘Awan no
woman was registered holding olive trees, unlike in other villages of the Kura.
But there are two cases of one person holding olive trees on another person’s
land, and one of these may reflect a marriage payment. In any case, older people
whom we interviewed in 1991–92 testified to the endowment of brides with olive
trees, and it is therefore important to mention this fourth principle.
If all agricultural labour came from within the community and there was
almost no sale of land to outsiders, then one would expect the networks for
mobilizing labour to be well developed, since, however accurately the allotment
was applied in 1884 of six qirat for a married man, half that for an unmarried
one, not every household would have the same resources (animal, material and
human), and shares were not reallotted after that date. Inevitably the demographic
equation in 1884 between household labour and share would become imbalanced.
Self-sufficiency of a community does not rest on self-sufficient households but on
forms of cooperation between households. These networks of mobilization operated
at two levels, at the level of individual households and at that of the constituent
groups called hamula within the village. The former are reflected in the tapu list
of musha‘ shareholders, the latter in the grouping of musha‘ shareholders into
three or four more or less equal groups. We saw how, for the purpose of laying
out the land equitably in 1933, Hawwara was divided into two halves and each
half was subdivided either into quarters and eighths or into sixths and twelfths.
In Kufr ‘Awan the division in 1939 was as minute.
A second form of network linking households was that of marriage alliances.
When conducting interviews in the village we were quickly made aware of the
importance of affinal networks (shabaka). Cooperation in agriculture often reflected
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