Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

affinal links. In a close-knit community, new means of redistributing land within the
community may have become important. It is difficult to document this precisely
but there are indications that the endowment of brides with land or olive trees
increased at the beginning of the twentieth century, and an increasing acceptance
that daughters could inherit land served as a mechanism of redistribution within
the community. This will be examined in Chapter 12.
The third form of relation linking households into wider formations was
patrilineal descent. In Hawwara the ideology of descent was used to consolidate
the grouping of the Gharaibas, in contrast to the Shatnawis. 2 In Kufr ‘Awan, quite
early in our interviews we were offered by our principal informant a conception of
the village’s constitution not as based on tribes (qaba’il) but as an encampment
(mukhayyam) or coming together of disparate groups. At points in interviews he
would steer discussion away from linking family ancestry to greater Arab history,
for he considered such ideology divisive. In any case mobilization through descent
has always to be qualified by the actual situation of family development on the
ground. In a village where land was periodically reallotted on the basis of the
number of active men, and where men formed their own households on marriage,
the principle of common descent would only ever operate in conjunction with
other principles of mobilization. When shares were frozen in 1884 the tension
between rights of inheritance and the claims of labour may have increased. This
is one reason why the reading of cases of multiple marriages has to be sensitive
to dates of births, marriages and deaths. The sons of one wife may have already
split off and found their own means of livelihood long before those of another
wife had grown up or the father had apportioned some of the management of
his land between them. Lines of inheritance may in practice fracture in conditions
of multiple serial marriages.
Underpinning our reading of the tapu registers of Kufr ‘Awan is the household
census of 1910, which is extraordinarily thorough even though, as with Bait Ra’s,
the entries of several households are missing (11 out of 136). 3 The person who
recorded entries was probably one of the headmen who, knowing those whom
he registered, would distinguish two people of the same name and same father’s
name from one another by recording the name of their father’s father. Sometimes
the name of a mother’s father is also recorded, allowing patterns of marriage to
be traced in a previous generation. Because daughters generally married within
the village, a genealogy could be constructed on the basis of the census and the
tapu registers against which to set other data.
From the ages recorded in the 1910 census it is possible to project backwards
to 1884, the year of tapu registration, and to calculate the ages of shareholders
registered then. This enables a finer analysis of share allocation in 1884 to test
whether in fact the calculation was based on six qirat for a married man, three
for an unmarried one. Synchronic registration cut across family histories at
different stages in their developmental cycle. Some fathers had adult sons at the
time of registration, others only young children; and among the former some sons
had already split off, married and formed their own households. Again, some
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Two hill villages