Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Part three | 10
three, not four, suggests that not all had the same standing. 14 Adjustments had
to be made in order to make up equal blocks of holdings.
With a significant amount of land passing officially through women, and being
registered in the names of women in 1939, exact computation of shares by so-called
families would be misleading. For instance the 19 Dawaghira male landholders
all had land in one block, but of the ten Dawaghira female landholders five had
land in the other three blocks associated with other families. Affinal networks
(shabaka) between families were crucial to the feeling of collective solidarity
which was such a pronounced feature of the village.
If at a higher level there is a general correlation in 1939 between named village
sections and the equal division of shareholders into quarters, at a lower level
there is no exact association between particular families and the sub-sections
that represent sixteenths of the whole village. Families differ in this regard, some
holding shares in the same sub-section (and land in the same corresponding
sub-block), others not. The details would be cumbersome. When we asked about
this point we were told that a person was free to associate with whichever group
he liked. However there is no denying some correlation. For instance, family-6
had all its 23 qirat in the first sub-block (A1), but members of family-3 had their
combined 41 qirat in three sub-blocks of block one (A1, 3 and 4), and three of
block two (A5, 7 and 8).
The example of one village section may be given to illustrate the adjustments
necessary to obtain such precise – hence fair – allotment of land. The section
called Khashashna (al-‘ashira al-Khashashna, al-firqa Sari al-Ahmad al-‘Ali in
the 1939 register of rights, jadwal al-huquq) was headed by a man of family-27
called Sari al-Ahmad. 15 Sari al-Ahmad had the largest share in the village (11¼q),
apart from the imam and his son (originally of the nearby village of Ausara) who
had between them bought 21 qirat and were included in the section. Families
belonging to this section held 1285⁄12 qirat out of 519⅔ or just under a quarter
(0.247). They could thus hold land almost entirely in one block, B13–16. To make
up an exact quarter one woman of a Dawaghira family (family-10) with ¾q and
a man and a woman from an ‘Amaira family (family-28) with 2½q were allotted
land in the same block, although at the same time one man and one woman of
Khashashna families (20 and 27) opted to hold land in block A5 where most
Dawaghira families had their allotment. Were there any special ties that might
have led the first three to affiliate with the Khashashna section and the last two
with the Dawaghira section, apart from individual choice? The woman from the
Dawaghira family, Labiba Salih ‘Awwad, was married to a man of a Khashashna
family (20) with whom she shared a holding together with his three sons. She
had been awarded rights only after claiming them at the 1939 cadastre. Her case
is considered in more detail in the next section (Figure 10.6). Similarly, the man
and the woman who held their land in block A5 were husband and wife in a joint
holding, the husband Nayif Ibrahim Sulaiman having bought his quarter qirat
from his wife’s mother, Hamda Salih ‘Awwad (the sister of Labiba) at the time
of the cadastre, after earlier having given away his inherited share as a marriage
166