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+# Alliance and descent #
+The contrast between alliance and descent is an idea developed by
+Louis Dumont to characterize differences between Meyer Fortes and his
+school of structural functionalists on the one hand and Edmund Leach
+and his school of structuralists on the other. Fortes argued that
+descent and descent groups were primary to most social systems based
+on kinship and could thus explain more about how these systems
+functioned. Leach, taking off from Levi-Strauss's arguments in *The
+Elementary Structures of Kinship*, argued that matrimonial alliances
+were more fundamental. The two sides drew for the most part on
+different types of societies and so their explanations were not
+mutually exclusive. Dumont pointed out that even so the divergence of
+views turned on different understandings of social structure
+itself. Fortes argued that descent groups served to create a political
+and jural order of rights and obligations, which itself was a
+reflection of a universal principle of kinship amity rooted in the
+biological family. Levi-Strauss's account of marriage alliances
+starts with a concept of kinship categories as a break with
+nature. For Levi-Strauss, the symmetrical and complementary categories
+of kinship derive from the fact that marriage is an exchange in which
+people are gifts between groups. This reciprocity among segments of
+society is what creates the social order, not the supposedly
+precultural facts of kinship amity and descent identity.
+## Works consulted ##
+Dumont, Louis. 2006. An Introduction to Two Theories of Social
+Anthropology: Descent Groups and Marriage Alliance, Robert Parkin,
+trans. New York: Berghahn Books.
+Leaf, Murray J. 2013. “Alliance-Descent Debate.” In Theory in Social
+and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia, Richard L. Warms and
+R. Jon McGee, eds. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications,
+Inc. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452276311.
+Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship,
+Rodney Needham, trans. Boston: Beacon Press.
+Fortes, Meyer. 1953. “The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups.”
+American Anthropologist 55 (1): 17–41. doi:10.2307/664462.