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UPSC Optional 2025Question 2AnthropologyKinship150 words

Theoretical significance of Purum kinship-system. (Answer in 150 words)

Model answer & approach

- Theoretical significance of Purum kinship-system. (Answer in 150 words)
Introduction
The Purum of Manipur, described by Tarak Chandra Das (1945), became the case on which alliance theory and its statistical critics fought out the meaning of prescriptive marriage.

Body
1. The system in outline: five exogamous patrilineal sibs, patrilocal residence, and prescribed matrilateral cross-cousin marriage — a man weds mother's brother's daughter — generating permanent wife-giver and wife-taker categories, the givers ritually superior.
2. The dispute it entered: Levi-Strauss read generalised exchange as a circulating connubium integrating the whole society; Rodney Needham defended it as a true prescriptive system; Homans and Schneider offered a rival explanation from sentiment towards the mother's brother; Leach questioned the closed cycles.
3. What it settled: Ackerman's recount of Das's genealogies showed only a minority of actual unions followed the rule, forcing the distinction between prescription as jural category and preference as observed behaviour.

Conclusion
Purum matters not for its size but because it obliged kinship theory to separate the model from the statistics of real marriages.
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