Dual Organization

Dual Organization

 

a structure of early clan society, reconstructable from ethnological data: the combination of two exogamous clans, tied together by intermarriage. Later, with the development and resultant segmentation of the primordial clans, dual organizations grew into a system of two exogamous phratries, encompassing two groups of related clans; such a system has been described by many ethnologists for many regions of the world. Still later, with the withering away of the phratries, traces or remnants of dual organization were retained in the pairings of the clan system or in the political structure that replaced it among many peoples and tribes (Upper and Lower Egypt, the right and left wing of the military organization of Asian nomads), as well as in the dualistic mythology.

REFERENCES

Engels, F. Proickhozhdenie sem’i, chastnoi sobstvennosti i gosudarstva. In K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch. 2nd ed., vol. 21.
Tolstov, S. P. “Perezhitki totemizma i dual’noi organizatsii u turkmen.” Problemy istorii dokapitalisticheskikh obshchestv, 1935, nos. 9-10.
Zolotarev, A. M. Rodovoi stroi i pervobytnaia mifologiia. Moscow, 1964.