Honor Bound by Ryan P. Brown

Author:Ryan P. Brown [Brown, Ryan P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Of Patronyms and Patriarchs

David H. Fischer, the Pulitzer Prize–winning professor of history at Brandeis University, is a scholar I’ve referenced several times already in this book. Fischer has documented, perhaps better than anyone else, the lifestyles and social norms of the southern Scots that they brought with them when they immigrated to the United States, either directly from Scotland or by way of Northern Ireland (the Ulster Scots). A central feature of Scottish life was that families were organized into clans—extended family networks headed by a family patriarch, typically a grandfather. This patriarch was the family leader, and if important decisions needed to be made that affected members of the clan, those decisions usually were made by him.

The Scots, it turns out, are not the only people to have organized themselves into clans headed by a patriarch. This sort of social system is actually quite common throughout history, all around the world. And it seems to be particularly common in societies with economies based on the herding of sheep, goats, pigs, or cattle, which—before the advent of agriculture—was what most economies were based on.

In modern America, people are unlikely to think of their families as being patriarchal clans and, indeed, compared with the “patriclans” of more traditional societies, today’s American families really aren’t nearly so patriarchal or so clannish. Nonetheless, the echoes of the Scottish patriclan might still be heard, if you listen carefully, wherever honor norms are alive and well. One subtle way in which this echo might resound is in the names that parents give to their children.

Along with my colleagues Mauricio Carvallo and Mikiko Imura, I decided to investigate baby-naming practices to determine whether the patriarchal system of the Scottish patriclans might somehow live on within contemporary America (Brown et al., 2014a). People who study names use the term patronym to refer to names that come from a male forebear (for example, a son named after his father or grandfather). Likewise, they use the term matronym to refer to names passed down from a female forebear (such as a daughter being named after her mother or grandmother). We wondered whether parents in honor-oriented regions of the United States might be more likely to use patronyms, but not matronyms, compared to parents in nonhonor-oriented regions. The basis for this idea comes from the social organization of the Scottish patriclan. In such a system, as historian David H. Fischer (1989) noted, sons tend to be named after grandfathers (first) or fathers (second), connecting newborn males to previous generations of the male-dominated patriclan. However, no such tradition exists for daughters, who historically were often married off in strategic alliances with other clans in honor cultures. In such a system, there really wasn’t much point in naming a girl after her female ancestors. The important connection for her would ultimately be to her husband’s family, more than her own.

Fortunately for my colleagues and me, the U.S. government keeps a close watch on many aspects of social life, including the name of every child born in every state in the union who receives a social security number.

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