From the article:
Why would accumulating property make patrilineal lineage necessary?
Having property go through women makes just as much sense; more really, since measuring lineage through women was the traditional method, and tradition of any kind is not easily overthrown.
Having property go through women makes just as much sense...
Maybe in a just world, but the history of mankind is not so. Men will fight to the death to defend their home (or they should), women will merely be killed (or, at best raped, and forced to bear the children of the conquerer and his lineage). This is true for the male of many species. The male bird is territorial. The female will defend to the death her young, but will not defend an empty nest. The male, however, will. Because the nest is the "future to the male. The discussion of "lineage" and "property" are actually two different subjects, though they affect each other in the life cycle of a species.
IMHO, it is precisely this confusion of the value given to property and offspring by males and females that causes many of our socio-political problems.
In the marilinear system, goods get distributed around (see Paragraph 2). Only with a surplus of goods (created by stable conditions) is there the need to transmit these goods to one's offspring (and not to the tribe in general) . In the female-line system the concentration of goods is vanified by the redistribution amongst the clans.