Migration dissolves descent structures and with them household authority

Evidence

The fact that descent organization did not travel to the south meant that kinship ties were much more fluid and the authority of household heads was frequently weak. Here the contrast is with Asian minority communities whose tight cohesion provides patriarchs with external support to domestic hierarchy. Frafra migrants were mostly an undifferentiated brotherhood of mobile single men, linked to a few prominent married men by ties of patronage and pseudo-kinship or descent. Such a community did not lend support to domestic hierarchy. Consequently, family labour was problematic. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2378

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Luhmann’s point that trust depends on observable social structure — here physical migration strips the kinship observability that undergirds domestic hierarchy.