Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

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total observation of the age and gender roles in the family was perceived by
the Binis as an earnest of their whole society and whole universe’s stability and
well-being. Those roles were believed to be distributed once and for all
according to the will of the supreme deity Osanobua. Our contemporary, the
Benin Prince Iro Eweka (1998: 162), has expressed this order’s basic principles
metaphorically: “the structure of the family is analogous to the natural ordering
of the heliocentric universe: the man (father) is the sun around which revolve
the women (other ‘planets’), around which revolve the children (‘moons’)” (see
also Ibid.: 14).
However, though the system was really stable as a whole – at the
social level, it was mobile at the individual level – for every person taken
separately: in the course of time children became grown-ups; junior brothers
substituted departed senior brothers; and once young women replaced elderly
ones. The status of a senior relative could not be ascribed at birth or honoris
causa while that of junior was not fixed forever. In the meantime, one’s
attempt to raise the status avoiding the generation principle could be not only
too difficult for realization but also, no doubt, seem dangerous for the whole
collectivity, while serving it was regarded as the supreme moral norm (see
Bondarenko 1995a: 50–53, 178–180; 1997b: 106–109). The community itself
was seen as “a single moral community and, ... to a considerable extent, there is
conformity to this ideal” (Bradbury 1973: 184).
Archaeological and ethnographic evidence show that the Bini
community was exogamous (see, e.g., Talbot 1926: III, 540, 713–715; Darling
1984: I, 138). The ethnographic data testify that in the precolonial time the
society was generally patrilineal with some elements of matrilinearity while the
postmarriage residence was strictly virilocal; divorces were impossible (see,
e.g., Dennett 1906: 198–199; Thomas, N. W. 1910a: I, 47–62; 1910b; 1910c;
Talbot 1926: III, 427–437, 460–467; Ajisafe 1945: 35–39, 41, 92–94;
Egharevba 1949: 20; Legogie 1951; Bradbury 1957: 27–31; 1973: 152; Tong
1958: 110–116; Akpata, O. 1959; Igbafe 1970; 1979: 19–20; Keys 1994: 13).
Every community occupied a village. A visible sign of a community’s
integrity was the earthen rampart about three meters high that terminated its
village’s territory (the same way as more inclusive ramparts encircled
chiefdoms). Symptomatically, that rampart was called iya, just like the
community itself. Not by chance it “… probably functioned as a communal
status symbol. [A rampart] … may at some stage have acted, in ritual terms, as
a symbolic boundary between the real world and the spirit one” (Keys 1994:
13).
The strength of social ties in the community was supported by strong
traditions of interfamily assistance (e.g., Egharevba 1949: 43, 67; Bradbury
1957: 30; 1973: 183–184) supported by public morality reflected in the folklore
(Butcher 1937: 346–349), by common festivals, beliefs – the ancestor cult
first of all (the same as at the family 66 and supracommunity levels of socio-