READ, Dwight (UCLA).
ALLIANCE : DESCENT :: EMERGENT : CONSTRUCTED -- OR, WHY IS AFRICAN ART FRACTAL.

Alliance theory and descent theory are said to differ in whether the focus is on the way in which social units are linked through marriage or through tracing ancestry through a single sex. Although the same vocabulary, such as moieties, lineages, etc., may be used to describe the form of social organization in both cases, moiety structure may arise by different processes. A moiety may be constructed at a local level, or by using the fractal property of generation distance to determine a social unit. Societies of the second kind that are exemplars of the fractal basis of social organization are also societies in which art and architecture are based on a fractal principal. Implications of this concordance are explored.