Major Kin Groupings: (I) Kul, Phuki and Their Women

Terminology as well as ritual and social relations distinguish two large groups of kin for each individual. First are those most closely associated with the phuki , a group of men agnatically related through the paternal lineage plus those of their women who are married to them, or fathered by them and (for most purposes) still unmarried. The other group of kin are those who have become related through marriage of women into and out of the patrilineal group, the tha:thiti , discussed in the next section.

The household is embedded in these two groups. Individuals include as their intimate kin not only their nuclear segment of the household and the larger household itself but also another group that has members from both larger kin groupings. These are the "syaphu (n )" or "syasyaphu (n )," the people "one cares most about, to whom one is closest." The word "sya " (phu [n ] means "people") is given various local etymologies and thought to be derived from sya gu , to hurt ("thus people whose pain one feels also") or from sya : (bone marrow, "as close to one as marrow to bone"). People, when asked to list syaphu (n ), characteristically begin with nuclear family members, then add others in the household, and then mother's brother (paju ) and his household, father's sister (nini ) and her household, their own married sisters and their children, and last (and in the case of men not always included) their own spouses. Special ties of affection or circumstance may enlarge, this list in various ways.

The largest patrilineal unit^[36] is all those people who are thought to descend from a common male ancestor, whose men (and unmarried women) share the same surname, and who are forbidden to marry each other.^[37] Such a unit has been called a patrilineal exogamous "clan" (e.g., Fürer-Haimendorf 1956). As we have remarked, this unit is not equivalent to a thar . A thar may be a "clan," in that its members believe they have the same name and constitute a social and occupational unit because they have descended from one man (this is most often the case

among the Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya), but in many thar s the shared name and group membership is believed by thar members to derive from a common origin in some profession or historical group. These latter thar s will often have within them intermarrying sections. There is no unambiguous local term for a "clan," but it is often referred to as a kul (from the Sanskrit kula , meaning group, family, lineage).^[38] "Kul " refers to either a patrilineage throughout time, or in other contexts, to the living members of that lineage, usually to the male members of that lineage, although, as is the usage with "phuki " (see below), it may include certain female members. Usually "kul " is used in a limited sense to refer to one segment of patrilineally related kin, the phuki , but in certain contexts refers to the maximal unit, a cluster of phuki s that had split into separate phuki units in the past, but whose historical connections are remembered and given some ritual representation in the worship of common lineage gods. The kul as a "clan" has the characteristics that have been noted for such units elsewhere in Hindu South Asia. "It is a grouping rather than a group, a taxonomic category rather than the basis for joint action. . . . [It] is mainly used to classify jati fellows into eligible and ineligible spouses" (Mandlebaum 1970, 135).

G. S. Nepali (1965, 253) wrote that:

The Newar joint family [the household unit] has specific characteristics which make it distinct from the normal Hindu joint family. Despite residential and property separation, several joint families act as a single unit among them for purposes of social and ceremonial functions, be it domestic or communal.

This unit is the phuki , for almost all purposes except exogamy the broadest patrilineal unit of social importance.^[39] Each phuki is made up of groups of households, often living in close proximity, who are brothers and/or the male descendants of brothers who had split off from a single ancestral paternal household in a relatively recent period. Although, like all members of the same kul , they share kul marriage prohibitions, what characterizes them as a group is that they, or rather the leaders representing each household, meet to consider the affairs of their constituent households, particularly marriage, divorce, and economic or legal difficulties. They act together as a major moral and ritual unit. They worship the same lineage gods on the same day of the year in the same place (chaps. 8 and 9). They unite for the performance of major rites of passage for phuki members (and for the feasts associated with them) and share major pollution entailed by the death (and to a more limited degree by birth) of any of their members. The sharing of

ritual duties, particularly the prolonged death pollution, is one of the limits to the number of households that can conveniently constitute a phuki If it were too large, everyone would be continuously occupied in the rites of passage of members, and often in major, socially disabling pollutions. When a phuki is sensed to be too large, members begin to look for a confirming sign from the lineage gods or from the deified ancestors of the kul that it is a proper time to split the phuki .

In the upper level thar s, at least, phuki s seem to split when they have more than twenty member families. People estimate the typical upper-level phuki group to consist of fifteen to twenty families. Lower level thars may have many less families in a phuki .^[40] The split segments are called baphukis , or "split phuki s." They will use the same shrine for their annual lineage god worship, but will worship on different days now, and they will no longer be affected by pollution caused by birth and death in the other baphuki . And now each will confine itself to discussion and regulation of the affairs only of its own member families.

The term "phuki " is used in some contexts to mean only the men (and in its most limited usage only those men who have had their initiation into their thar or lineage), and in this usage people speak of the women associated with the phuki as the (1) "daughters of the phuki " (the still unmarried women) and (2) the "women who have come into the phuki " (the wives of members). Sometimes, however, the word "phuki " is used to include these women. Daughters and sisters who marry "out" into other phuki s are no longer members of the phuki in strict definition, and as they are also not members of the other large category "feminal kin" are in an in-between category.

There is a decision-making phuki council made up of the male heads of the component households. Its members are ranked by the same principle that ranks male members of a household by age within successive generations. The senior member of the phuki council, the phuki thakali or naya :, and his wife, the phuki naki (n ),^[41] have ceremonial roles in all rites of passage, and other ceremonies involving phuki members. The organization and functions of the phuki council vary by thar , as does its integration into still larger organizations representing the thar .^[42]