Property has served as a common focus in many discussions of family form. For instance, it has been seen as central in the contrast to be drawn between kinship and residence as two quite different principles of organization. One might therefore distinguish between a jurally defined corporate group linked by rights in property which its members enjoy in common and a collection of kin or indeed non-kin who share a common residence. For Peter Laslett a ‘fraternal joint family’ would exist only when two married brothers co-resided, but for Maurice Freedman such a family would have existed in China whenever two or more brothers were co-parceners in a family estate, regardless of whether these men were married or whether they and their respective wives and children lived in different residences.

To concentrate upon rights in property that are shared by family members as a fundamental variable defining or indeed determining the form taken by the family attaches to the family the specific function of control over property, including its transmission. For it is implicit in so many studies of pre-industrial societies that the most important method of acquiring property is by the process of inheritance. Implicit, too, is the assumption that inheritance normally takes place between close kin and affines. Indeed, as Goody puts it, ‘transmission mortis causa is not only the means by which the reproduction of the social system is carried out …; it is also the way in which interpersonal relationships are structured’.