Chuukese residence controversy
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In 1948-1952, Wikipedia:George Murdock and his team of graduate students are researchers, including Wikipedia:Ward Goodenough and John L. Fischer, did fieldwork on the Micronesian atoll of Wikipedia:Truk, now called Chuuk. They produced a detailed genealogy of many generations of atoll residents, inheritance, kinship terminologies, matrilineages and their landholdings, household residence, rank, and status-related behaviors.
Goodenough and Fisher later wrote papers about household residence rules, with different interpretations and rejoinders (Goodenough 1956, Fischer 1958). These exchanges became known as the Goodenough-Fischer debate over residence rules. Each had taken their own residental census, three years apart. The difference between their findings was that Goodenough had classified as avunculocal what Fischer classified as virilocal the pattern where a couple went to live with the husband's parents, who were living with the mother's kin, hence the couple was living with the husband's mother's brother (avunculocal) and with the husband's father (virilocal). Fischer (1958:509) did not want to involve matrilineages in the definition of residential form. Fischer also preferred a classification of residence by individuals in relation to the parents, parents' siblings, or other relatives that they lived with after marriage, and both agreed that decisions about residence varied through time for each individual.
Cross-cultural codes on residence done by Murdock (1962:117) referred to this controversy but his argument was that in coding at a societal level, when a difference between rules and practice occurs, the coding ought to follow the normal case as the coding should reflect the convergence between rules and practice that occurs with cultural integration. This led the majority of anthropologists, especially those with a postmodern or critical perspective, to reject the codings in Murdock's Atlas. Schneider, who also worked with the Chuukese was critical of Murdock, Fischer, and Goodenough in arguing that residence was an issue of people who belong to parcels of the land rather than the other way around: i.e., rules here were constituted at a different level that that of individual choice with respect to living with or apart from other kin.
http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0094-0496(198108)8%3A3%3C422%3ATACOCA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4 Colby Fernandez Kronenfeld
