Abstract
The article is aimed at the analysis of kinship and marriage patterns in the Czech speaking community in Bulgarian village Vojvodovo. The question of the definition of kinship, type of kin groups and the character of kinship are discussed in the text.
Vojvodovo villagers used to practice some specific types of marriage to maintain religious endogamy, like marriages between relatives, or leviratic and sororatic marriages. The "marriage alliances" encountered here, however, cannot be interpreted in terms of Levi-Straussian alliance theory, since there were no clearly bounded unilineal descent groups (kinship was bilateral), and hence there were no structural units that could maintain alliances.
On the contrary, marriage alliances can be seen as a function of the endogamous community in its effort to perpetuate its singularity and uniqueness.