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In this tool, students are introduced to kinship, defined as the most basic principle of organizing individuals into social groups, roles, and categories. Since this.
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As the basic unit for raising children, Anthropologists most generally classify family organization as matrifocal a mother and her children ; conjugal a husband, his wife, and children; also called nuclear family ; avuncular a brother, his sister, and her children ; or extended family in which parents and children co-reside with other members of one parent's family. However, producing children is not the only function of the family; in societies with a sexual division of labor, marriage , and the resulting relationship between two people, it is necessary for the formation of an economically productive household.

Different societies classify kinship relations differently and therefore use different systems of kinship terminology — for example some languages distinguish between affinal and consanguine uncles, whereas others have only one word to refer to both a father and his brothers. Kinship terminologies include the terms of address used in different languages or communities for different relatives and the terms of reference used to identify the relationship of these relatives to ego or to each other.

Kin terminologies can be either descriptive or classificatory.

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When a descriptive terminology is used, a term refers to only one specific type of relationship, while a classificatory terminology groups many different types of relationships under one term. For example, the word brother in English-speaking societies indicates a son of one's same parent; thus, English-speaking societies use the word brother as a descriptive term referring to this relationship only.

In many other classificatory kinship terminologies, in contrast, a person's male first cousin whether mother's brother's son, mother's sister's son, father's brother's son, father's sister's son may also be referred to as brothers. The major patterns of kinship systems that are known which Lewis Henry Morgan identified through kinship terminology in his work Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family are:. The six types Crow, Eskimo, Hawaiian, Iroquois, Omaha, Sudanese that are not fully classificatory Dravidian, Australian are those identified by Murdock prior to Lounsbury's rediscovery of the linguistic principles of classificatory kin terms.

In many societies where kinship connections are important, there are rules, though they may be expressed or be taken for granted. There are four main headings that anthropologists use to categorize rules of descent. They are bilateral, unilineal, ambilineal and double descent.

Kinship Social Organisation by Rivers William Halse

A descent group is a social group whose members talk about common ancestry. A unilineal society is one in which the descent of an individual is reckoned either from the mother's or the father's line of descent. With matrilineal descent individuals belong to their mother's descent group.

Matrilineal descent includes the mother's brother, who in some societies may pass along inheritance to the sister's children or succession to a sister's son. With patrilineal descent , individuals belong to their father's descent group. Societies with the Iroquois kinship system, are typically unilineal, while the Iroquois proper are specifically matrilineal. In a society which reckons descent bilaterally bilineal , descent is reckoned through both father and mother, without unilineal descent groups. Societies with the Eskimo kinship system, like the Inuit , Yupik , and most Western societies, are typically bilateral.

The egocentric kindred group is also typical of bilateral societies. Some societies reckon descent patrilineally for some purposes, and matrilineally for others. This arrangement is sometimes called double descent. For instance, certain property and titles may be inherited through the male line, and others through the female line. Societies can also consider descent to be ambilineal such as Hawaiian kinship where offspring determine their lineage through the matrilineal line or the patrilineal line.

A lineage is a unilineal descent group that can demonstrate their common descent from a known apical ancestor. Unilineal lineages can be matrilineal or patrilineal, depending on whether they are traced through mothers or fathers, respectively. Whether matrilineal or patrilineal descent is considered most significant differs from culture to culture. A clan is generally a descent group claiming common descent from an apical ancestor. Often, the details of parentage are not important elements of the clan tradition.


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Non-human apical ancestors are called totems. A phratry is a descent group composed of two or more clans each of whose apical ancestors are descended from a further common ancestor. If a society is divided into exactly two descent groups, each is called a moiety , after the French word for half. If the two halves are each obliged to marry out, and into the other, these are called matrimonial moieties.

Houseman and White b, bibliography have discovered numerous societies where kinship network analysis shows that two halves marry one another, similar to matrimonial moieties, except that the two halves—which they call matrimonial sides [7] —are neither named nor descent groups, although the egocentric kinship terms may be consistent with the pattern of sidedness, whereas the sidedness is culturally evident but imperfect.

The word deme refers to an endogamous local population that does not have unilineal descent. In some societies kinship and political relations are organized around membership in corporately organized dwellings rather than around descent groups or lineages , as in the " House of Windsor ". The socially significant groupings within these societies have variable membership because kinship is reckoned bilaterally through both father's and mother's kin and come together for only short periods.

Property, genealogy and residence are not the basis for the group's existence. Marriage is a socially or ritually recognized union or legal contract between spouses that establishes rights and obligations between them, between them and their children, and between them and their in-laws. When defined broadly, marriage is considered a cultural universal. A broad definition of marriage includes those that are monogamous , polygamous , same-sex and temporary.

The act of marriage usually creates normative or legal obligations between the individuals involved, and any offspring they may produce. Marriage may result, for example, in "a union between a man and a woman such that children born to the woman are the recognized legitimate offspring of both partners.

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There is wide cross-cultural variation in the social rules governing the selection of a partner for marriage. In many societies the choice of partner is limited to suitable persons from specific social groups.

Kinship, family and marriage among the Indian tribes (ANT)

In some societies the rule is that a partner is selected from an individual's own social group — endogamy , this is the case in many class and caste based societies. But in other societies a partner must be chosen from a different group than one's own — exogamy , this is the case in many societies practicing totemic religion where society is divided into several exogamous totemic clans, such as most Aboriginal Australian societies. Marriages between parents and children, or between full siblings, with few exceptions, [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] have been considered incest and forbidden.

Systemic forms of preferential marriage may have wider social implications in terms of economic and political organization. In a wide array of lineage-based societies with a classificatory kinship system , potential spouses are sought from a specific class of relative as determined by a prescriptive marriage rule.

Insofar as regular marriages following prescriptive rules occur, lineages are linked together in fixed relationships; these ties between lineages may form political alliances in kinship dominated societies. Levi-Strauss thus shifted the emphasis from descent groups to the stable structures or relations between groups that preferential and prescriptive marriage rules created. One of the foundational works in the anthropological study of kinship was Morgan's Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family As is the case with other social sciences, Anthropology and kinship studies emerged at a time when the understanding of the Human species' comparative place in the world was somewhat different from today's.

Evidence that life in stable social groups is not just a feature of humans, but also of many other primates , was yet to emerge and society was considered to be a uniquely human affair. As a result, early kinship theorists saw an apparent need to explain not only the details of how human social groups are constructed, their patterns, meanings and obligations, but also why they are constructed at all. The why explanations thus typically presented the fact of life in social groups which appeared to be unique to humans as being largely a result of human ideas and values.

Morgan's explanation for why humans live in groups was largely based on the notion that all humans have an inherent natural valuation of genealogical ties an unexamined assumption that would remain at the heart of kinship studies for another century, see below , and therefore also an inherent desire to construct social groups around these ties.

Even so, Morgan found that members of a society who are not close genealogical relatives may nevertheless use what he called kinship terms which he considered to be originally based on genealogical ties. This fact was already evident in his use of the term affinity within his concept of the system of kinship. The most lasting of Morgan's contributions was his discovery of the difference between descriptive and classificatory kinship terms, which situated broad kinship classes on the basis of imputing abstract social patterns of relationships having little or no overall relation to genetic closeness but instead cognition about kinship, social distinctions as they affect linguistic usages in kinship terminology , and strongly relate, if only by approximation, to patterns of marriage.

A more flexible view of kinship was formulated in British social anthropology. Among the attempts to break out of universalizing assumptions and theories about kinship, Radcliffe-Brown , The Andaman Islands ; , The social organization of Australian tribes was the first to assert that kinship relations are best thought of as concrete networks of relationships among individuals. He then described these relationships, however, as typified by interlocking interpersonal roles. Malinowski , Argonauts of the Western Pacific described patterns of events with concrete individuals as participants stressing the relative stability of institutions and communities, but without insisting on abstract systems or models of kinship.

Gluckman , The judicial process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia balanced the emphasis on stability of institutions against processes of change and conflict, inferred through detailed analysis of instances of social interaction to infer rules and assumptions.

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John Barnes , Victor Turner , and others, affiliated with Gluckman's Manchester school of anthropology, described patterns of actual network relations in communities and fluid situations in urban or migratory context, as with the work of J. Yet, all these approaches clung to a view of stable functionalism , with kinship as one of the central stable institutions. Kinship systems as defined in anthropological texts and ethnographies were seen as constituted by patterns of behavior and attitudes in relation to the differences in terminology, listed above, for referring to relationships as well as for addressing others.

Many anthropologists went so far as to see, in these patterns of kinship, strong relations between kinship categories and patterns of marriage, including forms of marriage, restrictions on marriage, and cultural concepts of the boundaries of incest. However, anthropologist Dwight Read later argued that the way in which kinship categories are defined by individual researchers are substantially inconsistent.

In trying to resolve the problems of dubious inferences about kinship "systems", George P.

Kinship and Social Organisation

Murdock , Social Structure compiled kinship data to test a theory about universals in human kinship in the way that terminologies were influenced by the behavioral similarities or social differences among pairs of kin, proceeding on the view that the psychological ordering of kinship systems radiates out from ego and the nuclear family to different forms of extended family. His field studies criticized the ideas of structural-functional stability of kinship groups as corporations with charters that lasted long beyond the lifetimes of individuals, which had been the orthodoxy of British Social Anthropology.

This sparked debates over whether kinship could be resolved into specific organized sets of rules and components of meaning, or whether kinship meanings were more fluid, symbolic, and independent of grounding in supposedly determinate relations among individuals or groups, such as those of descent or prescriptions for marriage. From the s onwards, reports on kinship patterns in the New Guinea Highlands added some momentum to what had until then been only occasional fleeting suggestions that living together co-residence might underlie social bonding, and eventually contributed to the general shift away from a genealogical approach see below section.

For example, on the basis of his observations, Barnes suggested:. But it may not be the only criterion; birth, or residence, or a parent's former residence, or utilization of garden land, or participation in exchange and feasting activities or in house-building or raiding, may be other relevant criteria for group membership.

Similarly, Langness' ethnography of the Bena Bena also emphasized the primacy of residence patterns in 'creating' kinship ties:. The sheer fact of residence in a Bena Bena group can and does determine kinship. People do not necessarily reside where they do because they are kinsmen: rather they become kinsmen because they reside there. In David M. Schneider raised [36] deep problems with the notion that human social bonds and 'kinship' was a natural category built upon genealogical ties and made a fuller argument in his book A critique of the study of Kinship [37] which had a major influence on the subsequent study of kinship.

Before the questions raised within anthropology about the study of 'kinship' by David M. Schneider [37] and others from the s onwards, anthropology itself had paid very little attention to the notion that kinship bonds were anything other than connected to consanguineal or genealogical relatedness or its local cultural conceptions. Schneider's study [38] of the symbolic meanings surrounding ideas of kinship in American Culture found that Americans ascribe a special significance to 'blood ties' as well as related symbols like the naturalness of marriage and raising children within this culture.

In later work and Schneider argued that unexamined genealogical notions of kinship had been embedded in anthropology since Morgan's early work [39] because American anthropologists and anthropologists in western Europe had made the mistake of assuming these particular cultural values of 'blood is thicker than water', common in their own societies, were 'natural' and universal for all human cultures i. He concluded that, due to these unexamined assumptions, the whole enterprise of 'kinship' in anthropology may have been built on faulty foundations. Certainly for Morgan the actual bonds of blood relationship had a force and vitality of their own quite apart from any social overlay which they may also have acquired, and it is this biological relationship itself which accounts for what Radcliffe-Brown called "the source of social cohesion".

Schneider , Schneider himself emphasised a distinction between the notion of a social relationship as intrinsically given and inalienable from birth , and a social relationship as created, constituted and maintained by a process of interaction, or doing Schneider , The crucial point is this: in the relationship between citamangen and fak the stress in the definition of the relationship is more on doing than on being. That is, it is more what the citamangen does for fak and what fak does for citamangen that makes or constitutes the relationship. This is demonstrated, first, in the ability to terminate absolutely the relationship where there is a failure in the doing, when the fak fails to do what he is supposed to do; and second, in the reversal of terms so that the old, dependent man becomes fak , to the young man, tam.

The European and the anthropological notion of consanguinity, of blood relationship and descent, rest on precisely the opposite kind of value. It rests more on the state of being We have tried to impose this definition of a kind of relation on all peoples, insisting that kinship consists in relations of consanguinity and that kinship as consanguinity is a universal condition.

Schneider preferred to focus on these often ignored processes of "performance, forms of doing, various codes for conduct, different roles" p. His critique quickly prompted a new generation of anthropologists to reconsider how they conceptualized, observed and described social relationships 'kinship' in the cultures they studied. Schneider's critique is widely acknowledged [40] [41] [42] to have marked a turning point in anthropology's study of social relationships and interactions.