Kinship is a relationship between any entities that share a genealogical origin, through either biological, cultural, or historical descent. In anthropology Anthropology is the study of human beings, everywhere and throughout time the kinship system includes people related both by descent and marriage Marriage is a social union or legal contract between individuals that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged by a variety of ways, depending on the culture or demographic. Such a union may also be called matrimony, while the ceremony that marks its beginning is, while usage in biology Biology is the science of studying living organisms. Prior to the nineteenth century, biology came under the general study of all natural objects called natural history includes descent and mating In biology, mating is the pairing of opposite-sex or hermaphroditic organisms for copulation and, in social animals, also to raise their offspring. For animals, mating methods include random mating, disassortative mating, assortative mating, or a mating pool. Human kinship relations through marriage are commonly called "affinity" in contrast to "descent" (also called "consanguinity"), although the two may overlap in marriages among those of common descent. Family relations as sociocultural genealogy lead back to gods[1] (see mythology The term "mythology" sometimes refers to the study of myths and sometimes refers to a body of myths. For example, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece. The term "myth" is often used colloquially to refer to a, religion A religion is a system of human thought which usually includes a set of narratives, symbols, beliefs and practices that give meaning to the practitioner's experiences of life through reference to a higher power, deity or deities, or ultimate truth. Religion is commonly identified by the practitioner's prayer, ritual, meditation, music and art,), animals that were in the area or natural phenomena (as in origin stories).

Kinship is one of the most basic principles for organizing individuals into social groups A group can be defined as two or more humans that interact with one another, accept expectations and obligations as members of the group, and share a common identity. By this definition, society can be viewed as a large group, though most social groups are considerably smaller, roles, categories, and genealogy Genealogy is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral traditions, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members. The results are often displayed in charts or written as narratives. Family relations can be represented concretely (mother, brother, grandfather) or abstractly after degrees of relationship. A relationship may have relative purchase (e.g., father is one regarding a child), or reflect an absolute (e.g., status difference between a mother and a childless woman). Degrees of relationship are not identical to heirship Inheritance is the practice of passing on property, titles, debts, and obligations upon the death of an individual. It has long played an important role in human societies. The rules of inheritance differ between societies and have changed over time or legal succession Categories: Legal terms | Political terms | Geography terminology. Many codes of ethics Ethics is a branch of philosophy which seeks to address questions about morality, such as what the fundamental semantic, ontological, and epistemic nature of ethics or morality is (meta-ethics), how moral values should be determined (normative ethics), how a moral outcome can be achieved in specific situations (applied ethics), how moral capacity consider the bond of kinship as creating obligations between the related persons stronger than those between strangers, as in Confucian filial piety In Confucian ideals, filial piety is one of the virtues to be held above all else: a respect for the parents and ancestors. The Confucian classic Xiao Jing or Classic of Xiào, thought to be written around 470 B.C.E., has historically been the authoritative source on the Confucian tenet of xiào / "filial piety". The book, a conversation.

Contents

History of kinship studies

One of the founders of the anthropological relationship research was Lewis Henry Morgan Lewis Henry Morgan was known as an American ethnologist, anthropologist and writer. However, his professional life was in the field of law. He is best known for his work on cultural evolution and Native Americans, which influenced the growth of the emerging new fields of ethnology and anthropology (which became primary at the turn of the 20th, in his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871). Members of a society may use kinship terms without all being biologically related, a fact already evident in Morgan's the 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, which situates broad kinship classes on the basis of imputing abstract social patterns of relationships having little or no overall relation to genetic closeness but do reflect cognition about kinship, social distinctions as they affect linguistic usages in kinship terminology A culture's kinship terminology comprises all words it uses to describe familial relationships. 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, and strongly relate, if only by approximation, to patterns of marriage.[2]. The major patterns of kinship systems which Lewis Henry Morgan Lewis Henry Morgan was known as an American ethnologist, anthropologist and writer. However, his professional life was in the field of law. He is best known for his work on cultural evolution and Native Americans, which influenced the growth of the emerging new fields of ethnology and anthropology (which became primary at the turn of the 20th identified through kinship terminology in his 1871 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 (1949) prior to Lounsbury's (1964) rediscovery of the linguistic principles of classificatory kin terms.

"Kinship system" as systemic pattern

The concept of “system of kinship” tended to dominate anthropological studies of kinship in the early 20th century. 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 A culture's kinship terminology comprises all words it uses to describe familial relationships. 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 and patterns of marriage, including forms of marriage, restrictions on marriage, and cultural concepts of the boundaries of incest. A great deal of inference was necessarily involved in such constructions as to “systems” of kinship, and attempts to construct systemic patterns and reconstruct kinship evolutionary histories on these bases were largely invalidated in later work. However, Dwight Read, a widely published anthropologist, later argued that the way in which kinship categories are defined by individual researchers are substantially inconsistent.[3] This occurs when working within a systemic cultural model that can be elicited in fieldwork, but also allowing considerable individual variability in details, such as when they are recorded through relative products.[4] For example, the English term uncle carries connotations other than "brother of a parent" depending on the writer.

Conflicting theories of the mid 20th century[5]

In trying to resolve the problems of dubious inferences about kinship "systems", George P. Murdock Even in his earliest writings, Murdock's distinctive approach is apparent. He advocates an empirical approach to anthropology, through the compilation of data from independent cultures, and then testing hypotheses by subjecting the data to the appropriate statistical tests. He also sees himself as a social scientist, rather than more narrowly as (1949, 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 The term nuclear family is used to distinguish a family group consisting of most commonly, a father and mother and their children, from what is known as an extended family. Nuclear families can be any size, as long as the family can support itself and there are only children and two parents, nuclear families meet their individual members’ basic to different forms of extended family Extended family is a term with several distinct meanings. First, it is used synonymously with consanguineous family. Second, in societies dominated by the conjugal family, it is used to refer to kindred who does not belong to the conjugal family. Often there could be many generations living under the same roof, depending on the circumstances. Lévi-Strauss Claude Lévi-Strauss, born in Brussels, grew up in Paris, living in a street of the 16th arrondissement named after the artist Nicolas Poussin, whose work he later admired and wrote about. Lévi-Strauss's father was also a painter, and Claude was born in Brussels because his father had taken a contract to paint there (1949, Les Structures Elementaires), on the other hand, also looked for global patterns to kinship, but viewed the “elementary” forms The Alliance Theory is the name given to the structural method of studying kinship relations. It finds its origins in Claude Lévi-Strauss's Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), and is opposed to the functionalist theory of Radcliffe-Brown. Alliance theory has oriented most anthropological French works until the 1980s, and its influences were of kinship as lying in the ways that families were connected by marriage in different fundamental forms resembling those of modes of exchange Social exchange theory is a social psychological and sociological perspective that explains social change and stability as a process of negotiated exchanges between parties. Social exchange theory posits that all human relationships are formed by the use of a subjective cost-benefit analysis and the comparison of alternatives. For example, when a: symmetric and direct, reciprocal delay, or generalized exchange.

Kinship networks and social process[6]

A more flexible view of kinship was formulated in British social anthropology Social anthropology is the branch of anthropology that studies how currently living human beings behave in social groups. Practitioners of social anthropology investigate, often through long-term, intensive field studies , the social organization of a particular people: customs, economic and political organization, law and conflict resolution,. Among the attempts to break out of universalizing assumptions and theories about kinship, Radcliffe-Brown Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was an English social anthropologist who developed the theory of Structural Functionalism, a framework that describes basic concepts relating to the social structure of primitive civilizations (1922, The Andaman Islands The Andaman Islands are a group of archipelagic islands in the Bay of Bengal, and are part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Union Territory of India. The Andaman Archipelago is an oceanic continuation of the Burmese Arakan Yoma range in the North and of the Indonesian Archipelago in the South. It includes some two hundred islands; 1930, 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 Bronisław Kasper Malinowski was a Polish anthropologist who is widely considered to have been one of the most important 20th-century anthropologists because of his pioneering work in ethnographic fieldwork, with which he made a major contribution to the study of Melanesia, and of reciprocity (1922, 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 Max Gluckman (26 January 1911 – 13 April 1975) was a South African-born British social anthropologist (1955, 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. John Barnes, Victor Turner Victor Witter Turner was a cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals and rites of passage. His work, along with that of Clifford Geertz and others, is often referred to as symbolic and interpretive anthropology, 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. Clyde Mitchell James Clyde Mitchell (21 June 1918 – 15 November 1995) was a British sociologist and anthropologist (1965, Social Networks in Urban Situations). Yet, all these approaches clung to a view of stable functionalism, with kinship as one of the central stable institutions.

Recognition of fluidity in kinship meanings and relations[2]

Building on Lévi-Strauss’s (1949) notions of kinship as caught up with the fluid languages of exchange, Edmund Leach Sir Edmund Ronald Leach was a British social anthropologist (1961, Pul Eliya) argued that kinship was a flexible idiom that had something of the grammar of a language, both in the uses of terms for kin but also in the fluidities of language, meaning, and networks. His field studies devastated 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 Social anthropology is the branch of anthropology that studies how currently living human beings behave in social groups. Practitioners of social anthropology investigate, often through long-term, intensive field studies , the social organization of a particular people: customs, economic and political organization, law and conflict resolution,. 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. Work on symbolic kinship by David M. Schneider David Murray Schneider was an American cultural anthropologist, best known for his studies of kinship and as a major proponent of the symbolic anthropology approach to cultural anthropology. He received his B.S. in 1940 and his M.S. from Cornell University in 1941. He received his PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard in 1949, based on fieldwork in his (1984, A Critique of The Study of Kinship) reinforced this view. In response to Schneider's 1984 work on Symbolic Kinship, Janet Carsten re-developed the idea of "relatedness" from her initial ideas, looking at what was socialized and biological, from her studies with the Malays (1995, The substance of kinship and the heat of the hearth; feeding, personhood and relatedness among the Malays in Pulau Langkawi, American Ethnologist Albert Gallatin and John Russell Bartlett founded the American Ethnological Society in New York City in 1842. Their goal was to promote research in ethnology and all inquiries involving humans. The early meetings of the AES took place in the homes of the members, where they discussed all aspects of human life, from history and geography to). She uses the idea of relatedness to move away from a pre-constructed analytic opposition which exists in anthropological thought between the biological and the social. Carsten argued that relatedness should be described in terms of indigenous statements and practices, some of which fall outside what anthropologists have conventionally understood as kinship (Cultures of Relatedness, 2000). This kind of approach – recognizing relatedness in its concrete and variable cultural forms – exemplifies the ways that anthropologists have grappled with the fundamental importance of kinship in human society without imprisoning the fluidity in behavior, beliefs, and meanings in assumptions about fixed patterns and systems.

Biological relationships

Ideas about kinship do not necessarily assume any biological relationship between individuals, rather just close associations. Malinowski Bronisław Kasper Malinowski was a Polish anthropologist, widely considered one of the most important 20th-century anthropologists. His pioneering ethnographic fieldwork made a major contribution to the study of Melanesia and of reciprocity, in his ethnographic Ethnography is a branch of anthropology. It is a methodological strategy used to provide descriptions of human societies, which as a methodology does not prescribe any particular method (e.g. observation, interview, questionnaire), but instead prescribes the nature of the study (i.e. to describe people through writing) . In the biological sciences, study of sexual behaviour on the Trobriand Islands The Trobriand Islands are a 170 mi² archipelago of coral atolls off the eastern coast of New Guinea. They are situated in Milne Bay Province in Papua New Guinea. Most of the population of 12,000 indigenous inhabitants live on the main island of Kiriwina, which is also the location of the government station, Losuia. Other major islands in the noted that the Trobrianders did not believe pregnancy to be the result of sexual intercourse between the man and the woman, and they denied that there was any physiological relationship between father and child.[7] Nevertheless, while paternity was unknown in the "full biological sense", for a woman to have a child without having a husband was considered socially undesirable. Fatherhood was therefore recognised as a social role; the woman's husband is the "man whose role and duty it is to take the child in his arms and to help her in nursing and bringing it up";[8] "Thus, though the natives are ignorant of any physiological need for a male in the constitution of the family, they regard him as indispensable socially".[9]

As social and biological concepts of parenthood are not necessarily coterminous, the terms "pater" and "genitor" have been used in anthropology to distinguish between the man who is socially recognised as father (pater) and the man who is believed to be the physiological parent (genitor); similarly the terms "mater" and "genitrix" have been used to distinguish between the woman socially recognised as mother (mater) and the woman believed to be the physiological parent (genitrix).[10] Such a distinction is useful when the individual who is considered the legal parent of the child is not the individual who is believed to be the child's biological parent. For example, in his ethnography of the Nuer The Nuer are a confederation of tribes located in Southern Sudan and western Ethiopia. Collectively, the Nuer form one of the largest ethnic groups in East Africa. They are a pastoral people who rely on cattle products for almost every aspect of their daily lives, Evans-Pritchard Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (September 21, 1902 – September 11, 1973) was a British anthropologist instrumental in the development of social anthropology in that country. He was professor of social anthropology at Oxford from 1946 to 1970 notes that if a widow A widow is a woman whose spouse has died. A man whose spouse has died is a widower. The state of having lost one's spouse to death is termed widowhood or viduity. The adjective is widowed, following the death of her husband, chooses to live with a lover outside of her deceased husband's kin group, that lover is only considered genitor of any subsequent children the widow has, and her deceased husband continues to be considered the pater. As a result, the lover has no legal control over the children, who may be taken away from him by the kin of the pater when they choose.[11] The terms "pater" and "genitor" have also been used to help describe the relationship between children and their parents in the context of divorce in Britain. Following the divorce and remarriage of their parents, children find themselves using the term "mother" or "father" in relation to more than one individual, and the pater or mater who is legally responsible for the child's care, and whose family name A family name is a type of surname and part of a person's name indicating the family to which the person belongs. The use of family names is widespread in cultures around the world. Each culture has its own rules as to how these names are applied and used the child uses, may not be the genitor or genitrix of the child, with whom a separate parent-child relationship may be maintained through arrangements such as visitation rights In family law, contact is one of the general terms which denotes the level of contact a parent or other significant person in a child's life can have with that child. Contact forms part of the bundle of rights and privileges which a parent may have in relation to any child of the family or joint custody Joint custody is a court order whereby custody of a child is awarded to both parties. In joint custody both parents are "custodial parents" and neither parent is a non-custodial parents, or in other words the child has two custodial parents.[12]

It is important to note that the terms "genitor" or "genetrix" do not necessarily imply actual biological relationships based on consanguinity, but rather refer to the socially held belief that the individual is physically related to the child, derived from culturally held ideas about how biology works. So, for example, the Ifaugao may believe that an illegitimate child might have more than one physical father, and so nominate more than one genitor.[13] J.A. Barnes therefore argued that it was necessary to make a further distinction between genitor and genitrix (the supposed biological mother and father of the child), and the actual genetic father and mother of the child.

Descent and the family

Descent, like family systems, is one of the major concepts of anthropology. Cultures worldwide possess a wide range of systems of tracing kinship and descent. Anthropologists break these down into simple concepts about what is thought to be common among many different cultures.

Descent groups

A descent group is a social group whose members claim 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 uniliineal, 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 Eskimo proper, are typically bilateral. The egocentrid 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.

Lineages, clans, phratries, moieties, and matrimonial sides

A lineage is a 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 a descent group that claims common descent from an apical ancestor (but often cannot demonstrate it, or "stipulated descent"). If a clan's apical ancestor is nonhuman, it is called a totem. Examples of clans are found in the Chechen, Chinese, Irish, Japanese, Polish, Scottish, Tlingit, and Somali societies. In the case of the Polish clan, any notion of common ancestry was lost long ago.

A phratry is a descent group containing at least two clans which have a supposed 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 (1998b, bibliography) have discovered numerous societies where kinship network analysis shows that two halves marry one another, similar to a matrimonial moieties, except that the two halves—which they call matrimonial sides[14] -- 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.[2]

The word deme is used to describe an endogamous local population that does not have unilineal descent.[15] Thus, a deme is a local endogamous community without internal segmentation into clans.

Nuclear family

The Western model of a nuclear family consists of a couple and its children. The nuclear family is ego-centered and impermanent, while descent groups are permanent (lasting beyond the lifespans of individual constituents) and reckoned according to a single ancestor.

Kinship calculation is any systemic method for reckoning kin relations. Kinship terminologies are native taxonomies, not developed by anthropologists.

Beanpole family is a term used to describe expansions of the number of living generations within a family unit, but each generation has relatively few members in it.

Legal ramifications

Kinship and descent have a number of legal ramifications, which vary widely between legal and social structures.

Next of Kin traditionally and in common usage refers to the person closest related to you by blood, such as a parent or your children.

In legal terms, for example in intestacy, it has come to mean the person closest to you, which is generally the spouse if married, followed by the natural children of the deceased.

Whilst someone is alive they may nominate any person close to them to be their next of kin. The next of kin is usually asked for as a contact in case of accident, emergency or sudden death. It does not involve completing any forms or registration in the UK, and may be a friend or carer unrelated to you by blood or marriage.

Most human groups share a taboo against incest; relatives are forbidden from marriage but the rules tend to vary widely when one moves beyond the nuclear family. At common law, the prohibitions are typically phrased in terms of "degrees of consanguinity."

More importantly, kinship and descent enters the legal system by virtue of intestacy, the laws that at common law determine who inherits the estates of the dead in the absence of a will. In civil law countries, the doctrine of legitime plays a similar role, and makes the lineal descendants of the dead person forced heirs. Rules of kinship and descent have important public aspects, especially under monarchies, where they determine the order of succession, the heir apparent and the heir presumptive.

See also

References

  1. ^ On Kinship and Gods in Ancient Egypt: An Interview with Marcelo Campagno Damqatum 2 (2007)
  2. ^ a b c Houseman and White 1998a (Bibliography)
  3. ^ Read 2001
  4. ^ Wallace and Atkins 1960
  5. ^ White and Johansen, 2005, Chapter 4. (Bibliography)
  6. ^ White and Johansen, 2005, Chapters 3 and 4 (Bibliography)
  7. ^ Malinowski 1929, p. 179-186
  8. ^ Malinowski 1929, p. 195
  9. ^ Malinowski 1929, p. 202
  10. ^ Fox 1977, p. 34
  11. ^ Evans-Pritchard 1951, p. 116
  12. ^ Simpson 1994, p. 831-851
  13. ^ Barnes 1961, p. 296-299
  14. ^ Houseman and White 1998b
  15. ^ Murphy, Michael Dean. "Kinship Glossary". http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/Faculty/murphy/436/kinship.htm. Retrieved 2009-03-13.

Bibliography

External links

Look up kinship in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Family
Household · Nuclear family · Complex family
Immediate family Spouse (Husband | Wife) · Parent (Father | Mother) · Child (Son | Daughter) · Sibling (Brother | Sister)
Extended family Grandparent · Uncle · Aunt · Cousin · Nephew · Niece · Common ancestor
Family-in-law Father-in-law · Mother-in-law · Son-in-law · Daughter-in-law · Brother-in-law · Sister-in-law
Kinship Consanguinity · Affinity · Fictive kinship · Marriage · Adoption · Divorce · Disownment · Repudiation
Lineage Genealogy · Patrilineality · Matrilineality · Bilateral descent · Family tree · Pedigree · Family name · Heredity · Inheritance · Heirloom
Relationships Familial love · Parental love · Marital love · Brotherly love · Filial piety · Veneration

Categories: Kinship and descent | Anthropology |

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