Kinship is a relationship between any entities
that share a genealogical origin, through either biological,
cultural, or historical descent. In
anthropology the kinship system includes people
related both by descent and
marriage, while
usage in
biology includes descent and
mating. 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 (see
mythology,
religion),
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,
roles, categories, and
genealogy. 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 or legal
succession. Many codes of
ethics consider the bond of kinship as creating
obligations between the related persons stronger than those between
strangers, as in Confucian
filial
piety.
History of kinship studies
One of the founders of the anthropological relationship research
was
Lewis Henry Morgan, 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, and
strongly relate, if only by approximation, to patterns of
marriage.. The major patterns of kinship systems which
Lewis Henry Morgan 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 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. 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. 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
In trying to resolve the problems of dubious inferences about
kinship "systems",
George P.
Murdock (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 to different forms of
extended family.
Lévi-Strauss (1949, Les Structures
Elementaires), on the other hand, also looked for global patterns
to kinship, but viewed the
“elementary”
forms of kinship as lying in the ways that families were
connected by marriage in different fundamental forms resembling
those of
modes of exchange:
symmetric and direct, reciprocal delay, or generalized
exchange.
Kinship networks and social process
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 (1922, The Andaman 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 (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 (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, 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 (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
Building on Lévi-Strauss’s (1949) notions of kinship as caught up
with the fluid languages of exchange,
Edmund Leach (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.
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 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). 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, in his ethnographic study of sexual behaviour on the Trobriand
Islands
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. 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"; "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".
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). 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,
Evans-Pritchard notes that if a
widow, 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. 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
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 or
joint custody.
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. 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 claimcommon 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 -- 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 is used to describe an endogamous local
population that does not have unilineal descent. 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
- On Kinship and Gods in Ancient Egypt: An Interview
with Marcelo Campagno Damqatum 2 (2007)
- White and Johansen, 2005, Chapter 4. (Bibliography)
- White and Johansen, 2005, Chapters 3 and 4 (Bibliography)
Bibliography
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