How Do Human Beings Organize Interdependence?
What Is Friendship?
AmericanCollege Student Friendship and Friendliness
What is Kinship?
Sex, Gender, and Kinship
How Many Sexes Are There?
Understanding Different Kinship Systems
What Is the
Role of Descent in Kinship?
Bilateral Kindreds
Unilineal Descent Groups
What Role Do Lineages Play in Descent?
Lineage Membership
The Logic of Lineage Relationships
Patrilineages
Matrilineages
What Are Kinship Terminologies?
Criteria for Distinguishing Kin
What Is Adoption?
Adoption in Highland Ecuador
How Flexible Can Relatedness Be?
Negotiation of Kin Ties among the Ju/’hoansi
Iñupiaq Relatedness
European American Kinship and New Reproductive Technologies
Compadrazgo in Latin America
How Can Practices of Relatedness Produce Unexpected Outcomes?
Conflicting Obligations among the Iteso
Assisted Reproduction in Israel
Organ
Transplantation and the Creation of New Relatives
What Are Sodalities?
Secret Societies in Western Africa
Membership and Initiation
Use of the Kinship Idiom
The Thoma Secret Society: A Microcosm
The Meaning of Secrecy in a Secret
Society
The Dimensions of Group Life
Main Points:
- Human life is group life; we depend on one another to survive. All societies invent forms of relatedness to organize this interdependence. People in all societies recognize that they are connected to certain other people in a variety of ways and that they are not connected to some people at all. Anthropologists have traditionally paid closest attention to those formal systems of relatedness called kinship
systems. But anthropologists also draw attention to other forms of relatedness, like friendship, that may provide ways of counterbalancing relations with kin. It is important to remember that all forms of relatedness are always embedded in and shaped by politics, economics, and worldviews.
- To recognize the varied forms that institutions of human relatedness can take is to acknowledge fundamental openness in the organization of human interdependence. New shared experiences offer raw
material for the invention of new forms of common identity. Anthropologists now argue that all communities—even face-to-face communities—larger than a single individual are contingent, “imagined” communities. That is, all human communities are social, cultural, and historical constructions. They are the joint outcome of shared habitual practices and of symbolic images of common identity promulgated by group members with an interest in making a particular imagined identity endure.
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Friendships are relatively “unofficial” bonds of relatedness that are personal, affective, and, to a varying extent from society to society, a matter of choice. Nevertheless, in some societies, friendships may be so important that they are formalized like marriages. Depending on the society, friendships may be developed to strengthen kin ties or to subvert kin ties, because friendship is understood as the precise opposite of formal kin ties. This illustrates the ways in which people everywhere
struggle to find ways to preserve certain ties of relatedness without being dominated by them.
- The system of social relations that is based on prototypical procreative relationships is called kinship. Kinship principles are based on but not reducible to the universal human experiences of mating, birth, and nurturance. Kinship systems help societies maintain social order without central government. Although female–male duality is basic to kinship, many societies have developed
supernumerary sexes or genders.
- Patterns of descent in kinship systems are selective. Matrilineal societies emphasize that women bear children and trace descent through women. Patrilineal societies emphasize that men impregnate women and trace descent through men. Adoption pays attention to relationships based on nurturance, whether or not they are also based on mating and birth.
- Descent links members of different generations with one another. Bilateral descent results
in the formation of groups called kindreds that include all relatives from both parents’ families. Unilineal descent results in the formation of groups called lineages that trace descent through either the mother or the father. Unlike kindreds, lineages are corporate groups. Lineages control important property, such as land, that collectively belongs to their members. The language of lineage is the idiom of political discussion, and lineage relationships are of political significance.
- Kinship terminologies pay attention to certain attributes of people that are then used to define different classes of kin. The attributes most often recognized include, from most to least common, generation, gender, affinity, collaterality, bifurcation, relative age, and the gender of the linking relative.
- Anthropologists recognize six basic terminological systems according to their patterns of classifying cousins. In recent years, however, anthropologists have become quite
skeptical of the value of these idealized models, because they are highly formalized and do not capture the full range of people’s actual practices.
- By prescribing certain kinds of marriage, lineages establish long-term alliances with one another. Two major types of prescriptive marriage patterns in unilineal societies are a father’s sister’s daughter marriage system (which sets up a pattern of direct exchange marriage) and a mother’s brother’s daughter marriage system (which sets
up a pattern of asymmetrical exchange marriage).
- Achieved kinship statuses can be converted into ascribed ones by means of adoption. In Zumbagua, Ecuador, most adults have several kinds of parents and several kinds of children, some adopted and some not. Zumbaguan adoptions are based on nurturance—in this case, the feeding by the adoptive parent of the adopted child.
- From the complexities of Ju/’hoansi kinship negotiations to the unique features of compadrazgo in Latin
America to the dilemmas created by new reproductive technologies and organ transplantation, anthropologists have shown clearly that kinship is a form of relatedness, a cultural construction that cannot be reduced to biology.
- Many egalitarian societies have developed sodalities that build on formal kinship institutions to create imagined communities of wider scope. Members of sodalities, such as western African secret societies, ordinarily take on responsibility for various public
functions of a governmental or ritual nature. Membership in such sodalities is often a mark of adulthood and may be connected with initiation rituals.
How kinship is traced over the generations?
Another important term to know when exploring the concepts of family and kinship is family lineage, meaning the tracing of a person's ancestry over past generations. Individuals may describe their lineage in one of three ways: patrilineal descent, matrilineal descent, or bilateral descent.
What is kinship system?
noun. : the system of social relationships connecting people in a culture who are or are held to be related and defining and regulating their reciprocal obligations.
What is kinship system in sociology?
At its most basic, kinship refers to "the bond of marriage and reproduction," says the Sociology Group, but kinship can also involve any number of groups or individuals based on their social relationships. ❖ The definition of kinship is a family relationship or other close relationship.
What is kinship system family?
refers to the culturally defined relationships between individuals who are commonly thought of as having family ties. All societies use kinship as a basis for forming social groups and for classifying people.
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