Anthropology Chapter 10: Kinship, Family and Marriage (349-392)

Case Study: The Nuclear Family—Ideal vs. Reality

Nuclear family concept acquired particular history in western industrialized cultures. They are families consisting of two parents—a mother and a father—and the child/children. Families adapted to an economic system that required increased mobility to follow job opportunities wherever they might lead. "detachable" nuclear family units are extremely well adapted to a culture that prioritizes economic success, independence, and mobility over geographic stability and intergenerational continuity. Nuclear family may be more myth than reality. Came into prominence during economic expansion after WW2. Even at its peak it was far from universal. Limited to a minority of Americans; particularly those in the white middle class. Biology is becoming less central and personal choice more important. More blended families in USA reflect new residential and interpersonal relationships that contrast sharply with imagined privacy and separation associated with nuclear family ideal.

Case Study: The Nuer of Southern Sudan

Nuer's economy was based largely on cattle. E. E. Evans-Pritchard found them to be patrilineal decent group (descent traced through father's line) where both boys and girls inherited membership in father's lineage, but only boys can pass on membership in lineage to own future children. Any children born by these girls would in turn belong to their husbands' lineages. The Nuer also recognized clan structures. The Nuer practiced exogamous marriage (marry outside village) find marriage partners from other clans. Men brought women to villages, women had to move to a new village. Allowed them to build lineages and connections with other groups. Cattle were the center of Nuer economic life. The cattle were owned by men only, but they were cared for by the women. A successful marriage proposal often required the groom to provide cattle in exchange for the bride. In their culture, the cattle were used to reflect the patrilineal nature of the Nuer decent.

family of procreation

family group created when one reproduces and within one rears children. formed through marriage and by having or adopting children

family of orientation

family group in which one is born, grows up and develops life skills

dowry

the gift of goods or money from the brides family to the grroms family as part of the marriage process

bridewealth

the gift of goods or money from the grooms family to the brides family as a part of the marriage process

Case Study: Families of Same-Sex Parents

Gay people more open about sexual orientation lately. Becoming more accepted. Gay couples on TV. But cultural debate over homosexuality and same-sex marriage in the US is intense and by no means settled. Growing number of states have legalized same-sex marriage, thereby enabling couples to qualify for many of the same social benefits that are available to heterosexual couples in those locales. These discussions about same-sex marriage illustrate the changing patterns of kinship in the US. We see that there is no single definition of marriage, but many. Those who seek same-sex marriage are not tying to redefine marriage, but merely to define it for themselves in their own interests, as people around the world have always done.

Case Study: Transnational Adoptions

Global trends and structural plays—in the USA, intercountry adoptions represented 14% of all adoptions, 3rd largest source after adoption by relatives and those organized through US child welfare agency. 20,000 out of 136,000 us adoptions were arranged. top sending countrues were china, guatemala, russia, ethiopia and south korea. Some countries do not allow for it. The exhange of babies creates a local market in which children in certain countries become commodities for consumption by parents in other countries. In Transnational Adoption: A cultural economy of race, gender, and kinship, Dorow traces journey of chinese children adopted by US parents as they cross geographic, cultural, ethnic, and class divides. Most children adopted from CHina have been abandoned in public spaces or secretly delivered to orphanages by chinese parents struggling to navigate the contradictory pressures of a strong cultural preference for sons and gov enforced family planning policies that seek to limit families to one child. Chinese daughters marry out into another family. SOns then provide the only guaranteed source of long-term labor and financial security, especially for rural families. China provides no legal channel for parents to put children up for adoption, dorow estimates that several hundred thousand abandoned babies, almost all girls, are in the care of chinese orphanages at any given time.

Case Study: Sharing a Hearth—The Langkawi of Malaysia

Janet Carsten studies that kinship is not only given at birth but also is aquired throughout life in malay villagers on island of Langkawi. The Langkawi house and its hearth-where people gather t cook and eat- serve as places to construct kinship. Langkawi kinship is acquired through co-residence and co-feeding. In the local thinking, "blood" and other bodily substances are formed by eating food cooked at home. Breast milk/semen seen as forms of blood. a husband and wife gradually become more similar by living and eating together. Sisters and brothers have closest kinship relationship in childhood because they grow up in same household eating same food; but as marry they move out of shared home and their "blood" becomes less similar. Malay ideal is to marry someone close in terms of genealogy, geography, social status, or disposition. Langkawi understandings of fosterng have often included expressions of hospitality in community to visitors. IDeal guest stays for a long time, becomes part of community, marries a local and raises kids.

Case Study: Marriage in Mexico

Jennifer Hirsh's 2007 study of love in small mexican town examines the rise of companionate marriage at the intersection of love and globalization. The population of Degollado, Jalisco (15,000 people) varies according to the season. In the spring and summer, many residents migrate north of border to do agriculture and construction work in the USA. They return in the winter and bring back dollars, baseball hats, electronics, and trucks. Hirsch found a distinct shift in the description of marriage of those who had relocated. For older women, love came from living well together and successful marriage involved fulfilling one's roles and obligations: men brought home money, women cooked and cleaned and raised kids. Younger women measured good marriage by level of intimacy and trust, as well as by mutually pleasurable sex. But found that companionate marriage and the emphasis on love do not lessen inequality in marriage or tensions about who earns the money and who give the orders, instead emphasizes on love that appears to provide a modernizing sheen to contininuing gender inequalities by glossing them over he sexuality and intimacy.

Case Study: Chosen Families in San Francisco

Kath Weston ethnographic study of construction of gay and lesbian families in SF in "families we choose" provides an example of creating kinship through choice. When parents, siblings, and other close relatives cut off kinship ties that US culture suggests should be permanent and enduring, gay men and lesbians have turned to chosen families instead. Come in all shapes and sizes. Close friends can become family. Adopted children. Former lovers. Anyone. Westen finds this to be common experience for those who access care for an intense illness, such as AIDS. Her study reminds us not to assume that the natural characteristics of biological kinship ties are better than the actual behavior of chosen families. In absence of functional, biologically related families, Westen points out chosen families take on characteristics of stability, continuity, endurance and permanence to become "real"

In the US do we practice exogamy or endogamy?

Kindred exogamy and class & race endogamy

Case Study: Fictive Kin—Black Networks near Chicago Illinois

Kinship can be a means to survive poverty according to Carol Stacks. She uncovered a dynamic set of *kinship networks based on mutual reciprocity through which residents managed to survive conditions of intense structural poverty and long-term unemployment*. These kinship networks included biological kin and fictive kin-those who became kin. Stretched among households and across generations, extending to include all those willing to participate in a system of mutual support. People provided child care, loaned money to others in need, took in children who needed a foster home for a while. They borrowed clothes, exchanged all kinds of things when asked, cared for one another's sick or aging family members. Residents of these flats succeeded in building lifelines for survival through extended kinship networks. Using their community members to survive, they are able to overcome structural violence.

Case Study: Impact of Assisted Reproductive Technologies

Technologies including sperm and egg donations, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy and cloning. Their emergence raises questions about the rights of parents and of children born with this assistance as well as the impact of these innovations on our ideas and experience of kinship and family. Culture, in the form of medical technology, is now shaping biology. These technologies are not new, most if not all cultures have had techniques for promoting or preventing conception or enabling or terminating pregnancy. (fertility enhancements, contraceptives, abortion, and cesarean surgeries) Over last 30 years, technological developments opened new avenues for scientific intervention in reproductive process and formation of kinship.

Case Study: Cousins by Choice—Asian youth in Southall England

The youth in Southall, an ethnically diverse suburb of London, call one another "cousin" as a way to build strong connections across ethnic, religious, and cultural boundaries. These connections enjoy the strength of kinship and friendship combined. Anthropologist Gerd Baumann states that these youth are less locked into the dominant ideas of ethnic, cultural and religious difference and are more open to the possibility of a connected asian community. Because "cousin" is common in many of the languages and immigrant cultures represented in community, people of diverse background share some common expectations about what being a cousin means. Having the title "cousin" is more important than friend because you have a sense of responsibility to them individual relationship strategies to overcome strife.

Case Study: Kinship, descent, and change in a Chinese village

There was an exogamous marriage pattern, which as result, over 90 percent of the men in Guest's study shared the same surname "Lu". Oral history held that the Lu lineage traced its origin back to a founding member, over 700 years in the past. Due to its antiquity and prominence in the village, the Lu family held great cultural power in the region. The "Lu" family, however, came face to face with China's efforts at modernization. In the 1960s, the Chinese government sponsored what was called a "Cultural Revolution". This government-backed revolution favored replacing the old with the new and was a deliberate effort to modernize the nation. During the revolution, the Lu family's genealogical records were destroyed, thus destroying all documentation of lineal descent over the course of 700-plus years. When modern historians attempted to reconstruct these records they had to rely primarily on oral histories. As a result, they were only successful in tracing the Lu lineage back to the early 1900s. Should we now consider the Lu family a lineage or a clan? Faced with increasing globalization, Guest also documented that many of the Lu family members were migrating to the United States and other nations around the world. As the family spread around the world, kinship ties weakened. Marriage rules and descent membership no longer carried the same weight. Connections with other lineage/clan members were no longer active relationships. Does kinship continue even when family members no longer interact on a regular basis?

marriage

creates socially recognized relationships and shared legal rights to property and inheritance

Case Study: Donor 150

Two half sisters, Danielle and JoEllen, whose mothers conceived them through artificial insemination, had recently found each other through the Donor Sibling Registry. The NY Times published a story about them titled, "Hello, I'm You Sister. Our Father is Donor 150." Jefferey Harrison, Donor 150, read this article and contacted the two women, both of whom were already adults, revealing his identity. Brings about the questions, who is related to whom? Who decides? What are our responsibilities to our kin? In this situation, are they family? They're biologically related, but socially, it's up to them. Biology: nature, natural kinship Socially: who raised the child, strong relationship, kinship

clans

claim connection to a founding ancestor, but dont provide same genealogical documentation

lineage

clearly demonstrates genealogical connections through many generations, tracing family tree to founding (apical) ancestors

incest taboo

cultural rules that forbid sexual relations to certain close relatives

afinal relationships

kinship relationship established through marriage and/or alliance, not through biology or common descent

monogamy

marriage (usually between one man and one woman

polygyny

marriage between one man and multiple woman

polyandry

marriage between one woman and multiple men

companionate marriage

marriage built on love, intimacy and personal choice rather than social obligation Individuals choose their partner on the basis of love

exogamy

marriage to someone outside the kinship group

nuclear family

mother, father and children

descent group

often imagined as long chains of connections from parents to children that reach back through many generations to a common ancestor or group of ancestors lineages and clans

arranged marriages

orchestrated by family of the bride and groom, continue to be prominent in many culture in Asia, the Pacific, the Middle East and Africa over the long run, arranged marriages last longer based off of partner satisfaction

endogamy

requiring marriage within kinship groups

Kinship

the system of meaning and power that cultures create to determine who is related to whom and how to define their mutual expectations, rights and expectations the creation of relatives is perhaps the most effective strategy that human have developed to form stable, reliable, separate, and deeply connected groups that can last over time and through generations kinship alliances are fluid and flexible