Anthropology: Chapter 10

Matrilineal (Descent Groups)

A form of descent in which people trace their primary kin connections through their mothers.

Patrilineal (Descent)

A form of descent in which people trace their primary kin relationships through their father.s

Cognatic Descent

A form of descent traced through both females and males.

Descent

A person's kinship connections traced back through a number of generations.

Patrilocal (Residence)

A residence pattern in which a married couple lives with or near the relatives of the husband's father.

Bilateral Descent

A type of kinship system in which individuals emphasize both their mother's kin and their father's kin relatively equally.

Unilineal Descent

Descent traced through a single line (such as matrilineal or patrilineal) rather than through both sides (bilateral descent).

Affinal Relatives

Kinship ties formed through marriage (that is, in-laws)

Extended (Family)

The family that includes in one household relatives in addition to a nuclear family.

Monogamy

The marital practice of having only one spouse at a time

Postpartum Sex (Taboo)

The rule that a husband and wife must abstain from any sexual activity for a period of time after the birth of a child.

Collaterality

Kin relationships traced through a linking relative.

Lineality

Kin relationships traced through a single line, such as son, father, and grandfather.

Polygny

The marriage of a man to two or more women at the same time.

Kinship

Refers to the relationships--found in all societies--that are based on blood or marriage.

Polyandry

The marriage of a woman to two or more men at the same time.

Ambilineal Descent

A form of descent in which a person chooses to affiliate with a kin group through either the male or the female line.

Avunlocal (Residence)

A residence pattern in which a married couple lives with or near the husband's mother's brother.

Matrilocal (Residence)

A residence pattern in which a married couple lives with or near the relatives of the wife.

Ambilocal (Residence(

A residence pattern in which a married couple may choose to live with either the relatives of the wife or the relatives of the husband.

Taboo

A social or religious custom prohibiting or forbidding discussion of a particular practice or forbidding association with a particular person, place, or thing.

Double Descent

A system of descent in which individuals receive some rights and obligations from the father's side of the family and others from the mother's side.

Lineage

A unilineal descent group whose members can trace their line of descent back to a common ancestor.

Parallel Cousins

Children of one's mother's sister or father's brother.

Moieties

Complementary descent groups that result from the division of a society into halves.

Horizontal and Vertical Function of Kinship

Horizontal- The ways in which all kinships systems, by requiring people to marry outside their own small kinship group, function to integrate the total society through marriage bonds between otherwise unrelated kin groups. Vertical-The way in which all kinship systems tend to provide social continuity by binding together different generations.

Fictive Kinship

Relationships among individuals who recognize kinship obligations even though the relationships are not based on either consanguineal or affinial ties.

Phratries

The Greek term used to describe a kinship division consisting of two or more distinct clans which are considered a single unit, but which retain separate identities within the phratry.

Hawaiian System

The Hawaiian system is the least descriptive and merges many different relatives into a small number of categories. Ego distinguishes between relatives only on the basis of sex and generation. Thus there is no uncle term; (mother's and father's brothers are included in the same category as father). All cousins are classified in the same group as brothers and sisters. Lewis Henry Morgan, a 19th century pioneer in kinship studies, surmised that the Hawaiian system resulted from a situation of unrestricted sexual access or "primitive promiscuity" in which children called all members of their parental generation father and mother because paternity was impossible to acertain. Anthropologists now know that there is no history of such practices in any of the cultures using this terminology and that people in these societies make behavioural, if not linguistic, distinctions between their actual parents and other individuals they may call "father" or "mother". Morgan's theses was based on an ethnocentric assumption that the term for relatives in ego's parents' generation had the same meanings that father and mother have in English. Hawaiian kinship semantics are now thought to be related to the presence and influence of ambilineal descent systems.

Omaha (Kinship) System

The Omaha system is similar to the Iroquois and is in fact a bifurcate merging system. Ego uses the same categorizations for father, father's brother and mother's brother that he would in an Iroquois terminology. However, there is a significant difference in cousin terminology. Parallel cousins are merged with siblings, however cross-cousin terms are quite peculiar and cut across generational divisions. Ego uses the same terms for his mother's brother's son as he does for his mother's brother (F) and the same term for mother's brother's daughter as for his mother (B). This lumping of generations is referred to as skewing. This pattern has the effect of stressing common membership of relatives in patrilineal lines; Ego's "mother" is defined as a female member of his mother's partilineage, and Ego's "mother's brother" as a male member of his mother's patrilineage. As such Omaha terminologies are associated with societies that have a strong patrilineal emphasis in their social organization. Examples of Omaha terminologies include: Dani kin terms Igbo kin terms

Sudanese System

The Sudanese system is completely descriptive and assigns a different kin term to each distinct relative, as indicated by separate letters and colours in the diagram above. Ego distinguishes between his father (A), his father's brother (E), and his mother's brother (H). There are potentially eight different cousin terms. Sudanese terminologies are difficult to relate to specific social institutions, since they include no categories per se. They are generally correlated with societies that have substantial class divisions. Examples of Sudanese systems include: Latin kin terms Turkish kin terms Old English kin terms

Woman Exchange

The exchange of women is an element of alliance theory - the structuralist theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss and other anthropologists who see society as based upon the patriarchal treatment of women as property, being given to other men to cement alliances.

Eskimo (Inuit) System

The kinship system most commonly found in the United States; associated with bilateral descent. Usually a mother, father, and their children live together. The Eskimo system is marked by a bilateral emphasis - no distinction is made between patrilineal and matrilineal relatives - and by a recognition of differences in kinship distance - close relatives are distinguished from more distant ones. Another feature of Eskimo terminology is that nuclear family members are assigned unique labels that are not extended to any other relatives, whereas more distant relatives are grouped together on the basis of collateral degree . (This process is called collateral merging). Because of predominant marking of immediate family members, Eskimo terms usually occur in societies which place a strong emphasis on the nuclear family rather than on extended kin or larger kinship groups. Examples of Eskimo terminology include: English kin terms Ju/'hoansi (!Kung San) kin terms

EGO

The person in kinship diagrams from whose point of view the relationships are traced.

Levirate

The practice of a man marrying the widow of a deceased brother.

Sororate

The practice of a woman marrying the husband of her deceased sister.

Serial Monogamy

The practice of having a succession of marriage partners, but only one at a time.

Clan(s)

Unilateral descent groups, usually comprising more than ten generations, consisting of members who claim a common ancestry even though they cannot trace their exact connection back to that ancestor