ANT100: Lecture_7

Relatedness §

Readings §

• A society must assign individual names, identities, roles, interests, and statuses. This entails establishing and perpetuating corporate groups.
• Kinship is one universal way of making and maintaining such groups. (not the only way)
• 3 principles of kinship system: Marriage; Residence; Descent (血统)
• Other sub-issues such as gender, domestic, and property relations with the interconnections they make significantly shape the experience of the society.
• In addition, non-kinship characters can also be sued to create corporate groups
  • Sex/gender, age, race, common interest, class/socio-economic status.

People who are “special” §

• Kinship - the fundamental form of relatedness
  • Consanguineal - by descent, united “blood”
  • Affinal - by marriage, your own or someone else’s
  • These are not imagined community, but it is the model of imagined communities (the ideal “brotherhood)
    • Potentially excludes others (only includes the people within the brotherhood)
• Lewis Henry Morgan: believes family is the building block of modern society
• Franz Boas: father of American Anthropology (An Anthropologist’s Credo)
  • “It is conviction that the fundamental ethical point of view is that of the in-group, which must be expanded to include all humanity.”
• “All men shall be brothers” - by Friedrich Schiller, version of the poem ”Ode to Joy” set to music in Ludwig van Beethoven’s 9th symphony
  • Can all people be brothers

Descent groups (family & kin) §

• Corporate groups: share identity, economic and other practical functions, may share residence; act as a unit towards others.

  • The basic building block of social organization
  • Society: a group of groups

• Descent is essentially biological, but it can be ascribed

  Adoption, fostering (in Pulau Langkawi, eating together)

Lineages §

• Patrilineage - everyone descended from same male line (mother is not part of the lineage)

• Matrilineage - reckoned on the female side only (father is not part of the lineage)

  • Most matrilineage society is still patriarchy based

  • Most powerful male relative is Mother’s Brother (more than father)

  Wendat (Wyandot, Huron), Haudenosaunee (Iroquois)

• Kinship systems is classified differently in different societies (even with biological relationships such as “mother” and “father”)

  • The Hawaiian, Sudanese, and Inuit (Eskimo) system:

    • Triangle - male; Circle - female; “ego” - the centre of perspective; ”=” - marriage
    • first 3 on test

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Different relatedness §

• Emotion (affect) towards people with the same kinship role tends to be similar

  • Traditional Hawaiian daughter would feel much the same about her biological mother and her biological aunts
  • ==Feelings of kinship are socially constructed (doesn’t mean its not real)==

    • Can be defined by imaged “substance” (blood, - “blood relations”)

  “I’m my own grandpa” - the marriages mentioned are legal but culturally inappropriate (bit Incest)

• Residence - multiple families live in the House. Hearth is where women spend most of their lives, don’t normally eat elsewhere

  • People recognize belonging to the same house as a relationship

• ==Commensality (eating together) strengths the relationship among members of the house==

  • Important in building forms fo relatedness, cross-culturally

  • Performs, conforms and creates relationships

  • Siblings are conceived of people who eat together

  Relatedness among Malay in Pulau Langkawi (by Janet Carsten) (Won)

  • Argued in 1995 for overlap between the social and the biological in Malay relatedness
  • “The core substance of kinship in local perceptions is blood, and the major contribution to blood is food” (especially rice)

• Siblings

  • The placenta is considered as a younger sibling (until “real” sibling is born), buried near house
    • Because they are both nourished by the mother’s blood in the womb (become milk)
  • Uterus - the siblings’ first house; placenta - child’s first commensal relation

• Fostering relations

  • Common in Palau Langkawi, very common among Indigenous group is Canada
    • Milk siblings - people who had drunk the same mother’s milk
    • Marriage among milk sibling would be incestuous
  • Commensality then would create the relatedness
  • Contributes to flexibility of relatedness

• Relatedness is the result of social behaviour as well as brith

• Actual relationships does not determine degree of relatedness

  • Palau Langkawi: living in the house or moved out
  • Toronto: sister or half-sister

Marriage patterns §

• A reproductive alliance between families (does not need legal connection)

• Does not just involve the two (or more) people married, its involve their entire family

• The basic element for perpetuating relatedness Mong different descent groups (families)

• Legal marriage is only one form of what anthropologists call marriage

• Find marriage partner

  • Independent self-selection (love marriage)

  • Arranged marriage - (exchange of women between allied families, conducted by men)

    • Sometimes for practical considerations (economic, health…) [wealth is important]

      Kerala Brahmin Wedding

Types of marraige §

• Exogamy - marry outside the group

  Gender, close kin (defined by each society), longhouse group (Amazon river “tribes”)

• Endogamy - marry within the group

  Age, social class, religion, “race” or ethnic group

• May be absolute and/or legal, or relative and informal

• Same-sex marriage

  • Typically the result of self-selection
  • Legalized in many contemporary jurisdictions
  • Informal same-sex marriage is older and more widespread than legal same-sex marriage
  • Two-spirited - LGBTQ, non-binary behaviors in indigenous marriage alliances
    • Many traditional indigenous groups in North America were very flexible on the relationship between physiology and gender roles
    • Called Berdache, and were persecuted by Europeans and the behavior was discouraged