Forming Family through Kinship - Introduction

Forming Family through Kinship ANTH 2301 Introduction Social scientists frequently refer to social norms and behaviours as sociocultural constructs. For instance, as discussed in Chapter 1, these norms and behaviours include how people are allocated to racial categories and what these categories indicate about an individual's status within that community. These customs and actions establish classifications and regulations based on social standards rather than biological realities, which makes them culturally diverse. Another sociocultural construct that establishes a web of biological and social ties between people is kinship. Social and biological links are interpreted by humans through kinship systems. While kinship is a common idea in human society, much like gender and age, there are vast differences in the precise "rules" governing who is related to whom and to what extent. Two people who in one cultural group might name each other cousins could not even think of themselves as related in another, depending on how kinship is defined. The widespread beliefs that kinship is fixed and derived from biological ties highlight how deeply ingrained sociocultural conceptions are in our daily lives. Our closest relatives are defined for us by culture, not by biology. Genetics is the foundation of biology, but culture determines kinship. Adoption is an intriguing and widely recognised example of the sociocultural aspect of kinship, wherein individuals who are not genetically related to one another are yet regarded as family members for legal and cultural purposes. Genetics is the basis for determining biological relatedness. This type of information is discovered through specialised DNA testing and usually has minimal bearing on our daily lives outside of situations involving the law and the economy when paternity or maternity may be in doubt. Otherwise, family is defined as the people we live with, depend on, and love, regardless of history or culture, including our own. These are the people we use family terminology to refer to, whether or not we have a precise genetic background with them: my mother, my kid, my aunt. The core of anthropology is the study of kinship. It offers profound insights on alliances and human relationships, including those who may and cannot marry, family formation processes, and even the distribution of social and financial resources within a society. Midway through the 1800s, amateur American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) finished one of the first studies on kinship. Drawn to the cultural multiplicity of the Haudenosaunee residing in upstate New York, Morgan started compiling lists of distinctions in family nomenclature throughout cultural groupings using historical narratives and questionnaires from missionaries serving in other regions. He identified three of the main kinship systems that are still in use today in Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871), designating each with either descriptive kinship terms, like “mother’s sister’s son,” or classificatory terms, which combine various relationships under a single term, like “cousin.” These three systems are now known as generational kinship, bifurcate merging kinship, and lineal kinship, even though Morgan used different names. His book's release signalled the start of kinship studies in anthropology. Following Morgan's work, anthropologists started studying kinship in greater detail. In his 1910 paper "The Genealogical Method in Anthropological Query," W.H.R. Rivers (1864–1922) presented the use of the genealogical approach in fieldwork. In order to get an understanding of how other cultures define family and family responsibilities, Rivers used a set of fundamental questions concerning parents, grandparents, and siblings to approach the study of kinship as a methodical investigation into the social structure of civilizations. Regardless of the size of the community, he maintained that examining kinship was a useful method of building rapport with individuals and encouraging them to provide more specific details about their life, even though his research was limited to small-scale communities. Even in modern times, ethnographers still employ surveys or in-person interviews as a kind of the genealogical technique, particularly when conducting fieldwork in small-scale populations. The goal of an ethnographer is to comprehend the sociocultural ties that exist in society and how family influences those interactions. British anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) and A.R. RadcliffeBrown (1881–1955) studied the intersections between kinship and other social institutions in the 1920s, expanding our understanding of kinship as a social institution. These intersections included inheritance, education, politics, and subsistence. Malinowski conducted fieldwork on the matrilineal Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea, where inheritance and ancestry could only be traced back through mothers and grandparents. He explored the functional importance of kinfolk in Trobriand culture and how it interacts with other social institutions to meet fundamental requirements in his work Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). Malinowski (1930, 19–20) states, "Kinship terminologies... are the most active and the most effective expressions of human relationship, expressions which start in early childhood, which accompany human intercourse throughout life, which embody all the most personal, passionate, and intimate sentiments of a man or woman," expanding kinship exploration beyond its early beginnings as a study of linguistic terminology only. He believed that kinship was what kept people bound to one another via strong relationships. In his work The Andaman Islanders (1922), A. R. Radcliffe-Brown similarly explored kinship as a social institution; however, rather than focusing on the role that kinship plays, Radcliffe-Brown looked at the roles and statuses that kinship practices produce for a person. Anthropologists gained a better understanding of the many ways that different cultural groups conceptualise concepts like family and community via these early kinship studies. In kinship connections, one's obligations and rights towards others are determined. These ties improve a society's ability to operate and provide solutions for common issues. While kindred has a lesser and more restricted function in larger-scale cultures, familial identification plays a substantial impact in most of the life choices an individual will have in small-scale communities with low population density. But kinship offers rules on how to behave with certain people and the expectations that go along with these relationships in every society. People's speech patterns and naming conventions highlight family ties throughout cultures. This kinship language is divided into two categories by anthropologists: words of address and terms of reference. Terms of reference are terms like "mother," "grandfather," or "father's brother" that are used to characterise a relationship between two people. Terms of address, such as "Mom," "Uncle," and "Grandpa," are words used to address family members personally. In certain cases, the terms "this is my father" and "hello, father" refer to the same thing. These words are significant because they describe interpersonal connections that bear rights and obligations that give human societies their structure.