ANTH1008 Chapter Notes - Chapter 13: Extended Family, Gay Bashing, Incest Taboo
ANTH1008 Tutorial Three: Marriage and Kinship
• One of the major ways in which people sustain their connections to each other is by
asserting that they are in some way related
• Human life is group life, how they choose to organise themselves is open to creative
variation, but each of them are born into a society whose political, economic, and
cultural practices were already well established when the children are born. These
traditional practices make some kinds of social connections more likely than other
kinds. As a result, much can be predicted about child's probable path in life just by
knowing the kind of social groups into which he or she is born.
• Relatedness is the socially recognised ties that connect people in a variety of different
way, e.g. friendship, marriage, parenthood, shared links to common ancestors,
workplace associations, etc. These everyday relationships are always embedded in, and
shaped by, broader structures of power, wealth, and meaning.
• For more than a century, anthropologists have studied those forms of relatedness
believed to come from shared substance and its transmission (Holly 1996, 171) The
substance believed to be shared may be a bodily one (blood, genes, breast milk), or a
spiritual one (soul, spirit, nurturance, or love), sometimes more than one substance is
thought to be shared. Systems of relatedness based on ideas of shared substance is
called kinship systems. Kinship systems are social relationships that a prototypically
derived from the universal human experiences of mating, birth, and nurturance.
• In the West as well as many other parts of the world, people are thought to share a
common substance because it was transmitted to them via their parents having sexual
intercourse, which led to their conception and birth. Anthropologists concluded that all
people everywhere based their kinship systems on the biology of reproduction,
validating Western beliefs of what counted as "real" relatives.
• In the early days of kinship studies in anthropology were based on the assumption that
all societies recognised the same basic genealogical relationships between mothers and
fathers, children and parents, sisters and brothers, and so on. But, over the years,
ethnographic evidence indicated that quite often people's understandings of kin ties was
strikingly at odds with these genealogical relationships. In other cases, these
genealogical relationships turned out to form but a small subset of the ways in which
people created enduring connections with one another.
What is Kinship?
• Anthropologists call culturally recognised relationships based on mating marriage and
those based on birth descent (the principle based on culturally recognises parent-child
connections that define the social categories to which people belong). Although
nurturance is ordinarily seen to be closely connected with mating and birth, it need not
be, and all societies have ways of acknowledging a relationship based on nurturance
alone, which is called adoption.
• Although marriage is based on mating, descent on birth, adoption of nurturance, it
doesn't necessarily mean that marriage and mating are the same thing, nor is descent
and birth, or even adoption and nurturance. This is because the human experiences of
mating, birth, and nurturance are ambiguous. Systems of relatedness in different
societies highlight some features of the experiences while downplaying or even
ignoring others, e.g. Europeans and North Americans know that in their societies that
mating is not the same as marriage, although a culturally valid marriage encourages
mating between the married couple. Similarly, all births do not constitute valid links of
descent: children whose parents have not been married according to accept legal or
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spiritual specifications do not fit the cultural logic of descent, and many societies offer
no positions that they can properly fill. Finally, not all acts of nurturance are recognised
as adoption, e.g. Foster parents in the US, whose custody of children is officially
temporary, alternatively speaking, through culturally created ties of kinship, a society
emphasises certain aspects of human experience, constructs its own theory of human
nature, and specifies "the process by which an individual comes into being and
develops into a complete (i.e. Mature) social person" (Kelly 1993, 521)
• Marriage, descent, and adoption are selective institutions. One society may emphasise
women as the bearers of children and based its kinship system on the fact, paying little
formal attention to the male's role in conception. Another society may trace connections
through men, emphasising on the paternal role in conception and reducing the maternal
role. A third society may encourage its members to adopt not only children but adult
siblings, blurring the line between biological reproduction and family creation.
Although they contradict one another, al three understandings can be justified with
reference to the panhuman experiences of mating, birth, and nurturance
Sex, Gender, and Kinship
• Kinship is based on, but not reducible to, biology. It is a cultural interpretation of the
culturally recognised facts of human reproduction. One of the most basic of these facts,
recognises in some form in all societies, is that two different kinds of human beings
must cooperate sexually to produce offspring (although what they believe to be the
contribution of each party to the outcome varies from society to society).
• Anthropologists use the term sex to refer to the observable physical characteristics that
distinguish the two kinds of human beings, females and males, needed for reproduction.
People everywhere pay attention to morphological sex (the appearance of the external
genitalia and observable secondary sex characteristics, e.g. Penis and breast sizes).
Scientists further distinguish males from females on the basis of gonadal sex (the
presence of ovaries in females, testes in males) and chromosomal sex (two X
chromosomes in females, one X and one Y chromosomes in males).
• At the same time, cross-cultural research repeatedly demonstrates that physical sex
differences do not allow us to predict the roles that males or females will play in any
particular society. Consequently, anthropologists distinguish sex from gender (the
cultural construction of beliefs and behaviours considered appropriate for each sex)
• The outward physical features used to distinguish between the sexes may not be so
obvious either. Sometimes genetic or hormonal factor produce ambiguous external
genitalia, a phenomenon called hermaphroditism
Marriage
• Marriage: an institution that transforms the status of the participants, carries
implications about permitted sexual access, perpetuates social patterns through the birth
of offspring, creates relationships between the kin of the partners, and is symbolically
marked.
• Forms of relatedness are intimately connected with a widespread social process--
marriage. Marriage and household formation provide significant forms f social support
that enable people to take part in wider patterns of social life. In many places, they also
facilitate important economic and political exchanges between the two kinship ground
to which the individual spouses belong (dowry and bridewealth)
• Even when marriage is not connected with lineage or clan relations, marriage provides
frameworks for linking previously unrelated people to one another, embedding
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individuals within groups, and organising individual emotional commitments and
economic activities
• 'Marriage' and 'family' are two terms anthropologists use to describe how mating and its
consequences are understood and organised in different societies.
• Marriage is more than living together or having sexual relations. In most societies,
marriage also requires involvement and support from the wider social group to which
the spouses belong--first and foremost, from their families.
• Nowhere in the world is marriage synonymous with mating, but some criteria are
common in most societies.
• A prototypical marriage ordinarily involves a man and a woman, but same sex
marriages are slowly being more recognised and legalised. The marriage:
-transforms the status of the participants;
-stipulates the degree of sexual access the married partners are expected to have
together;
-perpetuates social patterns through the production or adoption of offspring, who also
have rights and obligations
-creates relationships between the kin of the partners;
-is symbolically markers in some way. E.g. An elaborate wedding, to the appearance of
the husband and wife sitting one morning in front of her hut
• In the 1930s E. E. Evans-Pritchard during his fieldwork among the Nuer people,
observed that the women in the community could marry another woman, and the new
woman would become a "father" of the children the wife bore. This practice also
appears in some other parts of Africa, and it's involves the distinction between the
father (pater) and biological father (genitor). The female husband (pater) would use her
own cattle to pay for the bridewealth to the wife's lineage, once the bridewealth was
paid, the marriage would be established. The female husband then got a male kinsman,
friend, or neighbour (the genitor) to impregnate the wife and to help with certain tasks
around the homestead that the Nuer believed could be done only by men. Generally, a
female husband was unable to have children herself "and for this, reason counts in
some respects as a man." She plays the social role of a man. She could marry multiple
wives if she were wealthy. She could demand damage payment if those wives engaged
in sexual activity without her consent. She was the pater of her wives' children. On the
marriage of her daughters, she receives the portion of the bridewealth that traditionally
went to the father, and her brothers and sisters received the portions appropriate to the
father's side. Her children were named after her, as though she were a man, and they
addressed her as "father"
• More common in the Nuer social life was what Evans-Pritchard called the 'ghost
marriage.' The Nuer believed that a man who died without male heirs left an unhappy
and angry spirit who might trouble his living kin. The spirit was angry because of a
basic obligation of Nuer kinship was for a man to be remembered through and by his
sons: his name had to be continued in his lineage. To appease the angry spirit, a
kinsman of the dead man (a brother or a nephew) would often marry a woman "to his
name". Bridewealth cattle were paid in the name of the dead man to the patrilineage of
a woman (the to-be wife's father etc.) She was then married to the ghost of the dead
man but lived with one of his surviving kinsmen. In the marriage ceremonies and
afterward, this kinsman acted as though he were the true husband. The children of the
union were referred to as though they were the kinsman, but officially they were not,
i.e. the ghost husband was their pater and his kinsman, their genitor. As the children get
older, the name of their ghost father would become increasingly important to them. The
ghost father's name, not his stand-in's name, would be remembered in the history of the
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Document Summary
These traditional practices make some kinds of social connections more likely than other kinds. Systems of relatedness based on ideas of shared substance is called kinship systems. Kinship systems are social relationships that a prototypically derived from the universal human experiences of mating, birth, and nurturance. In the west as well as many other parts of the world, people are thought to share a common substance because it was transmitted to them via their parents having sexual intercourse, which led to their conception and birth. Anthropologists concluded that all people everywhere based their kinship systems on the biology of reproduction, validating western beliefs of what counted as real relatives. In the early days of kinship studies in anthropology were based on the assumption that all societies recognised the same basic genealogical relationships between mothers and fathers, children and parents, sisters and brothers, and so on.
