Chapter 10

Kinship and Descent

What Is Kinship?• Kinship is a relationship between any entities that

share a genealogical origin (biological, cultural, or historical).

• Kinship is the most basic principles for organizing individuals into social groups, roles, categories, and genealogy.

• One’s kinship status, determines these rights and obligations.

• Kinship is especially important in societies where institutions such as a centralized government, a professional military, or financial banks are absent or ineffective.

Functions of Kinship Groups

• Vertical function: provides social continuity by binding together a number of successive generations

• Horizontal functions: solidify a society across a single generation typically through marriage.

– Maintaining the integrity of resources that cannot be divided without being destroyed.

– Providing work forces for tasks that require a labor pool larger than households can provide.

– Rallying support for purposes of self-defense or offensive

attack.

Yoruba Egungun Dancer

• The Yoruba of West Africa commemorate family ancestors in the form of masked dancers who become possessed by the spirits of the dead to commune with their descendants.

• Image credit: © 1997 by Egba-Egbado Descendants Association. All rights reserved.

• For further information visit the Egba-Egbado Descentdants Association Web Site

Kinship studies

Kinship Diagrams - Basic Elements

Kinship Diagram - EGO

• Relationships are traced through a central individual labeled the Ego.

• The various elements are joined to produce a kinship diagram.

Review of Terms

• Consanguineal kin:

• Affinal kin:

Are relatives by blood, as determined by the local socio-cultural system.

Are relatives acquired by marriage either from the:

• Family of origination or the

• Family of procreation

Identify the Ego’s relatives?

• Can you identify all of Ego’s relatives below?

Lineal & Collateral Kin• Lineal kin: are

either direct ancestors or descendants of a particular Ego.

• Collateral kin: are composed of Ego’s siblings and their descendants & the siblings lineal kin of ascending generations and their descendants as well.

What Are Descent Groups?• A descent group is made up of relatives who live their

lives in close proximity to one another. – Have a strong sense of identity.– Often share communally held property– Provide economic assistance to one another.– Engage in mutual civic & religious ceremonies.

Functions of Descent Groups

• Mechanism for inheriting property & political office.

• Provide aid and security to their members.

• Repositories of religious tradition, with group solidarity enhanced by worship of a common ancestor.

• Control behavior.

• Regulate marriages.

• Structure primary political units.

Descent Systems

• Unilineal systems: descent is traced through parents and ancestors of only one sex (i.e mother’s line or father’s line, but not both).

• Non-unilineal (Cognatic) systems: descent is traced through either or both parents.

– While people of European ancestry are more familiar with cognatic kinship institutions, only 30% of the world's cultures view descent and group membership on this basis. The remaining majority of societies, including India and China, follow unilineal principles (Murdock 1949:59).

Unilineal Descent Groups

• Matrilineal descent (uterine)– Descent traced exclusively through the female line

to establish group membership.

• Patrilineal descent (agnatic)– Descent traced exclusively through the male line

to establish group membership.• A woman’s children are not included in her patrilineal

group. http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/anthropology/tutor/descent/unilineal/patri04.html

In many societies, unilineal descent groups assume important corporate functions such as land ownership,

political representation and mutual aid and support.

Matrilateral & Patrilateral Kin

Matrilateral kin (uterine): family members associated through Ego’s mother.

Patrilateral kin (agnatic): family members associated through Ego’s father.

Patrilineal descent

Photo source: YANOMAMO INTERACTIVE CD/ROM

Peter Biella, Napoleon A. Chagnon and Gary Seaman

© 1997 by Harcourt Brace & Company

• Most common unilineal descent group.

• A man, his children, his brother’s children, and his son’s children are all members of the same descent group.

• Females must marry outside their patrilineages and belongs to her father’s and his brother’s group.

• A woman’s children belong to the husband’s lineage rather than her own.

• Authority over the children lies with the father or his elder brother.

Patrilineal Descent – The Nuer• The Nuer are organized into sub-

divisions of clan lineages descended through the male line from a single ancestor. The lineages are a major structural factor for political order. These lineages are significant in the control and distribution of resources, and tend to coalesce with the territorial sections. Marriages must be outside one's own clan, and are made legal by the payment of cattle by the man's clan to the woman's clan, shared among various persons in the clan. The territorial groupings and lineage groupings are more closely aligned for some purposes than for others.

Matrilineal Descent• A woman, her siblings, her children,

her sister’s children, and her daughters children.

• Does not confer public authority on women, but women have more say in decision making than in patrilineal societies.

• 15% of the unilineal descent groups found among contemporary societies including:

– Native Americans (Hopi, Navajo, Cherokee & Iroquois).

– Truk & Trobrianders of the Pacific– Bemba, Ashanti, & Yao of Africa.

Hopi mother and child, c. 1900. Click on image for detail. Photo NAU.PH.93.38.4 by Edward S. Curtis, courtesy of Cline Library Special Collections, Northern Arizona University

White Mountain Apaches & Matrilineal Descent

• White Mountain Apaches in Arizona are organized in matrilineal clans.

• Small groups of these women lived and worked together, farming on the banks of streams in the mountains and gathering wild foods in ancestral territories.

• They trace their ancestry to Changing Woman, a mythological founding mother.

Question• In a/an ___________ descent group,

membership is traced either through males or through females but not both.

A. matrilineal

B. patrilineal

C. unilineal

D. double

E. ambilineal

Answer: C

• In a/an unilineal descent group, membership is traced either through males or through females but not both.

Question

• If you are a member of a patrilineal descent group.

A. descent is traced exclusively through females.

B. your sisters belong to the same patrilineal descent group that you do.

C. you are likely to live in a horticultural society.

D. your brothers belong to the same descent group but your sisters do not.

E. you do not have a mother.

Answer: B

• If you are a member of a patrilineal descent group, your sisters belong to the same patrilineal descent group that you do.

Organizational Hierarchies of Lineages

• This diagram shows how lineages, clans, phratries, and moieties form an organizational hierarchy.

• Each moiety is subdivided into phratries, each phratry is subdivided into clans, and each clan is subdivided into lineages.

Types of Unilineal Descent Groups

• Moiety– Each group that results from a division of a

society into two halves on the basis of descent.

• Phratry– A unilineal descent group composed of two

or more clans that claim to be of common ancestry. If only two such groups exist, each is a moiety.

Types of Unilineal Descent Groups

• Clan – An extended unilineal kinship group, often

consisting of several lineages, whose members claim common descent from a remote ancestor, usually legendary or mythological.

• Lineage– A unilineal kinship group descended from a

common ancestor or founder who lived four to six generations ago, and in which relationships among members can be stated genealogically.

Lineages • Made up of consanguineal kin who can trace their

genealogical links to a common ancestor.

• Marriage of a group member represents an alliance of two lineages.

• Lineage exogamy maintains open communication and fosters exchange of information among lineages.

Lineage Exogamy

• Lineage members must find their marriage partners in other lineages.

• This curbs competition for desirable spouses within the group and promotes group solidarity.

• Lineage exogamy also means that marriage is more than a union between two individuals; it is also a new alliance between lineages.

Red circle marks range when first cousin marriage is

allowed.

Yellow extension marks range when first cousins marriage is prohibited.

Western Marriage Prohibition Variants

Clans• Created when a

large lineage group splits into new, smaller ones.

• Members claim descent from a common ancestor without knowing the genealogical links to that ancestor.

• Clan identification is often reinforced by totems.

In the highlands of Scotland clans have been important units of social organization.

THE SEVEN CHEROKEE CLANS

Totemism

• The belief that people are related to particular animals, plants, or natural objects by virtue of descent from common ancestral spirits.

Kwakiutl totem poles and house of Nimpkish Chief Tlah-Co-Glass

The figures carved on Northwest Coast poles generally represent ancestors and supernatural beings that were once encountered by the ancestors of the lineage, who thereby acquired the right to represent them as crests, symbols of their identity, and records of their history.

Moieties

• Many Amazonian Indians in South America’s tropical woodlands traditionally live in circular villages socially divided into moieties.

• This is the Canela Indians’ Escalvado village as it was in 1970.

• Nearly all 1,800 members of the tribe reside in the village during festival seasons, but are otherwise dispersed to smaller, farm-centered circular villages.

Question

• When the membership of a descent group grows too large, ___________ may occur, creating two new, smaller lineages.

A. fusion

B. lineal decrease

C. fission

D. exogamy

E. moietization

Answer: C

• When the membership of a descent group grows too large, fission may occur, creating two new, smaller lineages.

Question• Membership in a __________ is determined

not by descent from a common ancestor (as in descent groups) but by the fact that they share a living relative (ego).

A. clanB. lineageC. phratryD. kindredE. moiety

Answer: D

• Membership in a kindred is determined not by descent from a common ancestor (as in descent groups) but by the fact that they share a living relative (ego).

Kinship Terminologies

• The Hawaiian system• The Eskimo system• The Iroquois system• Omaha system• Crow system• Sudanese or descriptive system

One of the founders of the anthropological relationship research was Lewis Henry Morgan.

The major patterns of kinship systems which Lewis Henry Morgan identified through kinship terminology in his 1871 work Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family are:

Eskimo System

• System of kinship terminology, also called lineal system, that emphasizes the nuclear family by specifically identifying the mother, father, brother, and sister, while lumping together all other relatives into broad categories such as uncle, aunt, and cousin.

Hawaiian System

• Kinship reckoning in which all relatives of the same sex and generation are referred to by the same term.

Polynesian societies throughout the Pacific Ocean are traditionally structured conforming to the Hawaiian system of kinship terminology.

Iroquois System• Kinship terminology wherein a father and father’s

brother are given a single term, as are a mother and mother’s sister, but a father’s sister and mother’s brother are given separate terms.

• • Parallel cousins are classified with brothers and sisters,

while cross cousins are classified separately, but (unlike Crow and Omaha kinship) not equated with relatives of some other generation.