Assignment A
Q1. Critically examine the descent approach to the study of kinship
Ans. Kinship in our society is used for establishing clear-cut corporate social units. Each of us is a
member of a cooperating and closely bound group of people. One can depend upon the help and
support given by such people. Such cooperating local groups are always larger than elementary
families of spouses and their children. When these groups are recognized or defined on the basis of
shared descent, anthropologists call them descent groups. Formally speaking there are six possible
avenues for the transmission of descent group membership, from parents to children.
These are
Patrilineal: Where descent is traced in the male line from father to son,
Matrilineal: Where descent is traced in the female line from mother to daughter,
Double: Where descent is traced in both the father’s line as well as the mother’s line for different
attributes such as movable property in one line and immovable in another,
Cognatic (bilateral): Where attributes are transmitted equally through both parents. Here no
unilineal groups can be formed but group structure can be cognatic, that is, the group of kinspersons
on the father’s and mother’s side. Membership can be acquired through either the father or mother,
Parallel descent: A very rare form of descent where descent lines are sex specific. Men transmit to
their sons while women to their daughters, and
Cross or alternative type descent: This is also very rare. Here men transmit to their daughters and
women to their sons.
Kinship was regarded as the theoretical and methodological core of social anthropology in the early
and middle part of the 20th century. Although comparative studies gradually abandoned an explicit
evolutionist agenda, there remained an implicit evolutionary cast to the way in which kinship studies
were framed. Indeed, scholarly interest in the cross-cultural comparison of kinship institutions could
be traced back to asset of questions deriving from the cultural evolutionists.
The central problem addressed by anthropologists of the early 20 th century was directly related to
the colonial enterprise and focused on understanding the mechanisms for maintaining political order
in stateless societies. Given that such societies lacked centralized administrative and judicial
institutions—the bureaucratic machinery of the state—how were rights, duties, status, and property
transmitted from one generation to the next? Traditional societies accomplished this task by
organizing around kinship relations rather than property. This distinction arose out of the models
that had been developed by Maine and Morgan, in which cultural evolution was driven by the
transition from status to contract forms of organization and from corporate to individual forms of
property ownership.
Prominent British social anthropologists of this period, such as Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-
Pritchard, and Fortes, generally advocated a functionalist approach to these questions. The major
premises of functionalism were that every aspect of a culture, no matter how seemingly disparate
(e.g. , kinship terms, technology, food , mythology, artistic motifs), had a substantive purpose and
that within a given culture these diverse structures worked together to maintain the group’s
viability. For instance, these scholars saw the family as a universal social institution that functioned
primarily to rear children. From their perspective this function was to a large degree self- evident
and cross –culturally constant. The wider groupings recruited through kinship, which were the basis
of political and economic organization, were much more culturally variable and hence of greater
interest.
Q2. ‘Cultural approach focuses on kinship as cultural ’. Discuss
Ans. In response to the often-deafening debates concerning the marriage equality movement in the
US, clandestine polygamous marriages in Italy, transnational adoptions, and expanding global access
to medicalized reproduction, this Curated Collection draws together five recent essays to be
published by Cultural Anthropology which critically examine the topic of kinships. Through an array
of methodological, theoretical, and textual approaches, the essays in this issue focus attention on
less familiar, though equally instructive, practices, and imaginaries of kinship. We offer these essays
as a challenge to reflect on the perpetual motion of the politics of kinship, as well as an invitiation to
explore the rich archive on the topic to be found in Cultural Anthropology.
In its 20 year history, Cultural Anthropology has published cutting edge scholarship on topics ranging
from incest to genetics. Despite the penetrating analyses that many of these studies offer, the pages
of Cultural Anthropology also reflect the wavering significance of the study of kinship to
anthropological scholarship. For although attention to kinship is evident from the earliest issues of
the journal, for example, Sherry Errington’s 1987 article “Incestuous Twins and the House Societies
of Insular Southeast Asia”, the journal was relatively silent on the topic of kinship for nearly a decade
after the publication of Errington’s essay until the posthumous publication of David Schneider’s
notes on alternative kinship formations. Schneider’s article,” The Power of Culture: Notes on Some
Aspects of Gay and Lesbian Kinship in America Today”, inaugurated a debate that brought
‘homosexual kinship’ into the spotlight and drew comment from Marilyn Strathern, Richard K.
Herrell, and Ramon A. Gutierrez.
The topic of kinship remained unexamined in these pages for another decade with exception of
Susan McKinnon’s article, ”Domestic Exceptions: Evans-Pritchard and the Creation of Nuer
Patrilineality and Equality” . McKinnon’s article offers an interrogation of the theoretical
underpinnings of the work of one of the most influential anthropologists in the discipline of
anthropology: Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard. McKinnon’s close reading of Evans-Pritchard’s
corpus on the Nuer (i.e., Naath) highlights the ‘situatedness and cultural specificity of the theoretical
frameworks’ that were in use at the time of its composition. This approach enables McKinnon to
reveal the presence of a tripartite division between the domestic, the political, and the religious
spheres undergirding Evans-Pritchard’s depiction of Nuer everyday life. Consequently, McKinnon
argues that Evans-Pritchard’s presentation of the Nuer as egalitarian and patrilineal not only
obscures the existence of alternative models of kinship and affiliation amongst the Nuer, but also
reinforces his onto- epistemological orientations.
Eight years after McKinnon’s essay, Cultural Anthropology revisited the topic of kinships with the
publication of two articles in its November 2008 issue: “we were Dancing in the Club, Not on the
Berlin Wall: Black Bodies, Street Bureaucrats, and Exclusionary Incorporation into the New Europe”
By Damani James Partidge and “Runaway Stories: The Underground Micromovements of Filipina
Oyomesan in Rural Japan” by Lieba Faier. Not only do these articles share a focus on the manifest
diversity in kinship formations, but their authors also both attend to how those formations are
inflected by local, transnational, and global forces.
Assignment B
Q3. How is family different from household?
Ans. Family:
‘Family’ has no particular definition. It could mean all the generation after a common ancestor
(an entire family tree) or parents and children living together as a single unit. In Sociology, we
often use the narrower definition while we bring in the rest of the family only when they all live
together (as in a joint family). A family is typically bound by common shared characteristics but
in the light of the modern world we live in, this is not a mandatory characteristic for the
determination of a unit as a family.
Now comes the question of families out of blood or kinship (marriage). In reality, families don’t
demand relationships through either blood or kinship. If this was a requirement, a single parent
with children (or adopted children) should conventionally not be considered a family but it is. So
are couples without children? The same goes for an unmarried couple with adopted children. So,
families don’t require multiple generations under one roof.
Household:
A household is typically a group of people who live under one roof, irrespective of their blood or
kinship relations. They are mostly families, though. But a significant lot could be students who
are flatmates, people who have moved out of home and are living independently or people living
in homes for migrant workers as such.
Taking into account the contemporary world, the two are not always the same. In this age of
numerous migrations, many individuals stay away from their parents or even spouses and
children. They pool in resources to live under the same roof. In conclusion, All families are also
households, but not all households are families. The difference between families and households
varies from one person to another as well as from one society to another.
Q4. Explain the caste and gender inter-sectionality in kinship.
Ans. India is perhaps one of the most diverse countries in the world. Not just in terms of its
geography but more so in terms of its cultural identity. Every region in the country has its own
norms, its own understanding of things and its own complexities therein. These complexities in
turn led to development of subsections in societies, subsections that began to be decided by their
knowledge of the Vedic texts, which began deciding the roles these sub sections played in the
functioning of the society, ultimately leading to the marginalisation of certain sections of the
society. This is the basic understanding of the caste system that was, and in many places
continues to be, prevalent in India. Along with the intersectionality of caste and gender there is
another facet of society that I shall look at in this answer. That is the multiple forms of
patriarchies that exist in our society. The plurality of patriarchies is a facet of social disparity,
which is entangled with as well as produces diversity; it has been sustained and partly generated
by combinations of legal pluralism, religious pluralism, and the customary domain. Caste
division, division of labour, and the complex articulation of matrilineal and patrilineal systems
and of the coexistence of tribal and agrarian modes of production with regional histories, along
with the formation of religious sects have played a major role in the crystallisation of multiple
patriarchies. One of the by-products of caste divisions was that women of all varnas could not be
clubbed together under the same patriarchal norms.
Q5. Write a note on the feminist contributions to kinship studies
Ans. From the 1960s onward the feminist movement and the scholarship it inspired have had a
very obvious impact on kinship studies. This resulted first in a number of important works that
documented the lives of women, which had previously been omitted from ethnographic accounts.
Women’s involvement in households and domestic arrangements, grade, exchange, labour,
religion, and economic life was rendered in detail, making the gaps in previous cross-cultural
studies all too visible.
By the end of the 1970s, attention had begun to shift from women to the symbolization of gender
itself. This shift can be connected to a broader questioning of gender roles outside (and within)
the academy and was marked by the analytical separation of the terms gender and sex, among
other things. Studies of women had made it eminently clear that there were very few
characteristics that could be attributed both exclusively and universally to one sex or the other;
whether one was expected to be strong or weak, aggressive or passive, serious or humorous,
disciplinarian or nurturing, and so on depended on cultural expectations, not on biology. To
Clarify this difference, scholars came to use sex to refer to biological characteristics, the most
obvious of which are the genitalia (e.g. , male, female, or hermaphroditic ). Studies of gender as a
symbolic system focused on the roles that men and women played, on ideas about what
constituted a proper man or woman in a particular culture, and on how differences between men
and women were perceived in that culture. They sought to avoid prior assumptions about what
these differences were.
Assignment C
Q6. Descent
Ans. It refers to the socially existing recognized biological relationships between people in
society. Every society looks at the fact that all offspring and children descend from their parents
and usually it is said biological relationship exists between parents and children. Therefore
descent is used to traces an individual’s ancestry. Descent and lineage are often used
interchangeably as well in conjunction to mean similar things for discussing kinship. Descent is
the principle whereby a person is socially affiliated with the group of his or her parents,
grandparents and so on. The individual belongs simultaneously to several descent groups- those
of two parents, the four grandparents, the eight great grandparents and so on
Q7. Cross-cousin marriage
Ans, Cross- cousin marriage divides members of the same generations into two approximately
equal groups, those of cross-cousins and “siblings” that include real siblings and parallel cousins.
Consequently, cross- cousin marriage can be a normal from of marriage in a society, but the other
systems above can only be privileged forms. This makes cross-cousin marriage exceptionally
important. In discussing consanguineal kinship in anthropology, a parallel cousin or ortho-cousin
is a cousin from a parent’s same- sex sibling, while a cross-cousin is from a parent’s opposite-sex
siblings. Thus, a parallel cousin is the child of the father’s brother or of the mother’s sister, while
a cross-cousin is the child of the mother’s brother or of the father’s sister.
Q8. Live-in relationship
Ans. The idea of live in relationship evolves from the broadened mindset of the people who
started to crave for a relationship with no-strings-attached. A living relationship couple are the
ones who cohabit, with no expectations being the bottom line. However, there is no legal
definition to describe the concept in Indian law. It is more of a westernised theory with very less
relevance with the Indian tradition. So the Supreme Court, at various instances taken the liberty
elaborate on the concept through their judgements. It is different from a marriage. (Marriage or
wedlock or matrimony, is a socially/ritually acknowledgeable union of a couple). Live in
relationship partners don’t force on obligations.
Q9. NRT
Ans. New Reproductive Technology refers to technologies that intervene in the biological act of
procreation. It can facilitate, prevent or intervene in the process of reproduction including birthing,
contraception, abortion and antenatal testing. NRT is also referred as assisted reproduction.
The most prominent reference for understanding NRT is In-vitro Fertilisation (IVF). In this procedure
eggs are surgically removed from one woman’s ovaries and transferred into another woman’s womb
in order to create reproductive possibilities. NRT is not only a medical device, but also an institution
that allows the “creation of parenthood, thus giving way to new forms of procreation (Heritier 1985).
NRT requires the intervention of human, machine and medical professional to make reproductive
choices available to individuals. The inherent requirement of third party in reproduction has
impacted the understanding of kinship.
Q10. Family of choice
Ans. The family by choice is an illustration of the fact that biology is not the only defining feature of
kinship. People can be kin without sharing blood and marital relation. Kinship is based on love and
enduring solidarity expected to characterise these familial relationship. Further it also negates the
idea of procreation based on heterosexual identities. Family is no longer seen only as unit for
reproduction rather it can be a non-procreative unit. Such family ties are based on ideology of choice
and love, and stand in opposition to biological model of kinship. The families of choice therefore,
emerge as an important basis to question biologically modelled heterosexual domain of kinship,
which has failed to provide support and care to lesbian women and men.
