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Chapter Summary
People are interdependent and they tend to organize themselves and conceptualize their relationships with each other via various forms of relatedness. These can include: friendship, marriage, parenthood, shared links to a common ancestor, or workplace associations (among other things). These forms of relatedness are shaped by cultural processes like politics, economics and other world views.
Kinship is a form of relatedness that focuses upon ideas about shared substance and its transmission, often thought to take place in the process of sexual reproduction. Cross-cultural comparison, however, shows that kinship is not a direct reflection of biology. Kinship principles are based on, but not reducible to, the universal biological experiences of mating, birth, and nurturance. Kinship systems help societies maintain social order without central government. Although female–male duality is basic to kinship, many societies have developed supernumerary sexes or genders.
Descent links generations of families, and there are a variety of patterns of descent. Bilateral descent results in the formation of groups called “kindreds” that include all relatives from both parents’ families. Unilineal descent results in the formation of groups called “lineages” that trace descent through either the mother or the father. Unlike kindreds, lineages are corporate groups. Lineages control important property, such as land, that collectively belongs to their members.
Marriage is a social process that transforms the status of its participants, stipulates the degree of sexual access the married partners are expected to have to each other, perpetuates social patterns through the production or adoption of offspring, and creates relationships between the kin of the partners. Woman marriage and ghost marriage among the Nuer demonstrate that the social roles of husband and father or wife and mother may be independent of the gender of the persons who fill them. There are four major patterns of post-marital residence: neolocal, patrilocal, matrilocal, and avunculocal.
Marriages may take the form of monogamy (married to one person at a time) or polygamy (married to several people). Polygamy can be further subdivided into polygyny and polyandry. The study of polyandry reveals how a society may distinguish a married woman’s sexuality from her reproductive capacity, a distinction not found in monogamous or polygynous societies. Most human societies permit marriages to end by divorce.Bridewealth is a payment of symbolically important goods by the husband’s lineage to the wife’s lineage. Anthropologists see this as compensation to the wife’s family for the loss of her productive and reproductive capacities. In contract, a dowry is typically a transfer of family wealth from parents to their daughter at the time of marriage.
There are three basic family types: nuclear, extended, and joint. Families may change from one type to another over time and with the birth, growth, and marriage of children. Friendship is a form of relatedness that is unique to humans. In some societies, the link between best friends may be ritually confirmed. Under conditions of globalization, older forms of relatedness such as kinship are transformed and new forms of friendship develop.
Learning Objectives
In this chapter, the student should learn to do the following:
- understand the ways in which cultural processes shape different systems of relatedness;
- identify the four major patterns of post-marital residence and provide examples of societies with such residence patterns;
- define marriage and discuss its various functions;
- understand the difference between a dowry and a bridewealth;
- discuss differences between monogamy, polygyny, and polyandry, and provide examples of societies that practice each of these three patterns;
- identify the three basic family types;
- discuss how friendship represents a form of relatedness;
- outline the various patterns of descent.