Chapter 11 Student Activities

A Personal Kinship Activity

Draw a kinship chart of your own family. Start with yourself at the bottom of the page and construct the chart using triangles for men and circles for women. Shade your own triangle or circle and label it “Ego” (Latin for “I”). Use the conventions in the figures in the chapter to draw in your parents and their siblings, your siblings, and the children of your parents’ siblings; then add your grandparents and their parents and siblings, and then the children of these people. Keep going until you get to the edge of your known universe of kinsmen. Why does your knowledge stop where it does? It’s probably because your parents and other relatives didn’t talk about these relatives; but why didn’t they?

A Thought Activity: A World of Kin and Strangers

Anthropologists sometimes divide the social world into kin and strangers. But we often have people in our lives who fall somewhere between these categories. What are some examples from your experience?