Chapter 16 Outline

Kinship and Gender: Sex, Power, and Control of Men and Women

Introduction

Soap operas and telenovelas are some of the most enduring and popular dramas on TV. Here is a very brief synopsis of the classic También los Ricos Lloran—“The Rich Also Cry” (1979):

Maid marries wealthy young man.
They have son, but she gives him away to an old woman on the street.
Mother spends eighteen years looking for son, tragically finding him only when he begins dating her adopted daughter.
Mother tells daughter that she is dating her own brother! Daughter is understandably hysterical.
Mother does not tell father that their sibling children are dating, fearing this might upset him.
Father gets mad anyway because he mistakenly thinks his wife is having an affair with daughter’s boyfriend.
He is so outraged that he confronts his wife and (unknown to him) son with a gun. Drama!
In the climactic moment, mother screams “Son!” Father is confused but does not shoot.
Son screams “Father, let me embrace you!”
Happy ending.

Although common in world mythology, such turns of event rarely occur in real life. Why are these melodramas so appealing to people in such a wide range of cultures? Probably because they are an exaggerated version of the real-life family dynamics many people experience: the complexities of love, sex, and power.
Anthropologists are especially interested in some of the cultural assumptions made by telenovelas.

For example, the father’s rage turns instantly to joy upon learning that the young male is his biological son. Likewise, the daughter would probably be less distressed about incest if she knew she was not the biological sibling of her “boyfriend.”

Not all cultures consider biological relatedness the defining characteristic of a family.
Cultural anthropology asks, How are families more than just groups of biologically related people? Within this larger question are the following questions around which this chapter is organized.

What are families, and how are they structured in different societies?
Why do people get married?
In what ways are males and females different? 
What does it mean to be neither male nor female? 
Is human sexuality just a matter of being straight or queer?

Peoples’ social lives are centered around core relationships of kinship, marriage, and family.

What Are Families and How Are They Structured in Different Societies?

Families fulfill similar functions in most societies: comfort and belonging for members, a sense of identity, shared values and ideals, economic cooperation, and nurturance of children.
Although these functions are common, the patterns of achieving them are constructed in culturally specific and dynamic systems of kinship: the social system that organizes people in families based on descent and marriage.
Families are not permanent entities as members come and go. Individuals may be members of multiple families in the course of a lifetime, beginning with a natal family (some scholars call this the “family of orientation”): the family into which a person is born and (usually) raised.
In other words, families are dynamic. The realities of life in any given society often create a gap between its real and idealized family types.
Politicians and religious leaders in the United States often argue for “traditional” marriages, families, and values—rarely bothering to specify which traditions they’re referring to (and probably not understanding the complex diversity of traditions that have existed).
Many assume the model presented in 1950s sitcoms like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver: working father, stay-at-home mother, and dependent children. Further, they assume that this “traditional” pattern existed pretty much from the beginning of time until the 1970s.
In reality, the idealized “tradition” presented by 1950s sitcoms isn’t much older than the sitcoms themselves. The independent American suburban family was a recent and short-lived phenomenon in the United States.
The Great Depression of the 1930s and the war years of the 1940s had kept birth rates low. The 1950s were a time of unprecedented economic growth, family stability, and a lot of babies—77 million “baby boomers” born in fifteen years.
Young nuclear families spurred the development and spread of suburban housing. By the late 1950s, independent American suburban families were the norm (about 60% of Americans lived in one), if not a deeply rooted tradition.
Beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Ozzie and Harriet norm changed in many interconnected ways:

More women in the workforce
More two-income households
Fewer children (one or two, rather than three or four)
More divorces
More blended families

Still, the United States and many other nations in the world, view the nuclear family as an ideal form: the family formed by a married couple and their children.
But many other forms exist, and this makes kinship charts (a visual representation of family relationships) particularly helpful to anthropologists: visual representations of family relationships (see Figure 16.1). These charts are useful for diagramming biological relationships, if not the cultural meanings associated with these relationships.
In economics, as well as other aspects of life, families function as corporate groups: groups of real people who work together toward common ends much like a corporation does.
Families are also versatile enough to include nonnuclear members. We call these extended families: larger groups of relatives beyond the nuclear family, often living in the same household.
Extended families were common in nineteenth-century America, with households shared by nuclear relatives, grandparents, unmarried aunts or uncles, etc.
In hard economic times, extended-family households provide a larger number of potential wage earners to contribute to the family’s needs.
Clans and lineages are larger descent groups that subtly differ from one another:

Clan: a group of relatives who claim to be descended from a single ancestor.
Lineage: a group composed of relatives who are directly descended from known ancestors (usually a known human ancestor).

Clans are most often exogamous: a social pattern in which members of a clan must marry someone from another clan, which has the effect of building political, economic, and social ties with other clans.
Descent is a complicated system of organization because we all have innumerable ancestors—we could conceivably trace our ancestry back to any of these people. One way that societies have traditionally narrowed their ancestors down is through unilineal descent (patrilineal or matrilineal).

Unilineal: based on descent through a single line, either males or females.
Patrilineal: reckoning descent through males from the same ancestors. Most clans and lineages in nonindustrial societies (Omaha Indians, the Nuer of South Sudan, societies in the central highlands of Papua New Guinea) are patrilineal.
Matrilineal: reckoning descent through women, who are descended from an ancestral woman. In matrilineal societies (such as the Trobriand Islanders) everyone is a member of his or her mother’s clan and a person’s strongest identity is with relatives in the mother’s clan and lineage.

Importantly, matrilineal societies are not necessarily matriarchal, in which women hold political power. Women may have some authority to determine clan land use, but it is usually the men who retain most control over clan resources.
In addition to clans and lineages, anthropologists have documented cognatic (or bilateral) clans: reckoning descent through either men or women from some ancestor. The main difference between a cognatic clan (e.g., Samoans) and a unilineal clan is that one can be a member of multiple cognatic clans.
Lewis Henry Morgan (1871) identified six basic kinship terminology patterns.
Given our innumerable ancestors and relations, individuals and societies reach a point where some must be “forgotten.” This is called genealogical amnesia: structural process of forgetting whole groups of relatives, usually because they are not currently significant in a person’s active social life.
Cultures vary in their childrearing patterns.
Beginning in the 1930’s, Margaret Mead studied how patterns of childrearing, social institutions and cultural ideologies shaped individual personality and thought patterns. This work was part of the culture and personality movement.

Mead studied childcare on the island of Samoa for her first project.
Today we believe parental care shapes adult aspirations.

How Families Control Power and Wealth?

One cross-cultural function of families is managing their members’ wealth. In this sense, wealth is broader than just currency, including resources, the work and reproductive capacity of family members, and inheritance rights when a member dies.
Anthropologists studying nonindustrial societies in early to mid-twentieth-century Africa, South America, and the Pacific quickly realized that women’s labor in the fields and gardens in horticultural, agricultural, and pastoral communities was extremely important to the family.
When a woman in these cultures married (leaving her natal family), it represented a loss of both her labor and her reproductive potential for the family. Compensation for this loss is called bride price: exchange of gifts or money to compensate another clan or family for the loss of one of its women along with her productive and reproductive abilities in marriage.

For example, in patrilineal Zulu tribes, cattle are paid as bride price. When a man decides whom he would like to marry, his male relatives begin negotiating bride price with the potential bride’s family.
Bride price or bridewealth may take many forms, including wild game in Amazon communities, pigs and shell valuables in New Guinea societies, or a young man’s work as “bride service” for his wife’s family for a set period of time.

Child price payments, intended to buy rights in a woman’s children, is most typical in societies with patrilineal clans. In those with matrilineal clans, the children belong to their mother’s clan and typically live with her.
Another form of marriage payment, common in India, is dowry: a large sum of money or in-kind gifts given to a daughter to insure her well-being in her husband’s family.
The practice of dowry has been illegal in India since 1961, but these laws are not observed in many parts of the country. In recent years, abuses of dowry (sometimes called “dowry deaths”) have outraged international human rights groups. Husbands’ families have effectively held wives as ransom for more dowry money, even threatening and killing women in some cases.
Families also control wealth, property, and power through inheritance rules.
In any society, inheritance goes to legitimate heirs. Often, but not always, these are the children of a socially recognized married couple.
See “The Anthropological Life: Family Centered Social Work and Anthropology”.

Why Do People Get Married?

For most Americans marriage is about love and sex, but in most marriage is about cultivating political and economic relations between families and families choose an individual’s marriage partner.
Marriage creates formally recognized ties between the marriage partners and their respective families, and any children resulting from the union are considered “legitimate.”
The many social functions of marriage explain why same-sex marriage has become a key political issue in many societies.
If there is a discernible global trend in marriage, it is toward two partners of any gender. As same-sex unions gain widespread acceptance, polygamy is decreasing in many parts of the world.

Polygamy: any form of plural marriage; previously far more common in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific than they are today. More specifically, anthropologists divide polygamy into the following:

Polygyny: when a man is simultaneously married to more than one woman. In Africa and Melanesia having more than one wife indicates an important man with greater wealth, higher social status, or more importance in the community.
Polyandry: when a woman has two or more husbands at one time—significantly rarer than polygyny. The best-known examples are the Toda of India and the Nepalese Sherpa, who relied on polyandry to keep large estates from splitting up. In both cases, brothers marry the same woman, a practice known as fraternal polyandry.

All cultures have rules regarding sex and marriage. In the case of arranged marriages, parents may select partners from specific socioeconomic, religious, educational, or ethnic backgrounds. (Even in non-arranged marriages, parents may have preferences, whether stated or not.)
In addition, there are universal cultural rules against marriage between people who are too closely related. (How close is too close varies.) These are referred to as incest taboos: the prohibition on sexual relations between close family members.

Two “exceptions that prove the rule” are ancient Egypt and Hawaii before European contact, where a monarch was expected to marry his sister. Of course, not everyone in these societies could engage in incest—only rulers, as “living gods,” were required to marry a sibling.
Some cultures prohibit marriage between cousins (at least, specific types of cousins); others do not.

Why do incest taboos exist, and why do they exist nearly everywhere?

Evolutionary explanations view taboos as an adaptive measure to avoid the birth defects associated with incest. However, first-cousin marriages, especially in populations of 300–500 people, don’t cause significantly higher rates of birth defects.
Another evolutionary explanation is the Westermarck effect, favored by Steven Pinker (1997). According to this explanation, natural selection has selected genes that cause us to lack sexual attraction toward people in and around our natal families. Both explanations link incest taboos to evolutionary biology since, in contrast to specific cultural rules, basic anatomy and physiology are shared by all people.
The weakness of Pinker’s argument is that (1) no gene or combination of genes has been identified as linked to this revulsion, (2) the range of relatives prohibited by the incest taboo varies too widely from society to society to be explained by natural selection, and (3) there is no reason to assume that the revulsion is the cause of the taboo since it could just as easily be that the incest taboo itself has generated the revulsion.
Some anthropologists counter that taboos can be explained socially, citing the research of Melford Spiro (1958). Spiro’s work showed that adolescents who lived together in Israeli kibbutzes rarely dated or married, despite there not being a prohibition against it.

In What Ways Are Males and Females Different?

Differences between men and women are reinforced by powerful, ongoing messages that tend to stereotype roles.
These stereotypes have become topics of intense debate in the United States, as our culture struggles over issues like why women are excluded from certain kinds of jobs, and why men dominate certain professions.
How can we explain why our culture constructs these differences in these specific ways?
The primary explanation our culture gives for differences between males and females is that they are “hardwired” differently.
Differences in sex, the reproductive forms and functions of the body, are often thought to produce differences in attitudes, temperaments, intelligences, aptitudes, and even achievements between males and females.
Conclusions about “hardwired” differences in sex are muddied by evidence that culture also shapes male and female preferences and behaviors.

See “Classic Contributions: Margaret Mead and the Sex/Gender Distinction”

While Mead’s work shaped anthropological thinking for decades, it has more recently been challenged in large part because it is so difficult to tease apart just how much differences in male and female behavior are caused by “sex”—the biology of our bodies—and how much they are caused by “gender”—the cultural component of “male” and “female”.
Anthropologists increasingly reject this either-or perspective—that it’s either biology or culture, either sex or gender—and accept that male-female differences are shaped by a mix of biology, environmental conditions, and sociocultural processes.
Following these intellectual shifts, anthropologists are changing their terminology, referring instead to the ideas and social patterns a society uses to organize males, females, and those who do not fit either category as gender/sex systems.
Gender is now seen as fluid and dynamic and not an essential entity.
Science textbooks have long suggested that human beings are a sexually dimorphic species, where males and females have a different sexual form.
The differences we can trace to sexual dimorphism are themselves not enough to challenge certainties about the fact of male and female difference.
The dichotomy between males and females breaks down as variations in chromosomes, gonads, internal reproductive structures, hormones, and external genitalia become apparent.
Some individuals diverge from the male-female norm and are called intersex, exhibiting sexual organs and functions somewhere between, or including, male and female elements.

One estimate puts the frequency of intersex in the United States at 1.7% of all live births, but the rates of intersex vary between populations.

Different societies deal with intersex differently: some do not make anatomical features the dominant factors in constructing gender/sex identities, and some cultures recognize biological sex as a continuum.
In the United States, most intersex children are treated shortly after birth with “sex- assignment surgery” to eliminate any genital ambiguity.
Decisions involved in sex-assignment surgery are rarely medical but are derived from culturally accepted notions about how a boy or girl should look.
Sex-assignment surgery shows that “sex” is not simply a biological phenomenon, but is literally constructed upon cultural assumptions: the assumption that sex is a dichotomy, as well as assumptions about what an ideal male or female should look like.
Nearly all societies with any degree of social stratification have more men in leadership roles than women in political, economic and social roles involving trade, exchange, kinship relations, ritual participation, and dispute resolution.
French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir‘s book “The Second Sex” argued that throughout history women have been considered “the second sex,” inferior in status and subordinate to men.
Prior to de Beauvoir, a handful of women anthropologists had studied women’s status and roles in other societies, seeking to understand if all societies treated women as unequally as Euro-American societies did.
It took both de Beauvoir’s work and that of these women anthropologists to demonstrate how anthropology as a discipline had largely ignored the issue of gender/sex inequality.
Most feminist anthropologists rejected the idea that biological differences are the source of women’s subordination, but that cultural ideologies and social relations impose lower status, prestige, and power on women.
On one side were those who argued that women’s lower status is universal.
On the other side were feminist anthropologists who argued that egalitarian male-female relations have existed throughout human history.
The entire feminist anthropology debate led to the recognition that gender/sex inequality is, if not universal, at least pervasive.
This also brought the study of what women say and do to the mainstream of the discipline.
This entire debate came to an impasse over differences of interpretation about the evidence, and participants shifted their positions.
This impasses also accompanied a shift in how anthropologists studied relations between men and women.
The resulting perspective suggests that gender/sex inequality is not something static that people “possess;” it is something that they “do.”
This also led to a rethinking of men and the anthropological study of masculinity, the ideas and practices of manhood.

What Does It Mean to Be Neither Male Nor Female?

Despite their natural “feel”, the male and female, man and woman dichotomies we take for granted are as artificial and constructed as any society’s gender/sex system.
Many gender/sex systems around the world are less rigid or constraining than our own.
In many societies, some people live their lives as neither male nor female, and have a culturally accepted, often prestigious, symbolic niche and social pathway.
Anthropologists call this third gender or gender variance: expressions of sex and gender that diverge from the male and female norms which dominate in most societies.
Third gender has often been entangled in debates about sexuality, which encompasses sexual preferences, desires, and practices.
Sexual preferences intersect in complex ways with gender variance.
Gender/sex identities, including normative categories like “man” or “woman,” are established not by sexual practices but through social performance.
In Navajo society five genders are recognized including nádleehé individuals held in high esteem who combine male and female roles and characteristics.
Indian hijras are a third gender who have special social status by virtue of their devotion to Bahuchara Mata.
Hijras are defined as males who are sexually impotent, either because they were born intersex or because they underwent castration.
The lack of male genitals leads hijras to be viewed as “man minus man” and as “male plus female” because they dress and talk like women, take on women’s occupations, and act like women in other ways.

Is Human Sexuality Just a Matter of Being Straight or Queer?

Sexuality—sexual preferences, desires, and practices— is usually assumed to be an either/or issue: people are either heterosexual or homosexual.
We also assume that most humans are heterosexual, a term that implies that this particular sexuality is normal and morally correct, while anything else is deviant.
“Queer” is a currently used term that once had derogatory connotations but in recent years has been given positive connotation in gay and lesbian communities.
Kinsey’s series of sexuality studies in the 1940s revealed that human sexuality is far more complex and subtle, concluding that sexuality exists along a continuum.
Anthropologists today emphasize that human sexuality is a flexible phenomenon ranging along a continuum from asexual (non-sexuality) to polyamorous (love of many).
The notion that sexuality is an essence buried deep in a person’s psychological self or genetic makeup is no longer accepted, nor is the notion that sexuality is just a matter of personal preference or individual orientation.
Rather, sexuality is learned, patterned, and shaped by culture and the political-economic system in which one lives.
In the 1960s, anthropologists began paying more consistent attention to same-sex sexuality.

See “Doing Fieldwork: Don Kulick and ‘Coming Out’ in the Field.”

From an anthropological perspective, one major difficulty in studying homosexuality in other societies is the problem of adequately naming it.
Most North Americans see sexuality as a fixed and stable condition and identity, an idea that originated much earlier.
in the late nineteenth century, medical science and psychology turned what people had previously considered “perverse” behaviors into bio-psychological conditions requiring medical intervention.
Gilbert Herdt’s study of the Sambia culture suggested that certain male initiation activities were a kind of “ritualized homosexuality” which holds a kind of erotic focus between men.
This is more complicated than it seems because after marriage Sambia men shift their erotic focus to women.
Among the Sambia, however, these ritual acts are intended to develop masculine strength.
Now, studies of similar rites refer to them as “semen transactions” or “boy-inseminating rites.”
Concepts of same-sex sexuality differ across cultures.

In several Latin American countries, for example, a man who engages in same-sex practices is not necessarily identified as (nor would he consider himself) a “homosexual.”

Every society places limits on people’s sexuality by constructing rules about who can sleep with whom.
Modern governments have asserted unprecedented levels of control over sexuality, implementing and enforcing laws that limit the kinds of sexual relations their citizens can have.

Conclusion

The concept of sexuality is a key dimension of kinship and gender.
What unites all of these concepts is that they touch on an issue of central importance to human existence: our capacity for procreation.
All of these concepts are intertwined in complex ways and shape the ideas and social patterns a society uses to organize and control males and females, and those who do not fit these categories.
How we think of these matters, as natural as they feel to us, are not as universal as we may assume.
Neither are kinship and gender as stable as they might seem, something clearly illustrated in the ongoing transformations of the “traditional” American family. Kinship and gender around the globe take many different forms that many feel are quite strange. Yet whatever their form or the particular individuals included in them, they invariably seem natural to the majority of people in the community.