Family, Marriage, and Kinship

Week 7: Understanding Family, Marriage, and Kinship

• Family is a concept invented by humans to define relationships.
  • Relationships are divided into:
    • Affinal: related by marriage
    • Consanguineous: related by blood
• Families are a unit: biological, economic, household-defining, nurturing, and emotional, changing across time and space.
• Family is universal but varies across cultures.
  • It is regulated with social norms and unwritten rules for relating, loyalty, and resource distribution.
• Family is defined by biology, marriage, descent, and law.
  • It shapes feelings of attachment in an immediate/ extended context:
    • Dual parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents
  • Aspects vary globally including:
    • Membership
    • How one becomes family
    • Family roles
• There is no singular agreement about why humans invented family.
  • Family emerged as humans organized into complex organizational forms.
  • Family includes institutions like law and the state.
  • The emergence of family is functional, fulfilling needs:
    • Subsistence
    • Love
    • Care
    • Wealth and Labour Organization
    • Sexual access
    • The creation of larger social groups

Social Regulations of Family Ideas

• How people are related
• Who should care for children
• Emotional proximity
• Distribution of material and economic resources
• Regulation of sexuality
• Loyalty and obligation to kinsfolk
• Work and labour

Marriage

• Marriage is a legal status between a couple, which provides rights.
  • Marriage regulates sexual access, household formation, reproduction, division of labor, attachment, and emotion.
• Cultural rules and laws prohibit or encourage marriage:
  • Endogamy: within a social group
  • Exogamy: outside a social group
• Marriage is regulated by:
  • Religion
  • Ethnic group
  • Kinship
  • Class
  • Area
• Rules can include taboos and laws against certain relations marrying.
• People marry to:
  • Access legal rights
  • For love and lifelong commitment
  • Form family partnerships and alliances
  • Establish Compatibility over religion, ethnicity, or class
  • Rear children
  • Access wealth and class mobility
  • Obtain inheritance
  • Become an adult

Transfer of Wealth and Inheritance

• Brideprice/wealth is a transfer of wealth from a groom to a bride's family, compensating for the loss of her productive value.
• Brideservice consists of labor done by the groom for the bride's family.
• Dowry is a share of inheritance accompanying the bride into her male family.
• Wealth can help a couple set up a household or pay the family for the loss of productivity.

Marriage as Alliances

• Marriage creates alliances between groups and defines living arrangements and rights.
• Marriage gives children a legitimate place belonging to a kin group.
• Children born out of wedlock are denied this membership in many societies.

Marriage and Household

• Cultural ideas dictate where families live after marriage based on:
  • Patrilocal residence (living with the groom's family)
  • Matrilocal residence (living with the bride's family)
  • Neolocal residence (living independently)

Forms of Marriage

• Monogamy: exclusive sexual and emotional relationship between two people
  • Levirate Marriage: a widow marries her husband’s younger brother.
• Polygamy: marriage between one person and multiple people
  • Polygyny: one husband and multiple wives
    • Sororal polyandry: one man marries multiple sisters.
  • Polyandry: one wife marries multiple husbands
    • Fraternal polyandry: marriage of one woman to several brothers.

Reasons for Different Forms of Marriage

• Forms of marriage are tied to:
  • Population size
  • Scarcity of resources
  • Family wealth
  • Inheritance
• Scarcity and harsh terrain can cause smaller population needs, thus, smaller family sizes which can shape the emergence of polyandry.

Tibe's Marriage System

• Fraternal polyandry is a system where three brothers marry the same woman, being equally treated regardless of progenitor.
• Fraternal polyandry keeps wealth concentrated and ensures prosperity.
• This system connects to an environment's harsh realities and is a means to keep population growth down, but, potentially creates conflict in certain instances of relationships between the brothers.

Same-Sex Marriage

• Canada has had same sex marriage since 2005.
• A common state occurrence to regulate people's intimate lives through:
  • Marriage
  • Inheritance
• Debates over same gender marriage occur because of religious grounds and opposition to marriage.

Chosen Families

• This refers to kinship ties created through bonds of love and choice, rather than procreation, blood, biology, or law.
• Chosen families may not have legal status.

Queer Kinship

• Historically queers have been denied access to kinship within their given families and were thusly motivated to form kinship among one another.
• Queer families critique kinship based on biology, blood, and heterosexual reproduction, but kinship has traditionally determined this.

Biology and Family

• Chosen or queer families challenge the centrality of biology and reproduction to family.
• Kinship is established that does not take biology and reproduction as determining factors.
• Biology and blood can organize kinship without choice.

Defining Kinship

• Kinship is a social system determining relationships and their meanings
• It determines:
  • One's relationship to others (son, nephew, etc.)
  • Proper behavior, rights, and duties
  • Ancestral lineage
• Kinship has:
  • Norms
  • Loyalties
  • Obligations

Kinship Determinants

• Kinship can be determined by:
  • Blood (consanguineous)
  • Legal arrangements (affinal)
  • Marriage
  • Adoption
• Some cultures emphasize blood for kinship.
• Care and commitment also determine kinship.
• In some systems people do not count as kin through:
  • Blood
  • Marriage
• Kinhip is defined culturally and socially.

Biology and Relationships

• Societies acknowledge biology's role in reproduction but have different views on biology and reproduction.
• The Mixtec of Santiago Nuyoo, for instance, allow the possibility of multiple biological mothers and fathers.

Types of Kinship

• Many systems do not prioritize biological progenitors so, instead, it is the caregiver who takes on kinship roles.
• A parent kinship may change through adoption.
• Descent is about defining group membership through lineage, access to a family's economic resources, and loyalty during conflict.

Descent Types

• Patrilineal: lineage traced through the father
• Matrilineal: lineage traced through the mother
• Bilateral: lineage traced on both sides, as seen in the West

Classification System

• Each kinship system has terms to describe relationships.
• English kinship terms like 'nephew' apply to both aunt's and uncle's sons.

Global Kinship Systems

• There are 7 main kinship systems in the world with six defined first by Lewis Henry Morgan.
  • Iroquois
  • Crow
  • Omaha
  • Inuit
  • Hawaiian
  • Sudanese kinship.
• The 7th, Dravidian, applies to Australian Aboriginal kinship

Croatian Kinship

• Croatia has a patrilineal descent system where:
  • Men on both sides are recognized as uncles, and have differing terms/expectations

Differing Kinship Terms

• Mother's brother's and wives (ujak and ujna).
• Sisters of one's parents are tetka and tetak regardless of family side.

Obligations and Relations

• Some groups live among their father's extended family.
• Couple lives in the groom's family (Patrilocal).
• Male kin of mother's are like nurturers.
• Fathers protect sisters.
• Brides move into groom's family, under his mother's authority.

Week 8: Human Survival and Economic Activities

• Humans work to turn nature's raw materials into survival necessities (human labor).
• Human activities are organized around survival.

Activities of Survival

• Hunting
• Foraging
• Farming
• Working
• Buying
• Selling
• Such activities are distinct from:
  • Leisure
  • Care
  • Rest
• Economics is a social activity involving dependence on others for necessities.
• Social complexity leads to increased interdependence.

Economic Exchange

• Interaction is constant through the circulation of things and linkages.
• Economic life: daily activities, social relations, enable making/getting things.
• Modes of the economic activity are:
  • Production: human activity converts materials for organization, knowledge
  • Distribution/selling: circulation of goods through exchange
  • Consumption/buying: patterns of buying and getting things

Types of Labour

• Labor that produces what people use as well as scale farming and production is done by the people themselves.
• Wage labor: people work for money to buy what others make.
• Wage labor leads to worker alienation from the products.

Exchange in Society

• Exchange and gifting create links, friendships, and alliances, governed by rules.
• Exchange unifies can integrate distant groups.

Anthropological Modes of Exchange

• Reciprocity: creates social obligations, like gifts
• Redistribution: authority gathers and redistributes wealth, like taxes/ donations
• Market: purchasing, bartering, bargaining
• All modes exist in a society

Circulating Wealth

• Wealth circulates through obligations and social connections sans monetary exchange.

Types of Reciprocity

• Generalized: giving freely with no item value assigned or expectation of return.
• Balanced: expecting something of same monetary value in certain time.
• Negative: receiving without giving much, like gambling

Gifting Rules

• Gifts always come with reciprocal expectations in affection or gratitude.
• Gifting creates social connections.
• Gifting is a moral economy of value, and emotion.

Marcel Mauss on Gift-Giving

• Mauss theorized the idea that gifting has a big role in community
• Giving gifts:
  • Comes with the obligation to reciprocate at some point
  • Establishes a social tie between people and groups
  • Reciprocation is obligatory
  • Without reciprocation, societal structure will break
  • Reciprocity expresses loyalty, connection, and honor

Obligation to Gift

• Distribution of goods and wealth is based on the obligations of giving and receiving
• Has a moral system through social links

Rejecting to Give

• To refuse to give is to reject alliance
• Everything is passed around as if there is a “constant exchange of spiritual matter” as it is a force that connects people

Asymmetry of Reciprocity

• The gift is not always equal in value relative to the giver and receiver
• Richer people give extravagant gifts without expectations
  • This creates power relations, moral superiority, and political power
• Clientage can describe the relationship here:
  • Repaying a gift with loyalty or obedience

Gifts and Redistrubution

• The ancient morality of the gift is generosity of people sharing their overabundance of resources.
• Sharing includes redistribution, charity, and religious rules like zakat in Islam

Conditions of Exchange

• Authority gathers goods to redistribute.
• Redistribution needs: central political structure to coordinate/enforce

Exchange Methods

• Wealth redistribution and goods through reciprocity
• Potlucks and fiestas form community relationships and togetherness
• Dishes pass around from person to person

What is Exchange?

• Market exchanges include people buying/selling through goods and services, money, or equal value.
• This is impersonal and doesn't need social obligations.

Exchanges

• People act out of human nature (logic) for self-interest.
• Anthropology proves people rely on production about need and greede.
• People choose based on reciprocity.

Reciprocity and Goodness

The relationship isn't self-interest, rather, a balance where parties both loss and gain goodness

Traditional Bazaars

• Sefrou's marketplaces are examples of marketplaces.
• These markets need over 600 shops, trade sectors and craft shops.

Bazaar Economy

• There is search for information/client relationships.
• Communication networks that distribute product information.
• Bazaars have poor, scarce, maldistributed, and intensely valued information.
• Shopping requires reliant, difficult, scarcity.

Information

• There is little information regarding quality, price, availability.
• Sellers use this to produce social relationships in the market.
• Marketplace offers information and is a social space and where sellers meet buyers, creating:
  • Social interaction
  • Sociality
  • "Information is the really advanced art"

Information Sharing

• Connections are made and sustained across networks
• Clienetilsm- repeated service and commodity exchanges
• Service exchanges are made frequently forming solid social bonds
• Social interaction exist between shoppers and sellers
• Going to the marketplace to make the right and useful connections

Leverage

Knowing the cost, offers and availability creates leverage

Exchange

Exchanges are people's economic routines

What are these interactions like? What do they do? Why?

• Economic activity's importance, and what people can afford

Value

• Price
• Worth
• Desirability

Value from Trade?

• Comes from knowing the norms, standards of output and intake

Value

• Exchange condition:
  • Labor
  • Cost
  • Cultural significance
• Market:
  • Supply & Demand
  • Rents
  • Value: - Meaning - History

Wealthy Societies

• Societies value relationships and meaning.

Why People Are Well Off Based on Meaning:

• They build relations from wealth and meaning
• Wealth comes from value

How Economics Are Organized

• Economics means organizing and managing human activity
• Each person and society must adhere to some kind of organization

Consumption

• What comes from the access to goods
• Access requires outside activity and materials

What is needed?

• We must sell things our nation make more materials and increase wealth

Globalization

• The amount of capital ideas and communication increases
• Standardization is easier to distribute and find out and see
• The communication of cultures

Global Economic System

• Involves nations, individuals, factories
• Distributes, creates wealth

The Global System is Made Up of:

• Trade institutions and governments
• Regulations
• Transport
• Treaties/Contracts

Less Trade

• In contrast reduction of governments imposing trade barriers can allow companies to flourish
  • Expand profit
  • Have various affects such as job and economical issues

NAFTA

• Canada, US and Mexico have a highly trade where each country can access materials

IGOs

• Organizations that guide and make decisions dealing with things of such

World Trade

• Organization that has direct influence as well

Global Market and Local Markets

The management impacts live act and think about themselves with equality

Brazilian Town Example

• There was cultural change
• Shift in wealth and job access

60s Society

• It was a fishing community

By 1980, There was:

• Economic change
• Change from industry to motors
• Highway
• Factor issues

Prices Increased and There Was

• Ownership within few
• Work increased

What is Wealth?

• Was once work for self
• Now there is new jobs
• Structure change
  • Religion has great impact here
  • Everything intertwines
  • Economic status

There is Now Complex Issues

• Consumption
• Eat
• Commodities
• Everything is changing and not staying to it's foundation so people must learn

Week 9: Power and Politics

• Humanity is organized into different groups, new ways are needed for managing these things
• Politics are:
  • Managing power, influence and authority in ways that:
    • Governance
    • Laws
    • Trade
    • Taxation
    • Election
  • It effects:
    • Alliances
    • Authority
    • How to manage conflict
• This all helps communities to:
  • Shape sense of belonging
  • Access
• Power and Politics:
  • Orders what's possible, normative and obvious.

Power- Who is it For?

• What can be controlled
• Who is it useful for?
• What can it influence/effect?

Institutions

• Distributes power to
  • Those with authority
  • Those who can coerce
  • Those whiling

Power Exists- How do we See This

• Power controls even when opposed and resisted

Influence of Authority

• What are the kinds and types?
  • Personality
  • Wealth - resources
  • Formal Rules
    • Voting
    • Ideology
• How and where is it effective or seen?
• What types of authority can effect?

Authority is Social and Formal

• People have varying opportunities for power (social authority)
  • Different rewards and punishments given based on those doing things
  • Compliance

How Society Views Power Over Us

• This belief can be based:
  • Tradition - beliefs and trust in those leading
  • Election
  • Heredity
• We either:
  • Trust or do not

What is Ideology

• What those with influence belief vs a world view
• What the world view dictates as just and fair

Ideology can be:

• Coerced from both sides for influence
• Education
• TV
• Valued actions

Influence

• How we make decisions based on our preferences, not some imposition
• By nature from interactions
• Not just by the powerful
• How they harness it for their goals

Foucault

• A philosopher in Europe What is the government's impact
• On the population
• On who they choose to believe and feel ( Not just what rules they make)

Understanding Power in Relations

• Intrinsic - Influence
• Shifts by what has power

Condition

• What kind defines all choices

Foucault's power leads to questions:

• How can we form new life styles
• What types of power or social control effects different aspects of life?
• What happens when this power is contested?

Power and State

• It is a holder of control on people and their well being
• We give power in exchange for security
• It is a holder and bestower
• What does this bestowal limit
• How well does safety control?

State Run Organization in General is not Well Seen?

• It must create conditions that better lives
• State actions must serve lives
• Use taxes well

What counts

• In social political aspects and different cultures?

Understandings

• A society accepts that there is power to organize
• To guide
• To define
• But not all do or agree

What is the Piaroa View?

• They are autonomous
• Free
• No one leads them (Egalitarian)
• No coercision

No Gendered Power ( Piaroa)

• People are equal and unique
  • Each skill benefits all
  • No leader

What is all this?

• The lines used to separate territories
• Rules and understanding
  • What it is used and not used for?

Colonial Control

• What power effects from such a small region
  • Almost every piece is parceled
  • State claims and organize
  • Those who violate the territories
  • How the people are then grouped as different and or "one"

Then These States

• Are regulated due to having great responsibility
  • Wealth
  • Culture
  • And much more

This Created Nationalistic Power

• How the people inside must believe and act
  • There must be community/ unity based on nation/group
  • And to break can be to not align

Power and Influence

Those are born under law and regulations

How that leads to Borders, Citizinship

• Sovereignty
  • Questions can be asked and not broken and accepted!

Colonization and Borders

• Power violence

Violence has Led To

• Indigenous peoples to have claims and movements restricted

Death Has Increased

• From political action
• All the power/ politics have shaped these rules

Americas Now

• The borders of Canada and America may have tensions
• These rules has decreased and become dangerous
• Border are talked often about by Republican party

The Borders

• Increased due to services and tariffs
• What does it mean that violence is used as justice?
• More migrate now towards South in hope!

W10 (Q1)

• Gender/ sex and body - Is it the same/ all over
• How you "Are" and not "do

Social Aspects.

• What people "do" to create and fulfill

Is there more than Male/Female identities?

• People fall into different gender labels but some feel as if they are "other" - Not same with others

Biology, Not All

• How the west uses the gender/ sexuality to make people follow this, yet....

• Other peoples

• Are not, thus showing how it's based on belief and not natural

How We View the Body Can Be False

• All bodies are different
  • If you do not fit "them" do you belong
• So thus there more ideas for gender come

How the West Sees?

• 2+genders - the ones that there are only
  • Shows more on those who are not one.

What Defines One's Body is Social

• And there must understanding between difference to fully grasp social norms

How Culture Is in Biology

What roles is played, and seen by individuals or cultural society

Foucault's Idea Comes

To the realization that both sex and gender

• Is fluid
• Is different by what and how social sees!