Understanding Kinship

What is Kinship?

• Kinship is the bond of blood or marriage which binds people together in a group.
• Kinship is a network in which people are related to one another through blood, marriage, or other ties.
• Kinship is a type of social relationship.

Concept of Kinship

• Kinship is the lifeblood or social building block that anthropologists study.
• Kinship, marriage and family form the bases of social life, economic activity, and political organization in non-industrialized, non-literate societies.
• People's behavior and activities in these societies are usually kinship-oriented, as indicated by Keesing in 1981.
• In contemporary, modern societies, contacts outside the home are mainly with non-relatives.
• People spend their lives almost exclusively with relatives and associates in non-industrial cultures.
• Everyone is related to, and spends most of their time with, everyone else.
• Rules of behavior attached to particular kin relationships are basic to everyday life (Kottak, 2002; Keesing).

Ways Kinship Can Be Created

• Through blood, based on the principle of consanguinity, where a consanguine is related to another person through blood and includes kin.
• Through marriage, known as the principle of affinity.
• Through adoption, fostering, or god-parenthood, known as fictitious kinship.
• Fictitious kinship is a parent-child relationship without blood or marriage ties.

Why Kinship is Important to People

• It determines status in society.
• It determines who someone can marry.
• It determines inheritances.
• It determines power.
• It determines ancestry.

Kinship by Blood Includes Descent

• Unilineal Descent
• Patrilineal Descent
• Matrilineal Descent
• Bilineal Descent
• Ambilineal Descent
• Double Descent

Defining Marriage

• Marriage is a sexual union between a man and a woman so that children born to the woman are considered the legitimate offspring of both parents.
• The main purpose of marriage is to develop new social relationships, rights, and obligations between the spouses and their kin, as well as to establish the rights and status of children once they are born.
• The relationship between individuals after Marriage in industrial societies can be easily severed.

Why People Marry

• For legal reasons
• For social reasons
• For emotional reasons
• For economic reasons
• To have children and a happy family

Types of Marriage

• Monogamy: One-to-one marriage, usually male to female.
• Polygamy: One-to-many marriage.
• Polyandry: One woman married to more than one male.
• Fraternal Polyandry: Two or more brothers taking one woman as their wife.
• Polygyny: One male marrying more than one wife at a time
• Levirate Marriage/Wife Inheritance: A man marries his deceased brother’s or close relative’s wife.
• Sororate Marriage: A man marries the sister or close relative of his deceased wife.
• Child Marriage/Arranged Marriage: A physically/mentally immature, young girl given in marriage, usually to an older man.
• Symbolic Marriage: A marriage not establishing economic or social ties.
• Fixed Term Marriage: Temporary marriages for a fixed period.

Rules of Marriage

• Endogamy: Marriage within one's own social group.
• Exogamy: Marriage outside a group to which one belongs; bars marriage within a smaller inner circle.

Marriage in the Philippines

• Marriage in the Philippines is a solemn social event.
• Marriage confers specific rights and responsibilities on the married couple.
• The Family Code governs marriage and covers the requirements for a valid marriage, reasons for annulment, or legal separation.

Marriage Set Up

• Legal Capacity and Consent
• Marriage License Requirements
• Solemnizing Officers
• Marital Regimes
• Rights and Obligations
• Annulment and Legal Separation

Marriage Payments

• Marriage is a contractual agreement between different groups, examining transferred rights and values along with economic and political rights and interests.
• Payments from the bride's side to the groom's family are known as dowry.
• Payments from the groom’s parents to the bride's parents are known as bride price or bride wealth.
• Bride price is more prevalent in primitive, tribal, and nomadic societies.
• At the time of marriage, women generally join the household of their groom.
• Bride price is a husband's payment to the bride's parents for the right to her labor and reproductive capabilities.
• Bride price amount is usually uniform throughout society, linked to the transferred rights number, not the families' wealth level (Goody, 1973; Quale, 1988).
• Bride price has been a custom since 3000 BCE in ancient civilizations like the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Hebrews, Aztecs, and Incas.
• In Germanic tribes, marriages were legal if they required bride price.
• Islamic law requires bride price for marriages.
• Bride price is associated with the Maghreb, Bedouin tribes, and Ottoman Empire countries.
• In stratified societies, a daughter's inheritance is known as dowry, which ensures her household status.
• Timing of inheritances depends on the son's efforts on parental estate.
• Giving the daughter her inheritance at the time of marriage reduces the incentive problem.
• Increased stratification is the main reason for receiving an inheritance.
• The dowry system dates back to ancient Greek city states and Romans.
• The dowry system was revived in the late Middle Ages.
• It became common among medieval Western Europe's social and economic groups.
• It was also transferred to parts of the Byzantine Empire until it fell to the Ottomans.

Definition of Family

• Marriage leads to the creation of families, although families arise independently of marriage.
• Marriage gives the family its legal and social validity.
• Conventionally, a family is an intimate kin-based group with at least a parent-child nucleus.
• Family is minimal social unit that cooperates economically and assumes responsibilities for rearing children (Olson and DeFrain, 1999; Howard and DunaifHattis, op cit p.: 462).
• In today's modern society, the dominant family form consists of a husband, wife, and their dependent child or children, which is a nuclear family.
• Nuclear family is not ideal in societies where polygamous marriage form is dominant.
• A more general definition of family sees it as any social group of people connected by marriage, ancestry, or adoption, and responsible for rearing children.
• In small-scale, traditional societies, a family may have a husband, wife/wives, wife's/wives' children, and/or the wives and children of his sons.
• This form of family is called extended family, which may emerge out of polygamous and marriage forms.

Family Types and Their Unique Family Dynamics

• Nuclear Family: Also known as elementary or traditional families.
• This includes two parents (married or common law) and their biological or adopted children.
• The main idea is that the parents raise their kids together in the family home.
• Single-Parent Family: One parent with one or more kids, where the parent is never married, widowed, or divorced.
• Extended Family: More common, with families with two or more adults related through blood or marriage, usually along with children.
• Includes aunts, uncles, cousins, or other relatives living under the same roof.
• Childless Family: Two partners who cannot or do not want kids, often forgotten or left out in family type discussions.
• Stepfamily: Two separate families merge into one.
• Like two divorced parents with one or more children blending families.
• i.e. one divorced parent, with kids, marrying someone who has never been married and has no kids.
• Grandparent Family: One or more grandparents raises their grandchild or grandchildren.

Functions of the Family

• The family is the most basic unit of social institutions and the building block of society.
• Family responds to some fundamental human needs, both individual and collective.
• The needs include love and emotional security; regulating sexual behavior; producing generations; protecting the young and disabled; and socializing children.

Functions and Functions of the Family

• Need for Love and Emotional Security.
• Need to regulate sexual behavior.
• Need to produce generations.
• Need to protect the young and disabled.
• Need to socialize children.
• The most important psychosocial function of the family is socialization, where newborn children are trained in society's values, norms, and standards, essential for their personality, emotional, social, and intellectual development.
• Other important psychosocial functions is providing social support, psychological comfort, and physical care, particularly in traditional societies, and protection for the young, the sick, the disabled, and the aged.
• Such families exert powerful authority on the behavior of children, particularly their sexual behavior.
• The family is essential, particularly in developing societies, in a kind-based communal network where para-medical service is freely made available to the cane kinfolk.
• The kinsfolk take notice of illness and care for the sick, expressing support.

Trends in the Problems of Contemporary Marriage and The Family

• Modernization influences cause changes in the marriage and family structure.
• Types and volume of problems in contemporary society is numerous.
• Divorce is the breakdown of marriage.
• Other phenomenon are the increasing trends in female headed households what has come to be known as "the feminization of poverty."

The Concept of Gender

• Gender refers to the socially constructed characteristics of women, men, girls, and boys.
• Gender includes norms, behaviors, and roles associated with being woman, man, girl, boy, and the relationships between them.
• Gender is a social construct that varies from society to society and can change over time.
• According to Distch 1996, religious, political, educational, communications, and occupational institutions and the family create and enforce expectations for how people should behave in known societies.
• In other words, gender differences derive from social and cultural processes (Bilton, 1996).
• Anthropological studies show that across cultures, most societies make women occupy lower social statuses.

The Concept of Gender: Difference Between Sex and Gender

• Sex differences between men and women are biological and natural.
• Men and women differ in primary (genitalia, reproductive organs) and secondary (breasts, voice, hair distribution) sexual characteristics.
• Average weight, height, and physical strength also differ for men and women.

The Concept of Gender: Gender Defined

• The term gender includes the traits and characteristics that culture assigns to males and females.
• Gender refers to male and female personalities' social and cultural construction (Kottak, 2002; Distch).

Gender Role Socialization

• Behavioral differences result from gender role socialization
• Societies has its own beliefs, values, and norms regarding what female or male should look, think and act like.
• Gender roles are the tasks and activities that culture assigns the male and female sexes.
• Gender roles vary depending on the environment, type of economic activity, people's adaptive strategy, and social complexity (Lorber, 1999; Kottak, 2002; Distch).
• Gender role socializations entail gender division of labor.
• It appears that almost every society divides labor on a gendered basis.
• Institutionalized rules are in place that dictate how labor is utilized by both female and male genders.

Gender Stereotypes

• Gender stereotypes are generalized views and preconceptions about attributes and characteristics that ought to be possessed by and roles to be performed by women and men.
• For example, in the Philippines, gender stereotypes often result in girls dropping out of school, marrying young, and working to support their households while boys are prioritized with education.

Gender Stratification

• Gender stratification is the description of unequal distribution rewards (socially valued resources, power, prestige, and personal freedom) between men and women.
• Gender stereotypes open the way for gender stratification.
• Men and women do not have equal access society's resources.

Ethnicity

• Ethnicity refers to, identification with, and feeling a part of an ethnic group, including exclusion from certain other groups because of this affiliation.
• Ethnicity means selected perceived cultural, physical differences, placing differing classes of people into distinct groups, whereby individuals identify themselves with social and cultural backgrounds (Howard and Dunaif-Hattis, 1992).

Race

• When an ethnic group is assumed to have a biological base (genetic material) it is then called race.
• Racism is a cultural construct

Ethnic and Racial Stereotypes

• Arise because of prejudice, judgement and discrimination.
• Prejudice involves devaluing or looking down upon a group because assumed behavior, values, capabilities, or attributes.
• Discrimination refers to policies and practices that result in harm for group members, especially in the areas of resources and opportunities.
• Negative discrimination negatively affects group and members
• Discrimination may be de facto (or informal), or de jure (part of the law.)
• Genocide is the most extreme form of ethic or racial discrimination.
• Genocide means deliberate murdering a group of people.
• Institutional discrimination means denying equality of rights.
• Positive discrimination includes programs for people and those in marginalised groups.