Kinship and Descent

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Chapter 10

• Kinship and Descent

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Kinship

• Kinship is how people are related to you
• Fictive adaptive (godparents, step-siblings,
  etc)
• Consanguine blood
• Conjugal marriage
• In kin groups certain people belong and others do
  not.
• Kinship plays a very important role in
  non-industrial societies

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Industrial societies and kinship

• Most things run by non-in groups
• Non-kin based group voluntary membership
• Non-overlapping Institutions do not overlap
  school separate from job

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Non-Industrial Societies

• Multifunctional kin groups- kin group manages
  where you live, work, worship, etc.
• All of the social structure is related to kin
  group

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Functions of Kin-Ordered Groups

• Kin-ordered groups are social organizational
  devices for solving challenges that commonly
  confront human societies
• Maintaining the integrity of resources that
  cannot be divided without being destroyed.
• Providing work forces for tasks that require a
  labor pool larger than households can provide.
• Rallying support for purposes of self-defense or
  offensive attack.

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What Are Descent Groups?

• A descent group is a kind of kinship group in
  which being in the direct line of descent from a
  real or mythical ancestor is a criterion of
  membership.
• Descent may be traced exclusively through men or
  women, or through either at the discretion of the
  individual.

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Descent Groups

• Members share descent from a common ancestor
  through a series of parent-child links.
• Unilineal descent establishes kin group
  membership exclusively through the male or female
  line.
• Bilateral descent trace descendants on both
  sides of family

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Functions of Descent Groups

• Provide aid and security to their members.
• Repositories of religious tradition, with group
  solidarity enhanced by worship of a common
  ancestor.

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Descent Groups

• Unilineal descent
• Descent that establishes group membership through
  either the mothers or the fathers line.
• Matrilineal descent
• Descent traced exclusively through the female
  line to establish group membership.
• Patrilineal descent
• Descent traced exclusively through the male line
  to establish group membership.

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Patrilineal Descent Groups

• Male members trace their descent from a common
  male ancestor.
• A female belongs to the same descent group as her
  father and his brother.
• Authority over the children lies with the father
  or his elder brother.

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Matrilineal Descent Groups

• Descent is traced through the female line.
• Does not confer public authority on women, but
  women have more say in decision making than in
  patrilineal societies.
• Common in societies where women perform much of
  the productive work.

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White Mountain Apaches

• White Mountain Apaches in Arizona are organized
  in matrilineal clans.
• Small groups of these women lived and worked
  together, farming on the banks of streams in the
  mountains and gathering wild foods in ancestral
  territories.
• They trace their ancestry to Changing Woman, a
  mythological founding mother.

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Unilineal Descent Groups

• Lineage
• A unilineal kinship group descended from a common
  ancestor or founder who lived four to six
  generations ago, and in which relationships among
  members can be stated genealogically.
• Clan
• An extended unilineal kinship group, often
  consisting of several lineages, whose members
  claim common descent from a remote ancestor,
  usually legendary or mythological.

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Unilineal Descent Groups (cont.)

• Phratry
• A unilineal descent group composed of two or more
  clans that claim to be of common ancestry. If
  only two such groups exist, each is a moiety.
• Moiety
• Each group that results from a division of a
  society into two halves on the basis of descent.

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Lineages

• Made up of consanguineal kin who can trace their
  genealogical links to a common ancestor.
• Marriage of a group member represents an alliance
  of two lineages.
• Lineage exogamy maintains open communication and
  fosters exchange of information among lineages.

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Lineage Exogamy

• Lineage members must find their marriage partners
  in other lineages.
• This curbs competition for desirable spouses
  within the group and promotes group solidarity.
• Lineage exogamy also means that marriage is more
  than a union between two individuals it is also
  a new alliance between lineages.

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Clans

• Created when a large lineage group splits into
  new, smaller ones.
• Members claim descent from a common ancestor
  without knowing the genealogical links to that
  ancestor.
• Clan identification is often reinforced by totems.

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Clan

• In the highlands of Scotland clans have been
  important units of social organization.
• Now dispersed all over the world, clan members
  gather and express their sense of kinship with
  one another by wearing a tartan skirt, or kilt,
  with a distinct plaid pattern and color
  identifying clan membership.

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Moieties

• Many Amazonian Indians in South Americas
  tropical woodlands traditionally live in circular
  villages socially divided into moieties.
• This is the Canela Indians Escalvado village as
  it was in 1970.
• Nearly all 1,800 members of the tribe reside in
  the village during festival seasons, but are
  otherwise dispersed to smaller, farm-centered
  circular villages.

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Organizational Hierarchies

• This diagram shows how lineages, clans,
  phratries, and moieties form an organizational
  hierarchy. Each moiety is subdivided into
  phratries, each phratry is subdivided into clans,
  and each clan is subdivided into lineages.

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Terms

• Fission The splitting of a descent group into
  two or more new descent groups.
• Totems The belief that people are related to
  particular animals, plants, or natural objects by
  virtue of descent from common ancestral spirits.

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Totems

• Tsimshian people of Metlakatla, Alaska, raise a
  memorial totem pole gifted to the community by
  carver David Boxley, a member of the Eagle clan.
• Totem poles display a clan or lineages
  ceremonial property and are prominently
  positioned in a place of significance.

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Kindred

• A small circle of paternal and maternal
  relatives.
• A kindred is never the same for any two persons
  except siblings.
• EGO is the central person from whom the degree of
  each relationship is traced.

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The Kindred
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Patrilineal Descent Diagram
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Tracing Matrilineal Descent
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Kinship Terminologies

• The Hawaiian system
• The Eskimo system
• The Iroquois system
• Omaha system
• Crow system
• Sudanese or descriptive system

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Eskimo System

• System of kinship terminology, also called lineal
  system, that emphasizes the nuclear family by
  specifically identifying the mother, father,
  brother, and sister, while lumping together all
  other relatives into broad categories such as
  uncle, aunt, and cousin.

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Eskimo System
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Hawaiian System

• Kinship reckoning in which all relatives of the
  same sex and generation are referred to by the
  same term.

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Hawaiian System
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Iroquois System

• Kinship terminology wherein a father and fathers
  brother are given a single term, as are a mother
  and mothers sister, but a fathers sister and
  mothers brother are given separate terms.
• Parallel cousins are classified with brothers and
  sisters, while cross cousins are classified
  separately, but (unlike Crow and Omaha kinship)
  not equated with relatives of some other
  generation.

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Iroquois System