Kinship

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Question. I have already started to collect data on family business groups in Thailand (or better said, started to negotiate access to the data) with an eye on trying to relate the business structures to rules of inheritance and marriage. Could you direct me to a good brief technical review on the treatment of lineages? I know of course of Harrison's work, but I suspect there is a lot more, including yours.

Answer (DRW): 1992 Representing and Computing Kinship: A New Approach. (drw & Paul Jorion). Current Anthropology 33(4): 454-463. http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/pw/White-Jorion1992.pdf 1997 Class, Property and Structural Endogamy: Visualizing Networked Histories. (L. A. Brudner & drw). Theory and Society 25(2):161-208. http://www.springerlink.com/content/n551750q42747757 - http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/3/

What these do is let you add couples and ownership units to a graph with firms. In the 1997 the firms are households. In the 1992 you get the pure kinship graph with both kinds lineages (depending on which kind of line you take as the lineage) and direct computation of interlineage cohesion units as bicomponents. You will see the main visual in the 1997 article was the (visual) inspiration for the Vedres/Stark (Balazs's) lineages in their structural folds paper, the difference being that I didn't group lineages together into the cohesive units.

[edit] Notes for In Press

2003 Special Issue: The fall of Kinship - get this through University of California + California Digital Library + Center for Research Libraries (CRL) at your UC library

Insna Conference 2009 Kinship papers

Kinship, Class, and Community Chapter 10: Sage Handbook of Social Networks, eds. Peter Carrington and John Scott.

http://kinshipstudies.org/?page_id=10 German V. Dziebel 2008 http://kinshipstudies.org/ The Genius of Kinship: The Phenomenon of Human Kinship and the Global Diversity of Kinship Terminologies http://kinshipstudies.org/?page_id=5 Human/Amerindian Origins

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinship Wikipedia edit project My Kinship and Complexity

[Kissing Cousins Have More Kin]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Douglas_R._White#Availability_for_Wikipedia:WikiProject_Anthropology.2FCollaboration_of_the_month

The term kinship is used for entities of common genealogical origin, whether biological, cultural, or historical descent. As used in wikipedia:anthropology the wikipedia:kinship system includes both descent and wikipedia:marriage, while parallel usage in wikipedia:biology would include descent and wikipedia:mating. Human kinship relations through marriage are commonly called affinity in contrast to descent, although the two may overlap in marriages among those of common descent. Family relations as sociocultural genealogy lead back to Gods (see mythology, religion), animals (see totems) or natural phenomena (as in origin stories).

Kinship is one of the most basic principles for organizing individuals into wikipedia:social groups, wikipedia:roles, and categories. Family relations can be represented concretely (mother, brother, grandfather) or abstractly after degrees of relationship. A relationship may have relative purchase (e.g., father is one regarding a child), or reflect an absolute (e.g., status difference between a mother and a childless woman). Degrees of relationship are not identical to heirship or legal wikipedia:succession. Many codes of wikipedia:ethics consider the bond of kinship as creating obligations between the related persons stronger than those between strangers, as in Confucian wikipedia:filial piety.

[edit] Forms of the family relation

Kinship relationships are between individuals while common descent defines groups of descendants or descent groups. While humans may refer to a common wikipedia:ancestor, however, the relationship attributed is not necessarily biological and is often based on shared cultural attributions about what constitutes wikipedia:genealogy or genealogical links. The interest of anthropology in relationship was classically based however not on the "actual" relationship, but on how relationships are understood, categorized and designated.

[edit] History of kinship studies

One of the founders of the anthropological relationship research was wikipedia:Lewis Henry Morgan, in his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871). Members of a society may use kinship terms without all being biologically related, a fact already evident in Morgan's the use of the term affinity within his concept of the "system of kinship". The most lasting of Morgan's contributions was his discovery of the difference between descriptive and wikipedia:classificatory kinship, situates broad kinship classes on the basis of imputing abstract social patterns of relationships having little or no overall relation to genetic closeness but do reflect cognition about kinship, social distinctions on linguistic usages in wikipedia:kinship terminology, and strongly relate, if only by approximation, to patterns of marriage.[1].

[edit] "Kinship system" as quest for pattern

The concept of “system of kinship” tended to dominate anthropological studies of kinship in the early part of the 20th century. Kinship systems as defined in anthropological texts and ethnographers were seen as constituted by patterns of behavior and attitudes and terminology for referring to relationships as well as for addressing others. Many anthropologists went so far as to see, in these patterns of kinship, strong relations between kinship categories and patterns of marriage, including forms of marriage, restrictions on marriage, and cultural concepts of the boundaries of wikipedia:incest. A great deal of inference was necessarily involved in such constructions as to “systems” of kinship.

[edit] Conflicting theories of the mid 20th century

In trying to resolve these inferences, wikipedia:George P. Murdock (1949, Social Structure) compiled kinship data to test a theory about universals in human kinship in the way that terminologies were influenced by the behavioral similarities or social differences among pairs of kin, proceeding on the view that the psychological ordering of kinship systems radiates out from ego and the wikipedia:nuclear family to different forms of wikipedia:extended family. wikipedia:Lévi-Strauss (1949, Les Structures Elementaires), on the other hand, also looked for global patterns to kinship, but viewed the “elementary” forms of kinship as lying in the ways that families were connected by marriage in different fundamental forms resembling those of modes of exchange: symmetric and direct, reciprocal delay, or generalized exchange.

[edit] Kinship networks and social process as articulated by social anthropology

A more flexible view of kinship was formulated in British wikipedia:social anthropology. Among the attempts to break out of universalizing assumptions and theories about kinship, wikipedia:Radcliffe-Brown (1922, The Andaman Islands; 1930, The social organization of Australian tribes) was the first to assert that kinship relations are best thought of as concrete networks of relationships among individuals. He then described these relationships, however, as typified by interlocking interpersonal roles. wikipedia:Malinowski (1922, Argonauts of the Western Pacific) described patterns of events with concrete individuals as participants stressing the relative stability of institutions and communities, but without insisting on abstract systems or models of kinship. wikipedia:Gluckman (1955, The judicial process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia) balanced the emphasis on stability of institutions against processes of change and conflict, inferred through detailed analysis of instances of social interaction to infer rules and assumptions. wikipedia:John Barnes, wikipedia:Victor Turner, and others, affiliated with Gluckman’s Manchester school of anthropology, described patterns of actual network relations in communities and fluid situations in urban or migratory context, as with the work of wikipedia:J. Clyde Mitchell (1965, Social Networks in Urban Situations). Yet, all these approaches clung to a view of stable wikipedia:functionalism, with kinship as one of the central stable institutions.

[edit] Recognition of fluidity in kinship meanings and relations

Building on Lévi-Strauss’s (1949) notions of kinship as caught up with the fluid languages of exchange, wikipedia:Edmund Leach (1961, Pul Eliya) argued that kinship was a flexible idiom that had something of the grammar of a language, both in the uses of terms for kin but also in the fluidities of language, meaning, and networks. His field studies devastated the ideas of structural-functional stability of kinship groups as corporations with charters that lasted long beyond the lifetimes of individuals, which had been the orthodoxy of wikipedia:British Social Anthropology. This sparked debates over whether kinship could be resolved into specific organized sets of rules and components of meaning, or whether kinship meanings were more fluid, symbolic, and independent of grounding in supposedly determinate relations among individuals or groups, such as those of descent or prescriptions for marriage. Work on symbolic kinship by wikipedia:David M. Schneider in his (1984, A Critique of The Study of Kinship) reinforced this view. In response to Schneider's 1984 work on Symbolic Kinship, Janet Carsten developed the idea of "relatedness" from her initial ideas, looking at what was socialized and biological, from her studies with the Malays (1995, The substance of kinship and the heat of the hearth; feeding, personhood and relatedness among the Malays in Pulau Langkawi, wikipedia:American Ethnologist). She uses the idea of relatedness to move away from a pre-constructed analytic opposition which exists in anthropological thought between the biological and the social. Carsten argued that relatedness should be described in terms of indigenous statements and practices, some of which fall outside what anthropologists have conventionally understood as kinship (Cultures of Relatedness, 2000). This kind of approach – recognizing relatedness in its concrete and variable cultural forms – exemplifies the ways that anthropologists have grappled with the fundamental importance of kinship in human society without imprisioning the fluidity in behavior, beliefs, and meanings in assumptions about fixed patterns and systems.

[edit] See also


[edit] Bibliography

Douglas R. White and Ulla C. Johansen, 2005, Chapters 3 and 4, wikipedia:Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

Michael Houseman and Douglas R. White, 1998, Network mediation of exchange structures: Ambilateral sidedness and property flows in Pul Iliya, in Kinship, Networks and Exchange, edited by Thomas Schweizer and Douglas R. White, 59-89. Cambridge University Press.

[edit] External links

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