Kinship/Relatedness

Why read this text…

Kinship and family networks frame the lives of all people, regardless of where they live. As a part of what makes us human, these networks connect people and shape relationships in all societies. Anthropologists have long studied different forms of kinship networks to understand how people organize relationships in small-scale and large-scale societies. Anthropological approaches to kinship and other forms of relatedness are useful for understanding forms of relatedness that shape and are shaped in the schools and broader educational contexts.

Historical Context

Louis Henry Morgan, an American lawyer and anthropologist was one of the first to study kinship systems. His book, The Ancient Society (1877) laid the foundations for the comparative study of kinship systems around the world. Kinship studies have focused on symbolic systems of classification that authorize and order both jural and emotional intergenerational relationships of descent and affinity, mutuality, and obligation. As the basis of all social organization, kinship is about what people do with “the basic facts of life: mating, gestation, parenthood, socialization, siblingship, and death“ (Fox 1983). Anthropologists were early to recognize that people understood and organized kinship differently, not necessarily through biology, or ‘blood’ relationships, as in most European cultures, but also through exclusive lines of descent, obligations of care and upbringing or living, working together and eating together. Thus the study of kinship has evolved from the study of comparative ‘systems’ that structure societies to the study of how people practice forms of relatedness (Carsten 2000), understand the mutuality of being (Sahlins 2013) and ‘do kinship’ through everyday and ritual processes of kinning (Howell 2003).

Discussion

In their effort to understand what kinship means in the context of a particular society, anthropologists have developed a number of related concepts such as: descent, descent group, lineage, affinity/affine, consanguinity/cognate and fictive kinship. Influenced by functionalist and structuralist approaches, social anthropologists primarily studied social structure and the rights and obligations that create and understand kinship networks. Cultural anthropologists, on the other hand, gave more attention to meaning, practice and agency in their study the symbolic aspects of kinship. Over the years, anthropologists have changed their perspective on kinship, moving from kinship as a matter of flesh and blood (Malinowski, 1930), and a way of talking about property and class relations (Leach 1967), to strategic choices and emotional bonds (Bourdieu 1977), talk about the networks of political power (Kuper 2016). They have also moved from, there is no such thing as kinship (Schneider 1968), to kinshipunderstood throughnotions of the‘mutuality of being’ or ‘common substance’ (Sahlins 2000). If we stop for a second and think how kinship is incorporated into daily life and into the daily reality of people, how it shapes and generates emotional support, form help between household members, we can confirm that kinship is a universal, vital principle of social life. In other words, kinship matters.

In her work on cultures of relatedness (2000) Janet Carsten introduced new concepts in the research of kinship, gender, and politics. Without rejecting the biological and psychological aspects of kinship, new studies focus more on the sociality of kinship. Anthropologists now study new reproductive technologies, same sex-marriages, partnership vs. marriage, remarriage, new forms of parenthood, and how individuals and states deal with these new forms of kinship. The ongoing challenge for anthropologists is to understand the organization of kin networks and other forms of relatedness in the context of a specific culture, to understand why people invest enormous amounts of time and effort, energy and money in cultivating close relationships with those they consider related. In this present moment of global interdependence, mobility and new family forms, anthropologists are asking how and why kinship and kin-like relations still play an important role in the lives of individuals. Of interest to the field of education is how we might apply anthropological approaches to kinship and relatedness to better understand cultural assumptions informing, as well as the workings of sharing of children between parents and teachers. How schools shape forms of peer relatedness that matter to children, and pedagogical notions of social inheritance and mobility.

Practical example

Family histories can play an important role in teaching history. Teachers meet students who have experienced life crises caused by internal family tragedies or external factors such as wars, conflicts, or natural disasters. Such experiences contribute to the forming of family narratives, which are transmitted from one generation to the next. To raise children’s awareness and help them cope with these events, and to build class community, teachers can have children conduct ethnographic research on their family’s history and narratives.

Such research may entail conducting interviews with family members and together exploring, family memorabilia and family photos. Students may create a family tree, connecting the people in the tree by means of photos and surnames, and discussing the different rights and obligations that define relationships. Research on family surnames allows students to gain insight into how surnames are derived from personal names, places of origin, family property or occupations. Discussing surnames allow students to learn about family identity with regard to social group or class. Students may also create family and personal mobility maps showing where and when the family/individual has moved and settled and resettled and raises questions about why families move or migrate.
In that students have many different family and personal histories and experiences, they should be allowed to create family trees based on emotional closeness or other forms of relatedness of significance to the child, for example, friends, pets, au pairs, neighbours and aunties.

Thinking further

Not all children live in conventional nuclear families. Some may have only one living parent, some live with their grandparents, others have divorced or same-sex parents. How might you frame a class discussion of these different family situations using anthropological approaches to kinship and relatedness?

Compare and contrast the relational ‘rules’ and obligations that define networks of relatives in relation to the rules governing board games played with friends and family or rules governing the price of Christmas presents bought for different family and non-family members.

Surnames have different forms of significance. While aristocratic surnames or surnames associated with villages, valleys or farms may signal long lines of descent, current hyphenated forms – such as Scheper-Hughes or Johnson-Hanks - signal marriage between different kin groups. How might you explore the variety and significance of surnames represented in the classroom, while remaining sensitive to how surnames signal structural and symbolic inequalities of class, ethnicity, birth, and more?

Ask children to make kinship charts of three-four generations of their family. Discuss the similarities and differences in these charts and how children classify and relate to grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Remain sensitive to what these charts may reveal of how families thrive or do not thrive, and how families are differently caught up in historical events of war and ethnic cleansing, migration, and economic threats to subsistence

KEY-WORDS/ CROSS-REFERENCES

kinship terminology, relatives, genealogy, kinship diagram, blood ties, relatedness, common ancestry, migration, mobility

Sources

Carsten, J. (ed.) (2000). Cultures of Relatedness. New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Douglas, M. (1966/2002). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge Classics). Routledge.

Fox, R. (1983). Kinship and Marriage. An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Howell, S. (2003). Kinning: The Creation of Life Trajectories in Transnational Adoptive Families. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 9(3), 465-484.

Johnson-Hanks, J. (2007). “Women on the market: Marriage, consumption, and the Internet in urban Cameron.“ American Ethnologist 34(4), 642-658.

Parkin, R. (2004). Kinship and Family: An Anthropological Reader 1st Edition. Wiley-Blackwell

Sahlins, M. (2013). What Kinship Is – And Is Not. Chicago: University Press.

Schneider, D. (1968). American Kinship. A Cultural Account. The University of Chichago Press.

Strathern, M. (1992). After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century. Cambridge: University Press.

Scheper-Hughes, N. (2001). Kinship Negotiations: What’s Biology Not/Got to Do with It. In: Franklin, S., McKinnon, S. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship. Duke University Press

Strathern, M. (2005). Partial Connections. AltaMira Press.

Stone L., & King E. D. (2018). Kinship and Gender. An Introduction. Routledge.

Authors

Danijela Birt Katić, Jelena Kuspjak (Croatia)

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