ANT207

Lecture 5 Tuesday October 11, 2011 Next Week: midterm Single page exam sheet and exam booklet Formal exam Study guide written Focus on the textbook Lecture notes Film advertising missionaries is part of the exam Essay question posted tonight Study guide posted tonight Part one is a kinship test (kinship diagram) o 10 short question of which you get to choose 8 o 2 or 3 sentence answers Longer questions and ask you to apply concepts 2 or 4 questions 20 minutes on each questions Lands end Apply what you know questions

Lecture
Intimate relations: Why do we need to know? Marriage Trying to look across cultures marriage is: every culture has some means of doing these things: o Regulates sexuality Unregulated sex is seen as dangerous All societies have rules about this Key things about culture We have rules around sex we are different from animals o Defines legitimate parenthood In many societies parenthood is about recruiting new members to a lineage Some contexts in about recruiting workers to a farm In many contexts your children are your allies and supporters Inheritors of property and family name People are very concerned with knowing who their parents are Every baby should be in a legitimate kinship system Protectors as parents Marriage regulates where a child fits in the kinship structure o Organizes political relations Domestic relations if you think about the elementary structure of Kinship Man, his sister, her husband They are our enemies, we marry them The structure of relations between groups The kinship atom A lineage cannot be self contained Enter into exchange relations with another group You have to marry someone from another lineage because you cant marry your sister Levi Straus Exogamy requires exchange

Reciprocal = moieties Asymmetrical = wife givers, takes o Superior groups o Not always equal exchanges o You can take wifes from one groups but you cant give wifes to that group o Every lineage has to make an exchange but it is not always back an forth Parallel/cross-cousin marriage (fathers sisters child or mothers brothers child) Bi-lateral, matri (mothers sisters child) or patri-lateral (fathers brothers child) o Bilateral cross-cousin marriage among the Yanomamo. o The shaded persons belongs to the egos patrilineage o Lineage systems often have cross cousins Politically there is a lot of stake in marriage thats why people make such a fuss over it Marriage as o Forming alliance o Transfer of rights over woman, children Bride wealth bride price is paid when a man and his family pay bride wealth to the brides side they are claiming rights over that bride as well as all of her children Making an alliance as well as consolidating the status of the children as party of the fathers lineage if the wife wants to go back to her family and the father hasnt paid the brides rights payment then the children can go with their mother o Its about he basic structure of society thats why it is so important o Dowry Inheritance; costs; maintain status Not the equivalent of the bride price What the brides side gives Part of the womans inheritance Of the estate Enables her to live in a grand style Some contexts it is regarded as the money the family pays for the man to take care of his new bride Different types of Families or households o Conjugal Means husband & wife form the household o Non-conjugal o Virilocal Move in with the mans side o Uxorilocal Move in with the wifes side o Neolocal Start your own household o Nuclear Monogamous, neolocal o Polygnous, One man many wives (very common) o Polyandrous One wife several husbands (very rare) o Extended 3 generations or more o Joint Lateral

The guys brother and their wives and children Woman and her sisters o Blended Divorce, remarried, step children o Family by choice Form families who have no marriage or parental relationship Elected to live together as a family Adoption Family can be formed voluntarily and collectively by any group of people Variations in parenthood o Social father/biological father, genitor o Social mother/biological mother/birth mother/ milk mother Adoption, divorce, death Sperm donation, surrogacy, organ donation Loosening up or concept of kinship Cultural weight that people put on these things and what are the implications of these Social/kin-like relationship when the original donation program had assumed that they would want it to be as anonymous as possible o Ghost marriage If your husband died before he had any children, who is going to be his lineage So his father might arrange to have the wife have lovers and children he has died but to die without descendants is a big problem and messes up the lineage Dont care about who the biological father is o Levirate The husband dies and she marries one of his brothers o Powerful woman takes a wife Becomes powerful and never had a child She can pay a bride price and have a wife and her children belong to the power woman Bilateral Kindred o Spreading out on both sides o Similar to ego-focused kindred Ego-focused Kindred o Everyone who is related to us is our kindred o All the people spread out around us o North America o Everyones kindred will be different o Includes your wives kindred o No loner the same as his brothers o Everyone who you are related to / married to is unique to yourself North America has ego-focused Kindred May be in your kindred but more distant Consanguis o Blood o Related to by blood Classificatory Kin o Has to do with naming o Same name for your fathers brother and your fathers cousins o Call them all uncle Fictive Kin o Not actually related to your but you treat them as if they were o Call your moms best friend aunt o And treat her like a kin/ aunt

Role of kinship in Euro-American society o Care o Affect o Belonging o Inheritance o Networks As society modernized the expectation is that you will favor your own Organized on the basis of kinship Who you are will be one of the main feature of how jobs resources are organized o Modern society rational-legal bureaucracy, neutral, achievement based o Principles Traditional society ascriptive favour your own Weber idea types need to examine ethnographically 80% of first jobs are networked o its about who you know o networks are a very big deal o we havent achieved what Weber thought we would

GENDER Has to do with the social and cultural construction What kind of social and cultural practices are attched to that How you are expected to behave as a woman or a man it is all culturally and socially constructive and far more variable that you would expect Making the seperation between the biological sex and the gender behaviour Means that we You might think that woman are very active in the market place and control the family purse would be a demonstration that woman have a lot of power and status visible in public spaces they seem to be economically active but men dont appear to be Woman appear to be busy so it marks them as low status while the men is contiplative status and power reside in the men Divisions of labour who does what but not jumping to the assumtions that just because she is busy does not mean that she has high status Need to be examined seperatly Whats the significance and meaning of the roles in that context? Are these signs of power and independence or is it completely different?