1 / 27

Kinship Practices

Kinship Practices. Enculturation/ Socialization and the Life Cycle. The main agents of SOCIALIZATION (enculturation) – family, school, peer groups, the mass media, and the work (particular attention to gender socialization) .

ellard
Download Presentation

Kinship Practices

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Kinship Practices

  2. Enculturation/ Socialization and the Life Cycle • The main agents of SOCIALIZATION (enculturation) – family, school, peer groups, the mass media, and the work (particular attention to gender socialization) . • The main stages of life cycle identified as:1) infancy; 2)childhood and adolescence, 3) young and mature adulthood, and 4) old age • Anthropological notions of “social birth” and “social person” • Social death vs. biological death

  3. Anthropology and the Study of Kinship Practices • Kinship (family, marriage, gender) forming the basis of the discipline; • ‘comparable to logic in philosophy and the nude in art’

  4. Kinship: a symbolic idiom that refers to biological ties which people use to organize their social lives. • Kinship and Fieldwork ex. degrees of “relatedness” - Kinship and Biology Ex. mating vs. marriage; births vs. descents; blood metaphor - Kinship terms

  5. Kinship & Politics: Blood is thicker than water

  6. GIFT • means present in English • means poison in German • means married in the Scandinavian languages. Q: any significance for kinship analysis?

  7. Bride price?

  8. What is the Family? • A definition of the family that avoids Western ethnocentrism see it as a group composed of a woman composed of a woman and her dependent children, with at least one adult man joined through marriage or blood relationship. • The family may take many forms ranging from a married couple with their children (conjugal family) as in North American society to a large group of several brothers and sisters with the sisters’ children (consanguineal family) as in sw India among the Nayar (the Mosu people of SW China). • The particular form taken by the family is related to particular social, historical, and ecological circumstances.

  9. Functions of family • Nurturance of children Nurturing children traditionally has been the adult female’s job, although men also may play a role, and in some societies mane are even more involved with their children than are women. • Economic Cooperation Dependence on group living for survival is basic human characteristic. Economic activities of men and women complement each other. An effective way to facilitate economic cooperation between men and women and to provide for a close bond between mother and child is through the establishment of residential groups that include adults of both sexes.

  10. The role of family from the functionalist perspective (Talcott Parsons) • Primary socialization (how children learn the cultural norms of the society into which they are born) Q: is family the primary socializing agency? • Personality stabilization (the role family plays in assisting adult family members emotionally).

  11. Family and household • Households are task-oriented residential units within which economic production, consumption, inheritance, child rearing, and shelter are organized and implemented. • Unlike family, the household is universally present. Most households in fact constitute families (family as the core of the household), although other sorts of households may be present as well (e.g., single-parent household in North America). Ex 1: Among the Nayar, married men and women are members of separate households, meeting periodically for sexual activities.

  12. Family Forms • Nuclear Family Married couple + Child(ren) • Extended Family Three or more generations

  13. The nuclear family is widespread, but not universal.

  14. Kinship Symbols

  15. A collection of nuclear families, related by ties of blood, that live together in one household (which might include grand parents, mother and father,, brothers and sisters, perhaps an uncle and aunt, and a stray cousin or two. The extended family

  16. Residence Patterns • Patrilocal residence: a woman goes to live with her husband in the household in which he grew up. • Matrilocal residence: a man leaves the family he grew up to go live with his wife in her parents’ household. • Neolocal residence: a married couple forms a household in a separate location. This occurs where the independence of the nuclear family is emphasized.

  17. Industrialization and Family Organization • North America • Neolocal residence pattern • patterns of residence and family types vary with socioeconomic class (ex. extended families as a response to poverty) • The divorce rate rose steeply between 1970 and 1994

  18. Family units in complex societies • Families are changing to include stepparenting, “reconstituted families,” gay and lesbian families, single-parenting, divorce, and separation. • Each of these dynamics represents a shift away from the traditional notion the nuclear family and calls attention to transformations that can best be understood in relations to the times in which they are emerged.

  19. Alternative to traditional nuclear family through adoption or the new reproductive technologies. Gay/lesbian family in the US

  20. Industrialization, State, and Family Planning: China • Single Child Family Policy / Birth Control Biological anthropologists vs. Sociocultural anthropologists • Demographic Transition : • low infant mortality rate • low birth rate

  21. 人类学家关注人口增 长的两个层面 • 首先，人类学家对于人类生育行为(包括伴侣/夫妻对于育儿数量的选择和控制)，采用的是一 种整体性(holism)研究角度，即把生育行为放在人们日常生活的整个系统中加以考察。对于特定社会语境中的行为模式的分析，能使我们看到某 一地区的出生率往往与地方条件尤其是经济因素有关。 • 人类学家还通 过在小型社区进行深入细致的田野研究来找出第三世界地区婴儿出生率偏高的成因。

  22. 发展中国家的高出生率问题 • 比起尼日利亚或萨尔瓦多的任何普通家庭，北美地 区处于平 均收入水平的家庭，应该有能力养育更多的孩子。然而事实上，北美平均每个家 庭的育儿数量仅为两到三个。而在尼日利亚等经济欠发达地区， 家户平均育儿多达六七个， 而且已经成为家常便饭。 • 能否想当然地做出以下结论：“穷 国”的育龄夫妇拒绝计划生育，无视多生多育对国家的教育和卫生系统带来的负担，是落后和无 知的表现。

  23. 人 口与环境的关 系、文化价值观、信仰体系和生育实践对于生育率的深 远影响 • 在北美，除了针对育儿的代价和收益(cost and benefit) 的经济层面的考虑之外，还有一 系列其他因素，在影响和促使配偶，使之做出限制家庭规模的决定。这些因素可以是：与“理 想”家庭规模相关的文化规范和社会期望；与职业选择有关的空间流动；妇女就业、职业目标和怀孕生育时间的“理性”选择；儿童成长过程对于社会资源的需求和耗费。

  24. 人 口与环境的关 系、文化价值观、信仰体系和生育实践对于生育率的深 远影响 • 在非工业化社会，孩童作为劳力的对于增加家庭收入和未来养老而言，具有相当高的潜在价值。除此之外，育龄夫妇愿意多生多育，还出于对下列因素的考虑：婴儿的高死亡率；扩大型家庭(多代同堂的居住模式)中每个 成员所具备的分担抚养幼儿的能力；比发达国家低得多的儿童养育费用；妇女育儿责任与赚钱养家义务之间相辅相成的关系。

  25. Readings M. Wolf, Uterine Families and the Women’s Community. P. L. Kilbride, African Polygyny: Family Values and Contemporary Changes Rubie Watson, The Named and the Nameless. V. Fong, China’s One-Child Policy and the Empowerment of Urban Daughters

More Related