Anthropology 310- Family, Kin and Community

1. Anthropology 310-Family, Kin and Community Summer Session 3 – 2008

2. Instructor • Christa Amouroux Hours: T&TH 9:00-1 pm. • Amouroux@sfsu.edu • Office: HSS 111 • Office Hours: 12:30-1:15 Wed or by appointment.

3. “Anthropologists use relationships to uncover relationships” Marilyn Strathern 2005

4. Key Questions • What has happened to kinship studies since 1970? • How do we rethink fundamental questions and assumptions about familial connection? • What new possibilities and critical insights are offered by reproductive technologies? • What are the future of kinship studies and family forms?

5. Contemporary US Families • In 2008, less than half of the children in the United States will spend their entire childhood residing with both of their biological parents. • Divorce and remarriage, gay or lesbian parenting partnerships, single-parent families, adoptive and foster families are all forms of modern family life. • Reproductive technologies blur the conception of the nuclear-biological family even further with donor insemination, surrogacy and in-vitro fertilization becoming more commonplace.

6. Attendance • Three or more absences will result in failing or being dropped from the class. • Late arrival and early departure will also impact your grade significantly. • Please do not sign-up for this course unless you intend to read all the materials, participate in discussion and attend all class meetings.

7. Weekly Homework • During most class sessions you will bring a newspaper article, clipping from a magazine or other written media piece which relates to the readings assignment for the class session. • Be prepared to discuss how your article relates to the current class readings. • This easy assignment will help you make connections with what you are learning in class and the world around you. This assignment will also help you construct your final paper as that we will • discuss how to critically analyze concepts.

8. Quizzes • 4 quizzes will be given • Cover the week’s readings • Make-up quizzes will not be given.

9. Mid Term • 2 part mid-term: In-class section and a take home section available. • In-Class Portion in class 7/31 • The midterm will test your knowledge of the terms and ideas covered in class, films and in the readings. It is vital to keep notes on the terminology and main concepts covered in this course in order to successfully complete the in-class portion of the exam. • Take Home Portion due 8/5 • You will use two previously assigned readings for the take-home. The questions will ask you to place these readings in conversation with each other, and to summarize the main points and take a critical position. The take-home is 5-6 pages in length.

10. Final Paper • Final paper 100 points- due in class on August 14, 7-8 pages • Double-spaced, consisting of an analysis of reproductive technologies. • Please use the course readings, films and notes in your analysis.

11. Final Paper Guidelines • Locate media coverage on one new reproductive technology. You can use a case that is being or has been covered in the media or a story covered in the past five years. • Time, Newsweek and LEXIS/NEXIS, advertisements from the internet, websites for sperm banks or egg donors. • Your paper should focus on one issue such as prenatal testing, genetic screening, invitro-fertilization, surrogacy, or sex selection technology. • SIGN-UP FOR A TOPIC BY WEEK 2 • The summer session is short, so make sure to keep notes on how the assigned readings relate to your topic. It is essential that you use readings from the class in your analysis of the topic.

12. Texts • Janet Carsten (2004) After Kinship • Gerald Mallon (2004) Gay Men Choosing Parenthood • Articles are available at http://amouroux.wordpress.com/family-kin-community-anthropology-310/ • Copies are also available in SCI 3rd Fl, Anthropology Department

13. Course Objectives • Develop a critical awareness of the meaning of the family and kinship as historically specific and socially constructed. • Develop critical reading and writing skills that allow for a nuanced understanding of issues related to the family, kinship and community. • Develop an understanding of a cross-cultural and transnational perspective of kinship, community and family.

14. Introduction to Kinship A Short History

15. What is Kinship? • “Kinship and marriage are about the basic facts of life. They are about 'birth, and conception, and death', the eternal round that seemed to depress the poet but which excites, among others, the anthropologist. [...] Man is an animal, but he puts the basic facts of life to work for himself in ways that no other animal does or can” (Fox, 1996 [1967]: 27).

16. One Definition: Blood and Law • Kinship is the recognition of a relationship between persons based on descent or marriage. If the relationship between one person and another is considered by them to involve descent, the two are consanguines ("blood") relatives. If the relationship has been established through marriage, it is affinal. (Stone, 1997: 5).

17. One Definition: Relationships • The socially recognized relationship between people in a culture who are or are held to be biologically related or who are given the status of relatives by marriage, adoption, or other ritual. • Kinship is the broad-ranging term for all the relationships that people are born into or create later in life and that are considered binding in the eyes of their society.

18. Kinship: Network • Kinship is a system of social relationships that are expressed in a biological idiom, using terms like "mother", "son," and so on. • It is best visualized as a mass of networks of relatedness, not two of which are identical, that radiate from each individual. Kinship is the basic organizing principle in small-scale societies like those of the Aborigines and provides a model for interpersonal behavior (Tonkinson, 1991:57).

19. Working Definition: Kinship • Kinship encompasses the norms, roles, institutions and cognitive processes referring to all the social relationships that people are born into or create later in life, and that are expressed through, but not limited to, a biological idiom.

20. Cross Cultural Kinship • According to anthropologists, many cultures around the world use the word "family" differently.  • To individuals in the United States there exists the concept of a nuclear family where a mother, father, and their children reside together while others consider all those people biologically related as "family." 

21. Cross Cultural Kinship • However, this is not cross-culturally valid.  • Cultures such as the Fore and the Runa consider people who are not biologically related to themselves as members of their family.  • Examples of these “fictive kin” are godparents or trading partners.

22. Kinship Charts • Triangle represents a man • O represents a woman • = denotes marriage • Line represents connection between persons • Triangle or circle with a diagonal line through it represents that the individual is dead • A diagonal line through the equal sign represents divorce. 

23. Kinship Symbols Male                    Either sex   Female  Sibling link Adopted Cohabitation = Deceased  Marriage  =  Divorce EGO Sexual relationship M or Mo = Mother F  or Fa = Father Z  or Si = Sister B or Br = Brother D or Da = Daughter S  or So = Son W =  Wife H =  Husband Co = Cousin P or Pa = Parent Ch = Child Sib = Sibling

24. After Kinship Janet Carsten

25. Janet Carsten: After Kinship • What is the future of kinship studies? • How do new reproductive technologies impact our understanding of family, personhood and marriage? • What “new” familial arrangements are emerging? • How can anthropologists understand these changes?

26. Future of Kinship Studies • Rethink the biological family • Consider new family forms • Rethink the connections between kin, family and community. • How is childhood being changed? • What are the new definitions of parents? • Is marriage integral to family? Why?

27. Janet Carsten: After Kinship • Story of Stephen Blood and his wife’s desire to use his semen to conceive a child. • “I think I have the most right of anybody to my husband’s sperm and I desperately want this baby” Diane Blood • Rabbinic debates in Israel. What is the relationship between a sperm donor and a child? • What is the status of a child conceived this way? • Sperm donors must be taken from non-Jewish men.

28. Janet Carsten: After Kinship • Non-Jewish sperm does not affect the Jewish identity of the child since Jewishness in inherited from the mother. • Erasure of the father/sperm donor • Connection between family and the state

29. Janet Carsten: After Kinship • Anna: “I’m on a high. I’d just been out and I’d bought myself a new jumper. I thought I’ll wear my trouser suit and this new jumper to meet her. I had it all planned out- I didn’t want to look too dressy; I didn’t want to look too scruffy. I just wanted to look in-between, because I had this idea that she was quite poor…”

30. Three vignettes • These three stories are used by Carsten to demonstrate the new forms of kinship in the 21st century: • Intense emotional experiences of family relations • Connection between private/public, legal/state and the process of nation-making • Issues of personhood, gender and body

31. Janet Carsten: After Kinship • Is kinship a “pre-given” order of things? • Is it natural and unchangeable? • Anthropologists have focused on the social meaning of kinship, leaving the biological aspects tacit. • But is there a separation between biological and social kinship?

32. Janet Carsten: After Kinship • “Broken” and “reconstituted families” • Technological innovations- fertility treatment, genetic testing, posthumous conception, cloning, and the mapping of the human genome • Shake fundamental conceptions of familial connection • Is this a brave new world “after kinship?”

33. History of Kinship • Mid-20th century social anthropologists such as Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard and Meyers Fortes kinship was the basis for understanding small-scale societies. • It was the structure in places that lack a state organization, or so it was thought. • Kinship was the political structure and the key to understanding these societies

34. Anthropology and Kinship • Virtually every major figure in American, British, and French anthropology felt compelled to consider kinship, sometimes briefly, but more often at considerable length. • J. F. McLennan (1970 [1865]) • Sir E. B. Tylor (1871, 1889) • Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss (1967), • W. H. R. Rivers (1900, 1906, 1907, 1910, 1914, 1915) • A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1950, 1965 [1952]) • Bronislaw Malinowski (1913, 1929, 1930).

35. Western & Non-Western • “Kinship is something ‘they’ have; ‘we’ have families and this is quite a different matter” • In this tradition, language was seen as a direct reflection of culture and kinship terminologies were of interest because they revealed the way that language shaped social categories and hence behavior. • 1970’s saw the “undoing” of kinship

36. History of Kinship • Nuclear family – universal social institution • Separated the politico-jural from the domestic • Politico-jural was the focus because it translated into the public roles held by men • Kinship was interesting to anthropologists because it explained how societies cohered, made decisions and reproduced social-political structures

37. History of Kinship • Early on kinship was defined by anthropologists as variable, but the assumption was that there was a large degree of universality and consistency of kinship patterns • Women were absent from anthropological accounts of kinship because the emphasis was a colonialist project of trying to understand the forms of decision-making among “tribes.”

38. Lewis Henry Morgan • Lewis Henry Morgan, often spoken of appropriately as the father of American anthropology, called attention to the subject in his pioneering ethnographic contribution, League of the Iroquois (1969 [1851]: 83-87). His Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) was the first systematic, cross-cultural analysis of kinship nomenclature.

39. Claude Lévi-Strauss • Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949, tr. 1962) -"Only kinship data present an internal logic comparable to the system of language." Examined the "roots of the kinship problem" beginning with incest prohibition (the origins of culture- gift and counter gift realized by alliance) and the "principle of reciprocity" (wife exchange) and organized a large number of phenomena that had seemed disparate and obscure.

40. The Elementary Structures of Kinship •  In The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949),Lévi-Strauss argued (contra Radcliffe-Brown) that a cultural phenomenon such as unilateral cross-cousin marriage cannot be explained in terms of individual sentiments. • Following the lead of Mauss and Durkheim, he proposed that a rule directing men to marry their matrilateral cross-cousins is, for structural reasons, more productive of social solidarity than the reverse.

41. Claude Lévi-StraussElementary Structures of Kinship (1949) • His work on kinship contained complex theorizing on the long-term structural implications of particular types of marriage alliance • “Positive Marriage Rules” • These were “elementary” rules which he contrasted with “complex” rules/systems • Because there was no injunction to marry a specific kin member ( i.e., elementary) only “negative marriage rules” (who not to marry)

42. Claude Lévi-Strauss • Levi-Strauss structuralism uses decontextualized ethnographic evidence and asserts all humans think in binary oppositions and that myths express and resolve dichotomies within society. • Myths are symbolic systems which reconcile fundamental human dilemmas and inherent contradictions between self and other, nature and culture, life and death. • As an arm chair anthropologist Levi-Strauss sought to identify patterns among wide range of "primitive" myths.

43. Claude Lévi-Strauss • For Levi-Strauss simple societies were ruled by kinship structures, primarily wife exchange • He underlined the centrality of marriage in kinship, that was the institution that maintained relations among groups, not just individuals. • Marriage was an elaborate, long-term exchange that cemented relations and involved the exchange of goods, services and loyalties • Alliance and descent theory

44. David Schneider • 1969 A Critique of the Study of Kinship and American Kinship (1968) • Founded a new study in the field of kinship • Generation of cultural meanings was the central problem rather than the functioning of the social group or the comparative analysis of kinship terminologies • Move from function to meaning in anthropology

45. David Schneider • This concern for meaning signaled a shift in anthropology from function to meaning (Geertz & Weberian focus on meaning) • It was a departure from British-style studies that focused on social structure (Fortes, Radcliffe-Brown, Levi-Strauss) • He defined a new way of doing kinship

46. David Schneider • He discussed why kinship could no longer progress as it had. • Critique: the analytic domain that kinship occupied was unsound. • Anthropologists has used folk models from their Euro-American cultures • These models were in-valid cross-culturally • Euro-American models assume the primacy of ties derived from sexual procreation

47. David Schneider • These assumptions – procreation and family/kinship- did not necessarily apply cross-culturally • His work problematizes the relationship between the biological and cultural in kinship • Assumed that Euro-American kinship was coherent and stable • Gender and feminist studies developed in response to Schneider’s critique

48. David Schneider • According to Carsten, “Schneider occupies a pivotal role in the reformulation of kinship studies in anthropology” • He focused on structure and functions of social groups and the meanings of kinship in a particular context • He was concerned with the generation of cultural meanings using language.

49. The natural order • When a person is related to a blood relative s/he is related first by common biogenetic heredity, a natural substance, and second, by a relationship, a pattern of behavior or a code of conduct (Cinderella) • Code of conduct – an expectation of behavior (legal) • Natural substance- genes (natural) • Nature trumps law

50. The Family • Family can mean “all relatives” but often refers to the nuclear family unit • Family is synonymous with relative (biological or legal) • Schneider defines family –assemblages of different kinds of relatives into a single cultural unit; this is quite different from “the simple plurality of relatives without regard for their kind or their relationship to each other” (fictive kin and families we choose) • Sexual intercourse: differentiates members of the family • Procreation/intercourse: is the symbol which provides the distinctive features in terms of the family as relative and the family as a cultural unit