Tracing backwards
Who are
we?
Where do
we come
from?
The two questions are
inextricably intertwined in
our minds. Somehow,
who we are seems to be
dependent in considerable
on our ancestry.
Ancestry can be looked
upon in two ways:
Objective point of
view from science:
Subjective point of
view within culture:
For example, the
origins of the human
species as understood
by
paleoanthropologists
How do ordinary
individuals (not
scientists) trace
backwards
People everywhere have
given thought and come
up with beliefs about
their origins, and these
beliefs involve a notion
of kinship -- for
example, descent from
Adam and Eve.
What we find in culture after culture is a tracing
forward in time from an original ancestor (though not
every culture does this), and also tracing backward in
time from the present to ancestors (possibly universal,
but how far back the tracing goes varies widely).
How is
that tracing
done?
The answer to the
first question is:
1. Kinship:
Much of the reckoning about the past, about
ancestry by ordinary individuals is done through
kinship, so we want to take a closer look at
kinship as part of culture and nature.
kinship, n.
1. Connection by blood,
marriage, or adoption; family
relationship.
Kinship diagram symbols
D
male
o
female
parent-child
or
}
husband-wife
sibling
Elementary Nuclear Family
D
D
o
o
Ego
Alphabetical Kinship Symbols
M
F
S
D
C
B
Z
H
W
mother
father
son
daughter
child
brother
sister
husband
wife
Elementary Nuclear Family
∆
F
∆
B
o
M
o
Ego
The diagrams can be extended indefinitely to
produce complex genealogical relations.
Extended Family Relations
o
D
D
F
D
B
o
M
o
Ego
o
D
D
o
D
D
o
o
Important
In the anthropological study of kinship, the extended
family relations are NOT called by the same terms as
those used in English (i.e., not as "uncle", "aunt,"
"grandfather," etc. They are called by combinations of
the elementary relations (i.e, as "mother's brother,"
"father's sister," "mother's mother." We'll find out why
in a minute.
Extended kinship relations can also be described in terms of the elementary
alphabetic symbols.
MOTHER'S BROTHER
MB
MOTHER'S BROTHER'S DAUGHTER
MBD
MOTHER'S SISTER'S HUSBAND
MZH
MOTHER'S MOTHER'S FATHER
MMF
Extended Family Relations
o
D
D
F
D
B
o
M
o
Ego
o
MZ
D
D
MZH
o
D
MB
D
o
MBW
o
Extended Family Relations
o
D
MF
D
F
D
B
o
M
MM
o
MZ
D
MZH
D
MB
o
MBW
o
D
o
D
o
Ego
MZS
MZD
MBS
MBD
Okay, so why do we use this system of diagramming and combination to represent kinship relations,
rather than using the English terms like "uncle," "aunt," and "grandmother."
Answer: because the English terms carve up the system of kin in CULTURE-SPECIFIC ways. Other
cultures carve it up differently. Example:
ENGLISH
IROQUOIS
"mother" = M
"mother" = M, MZ, FBW
"aunt" = MZ, FZ, MBW, FZW
"aunt" = FZ, MBW
Iroquois Type Kinship Terminology - Mother's Side
"father"
o
D
MF
MM
"uncle" "aunt"
D
F
D
B
o
M
"mother"
o
MZ
D
MZH
D
MB
o
MBW
o
D
o
D
o
Ego
MZS
MZD
MBS
MBD
"brother and sister"
"cousin"
What are we tracing:
A key question for us: When people trace their
ancestry, to determine who they are, are they
interested in the genetic material that has been
been passed or the cultural material?
Your own experience:
What determines who you are: your biology or your culture?
How many wonder whether their “parents” are their “real” parents?
2. Roles
Role = a bundle of rights, duties,
expectations:
• Right = what you can demand of others;
• Duty = what you must do in relation to others;
• Expectations = how you should be.
Status = position within a structure
of positions
Recruitment = method for
selecting who occupies what
status.
Examples of roles:
-surgeon
-policeman
-professor
-quarterback
-President of the
U.S.
• Concept of the “role” in acting.
• Roles or parts are related to other roles & parts.
• Learning a part (social transmission).
• Script (where does the script come from?).
• Kinship -- in what measure do we learn the
roles the way an actor does? In what measure are
they given by biology?
Kinship relations are kinds of roles. We have to study
the relations to understand (1) what rights, duties, and
expectations make up that relation; but also (2) how do
individuals who play the roles come to occupy that
position (i.e., what is the "principle of recruitment to the
status.")
Kinship relations are kinds of roles. We have to study
the relations to understand (1) what rights, duties, and
expectations make up that relation; but also (2) how do
individuals who play the roles come to occupy that
position (i.e., what is the "principle of recruitment to the
status.") Thus, when we study the role of "husband" in
American culture, we have to ask what kinds of rights,
duties, and obligations attach to the position of
"husband." We also have to ask: How does one come
to be a "husband"?
What are some of the rights and duties of a
"husband" in contemporary U.S. culture?
What are some of the rights and duties of a
"husband" in contemporary U.S. culture?
• Right to have sex with his wife (sometime);
• Right to expect that his wife will not have sex
with other men (or women) while she is his wife;
• Duty not to have sex with other women (or men)
while he is married;
Etc.
How does one get to be a "husband":
How does one get to be a "husband":
Man must have the consent of the women to
whom he is to play the role of husband;
Man and woman must undergo a ceremony
("marriage”) performed by an appropriate authority (e.g.,
a justice of the peace).
Etc.
IMPORTANT: roles are part of culture. They are
socially learned, socially transmitted. Because they are
part of culture, we might expect them to change over
time. We can also expect to find differences in the
roles between different societies. When we find a role
in another culture that resembles one in our own (e.g.,
"husband"), we have to be careful not to project onto
the characteristics of the role in our own culture, and,
instead, attempt to understand its own characteristics.
For example, how does one get to be a "husband" in
that culture? What rights and duties does a "husband"
have in that culture?
Example of variability in the "husband" role:
Tallensi people of northern Ghana in Africa. Unlike the
contemporary American role of "husband," it is not the duty of
Tallensi husband to confine his sexual relations to one wife. On
the contrary, it is right of a man to have more than one wife.
This is called POLYGYNY. The man has a right to sexual
access to each of them.
Classic study of the Tallensi done by the British anthropologist Meyer Fortes and
published in 1949 called The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi.
o2
o1
o3
D
o4
Ego
o
o
o
o
“In Islam, the regulations concerning
polygyny limit the number of wives a
man can have while making him
responsible for all of the women
involved.”
Islamic polygyny?
“ ... Marry women of your choice, two,
or three, or four; but if ye fear that ye
shall not be able to deal justly (with
them), then only one or (a captive) that
your right hands possess. That will be
more suitable, to prevent you from doing
injustice.”
(Qur'an 4:3)
POLYANDRY
If polygyny is a rule permitting one man to marry
several wives at the same time, there is another rule
(polyandry) found in some cultures around the world in
which a woman may marry more than one man at the
same time. There are even some cultures in which group
marriage is permitted, i.e., two or more women married
simultaneously to two or more men. Rules permitting or
requiring multiple spouses are grouped under the term
polygamy.
Important point: rights, duties, and expectations are not
just a matter of what the individuals immediately
involved in a role believe or practice. They are what the
broader society understands as the norm, that is, as the
way people ought to be behave in a particular role.
For this reason, societies often develop ways of publicly
acknowledging a role. Marriage ceremonies are an
example of this, in which appropriate authorities
establish and recognize the existence of a husband-wife
relationship. Graduation ceremonies acknowledge the
conferral of academic degrees. Inauguration
ceremonies take place to install a new president. And so
forth. Society has a stake in establishing and
maintaining roles.
3. Is the family a natural unit?
We have have been talking about tracing backwards in
this lecture from a subjective point of view. What are
people tracing when they trace their ancestry?
Answer = social relations, which are constructed in
accord with roles, which are in turned culturally learned.
Let’s turn now to the comparative study of subjective
cultural points of view. We begin to get something like an
objective demonstration.
Is the family a natural unit?
Why are we interested in these questions about kinship
roles in a course about biology, language, and culture?
• Kinship is the key nodal institution between biology
and culture.
• Human's reproduce sexually.
• Kinship is in part about biological reproduction.
However, it is important to distinguish the family as an
institution constituted by culturally-prescribed roles, and
the family as a biological unit.
The culturally consituted family is not necessarily
identical to the biological family.
Are male and female two different beings?
A key aspect of the ability of humans, like other animals, to
adapt biologically is sexual reproduction, in which the genetic
material from two different organisms comes together to
produce a new one.
In the living world, sexual reproduction does not always mean
that there are two distinct organisms (gonochoric (animals);
dioecious (plants)), a male and a female, carrying distinctive
sets of chromosomes, that come together.
Some sea
anemones, for
example, are
hermaphrodites,
carrying both the
male and the
female
reproductive
parts.
A number of fishes are also either simultaneous
hermaphrodites (like anemones) or sequential
hermaphrodites (changing their sex over time). Mollies
are an example of sequential hermaphrodites.
However, most animals, like humans,
have the distinct sex organs on
different organisms.
So it seems natural to find an analogy between the genetic
processes involved in human reproduction and the social
units referred to as "families."
Biological reproduction: genes
Social reproduction: family
o
∆
o
Thesis: the family exists as a social unit for the
purposes of transmitting culture, not just biological
reproduction.
Observation: the family is not necessary for biological
reproduction.
This can be seen among non-human primates most
closely related to humans. Among chimpanzees, we
find strong mother-child bonds, but apparently no
father-child bonds. This goes along with the apparent
absence of regular husband-wife type relations. Some
evidence for occasional consortships, in which a female
goes off with a particular male for several days to
weeks, but sex during estrus is generally described as
"frenzied," with multiple males mating with a single
female.
Gene flow and social reproduction
in chimps and bonobos
D
D
D
D
D
D
o
D
o
Question 1: Are humans biologically programmed to live
in families (involving the presence of a husband/father
figure), although chimps and bonobos are not? Or is the
human family a cultural invention (like the wheel or
control over fire) that is socially learned and socially
transmitted?
The specific form of the family cannot be biologically
determined, since the form is so highly variable from
culture to culture, as we have seen: monogamy vs.
polygyny vs. polyandry vs. group marriage; also wide
variability in rights, duties, expectations.
Comparative evidence indicates that, in the vast majority of
cultures, there is something resembling the roles of "father"
and "husband."
However, even where there is an ideal of families with
father/husbands, many families may be matrifocal (i.e.,
with only mother and children).
Tentative conclusion: the family appears to be a
cultural invention that is socially learned and
socially transmitted.
We may well ask why so many cultures have
employed this cultural construct. Must it have
some adaptive significance?
Question 2: Even if the family is a cultural invention,
might it serve the purpose of supplying greater
certainty to males of their own paternity, and, hence,
more reason for them to participate in the socialization
of the young?
Adoption: in cultures where the completed family
(with husband/father) is especially highly valued, such
that bachelors or unmarried women are looked down
upon, there tends also to be a great emphasis on
adoption. Therefore, families are formed even in the
absence of biological connections between father and
child, or even mother and child.
Cultural forms that obscure biological paternity: while
polyandry and group marriage are relatively
uncommon, these forms make it difficult if not
impossible to determine paternity. Also practices (like
ritualized group sex among the Xavante) that tend to
undercut the certainty of paternity associated with
marriage.
Jural fatherhood does not necessarily mean care for the
child: Nayar case (Kerala state, SW India) — jural
father may have little or no contact with child; Nuer
case: woman may marry a housepost. Has a husband
but husband is not the care-giver.
Folk theories of biology: many theories about how
sexual reproduction takes place allow for multiple
"fathers." Xokleng of Brazil: mother contributes
blood, father semen to make bone, but repeated sexual
intercourse needed; semen may come from different
men. Trobriand Islanders (off coast of New Guinea):
in their official discourse, as described by Bronislaw
Malinowski in the 1910s, there is no recognition that
the father actually makes a biological contribution to
the child. Sexual intercourse simply opens the womb
and makes it receptive to spirits of deceased relatives
that are floating around. So many theories do not
acknowledge the idea of one "father."
Conclusion: the family does NOT exist, at least in
many well-attested ethnographic cases, for the purpose
of supplying assurance of biological paternity to males.
Why then does it exist? What kind of adaptive value
does it have? We'll come back to this in later lectures.
4. Do chimps have culture?
We will not spend much time on this question,
however will be asking in subsequent lectures
whether chimps have the capacity for language. In
the present lecture, since we have established that
chimps (and bonobos) do NOT have families, while
human societies regularly do, it is worthwhile to
wonder whether, if chimps do have culture, that
means that culture does not depend upon the
invention of the family form with husband/fathers.
The short answer to this question is that the evidence
currently available supports the view that chimps DO
have some culture. Chart shows a small bit of the
accumulated evidence from four decades of field
research among wild chimpanzee populations in
Africa (from Andrew Whiten and Christophe Boesch,
"Cultures of Chimpanzees," Scientific American,
284(1(January)): 60-67).
Conlusion: chimps do have rudimentary culture.
Therefore, the human-type family with its role of
husband/father is not essential to culture. Some
transmission can be achieved through the mother-child
bond without the husband-father.
However, it is one thing to ask whether rudimentary
culture could be achieved without human-type families.
Another to ask whether complex culture (including
language?) would be possible without human-type
families.
Are families (however variably constituted) essential
for accumulation and transmission of greater quantities
of culture?