Seeing Anthropology
Cultural Anthropology through Film
4th edition (abridged)
by Karl G. Heider
Chapter 9
Social Organization and Kinship
Societies are organized groups of people. Recall the discussion in Chapter 2, which distinguished between "society"
and "culture." The concept of a society centers on patterned relationships, or ties (the social organization, or social
structure) between people. The concept of a culture, however, centers on cognition, shared ideas or knowledge (the
cultural schemas). Although we (even anthropologists) sometimes use "culture" and "society" interchangeably, they do
have importantly different meanings.
Think about the term "members." It also means body parts. Members of a club, or social unit, or society, are joined in
an organized whole, as are the parts of a living body. Nevertheless, we do not speak of "members of a culture" but of
people who "share" a culture. You can be thrown out of a social unit but you cannot be removed from a culture or
subculture.
In Chapter 2, we saw that cultures are fuzzy categories with no clear boundaries. In contrast, societies and social units
generally have precise boundaries. A person either is or is not a member of a social unit. Cultures and societies are
similar, however, in that each concept can be used at various levels of inclusiveness. We can use the term "society" for
the largest groups, and "social units" for smaller groups (this relationship is comparable to the one between "culture" and
"subculture").
Within any society, there are many different social groups, large and small, that are organized according to different
sorts of principles and that perform different functions. Some groups constitute embedded series, or units within units with
different degrees of inclusiveness.
In summary, groups can be defined according to a number of different criteria:
1. Recruitment: How do people become members of a group? By being born into a kinship group (such as a
clan), by residence (such as a local group like a neighborhood association), by age (such as Generation X),
by choice (such as a club), or by a combination of several criteria?
2. Organization.' Does the group have explicit formal membership, leadership, and functions (such as the United
States or a Rotary Club)? Or is it more of a broad category or class of people such as farmers, Irish
Americans, or senior citizens?
3. Boundedness: Is the group limited to a certain place, or does it extend across territorial boundaries?
4. Corporateness: Does the group own or control real or intellectual property such as land or ritual knowledge?
5. Function.' What does the group do? Does it wage war, regulate marriage, run an irrigation system, or perform
religious ceremonies?
The most basic type of group is a kinship group. Anthropologists have long been impressed with the importance of
kinship, which can be defined as the various cultural constructions or elaborations of marriage, creating affinal relatives
(in-laws), and birth, creating consanguinal (blood) relatives. To summarize: Kinship = Affinity + Consanguinity. Kinship
groups are universal, but the patterns and rules that govern kinship ties vary dramatically from culture to culture.
The realm of kinship is a prime example of interaction between biology and culture, our "biocultural model." Recall our
example of an "unclear family" from Chapter 8, where we saw a complex tangle of consanguinal and affinal ties. Sex and
birth are part of our biology. Nevertheless, those relationships are elaborated in myriad ways in different cultures, leading
to the "cultural construction of kinship."
On the whole, domestic household groups, at the small end of the social unit scale, are kin-based, built around a
nuclear family (wife, husband, and child), an extended family (three or more generations), or related families (two siblings
and their families). By the time we move up in size to social units that we can call settlements (village, hamlet, or
compound cluster), we are no longer dealing with only kin, and we find many unrelated people who for one historical
reason or another are linked in that social unit. At the large end of the social unit scale today are nations (for example,
Malaysia, Canada, Indonesia), in which kinship ties are of minimal significance.
When trying to understand the social structure of a society, you can use three general rules of thumb:
 The smaller the society (the maximal social unit), the more prominent a role kinship will play in organizing the
subunits (the constituent social groups).
 The larger the maximal social unit, the more different sorts of subunits there will be.
 The larger the maximal social unit, the more the subunits will be organized on principles other than kinship.
DESCENT GROUPS
The most important of the kinship groups are descent groups, which contain the people who are united by a direct
line of descent from a common ancestor. These groups can be unilineal, in which descent is traced through only one
parent (the most widespread form of descent group), or non-unilineal, in which descent is traced through either or both
parents. In the United States, for example, the most common descent pattern is non-unilineal. However, that is far from
the norm.
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In unilineal descent, membership in the descent group is automatically determined at birth by one of two rules of
descent. In patrilineal societies, the person is a member of his or her father's group (a patrilineal descent group) or in
matrilineal societies, descent is reckoned through the mother (a matrilineal descent group). Unilineal descent groups
vary in size, in function, and in how explicitly people can trace their genealogical relationships.
Descent groups usually have several attributes. They are generally
 Exogamous
 Corporate (Some property is usually owned jointly, in the name of the group as a whole. It may be land, livestock,
or sacred objects or even sacred knowledge.)
 Totemic (Descent groups often are associated in some ritual or symbolic sense with particular animals, birds, or
other aspects of nature, an idea we will explore further in the section on totems in Chapter 11.)
All manner of other social and religious activities may also be organized by these descent groups. The groups
themselves may be egalitarian, or they may be ranked in a hierarchy. We differentiate unilineal descent groups
mainly on the basis of size.
Lineages, Clans, and Sibs
The lineage is the smallest unilineal descent group, in which everyone knows the other members of the groups and
how they are related. In societies in which these lineages make up parts, or segments, of larger units, we speak of
segmentary lineage systems. Clans and sibs are larger unilineal descent groups in which people believe that they can
trace their descent back to some founding ancestor and therefore have a sense of collective identity. However, the line of
descent is only assumed and cannot be reconstructed. Clans and sibs are generally exogamous, marriage being
forbidden between members of the same group. A distinction is often made between groups that are territorially bounded
and own property in the name of the group and are called clans, and groups that are more widely dispersed and have no
corporate holdings and are called sibs. Clans or sibs may be made up of clearly recognized lineage segments, as with
the Nuer, or may be more internally undifferentiated, as with the Dani, who do not emphasize lineages.
Patrilineal Descent
There are far more patrilineal societies than matrilineal societies. In patrilineal societies, a person is born into his or
her father's group. Property is inherited through the male line, and often family names or titles are passed down through
males. Strong patrilineal emphases in naming and inheritance can exist without strongly developed patrilineal descent
groups. European societies, for example, have long used patrilineal principles for family names and for inheritance but
lacked formal descent groups. As we shall see in Chapter 12, all societies—whether patrilineal or matrilineal—are
patriarchal. That is, they vest most of the real power in men.
Matrilineal Descent
We need to distinguish matrilineal descent, the rule of descent through women (or the principle that a person takes his
or her social location from the mother, not the father), from matriarchy, a theoretical society where women, not men,
yield the power. In theory, a matrilineal system is just the mirror image of a patrilineal system. In practice, however,
because of the dominance of males in every society, this matrilineal system turns out to be not all that different from a
patrilineal system. Although an overwhelmingly large majority of unilineal descent group systems are patrilineal, a
significant minority are matrilineal. These groups include widely separated cultures such as the Navajo and the Hopi in
North America; many sub-Saharan groups; some cultures in India, especially in the southern state of Kerala; and the
largest of all, the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia (see Krier, 1995; Blackwood, 1995).
Non-Unilineal Descent
There are ways to constitute descent groups other than through a strictly unilineal rule (be it patrilineal or matrilineal).
Some societies form cognatic descent groups by allowing individuals to choose whether to become affiliated with their
father's descent group or their mother's descent group. This choice is often tied to residence. A person has relatives in
several areas and so is entitled to join any of these groups but chooses one, gaining rights to land and other benefits
through that group. Cognatic descent groups, then, are corporate groups that own some valuables in common.
Linda Stone draws a useful distinction between cognatic societies and bilateral societies (1997:178). Cognatic
societies are organized into cognatic descent groups, and every person has chosen membership in one out of several
groups that he or she is eligible to join. Bilateral societies, which are common in Europe and Southeast Asia, also
recognize descent through both father and mother but do not have actual organized descent groups. People can inherit
through both father and mother and, as we shall see in the next section, kinship terms for cousins, uncles, and aunts do
not distinguish the father's side from the mother's side. In bilateral societies, however, one can often recognize a
unilateral bias in one realm or another. For example, most Americans follow a patrilineal principle in family names, but
there is an unrecognized matrilineal bias in postmarital residence as well as where you eat Thanksgiving dinner.
KINSHIP TERMINOLOGY SYSTEMS
Among the first really good sets of ethnographic data were kinship terms, the words that people use to talk about
their relatives. There were lots of reasons for this development. Kinship terms are easy to discover. People talk about
kinship freely. People use kinship terms openly.
Diagramming the Kin Universe
There are many ways to show kinship ties on paper. Sometimes "family trees" are drawn literally like trees, starting
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with a single ancestor (the important founder, or apical ancestor) and branching up. Sometimes the diagrams hang down
like a branching chandelier. Sometimes the focus is on a single person, the "I," or the speaker, placed in the center with
parents and grandparents radiating out in widening concentric circles.
Try collecting someone's genealogy. You will quickly find that unless that person has a very standard simple family, in
which no one married more than once and there are no stepsisters, half-cousins, or the like, your diagram will quickly get
complicated and overloaded. For convenience here, we can just map married couples and the set of children associated
with the first marriage. Using this simple diagram, you should be able to map all the relatives.
Every culture has a finite and fairly small set of words that label categories of relations. This vocabulary is called their
kinship terminology. It includes terms of reference, which are used when speaking about another person ("He is my
father.") and terms of address, which are used when speaking to another person ("Hey, Mom!'). Terms may refer to
relatives by marriage (affines) or to biological relatives (consanguines), or they may cover both (such as uncle, who may
be a father's brother or an aunt's husband).
There may be multiple terms, each denoting the same person but with different connotations (pop, pa, dad, daddy,
papa, father). Complicating things, kinship terms are often extended metaphorically to non-kin (Uncle Sam, Mother
Teresa, Brother Cadfael, Father Christmas).
Another problem arises when members of a society refer to someone by using a kin term when no biological
ormarriage relationship exists. It may just be an expression of friendship or collective identity. One example is the use of
the term brother among African Americans in the United States. It is more an expression of solidarity and shared identity
than a definition of a biological relationship.
From here, with a large enough piece of paper, you can map any relationships. For example, here is a more complicated family. The first wife of the
man (A) died; he and his second wife divorced. What are the English kinship terms for A and B? B and C? C and D?
NON-KIN GROUPINGS
Kinship is not the only means of grouping people in a society. Age is another dimension along which members of a
society are organized. Many of the more complex societies are characterized more by involvement in voluntary
organizations, such as churches, corporations, clubs, and the like, than by groupings that are determined at birth.
Organization by Age
Many societies group people, especially boys, by age cohorts that cut across descent groups. We have seen this
pattern among the Nuer. The cohort, called an age set, is formalized with an initiation ceremony in the early teens.
Because neighboring Nuer tribes do the same thing, a man traveling away from home can claim ties with the age set that
is equivalent to his own. So the Nuer age set members provide social and political support to each other and are allies in
conflicts.
Western societies include some structures that are generally equivalent to age sets. In Austria, people are labeled by
their birth year, rather like a good wine (for example, Jahrgang 1977). In the United States, high school and college
classes are identified by the year of their graduation, and they celebrate their collective identity with class reunions every
five or ten years.
Voluntary Associations
Large-scale industrial societies such as the United States are characterized by social groupings that are based not on
inherent attributes such as ancestry or date of birth but on the individual's choice. This structure allows for a vast number
of social groupings, in contrast to descent groupings, which are more limited.
The distinction between automatic and voluntary group membership is not as clear as it seems at first glance. On the
one hand, ethnographers who describe kin-based societies inevitably come across cases in which people manipulate or
even break the rules, even as they are ostensibly agreeing with them. On the other hand, in the United States, many of
our "voluntary" social groups are those of our parents. Churches, schools, and clubs all have a degree of family continuity.
Even though they are technically voluntary, we somehow wind up in our paternal or maternal groups.
One of the most ambitious fieldwork studies of such voluntary associations in the United States was conducted by
two psychologists, Roger G. Barker and Herbert F. Wright. They and their research team exhaustively cataloged all of the
"behavior settings" in which the residents of a small Midwestern town interacted:
The Presbyterian worship services, the high school basketball games, and the post office, for example, persist year after year with their unique
configurations of behavior, despite constant changes in the persons involved. These persisting, extra-individual behavior phenomena we have
called the standing behavior patterns. (Barker and Wright, 1955:7)
Of the 585 behavior settings identified, many revealed ongoing voluntary associations in the town, from formal (Boy
Scouts) to informal (high school kids at the drug store soda fountain). An analysis of kinship groups in the town would
have given only an incomplete picture of social activities there. In fact, most activities were organized through voluntary
associations.
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SEEING ANTHROPOLOGY
Social Organization and The Nuer
Filmmakers: Hilary Harris, George Breidenbaugh, and Robert Gardner
The Nuer, shot in 1968 in Ethiopia, is surely one of the most beautiful of our films. Hilary Harris, who shot most of it,
was already famous for his New York dance films, and his sensitivity to Nuer movement shows clearly. Robert Gardner,
who had made the Dani film Dead Birds (Chapter 3) seven years earlier, visited Harris in the field for a couple of weeks
with a synchronous sound camera and shot the interview sequences.
The short clip begins as a Nuer man describes the importance of cattle in Nuer life. We see scenes of domestic
activity: milking, cooking, and fetching water from a river. A group of men try to work out a problem: one man's wife has
not borne him a son, so he wants to divorce her and have the bride wealth cattle returned. More domestic scenes follow,
and then the men of an age set gather to drink beer together.
Setup Questions
1. How does the film use emic, or native, statements to augment the etic narration?
2. What various uses do the Nuer make of cattle and cattle products?
3. What does the divorce case suggest about cattle and social organization?
CHAPTER SUMMARY
 Social organization refers to the ways in which a society is subdivided into constituent subgroups or
smaller social units.
 In organizing themselves, all societies use principles based on the biological facts of procreation: affinity,
the (marriage) links between a man and a woman, and consanguinity, the "blood" link of descent
connecting parents and children. Unilineal descent groups are formed by the rule that a person is by birth
a member of the father's group (patrilineal descent) or of the mother's group (matrilineal descent). These
groups are usually exogamous, corporate, and totemic.
 Small unilineal descent groups, in which everyone knows everyone and the links are common knowledge,
are called lineages; larger groups, in which the exact relations may be no longer remembered, are called
clans and sibs.
 Some societies use a principle of non-unilineal descent, forming cognatic descent groups where people
use either patrilineal or matrilineal links to claim membership in a particular group.
 Most kinship terms are like uncle, lumping several different sorts of people together in a single category.
This choice is not an arbitrary one, as the sets of kinship terms in a culture give clues about the structure
of the interpersonal relationships. The terminology tends to lump together people who are alike in
culturally salient ways and split apart those who are different in culturally important ways.
 Common non-kinship criteria for forming social units are age (age sets) and voluntary associations (such
as clubs).
KEY TERMS
affines (affinal)
age sets
clans
consanguines (consanguinal)
descent groups
genealogical method
kinship
kinship terms
lineage
matriarchy
matrilineal descent
non-unilineal descent
patriarchal
patrilineal descent
sibs
social organization
social structure
societies
totemic
unilineal descent
voluntary associations
QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT
1. Why are patrilineal systems so much more common than matrilineal systems?
2. In large-scale societies, kinship principles seem less important than in small-scale tribal societies. What does
this fact suggest about the advantages and disadvantages of kinship organizations?
3. Can you identify changes in (ideas about) social organization between older and younger generations today?
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