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0:00
Kinship today! A little kinship family marriage stuff. Truly exciting material. I mentioned in the prompt, but no one took me up on it, that back in the day, say 70 years ago, for
0:22
anthropology you would have come into a class like this and all we would be doing was kinship. That would be like half the class was doing kinship, and I'd make you do kinship charts, you'd have to memorize the six forms of
0:41
kinship all around the world. You'd be doing these circles and triangles and stuff,
0:51
to the extent that other people, outsiders, joked that anthropology had become "kinshipology."
1:01
I want to talk with you about why anthropologists got so hung up on kinship. In some classes I've tried to reverse the order of the chapters, because in in some ways it's anthropology's emphasis on kinship and familial relationships and trying to trace those out that they ended up discovering all kinds of things about gender and sexuality, that later on with the feminists in the 1970s, in Feminist Anthropology we're able to take some of those old kinship
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studies and be like, "oh wait a second there's a whole bunch of crazy interesting material in here if you just took it the right way, if you just interpreted it in the right way." But the early anthropologists were probably not going to interpret it in the right way. There's a famous book by Lewis Henry Morgan _Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family_. Systems of blood relatedness, and affinity or marriage, of the human family.
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Lewis Henry Morgan is a local hero; he did a lot of his own anthropological work in upstate New York. The department of anthropology at Rochester I think is named after him. He's an alternative to the Franz Boas approach. He wasn't really an academic, as you may remember from our earliest class, he was a proponent of a unilinear or unilineal
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evolutionary model. He believed that all societies were ranked from most primitive to most civilized. This is what Boas ended up fighting against. But he did do some interesting work. He has a great book on the American Beaver for example, which is just fascinating stuff.
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He shouldn't be completely discarded, but a lot of his ideas were of his time.
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The reason why anthropologists were so into kinship at the time is because it was assumed that kinship is just biology. Kinship is just men and women need to get together to reproduce. They're going to reproduce in this way. That's just a biological fact. When we think about kinship, we're just translating biological facts into cultural terms. They went around the world, and they'd figure if somebody didn't have the right words for father or mother or something,
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they somehow didn't know the biological facts, or they were engaged in some primitive weird practices. It was this idea that in some ways biology was the root of kinship, and societies could be ranked from primitive to most civilized based on their kinship system. Kinship was also something that was easy to send people out and get some rapid knowledge. You could send out soldiers and missionaries and give them a page and say, "Just ask people even if you do
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not speak the language. You can ask, 'What is the name of this person to you? What do you call this person?'" There are a lot of kinship systems in the world where people would call
4:47
their father's brothers "father" as well. People would get really freaked out by that and said they were engaged in some primitive promiscuity, when in fact that was not true at all. There are many other languages and other ways kinship terms can be very much more distinguishing than ours. For example, many societies have different words for mother's brother and uncle on your father's side, because those two people will be very different based on your descent
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relationships. People got really into this. It took a long time to reorient the study of kinship. I want to mention, because it also goes back to something we were talking about, the idea of structural functionalism. This was from the UK. The anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown wrote a book called _Structure and Function in Primitive Society_, and what was fascinating about this is the ways in which we talked about structural functionalism as the ways in which a
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society was thought to be a functioning unit. Every part of it would have a function, every part of the structure would have its own function, and kinship was a key to unlocking what people thought of as primitive societies. If you could somehow understand their kinship relationships, if you could sort them into a category, you could then find out something about their social life.
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Radcliffe-Brown had an interesting essay in this in which he talks about a society in which
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you would never talk about sex--they were very buttoned down, no jokes, just very Puritan when it came to talking about sex. Except he noticed that whenever it was one young man and one particular older woman, all of a sudden they would start joking about sex. There would be all this sex talk, jokes, pulling, goofing around. It was completely mystifying. It was not the man's wife, until they finally figured out, wait a second, this is the mother-in-law relationship.
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It is a very tense relationship in this society, especially at the beginning
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part of the marriage. This was the way that they handled the tension--to make all these sex jokes, then go back to their regular life. It was almost as if kinship could unlock a strange key to the workings of these kinds of societies. People got really into it. One of the most famous books
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about descent--so, descent is one way that we think of kinship,
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the idea of being related to people back in time, your elders or your ancestors--one of the most famous books about this was a book by Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer in the Sudan. Again,
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it was the idea that how do people organize themselves
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in the absence of a state or a government or a police force or laws? This is particularly an issue for the Nuer because the British were trying to exercise colonial rule in this area. They were facing enormous resistance and fighting from the Nuer. They could not figure out, "How are these people organizing themselves? They do not have a centralized government, but they seem to be resisting and fighting back. What is going on?"
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Evans-Pritchard's answer to this was they were organizing themselves in these patrilineal descent lines. So, descent lines that were not necessarily literally biologically associated with a founding--a number of founding fathers--but they would organize themselves in these fatherly lineages. So, Evans-Pritchard and others made a big deal about these kinship patterns (240-41).
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In early anthropology this would have been a huge part of this. There were six different patterns and you could explain all sorts of things about social life through them.
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In later work, we re-examined some of these ideas.
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One of the things that we found out is that: 1. It was not necessarily the anthropologists who were the most obsessed--it was not necessarily the people themselves who were most obsessed with descent (242). It turned out that often it was people like the person with the name E.E. Evans-Pritchard who was very interested in descent and lineage and family trees and all these things.
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In some ways--as one of you observed, this is still the case in our own society. Although we do not necessarily say that we organize ourselves by lineages, we sometimes are more obsessed with kinship, oftentimes more than the people we were studying at the time.
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2. The other thing that on re-examination many things that people figured out is that if you just go in and talk to people about who should marry whom or how you should behave or what is your social organization, you will come up with--people will tell you what should be done or the rules or the ideals, and those are often very different from the lived experience that you would have in these places once you are doing actual anthropological fieldwork (243). There is
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often a divergence between what are the rules or guidelines and the lived experience there. 3. The other thing that people realized is that the idea of patrilineality, the idea of patrilineal organization, was oftentimes a reconstruction of something that may have been much more fluid than people were necessarily--it goes back to, it is related to point two, is that when you are just talking to someone about social organization,
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people can be like, "Oh yes, we honor our fathers' lineage and all these things," but that is sometimes a reconstruction of something that is much more complicated in practice (244-45). 4. Finally, my favorite is that what Gough--and she is the one who is quoted here, as the re-examiner of Evans-Pritchard's work--is they were in a
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resistance effort (246). They were trying to resist the Brits. It is at a time when
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lineage and kinship might become super important. If you think about when you are going to war with somebody, all of a sudden the people that you most want by your side are the people who you might consider closest to you. It could have been, or it is probably the case, that these ideas about who belonged to whom were extremely important in the resistance effort. In fact, some of the things that Evans-Pritchard talked about--the importance of kinship to the Nuer--may
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not have been as huge, or may have been very much a historical relationship there.
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So, descent is one huge way in which we do kinship. We can really get into those kinship charts--people get into genealogies all the time these days, often taken from anthropology.
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There is the descent or what is called "the bloodline" stuff. Then, there are affinal ties or affinity or the ties of marriage, and marriage of course is, we know it as a relationship of
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companionship and sanctioned sexual relationships between two people, but marriage often has a lot to do with organizing resources, inheritance, and political alliance (248). In many cases, in many societies, it also can have to do with political alliance, where you are trying to form ties with a neighboring group or you are trying to form ties with a powerful family. So, marriage is one of the ways that we do that.
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In many societies there is at least some form of arranged marriage, because these things are hugely important--inheritance, your economic and political station--you do not want to leave that to chance, the whims of children. Now, of course, whenever we think about arranged marriage, we can go find the most extreme examples of arranged marriage. As we know, we can find children being married off too young in age. Of course, nobody wants to--that
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is something that is surely unjustified. But that is a pretty extreme example. Most societies have some degree of arrangement or some degree in which the grown-ups are trying to steer the marriage choices or in some ways more determine what they are.
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Of course, Guest asks: "What about love?" (249) Because as we know, love is what we are supposed to be basing our marriages on. It has become very hugely important to us. And what I and others would say about that is that most societies, almost all societies, recognize the importance of romantic love. People fall in love all over the place and for hundreds of years. But most societies would consider--or have considered in the past--most societies would
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consider that, okay, there is romantic love, but you do not want to base your marriage on that. Romantic love as basis for marriage is a relatively recent notion: too fragile.
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The idea that we should base marriages on romantic love is relatively recent. It comes to us from those wonderful Jane Austen novels 150 years ago. It is not that romantic love is missing from other societies, it is just that you would not want to gamble on it that much. If you think about it, well, they would also say, "Well, love is not something--you do not start off being in love. You grow into love over time. You will grow to love this person."
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Then, I would say, if you think about it, if you think about how many times--oftentimes
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when somebody says, "I just fell in love with somebody," it is like, it is as often used to get out of a relationship as it is to get into one.
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It is like some of the evolutionary biologists tell us that love is there to spread things around, to make you crazy and do things that you might not have done.
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A lot of people would say it is too fragile. That said, romantic love has been acknowledged in many different societies and for many years was on the rise in many different societies. It is
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not just Western societies. If you look at television shows in almost any country today,
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a lot of romantic love has become the ideal in many societies as the basis for marriage. I put "was on the rise" there because this was true as of about 10 years ago, but I feel like there has been a tiny bit, maybe, of, I do not want to say backlash, but like, there are some young people in other societies, maybe even in our own, who are wanting their parents and others to help them out with their marriages. They feel like it is a little too
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chancy out there in the romantic love business. I am not sure about that--it is a little bit of a counter-trend to the idea that everywhere people are basing themselves on romantic love.
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We will talk more about love stuff in a second. I want to go on to,
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because Guest puts it in here, a fascinating topic to anthropologists is the idea of the incest taboo (250). The incest taboo is in some ways a universal. That is to say, that in every society, you are not supposed to marry people that are too close to you. Certainly not
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siblings--you do not want to get that close. There are some examples of people who would marry their siblings, but you would have to be divine, you would have to be the children of kings or something. So, no one else was available to be married, but that would be because you are making a claim to be supernatural. In the natural world, in the human realm, most societies have some form of an incest taboo. It has really been an ongoing anthropological issue why this would be.
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On the one hand, people have been like, "Well, of course, you do not want to be mixing those genes up too close. Who would want that?" But it is not so obvious, at least biologically, genetically.
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Some of the most more recent studies, even of first cousin marriage, have called into question that this would be necessarily a biological or genetic issue.
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That is true--thanks. A lot of people do not believe marriage is much for--what you are saying on the decline of love, that is probably something that gets in there too. Hmm, I have to think about that one. Let us put that on our thinking hat. Okay, more about the incest taboo, then we will get back to this idea of love and who can marry whom in one second, I promise.
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A lot of people, of course--the siblings are too close. Cousins become interesting. So,
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most of us probably would consider first cousins too close, although there are a lot of examples of pretty prominent first cousin marriages in our own society. But in other societies,
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what are called cross-cousins might be seen as an ideal marriage partner. Just as I said, in some societies, if you are in a patrilineal or a matrilineal society, you will consider yourself related to the people on your father's side or the people on your mother's side, but not really related to the other side. Okay, let us see, let me see if I can do this. Let us say we are in a matrilineal society. There I am, ego, that is me. If I am in a matrilineal society, I consider my
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main relatives, or even maybe my only true relatives, to be those on my mother's side. These would be my main cousins over here. These would not be eligible marriage partners. But the people on my father's side, I am not really related to them because they are in a different lineage. So, especially my father's sister's children would be not really considered
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my relatives. I know them--in fact, there might be some advantage to having to form some marriage alliance with them, because it would bring your group
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closer, but it would not be too close. Even the idea of who is related to whom as far as first cousins can be cross-culturally variable, whether you live in what we call a bilateral kinship society, in which you think of yourselves as equally related to your mother and father's relatives, or whether you live in a unilineal descent in which you are more related or only related to people on your father or your mother's side.
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Nobody has really figured out what the basis of the incest taboo is. I do not think there has been an actual definitive statement, in part because it varies. Some truly
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radical feminist anthropologists have said, "Well, we probably should not talk so much about the incest taboo, since it is so regularly broken in American society." It is one of those things that people shudder about, but it gets broken way too much. Maybe we should think about the ways in which it is violated.
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All right, that brings us, or is related to, the topic of exogamy and endogamy, which is basically marrying out--your rules for how far away you should marry--and marrying in--your rules for how far in the group you should be. So, exogamy is related to the incest taboo, because you do not want to be too close. So, in no society--of course,
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closeness is defined cross-culturally differently, but you do not want to be too close. You need to be somewhat exogamous. Guest mentions kinship exogamists or kindred exogamous (251), which is what we do--we do not want to be with our own kindred.
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However, almost all groups have some idea about who you should--the group in which you should marry, or that there should be some in-group idea. So, returning to the idea of love,
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there is an interesting thing here is that we believe in our country, we truly believe that our marriages are based on love and our very marriages are based on our own personal choices and our own
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ideas and who we fall in love with--a little bit of destiny there too. But the funny thing is
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that even though we in the United States believe so much in love, we are almost entirely--way,
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way up there--social class endogamous. It is very rare to see a marriage between two different social classes. For the most part, the wealthy are marrying each other, working class are marrying each other, the upper middle class are marrying each other. Not strictly--every so often, there are examples of crossings. You can probably shoot me down and say, "Well, I know my uncle did this and that," but it is quite statistically rare that you would
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ever go outside the social class bounds, even though our marriages are all based on love.
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A question is: How do we keep believing in love and keep saying, "Well, marry whomever you want, darling," while still this class endogamy--and to a degree, race endogamy--persists? (251).
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Guest also mentioned religious endogamy. I am not sure that is as true anymore, but certainly class endogamy is hugely true, and for the most part, because class and race are often very interconnected, this happens--people
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really maintain endogamy. That is, despite the fact that of course, fortunately, laws about so-called miscegenation--laws, it used to be there were legal reasons why people could not be married if they were from different so-called races--but now, hopefully, there are not legal reasons. But, for the most part, we still have a pretty secure social class endogamy. How does that happen? One simple way is that although you can marry anyone you like,
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they need to be somewhere--you need to be able to get to know them. Sometimes you are simply limited to the people who are in your zip code, and as we talked about in our unit on race and racism,
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even though there are not laws about where people can live, they are often sorted pretty much by wealth. The people in your zip code are going to be the people that you basically meet, you go to school with, you interact with. In this country, we are
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fairly well segregated--fairly segregated by wealth, not entirely, but pretty close. That is why our schools, in fact, maintain this for the most part pretty segregated state. But there is another trick that we need to help us out in this. That is college,
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which is to say that when we bring people--we can bring people from different parts of the country, from different zip codes. We can put them together in a place, and used to be then they could get together and be close to each other and have fun and develop romantic partnerships. Cannot do that anymore, but someday we will be able to do this again, and our marriage patterns will
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work out. So, my zip code was rural Montana and my wife's zip code was New Jersey. We got together basically in college. It is great, because college is a wonderful sorter of social class.
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People from supposedly different backgrounds end up at very similar colleges, in part because all of our standardized tests again sort very well according to social class, according to wealth. Then, people meet each other of basically the same social class and get interested in each other.
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I was struck by what Guest said here--it is not just a form of making sure you are going to get married to the right people. These people who have wealth "send their children to elite private schools to meet future partners and encourage in-group marriage" (248). Those of you who have grown up in public school, they are mostly people like you, but there is just a slight chance that you might meet somebody from the wrong side of the tracks. But if you can get
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into those elite private schools, then you do not have to worry at all about that, because they
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make sure that everybody is in the same social class. This is an interesting little thing that we can learn anthropologically about our own assumptions about who should marry whom, about our exogamy--out-marriage--and endogamy--in-group marriage.
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All right, marriage continued. A little bit on--nobody
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found this part, it was very brief in Guest. We will do it briefly too. Monogamy--you all know about one person married to one person--to be contrasted with polygyny or forms of marriage in which one person can be married to more than one person (250). Now,
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monogamy is probably a majority form of marriage across the world. Even in societies that permit polygynous or polygamous marriages, monogamous marriages are, in general, what people are doing. In most societies where polygamous marriages are permitted, we get that confused with what is called "polygamy." So, polygamy is being married to more than one person. Polygyny is specifically one man being married to more than one woman. We often, as I just did, conflate polygamy and
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polygyny, because polygyny is more familiar to us, or it is something that is permitted in probably the majority of the world's societies. It is usually the one poly- form of marriage that more of us have heard about, but technically, one man being married to more than one woman is called "polygyny." It is one particular type of polygamy. It is not the only one.
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In societies in which polygyny is permitted, it is usually something that is done by a minority of the men, and usually it is done by the wealthiest. That is because in most of these societies, in order to have this marriage, you need to be able to provide for more than one--you need to provide for more than one woman. This is usually, interestingly, associated with social class and seen as an ideal, because it is something you can do if you have enough money to do it.
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Guest mentions that sometimes, every so often, people will have these debates. The people who engage in polygamous marriages will say, "Well, you--the West--are so high and mighty on your monogamy thing, but you do not really do monogamy. You do serial monogamy," which is basically the idea that you are married to one person for a while, then you get married to somebody else as we go along--also something we often learn to do in college.
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The other form of
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polygamy is called "polyandry," which is when one woman gets married to more than one man. Polyandry is very rare as a marriage form--it is extremely rare. There are a couple areas of the world--Guest
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mentions highland Tibet--in which polyandry is or has been sanctioned. It is almost always what is called "fraternal polyandry," which is a set of brothers who would get married to one woman.
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It is seen as a way to keep resources and land in the family instead of splitting it up among a set of brothers. Again, it is usually done by the at least moderately well-off in order to preserve resources. So, polyandry is a rare form of marriage.
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This was re-examined recently. I sometimes assign this article--some anthropologists are now saying that polyandry may be more common, maybe not as a sanctioned form of marriage, but as a
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survival strategy and a cultural idea in different places. There are places, for example, where
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when a woman gets pregnant, it might be seen as beneficial to take a second or a third father for the child. This might not be a marriage relationship, but is a polyandrous
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relationship in order to have multiple providers. It is an interesting--this is a fairly readable and popular article if you want to check it out.
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A couple other things from this chapter. One is about something that we were talking about before, which is the idea of--where, how do ideas about kinship and family fit into the idea of the nation-state? (255-257) Not too long ago, we felt that kinship and marriage and family was something that was going to fade out as an organizing principle of a country or a nation. The idea was that, in other societies where they do not have centralized governments,
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that is where kinship becomes important. It does not seem to have faded out. In fact, in some ways, the whole notion of a nation, as we talked about, is an imagined community--the notion that you are in some ways interrelated, related to the other people that belong to this territory. We use all sorts of kinship metaphors in order to describe our country, in order to figure out who should be included and who should be excluded. It is all about kinship. I think that anyone
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who is looking at the political scene of the United States over the last 20 years and realizes how many interconnected families have been running for office, realizes that kinship is hardly over as a way of maintaining or perpetuating or understanding political power. There is some interesting stuff about Israel, also going back to something that--going
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back to the descent issues, there are some stuff there about Guest's own study of these Chinese patterns of descent, but how they are changing with immigration and migrating patterns (246-248). Of course, that both sometimes overlaps with or in some ways counteracts the boundaries of the nation-state. That is a really--both of these are really fascinating sections about this tension between what we might consider the traditional notions of who
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is related to whom, the boundaries of citizenship, and where people should be located in a country.
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Also some interesting stuff in here about the nuclear family (257-258). The nuclear family
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has been assumed to be an ideal--the mother, father, two kids, and a dog--as
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is assumed. The reason we call it "the nuclear family" was it was assumed to be at the nucleus of all kinship relations, and in our own society, was seen as this enormous ideal.
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Guest draws here on the work of Stephanie Coontz, an interesting historian. She wrote a book called _The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap_, which is all about how, in fact, this idea, this ideal of the nuclear family, really was not ever as realized as it was imagined when it was put forth as an ideal. And certainly in the last 30 years, it has probably been true that more people have decided to do different kinds of families, or there has been
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a lot of stress, you might say, on what we might consider the traditional nuclear family. But as Coontz writes, we are not--it is not clear entirely that this was more than a nostalgic ideal and not something that was realized across the U.S. landscape.
42:22
A couple of you pulled out some interesting things that I just wanted to point out. I did not know this, but I looked it up--I think it is true. So, you have heard the idea of "blood is thicker than water," which--that is all I had ever heard. That is the idea that, well, the people you are related to by blood is more important than the people that you are related to by friendship, which is like water. I do not know if you have ever heard this. You may have heard this way, and
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I always used to say, "Well, but it turns out that sometimes friendship can be more important than--"
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But the full quote, according to one of you--and I checked it out, I think it is true--from the Bible itself: "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb." What this is saying is that the covenant, the choices and agreements and alliances we make,
43:29
is thicker, more important than whatever happens to us descent-wise. As our commenter says, it is the exact opposite of what people usually think of when they say "blood is thicker than water." It is interesting. I have to--like I said, this is a revelation to me. I need to look more into this, but it speaks to what I think many of us experience, is that people talk about the families you choose. It is not to ignore your biological family, but a lot of times
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we choose to be close to people, and even if you are biologically related to somebody, that kinship tie has to be continually reinforced and made. It is not just a given.
44:27
Then one of you pointed out something that comes up a little later in the chapters--these, what are called new reproductive technologies. This came out a little bit in the section about, you know, who counts as Jewish. If you can have one person who is the sperm donor, one person who is an egg donor, one person, another person who is carrying that child as a surrogate mother, then who is--who is related to whom? These things about who is related to whom and
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what counts as kinship and what counts as family have become even more complex now. This is, as Guest says, "Across the globe, when reproductive technologies become increasingly specialized, the implications for cultural constructs such as family and kinship become progressively more complex" (260). This is not a new thing, not an entirely new thing, but it certainly does bring new wrinkles to the picture
45:29
when you have reproductive technologies that seem to be able to separate--almost, we might say, the genetic egg-sperm thing from the biological development thing, and then in some cases transfer that biologically developed child over to the genetic parents. It is just--it is complicated.
45:59
Some people also have noted that there are new forms of kinship being made around,
46:06
in some cases, organ donation. People will form kinship-like ties
46:17
after an organ donation has taken place. These things are--there are not easy answers to them, because they mess with our traditional ideas of kinship.
46:32
Guest, in the middle of this chapter on page 253, asks one of his Guest questions:
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"Are Biology and Marriage the Only Basis for Kinship?" (253)
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This is one of those questions that I am like, "Guest, come on, man, you do not need to ask us this question anymore. We all know the answer by now." What do you say?
47:04
No, dude! Thank you. A big no. Why even ask us anymore? Thank you, whoever unmuted to say that. The big no, right? Even if you are related to somebody biologically speaking or marriage speaking, you always need to be doing things to maintain that relationship. You can form kinship-like relationships all over the place.
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