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Nuclear Family and Kinship Systems
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0:00
Yeah, so this is what we actually call the nuclear family. Yeah, so it's the, you know, it's seen as the nucleus, as the smallest unit of family life. And in this country we have to add 2.14 children and a dog. Cheers — you have a dog? At least one. Two dogs, okay, so add in two dogs. Muckle, Tubelle de González, and Camp tell us about the nuclear family — that it works for industrial societies, because if you're a small unit, if you're a tiny unit, a tiny kinship chart,
0:50
it's good because you can move around and you can go where the jobs are. And so they say that this corresponds to what they call independence training: that people have, are trained to think for themselves and to think independently and to establish new units of residence when they get married. So neo-local nuclear families. And I used to ask this because some people think of this as the the American ideal.
1:29
But now, I don't want to get too depressed about it because in fact it is not going well for the neo-local nuclear family. It's going quite sadly because a lot of people lack the resources to form marriages, so they can't establish a neo-local residence because it's so darn expensive to buy a house. And the thing is that although it may make it easier to move around to get a job, it's also a unit which is extremely fragile under times of stress,
2:03
and so it puts a ton of pressure on just a couple of people to be managing a whole lot of resources.
2:13
So, you know, I think — by saying I think it's sad, I'm not saying that we should go back into some kind of *Leave it to Beaver* state of the 1950s and glorify that era. But it might be helpful for us to recognize that this does put an enormous amount of pressure on a small number of people, and expectations that are probably hard to make. And so in some ways you might say that a more extended family, and drawing more people into the kinship idea, is also a good adaptation,
2:53
especially in times of stress and being able to draw on longer chains of resources. So it's just something to think about as we think about, well, what does make sense in our changing world. And Muckle, Tubelle de González, and Camp, they talk about different kinds of kinship systems — ways that people have recognized different kinds of kin. And if you remember back to our video of the person who was telling us how to make a kinship
3:29
chart, she said that you should always start with your paper — I actually have a blank sheet of paper, I kind of wish I did now — anyway, you should start with it in landscape mode, right? You should start with it like that, and you should start with yourself, ego, at the bottom. Why do we start our kinship charts in landscape like this? Why not do this? Yeah, I guess they get wider faster than they get tall, because we believe in our society — and many
4:07
people do, as I said — that our kinship comes... this is actually technically called a bilateral kinship system, in which we feel that we are equally related to the people on our
4:24
mother's side and on our father's side, and that those kind of go back, and that we reckon our inheritance and relatedness on both sides. There are also unilineal systems, in which inheritance, names, and relatedness — actually it may not necessarily, at least official relatedness — passes through one side or the other. And if we lived in a unilineal kinship system, we would not actually start with a landscape mode,
5:09
we would start with a portrait mode, because let us say that we live in a patrilineal system: you would actually be going back along the father's line way back up. And in our society, in a bilateral society, because we get wide, most people cannot think of off the top of their head more than — let me see — parents, grandparents, great-grandparents — three generations. Does anybody know the names of their great-great-grandparents off the top
5:44
of their heads? Great-greats, huh? Oh, got one. How about great-great-greats?
5:56
Yeah, so because we're bilateral, basically. And I got one. So we're bilateral, and so we think that they get complicated toward the outside. If we were in a patrilineal or a unilineal system, you could name five generations back easy, because there they are. It's not so hard.
6:16
There's also matrilineal systems. A lot of — there's a lot of — patrilineal systems are statistically more, there's more of them. But matrilineal systems are an important — a lot of Indigenous societies in the Americas, a lot of Native American societies, are matrilineal, reckoning kinship, inheritance, and some forms of political power through the matrilineal line. So it's an important system to think about.
6:59
We are, like I said, we're bilateral. However, our kinship charts usually have at least some patrilineal aspect to them. What's the little patrilineal aspect that many of us have in our society?
7:21
Your last name. Yeah, usually. Yeah, maybe it's changing a little bit for some people. In Spanish-language naming systems you get your
7:36
father's name and mother's last name as a double combination, but then the mother's name usually drops out, so it becomes patrilineal over time. But we usually think of ourselves as bilateral. Now, people that have different ideas about relatedness and inheritance tend to have different kinship terms for people that we sometimes group under the same kinship term. So in this example they are talking about cousins, who we would group as just cousins, but in other societies — if you
8:23
are for example in a matrilineal system, you would have different terms for your cousins on your mother's side, because they would be very differently related to you and important in your life in ways that your father's cousins wouldn't be, and they'd be sort of more distant. And often in matrilineal societies, the mother's brother is of extreme importance for the child, because that's the kind of alliance that things are going to be passed down along.
9:01
And so in some cases the mother's brother is as or more important than the father, who is going to have kinship obligations actually to his — his mother's lineage. Actually, not his sister, sorry. He will have kinship obligations to his own mother's lineage, and perhaps not to his own children as much, who are getting most of their stuff from their mother's side. So what this adds up to — and like I said, in early anthropology we go through all the different
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kinds of ways in which people call each other and think about these things — but what it adds up to is that kinship is not simply a translation of biology into society or into culture. People who might be in our own terms equally biologically related, like cousins or like aunts and uncles, may not even be considered kin in some societies. So on the one hand we can have people who are biologically related who actually then don't even count as kin, but on
10:26
the other hand we have people who can become kin or become incorporated into our networks. So Muckle, Tubelle de González, and Camp discuss the notion — it's not sure if I like this term — but it's called fictive kinship. And it's probably an artifact of anthropologists saying, well, there's some kinship that is real and some kinship that is fictive. But it means people who are not biologically related but nevertheless have
10:58
been incorporated into people's lives. And the way that often works — and I like this word more — is what they call nurture kinship: in many societies, it's not necessarily who you are blood-genetically related to, it's who provides your nurture, your sustenance, your food very importantly, and that becomes the biological relationship, because food is also a biological relationship as much as anything else. And so nurture becomes very important.
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And so even in places that reckon by genetics or blood or those kinds of things, as you probably know there are people who have genetic or blood or biological relationships that are not that important to us, and there are other people who are biologically related and are also providing nurture, and those people are perhaps more important. So even people who are biologically related, blood relationships,
12:06
they need to be actively made through nurture. So kinship is something that anthropologists discovered is something people make and do culturally. It is not just a biological given.
12:27
In the last class we talked about the contribution of feminism to anthropology and feminist anthropology, and the ways in which they looked at these kinship charts and looked at the different relationships and said, wait a second, what's the deal here with the kinds of power relations that are going on? And one of the wonderful things that they did is, in the 1970s, separated out the term *sex* from *gender*.
13:01
And I think this has become fairly common to know, but basically the idea is that there are biological differences — what we call sex, hormones, genetics, all those kinds of things, physiological differences — which is distinguished from the social meanings and the expectations and the ideas that we have about people, which we refer to as gender. So gender are all the ideas, social roles, things that we expect of people
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that we think have certain sex characteristics. So this was something that
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the famous anthropologists and others brought to our attention in the 1970s. Now it's become a little bit difficult in today's world because
14:11
people don't like to say sex, maybe, and so they just use the term gender as a euphemism instead of saying sex. And my best example of that is what are called gender reveal parties. I don't know if you've ever been to one of these — probably shouldn't, because the only time I hear about them is when they're shooting off a cannon and burning things down and somebody gets hurt. But maybe there's nicer versions of these. But the idea is,
14:42
you can take an ultrasound and look in, and you're going to now tell us what the baby is. These actually should be called sex reveal parties, because they are trying to deduce from the picture what the baby is going to be. But if you put out a sign that's a sex reveal party, it would not — well, it might, it just might go over differently, let's put it that way. So we call them gender reveal parties, but that's a euphemism, because gender is all the social expectations. However,
15:26
we are actually then revealing that we load up people with gender even before they're born. And so in the olden days we didn't know — we didn't start trying to figure that out until somebody was born — but these days we do the ultrasound, we buy a bunch of toys, we paint the nursery, we get all the clothes ready, and so people get gendered up even before they're born. So we kind of have a paradox, I think, in our society, where
15:59
it seems like people are more open to ideas about gender and gender fluidity, but on the other hand we seem to also be gendering people from much earlier ages than we used to. But anyway, let's just keep that in mind: that there is a distinction that has been made between the biological aspects of sex and the social aspects of gender. And if we make that distinction, or if we are able to keep that distinction in our minds,
16:32
that means that, well, why should we necessarily expect that there are only two genders in the world? Because those are social expectations that we have, and there's not necessarily a reason that there should only be two. And in fact if we look around at different societies, there are ideas that there are more than two social genders. One of the most famous ideas comes to us again from primarily Native
17:05
American or Indigenous societies in the Americas, in which a term is now used across different societies and has been in some ways resuscitated — the idea of Two-Spirit people: people who are born with kind of special characteristics. In some cases it's that they are biologically male or female but take on the gender role of the other. So there could be a third or a fourth gender, or they might have their own
17:45
special role in society and special place, which is outside of the two-gender system.
17:57
Note that this was once, in the old research that anthropology has done, this was referred to as berdache, which is a French word for a male prostitute, which is a derogatory term. So we don't use that term anymore, but that's because the Europeans did not understand what was going on. They both mislabeled what was going on and persecuted people for it. So a lot of what's been done now is to kind of recuperate some of those older identities.
18:41
In this case — and we'll talk a little bit about sexuality — but it's one of those cases in which,
18:50
if you are looking at it from the biological point of view, you would say, well, they are engaged in homosexual acts, but they wouldn't identify as a homosexual identity, because if you're
19:05
outside of the gender bounds there isn't an identity to be had. If you're having sex with a third or fourth gender person, what is that exactly? So that's one example. Another very famous example are the hijras in South Asia and India that Muckle, Tubelle de González, and Camp discuss. And these are two of the most famous examples cited in anthropology.
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But if we look around the world, there are actually different gender societies — or three-or-more gender societies — on every continent. In a recent PBS film called *Two Spirits*, they had a little map and they said that there are actually hundreds of societies that have
20:03
gender identities which are beyond the traditional binary. So again, there are some very famous cases from the Americas and from India, but this occurs in many different societies across the globe.
20:26
Most people — well, at least I think most people — we can sort of imagine, because it's about social roles and expectations and not necessarily about biology, we can imagine that you could have people of more than two genders. More recently, people have begun to think about
20:52
the sex binary. So we talked about the gender binary and the social expectations,
20:59
but people have also started to question whether our sex or biology simply comes as two.
21:11
What would you say, what do you think of this article?
21:23
I know. Oh, this is happening — it's happening even more now. It's actually — there's been some very recent high-profile cases. It is kind of quite complicated. In this case — I think it takes us back to the idea — what I like about this article is, it takes us back to the idea of, well, it's not actually as simple to identify even a skeletal difference of males and females. And in fact, this is — you know, there are — it's not that
22:25
they're completely the same, there's some general differences and you can kind of reconstruct, but it's not as clear-cut as we once imagined, and we once over-classified skeletal remains as male just because that's what we did. But that's impossible, and so once we went back and took a look at it, we've been reclassifying some of them as female or indeterminate. So it brings up — I'm going to leave this as a question — which is that, you know, is it
23:01
the fact that we have been so strict in our own society about the gender must be a binary which makes us then go and say, aha, well that must mean sex is a binary and sexuality then is a binary?
23:20
And the reason I'm leaving this as a question — well actually I think what is not in doubt is that the biology of this is messier than we once believed or we once thought.
23:39
You noticed this about people who are born intersex — what did we often do at such people?
24:06
Yeah. I mean, to be fair, there are some conditions which are just like that, that it seems obvious and perhaps a surgery is warranted. But there are many cases in which, because people were expecting something or something else, they made a decision and they decided to fix that person. And I think the intersex community today is at least saying, hey, can you just chill out on that, just hold off on that for a while, just let people be and let them think about that.
24:44
And so more people are thinking about sex beyond this idea that it has to be one or the other.
24:52
Some people have proposed — and I think Kralick is one of those — that there is a kind of continuum, and there's a mix of characteristics, or a spectrum of sex.
25:08
I've left this as a kind of a question in my own mind. When I think of a continuum — when I say something like skin color is on a continuum, right, we could line all the people of the world up and there's no boundary between White and Black, it's a complete continuum — for me, I think that sex is a little trickier than that. It's not that you can line people up in the world and there's no dividing line. Many people are falling into one basket or the other,
25:43
but there's also different kinds of combinations of hormones, genetics, social training, which means that it's more complicated than we thought. Whether we're going to be able to then sort people into new categories or whether we should think about this more as a continuum...
26:06
What to me is clear is that we have to get away from an insistence on a binary, and we have to think about all the ways in which people come in their wonderfully messy and diverse biology, and stop trying to fix people. I actually was interested in — you don't have to copy this down, this is just a bunch of statistics about gender and genetics — and so, you know, we're taught that people have XX and XY and that that makes you who you are, etc. etc. But in fact
26:41
a decent percentage of people are born with three different chromosomes or something else, or have something going on. Some people live their lives completely identifying with one gender or the other and not even realizing that they are having an extra chromosome. So I think that, you know, these are not going to be easily resolved issues. There have been some — even last year there were some issues about swimming competition and people being at what
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stage are people allowed to compete in different gendered competitions. So these are not going to be easily resolved issues. But it seems like, again, human biology is more complex than many of us were taught. It's — I don't know if the word *messy* is right, but it's more diverse than we once were taught to believe, and it would help us to appreciate that and approach these things with compassion and empathy for the difficult decisions that people have to make.
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Muckle, Tubelle de González, and Camp also talk about sexuality.
28:05
And now that we're past nine o'clock in the morning we can talk about sexuality, I think. I don't want to do this before nine.
28:13
So the first thing that I would say is that in our society, like we said, we have tended to see gender as a binary, and then we tend to see sexuality as a binary. So
28:29
we tend to emphasize how you're male or female — or have tended to — and then we say, well, you're heterosexual or homosexual. The idea that this is a binary identification, and that people have an identity as either heterosexual or homosexual, that identity is actually relatively recent in our history — probably arising in the last hundred years or so, actually. Now what does that mean? What I mean by that is that in all societies
29:13
and throughout time — and actually across the animal kingdom, although people have been reluctant to see this — we see heterosexual and homosexual activities and all kinds of things going on. But that doesn't necessarily mean people identify as gay or lesbian or heterosexual.
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Those activities have definitely been going on, and even today, although there are differences across our own contemporary societies and ideas of heterosexual and homosexual.
29:55
So Muckle, Tubelle de González, and Camp give us a kind of a famous case from Papua New Guinea, which is complicated, so I don't like to go too much into it. But in that society, if you were a male, you would need to perform homosexual acts in order so that you could gather the strength to then perform heterosexual acts — which is kind of a very different way of thinking about things. So
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neither of those would be an identity. They would be kind of slow into each other, you might say.
30:33
And in other places — most especially in many Latin American countries and in Brazil, the idea is — and that's why we have to go, it has to be way past nine o'clock in the morning to talk about this — the idea is that you could be a completely heterosexual male, for example, and have sex with other men as long as you were the penetrating person, and then you would be heterosexual, because penetration is considered heterosexual. All right. That's it, I can't do anymore.
31:06
So the point is that there's a range of ideas and identities, and the idea that this should be fixed in a certain way is perhaps unique to our society. The other thing I will say is
31:21
that, although some people have said there is only one form of traditional marriage, that is also untrue. In many different societies there have been ways in which people have had long-term same-sex unions. In some societies those are actually kind of sanctioned, but they show up in the kinship charts differently because people then would take on the gender identity of another. But there are ways that people have done this throughout human history.
31:59
So it brings us to a kind of summary of this chapter. When we started this chapter, we started off with a kinship chart, and the way anthropology was talking about these ideas about how people were related — and as I said, it was basically the assumption that there was heteronormative biology, and that that would be reflected in every society.
32:35
I do want to give credit to a couple of early anthropologists — Margaret Mead, who we will read about at the very end of the course, and Ruth Benedict, who I have showed you a couple of pictures of, a person who's quoted as, "the purpose of anthropology is to make room for human difference." They were actually, back even when these guys were doing their kinship charts, there were some people who really were fighting
33:04
back against that and talking to us — maybe not in the terminology that contemporary people are able to use — but they were talking about the ideas of both multiple gender possibilities, multiple sexuality possibilities, and the importance of understanding how
33:28
welcoming those differences could be beneficial to our own society. So what anthropologists found is how kinship is made, how many different marriage patterns you could have, different kinds of families. And I'm not sure if I want to use the word *weird*, but I guess I'm going to — that some people in our society think about what things, and we're like, oh, that's strange or that's new or that's weird. But I guess I would say that whatever we think of
34:07
as weird, we can find something stranger if we look cross-culturally or historically. And so at the end of the chapter they talk about all kinds of different forms of body modifications, and people have been doing sex operations for a long, long time, and people doing different gender bending and third genders and doing extended families and different marriage arrangements and making their sexuality complex is not something that just happened last year in the United States.
34:43
So people get excited about whether what kind of sign we're going to put on the toilet — this is not something that is recent and it's not unique to our own society. This is something that if we look cross-culturally and historically, we see lots of different things going on. We do want to though — when we get dizzy with all the variety — we do want to realize that
35:18
we always need to pay attention to how those categories of family, marriage, and kinship might be a source of different relationships of inequality or power. And so that's where I think old-fashioned feminism is both historically important for changing how we thought about these things, but remains relevant in that it points our attention to the potential that difference turns into inequality, or the difference can be used to justify different relationships
35:57
of power and inequality. So we always want to be paying attention to that, as much as we want to celebrate or at least be empathetic toward difference
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