Chinese kinship
The Chinese kinship system is classified as a Sudanese or descriptive system for the definition of family. The Sudanese/Chinese kinship system is the most complicated of all kinship systems and it maintains a separate designation for almost every one of Egos kin based on their generation, their lineage, their relative age, and their gender. In the Chinese kinship system and paternal lineages are distinguished, for example, a mothers brother and a fathers brother have different terms. The relative age of a relation is considered. For example, a younger brother has a different terminology than his older brother. The gender of the relative is distinguished, as in English, the generation from ego is indicated, like in English. Chinese kinship is agnatic, emphasising patrilineality, kinship terms appeared in the earliest Chinese lexicon, Erya. Chapter Four 釋親 is dedicated to an explanation of kinship and marriage, another lexicon from late Han Dynasty, has a detailed list of forms of address for all relatives.
With the influence of Confucianism, the concepts of kinship and consanguinity are deeply ingrained in Chinese culture. Also, since it is taboo to refer to or address a senior family relation by his or her given name. When there are many siblings as in many Post–World War II baby-boom families, for example, 大 is used in the address for 大姨, 二姨 for the second eldest sister of ones mother, 三姨 for the third eldest sister of ones mother, etc. In cases where someone is older than his more senior relation, such as an uncle, because some of these terms have no equivalent in foreign languages, they are not easily translated and the descriptiveness is often lost in translation. However, terms such as Second Uncle are sometimes used, translating kinship terms from other languages often presents the problem of ambiguity as there is no equivalent general term such as aunt. Despite the complexity of the address system, it is common to simplify it for the sake of familiarity. Some formal kinship terms are not familiar to people, cumbersome.
For example, a cousin once removed may at her discretion be referred to as simply a cousin if she is of an age to the speaker. The Great Qing Legal Code was the last set of Chinese laws where the complete kinship terms were shown, the Qing code not only confirmed the importance of defining kinship relations, but defined the legal and moral conducts between family relations. Kinship relationships played a role in the administration of justice under the Qing
Marriage
The definition of marriage varies according to different cultures, but it is principally an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually sexual, are acknowledged. In some cultures, marriage is recommended or considered to be compulsory before pursuing any sexual activity, when defined broadly, marriage is considered a cultural universal. Individuals may marry for several reasons, including legal, libidinal, financial, whom they marry may be influenced by socially determined rules of incest, prescriptive marriage rules, parental choice and individual desire. In some areas of the world, arranged marriage, child marriage, conversely, such practices may be outlawed and penalized in parts of the world out of concerns for womens rights and because of international law. These trends coincide with the human rights movement. Marriage can be recognized by a state, an organization, an authority, a tribal group. It is often viewed as a contract, Marriages can be performed in a secular civil ceremony or in a religious setting via a wedding ceremony.
The act of marriage usually creates normative or legal obligations between the individuals involved, and any offspring they may produce, some cultures allow the dissolution of marriage through divorce or annulment. In some areas, child marriages and polygamy may occur in spite of laws against the practice. For example, the number of marriages in Europe decreased by 30% from 1975 to 2005 and these changes have occurred primarily in Western countries. The word marriage derives from Middle English mariage, which first appears in 1250–1300 CE and this in turn is derived from Old French and ultimately Latin, marītāre, meaning to provide with a husband or wife and marītāri meaning to get married. The adjective marīt-us -a, -um meaning matrimonial or nuptial could be used in the form as a noun for husband. Anthropologists have proposed several competing definitions of marriage in an attempt to encompass the wide variety of marital practices observed across cultures, even within Western culture, definitions of marriage have careened from one extreme to another and everywhere in between.
The anthropological handbook Notes and Queries defined marriage as a union between a man and a such that children born to the woman are the recognized legitimate offspring of both partners. In recognition of a practice by the Nuer people of Sudan allowing women to act as a husband in certain circumstances, Kathleen Gough suggested modifying this to a woman, none of these men had legal rights to the womans child. Economic anthropologist Duran Bell has criticized the definition on the basis that some societies do not require marriage for legitimacy. He argued that a definition of marriage is circular in societies where illegitimacy has no other legal or social implications for a child other than the mother being unmarried. In 1955 article in Man, Leach argued that no one definition of marriage applied to all cultures and he offered a list of ten rights associated with marriage, including sexual monopoly and rights with respect to children, with specific rights differing across cultures
Parallel and cross cousins
In discussing consanguineal kinship in anthropology, a parallel cousin or ortho-cousin is a cousin from a parents same-sex sibling, while a cross cousin is from a parents opposite-sex sibling. So a parallel cousin is the child of the brother or of the mothers sister. Where there are unilineal descent groups in a society, ones parallel cousins on one or both sides will belong to ones own descent group, while cross cousins will not, the role of cross cousins is especially important in some cultures. For example, marriage is promoted between them in the Iroquois system, parallel cousins are occasionally the subject of promoted marriage, such as the preferential marriage of a male to his fathers brothers daughter, common among some pastoral peoples. Such a marriage helps keep property within a lineage, on the other hand, parallel cousin unions in some cultures would fall under an incest taboo, since parallel cousins are part of the subjects unilineage whereas cross cousins are not. In many classificatory systems of terminology, relatives far beyond genealogical first cousins are referred to using the terms for parallel.
And in many societies, parallel cousins are referred to by the same terms that are used for siblings. The remaining types of kinship terminology do not group parallel cousins together in opposition to cross cousins, note that there is no possibility of any classificatory cousins sharing the same mother. Because maternal identity is never in question, they would be classified as siblings. Only mistaken paternity leads to such errors and this possibility is much less likely for cross cousins, because in the absence of full-sibling incest, it is unlikely that cross cousins can share a father by overt or covert sexual relationships. Andrey Korotayev claimed that Islamization was a strong and significant predictor of parallel cousin marriage, according to Korotayev, a systematic acceptance of parallel-cousin marriage took place when Islamization occurred together with Arabization. Kinship and descent Family Genealogy Cultural anthropology Cousin marriage List of coupled cousins Mahram Kin Naming Systems part 1, matrilineal and Patrilineal Kin at the University of Manitoba
Cousin marriage
Cousin marriage is marriage between cousins. Opinions and practice vary widely across the world, in some cultures and communities, cousin marriage is considered ideal and actively encouraged, in others, it is subject to social stigma. Cousin marriage is common in the Middle East, for instance, in some countries outside that region, it is uncommon but still legal. In others, it is seen as incestuous and is prohibited, it is banned in China and Taiwan, North Korea, South Korea. Supporters of cousin marriage where it is banned may view the prohibition as discrimination, more than 10% of marriages are between first or second cousins. In the past, cousin marriage was practiced within indigenous cultures in Australia, North America, South America, various religions have ranged from prohibiting sixth cousins or closer from marrying, to freely allowing first-cousin marriage. Cousin marriage is an important topic in anthropology and alliance theory, children of more distantly related cousins have less risk of harmful genetic mutations.
In fact, a study of Icelandic records indicated that marriages between third or fourth cousins may be optimal, at least from the perspective of producing the most children and grandchildren. According to Professor Robin Fox of Rutgers University, 80% of all marriages in history may have been second cousins or closer. The founding population of Homo sapiens was small,700 to 10,000 individuals, proportions of first-cousin marriage in Western countries have declined since the 19th century. In the Middle East, cousin marriage is strongly favored. Cousin marriage was legal in all states before the Civil War, anthropologist Martin Ottenheimer argues that marriage prohibitions were introduced to maintain the social order, uphold religious morality, and safeguard the creation of fit offspring. Writers such as Noah Webster and ministers like Philip Milledoler and Joshua McIlvaine helped lay the groundwork for such viewpoints well before 1860 and this led to a gradual shift in concern from affinal unions, like those between a man and his deceased wifes sister, to consanguineous unions.
To many, Morgan included, cousin marriage, and more specifically parallel-cousin marriage, was a remnant of a primitive stage of human social organization. Morgan himself had married his cousin in 1853, in 1846, Massachusetts Governor George N. Briggs appointed a commission to study idiots in the state, and this study implicated cousin marriage as responsible for idiocy. Within the next two decades, numerous reports appeared with similar conclusions, that cousin marriage sometimes resulted in deafness and idiocy. Despite being contradicted by other studies like those of George Darwin and Alan Huth in England and Robert Newman in New York and these developments led to 13 states and territories passing cousin marriage prohibitions by the 1880s. Though contemporaneous, the movement did not play much of a direct role in the bans
Unilineality
Both patrilineality and matrilineality are types of unilineal descent. The main types of the unilineal descent groups are lineages and clans, a lineage is a unilineal descent group that can demonstrate their common descent from a known apical ancestor. Its conclusion is that as the communal democracy correlates positively with the supracommunal one, christianization might have contributed to the development of modern democracy by helping to replace unilineal descent organization in Europe
Coming of Age in Samoa
Coming of Age in Samoa is a book by American anthropologist Margaret Mead based upon her research and study of youth – primarily adolescent girls – on the island of Tau in the Samoan Islands. First published in 1928, the book launched Mead as a pioneering researcher, since its first publication, Coming of Age in Samoa was the most widely read book in the field of anthropology until Napoleon Chagnons Yanomamö, The Fierce People overtook it. The book has sparked years of ongoing and intense debate and controversy on questions pertaining to society and science. It is a key text in the nature and nurture debate, as well as in discussions on issues relating to family, gender, social norms, and attitudes. Although Meads work has been very influential some of her most significant claims about Samoan culture have been criticized and contradicted by subsequent research and it is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways. Boas felt that a study of the problems faced by adolescents in another culture would be illuminating and she discusses various limitations in each approach and introduces the new field of anthropology as a promising alternative science based on analyzing social structures and dynamics.
For this reason her methodology is one of studying societies in their natural environment, once she has an understanding of Samoan culture she will delve into the specifics of how adolescent education and socialization are carried out in Samoan culture and contrast it with western culture. Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture, to answer this question, she conducted her study among a small group of Samoans. Mead studied daily living, social structures and dynamics, etiquette, Mead begins with the description of a typical idyllic day in Samoa. Then she describes child education starting with the birth of children which is celebrated with a ritual feast. After birth however, Mead describes how children are ignored, for girl children sometimes explicitly ritually ignored. She describes the methods of disciplining children. Most involve some sort of punishment such as hitting with hands, palm fronds. However, the punishment is mostly ritualistic and not meant to inflict serious harm, children are expected to contribute meaningful work from a very early age.
Initially, young children of both sexes help to care for infants, as the children grow older, the education of the boys shifts to fishing while the girls focus more on child care. However, the concept of age for the Samoans is not the same as the west and they dont keep track of birth days and they judge maturity not on actual number of years alive but on the outward physical changes in the child. As a child gets bigger and stronger he or she gets more work, male adolescents undergo various kinds of both encouragement and punishment to make them competitive and aggressive. For the males there are different possible jobs in the community
Mosuo women
Known to many as the Kingdom of Women, the Mosuo are a small ethnic group living in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces in China, close to the border with Tibet. A population of about 50,000, the Mosuo are found near Lugu Lake in the Tibetan Himalayas 27°42′35. 30″N 100°47′4. 04″E, scholars use diverse terms and spellings to designate the Mosuo culture. Most prefer Mosuo some spell it Moso, while a minority use neither term, Matrilineal cultures trace descent through the female line. It can be considered a society in which one identifies with ones mothers lineage including familial lineage or property inheritance, matriarchal cultures are run by women. Women hold primary power, predominate in roles of leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property at the specific exclusion of men. The Mosuo tribe is a matrilineal culture but many anthropologists classify the Mosuo tribe as a matriarchal society, even the Mosuo themselves sometimes use the term matriarchal to describe their culture in order to bring more tourism and interest into their culture.
Nevertheless, anthropologists like Peggy Reeves Sanday determine societies like Mosuo are in fact matriarchies, the Mosuo are a small ethnic group living around Chinas Lugu Lake in the provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan. The nobility was afraid of the peasant class gaining power, since leadership was hereditary, the peasant class was given a matriarchal system. This prevented threats to nobility power by having the peasant class trace lineage through the female line and this system has led to numerous unusual traits among Mosuo society. A Mosuo girl is considered a woman after she has participated in the coming of age ceremony and this ceremony, observed between the ages of 12 and 14, marks a Mosuo girls transition to womanhood as well as a Mosuo mans transition into manhood. Here women are introduced to skirts and men to pants, prior to the coming of age ceremony, Mosuo children dress the same and are restricted from certain aspects of Mosuo life, namely religious ceremonies. After the coming of age ceremony, Mosuo women are allowed their own private bedroom within the household in which they live, the Mosuo men practice tisese which misleadingly translates as walking marriage in Chinese.
However, the Mosuo term literally means goes back and forth, Women have the choice to invite men of interest to their private sleeping room. If the man does not reciprocate this desire, he may simply never visit the womans household, men perform tisese in the true sense of the word. They can seek entry into the chambers of any woman they desire who desires them. When feelings are reciprocal, a man will be allowed into a private sleeping area There he will spend the night. Male suitors have been known to descend into a womans bedding chamber from a designated opening in the ceiling, commonly using a grappling hook. Anthropologist Cai Hua termed tisese as furtive or closed visiting, meaning no public acknowledgement or obligations are required between parties, at night Mosuo adults are free to experience sexuality with as many or as few partners as they wish
Kinship
Anthropologist Robin Fox states that the study of kinship is the study of what man does with these basic facts of life – mating, parenthood, siblingship etc. Human society is unique, he argues, in that we are working with the raw material as exists in the animal world. These social ends include the socialization of children and the formation of economic, political. Kinship can refer both to the patterns of social relationships themselves, or it can refer to the study of the patterns of relationships in one or more human cultures. Further, even within two broad usages of the term, there are different theoretical approaches. Broadly, kinship patterns may be considered to include people related by both descent – i. e. social relations during development – and by marriage. Human kinship relations through marriage are commonly called affinity in contrast to the relationships that arise in ones group of origin, in some cultures, kinship relationships may be considered to extend out to people an individual has economic or political relationships with, or other forms of social connections.
Within a culture, some descent groups may be considered to lead back to gods or animal ancestors and this may be conceived of on a more or less literal basis. Kinship can refer to a principle by which individuals or groups of individuals are organized into groups, categories. Family relations can be represented concretely or abstractly by degrees of relationship, a relationship may be relative or reflect an absolute. Degrees of relationship are not identical to heirship or legal succession, many codes of ethics consider the bond of kinship as creating obligations between the related persons stronger than those between strangers, as in Confucian filial piety. In a more general sense, kinship may refer to a similarity or affinity between entities on the basis of some or all of their characteristics that are under focus. This may be due to a shared origin, a shared historical or cultural connection. For example, a person studying the roots of human languages might ask whether there is kinship between the English word seven and the German word sieben.
It can be used in a more diffuse sense as in, for example, in biology, kinship typically refers to the degree of genetic relatedness or coefficient of relationship between individual members of a species. It may be used in this sense when applied to human relationships. Family is a group of people affiliated by consanguinity, affinity, in most societies it is the principal institution for the socialization of children. Kin terminologies can be descriptive or classificatory
Polyandry in India
Polyandry in India refers to the practice of polyandry, whereby a woman has two or more husbands at the same time, either historically on the Indian subcontinent or currently in the country of India. An early example can be found in the Hindu epic Mahabharata, in which Draupadi, Polyandry was mainly prevalent in the Kinnaur Region, a part of Himachal in India which is close to the Tibet or currently the Indo-China border. As mentioned in the epic Mahabharata, the Pandavas were banished from their kingdom for thirteen years, a minority of the Kinaauris still claim to be descendants of the Pandavas and thus justify the practice of polyandry. However, this is an issue as Kinnauris existed long before the Pandavas as mentioned in the epic. Apart from Kinnaur, polyandry was practised in South India among the Todas tribes of Nilgiris, while polyandrous unions have disappeared from the traditions of many of the groups and tribes, it is still practiced by some Paharis, especially in the Jaunsar-Bawar region in Northern India.
Recent years have seen the rise in fraternal polyandry in the societies in Malwa region of Punjab to avoid division of farming land. Polyandry is in practice in villages of Kinnaur district of Himachal Pradesh. Fraternal polyandry is mainly in practice in villages, where the societies are male dominated, there are many forms of polyandry which can be found here. Most often, all the brothers are married to a woman, the wife can only ascertain the blood-relationship of the children, though recently there have been a few instances of paternity tests using DNA samples being used to solve inheritance disputes. The rules for breaking the marriage are strict and a brother going against the agreement can be treated as an outcast while losing all his shares in the property. The territory of Kinnaur remained forbidden for many years as the route was only established 30 years back. Todas are tribal people residing in the Nilgiri hills in South India who for centuries practiced polyandry. They practiced a form of relationship which is considered to be a classic example of polyandry.
They practiced both fraternal and sequential polyandry, the males who shared one or two wives were almost always full or half-brothers. A Toda woman when married was automatically married to her husbands brothers, when the wife became pregnant, one husband would ceremonially give a bow and arrow to the wife, and would be the father of that child. When the next child arrived, another husband would perform the ceremony and polygamy were prevalent in Kerala till the late 19th century and isolated incidents were reported till mid-20th century. Castes practicing polyandry were Nairs, Kammalans and a few of the artisan castes, in the case of Nairs and other related castes, a mans property is inherited by his sisters children and not his own. Under Nair polyandry, the only conceivable blood-relationship could be ascertained through females, Polyandry is still practised in Jaunsar-Bawar in Uttarakhand
Consanguinity
Consanguinity is the property of being from the same kinship as another person. In that aspect, consanguinity is the quality of being descended from the same ancestor as another person, the laws of many jurisdictions set out degrees of consanguinity in relation to prohibited sexual relations and marriage parties. Rules of Consanguinity are used to determine heirs of an estate according to statutes that govern intestate succession, the Knot System is a numerical notation that defines consanguinity. Issues of consanguinity arise in several aspects of the law, Laws prohibiting incest govern the degree of kinship within which marriage or sexual intercourse is permitted. These are almost universally prohibited within the degree of consanguinity. Some jurisdictions forbid marriage between first cousins, while others do not, marriage with aunts and uncles is legal in several countries. Consanguinity is relevant to inheritance, particularly with regard to intestate succession, in general, the law favors inheritance by persons closely related to the deceased.
Some jurisdictions bar citizens from service on a jury on the basis of consanguinity with persons involved in the case, in many countries, laws prohibiting nepotism bar employment of, or certain kinds of contracts with, the near relations of public officers or employees. Under Roman civil law, which early canon law of the Catholic Church followed, in the ninth century the church raised the number of prohibited degrees to seven and changed the method by which they were calculated. Eventually the nobility became too interrelated to marry as the pool of non-related prospective spouses became smaller and they had to either defy the churchs position or look elsewhere for eligible marriage candidates. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council made what they believed was a change to canon law reducing the number of prohibited degrees of consanguinity from seven back to four. The method of calculating prohibited degrees was changed also, instead of the former practice of counting up to the common ancestor down to the proposed spouse, the new law computed consanguinity by counting back to the common ancestor.
After 1215 the general rule was that while fourth cousins could marry without dispensation, in fourteenth century England, for example, papal dispensations for annulments due to consanguinity were relatively few. The connotations of degree of consanguinity varies by context, most cultures define a degree of consanguinity within which sexual interrelationships are regarded as incestuous. The rule is strict on the mothers side, where the limit is about four generations back. This rule does not apply to Muslims or other ethnic groups, islamThe category includes those one is forbidden to marry due to relationship of blood as well as some who are forbidden due to marital relations. And do not marry women whom your fathers married except what has already passed and it was indeed obscene, hateful and an evil way. And those already married except those whom your right hand possesses, and allowed for you are all besides these if you seek them with your property seeking chastity not fornication
Monogamy
Monogamy is a form of relationship in which an individual has only one partner during his or her lifetime or at any one time, as compared to polygyny, polyandry, or polyamory. The term is applied to the social behavior of some animals. It is important to have an understanding of the nomenclature of monogamy because scientists use the term monogamy for different relationships. Biologists, biological anthropologists, and behavioral ecologists often use the term monogamy in the sense of sexual, if not genetic, modern biological researchers, using the theory of evolution, approach human monogamy as the same in human and non-human animal species. They postulate the following four aspects of monogamy, Marital monogamy refers to marriages of two people. Social monogamy refers to two living together, having sex with each other, and cooperating in acquiring basic resources such as shelter, food. Sexual monogamy refers to two partners remaining sexually exclusive with other and having no outside sex partners.
Genetic monogamy refers to sexually monogamous relationships with genetic evidence of paternity, when cultural or social anthropologists and other social scientists use the term monogamy, the meaning is social or marital monogamy. There are philosophical aspects in the field of interest of e. g. philosophical anthropology and philosophy of religion, the word monogamy comes from the Greek μονός, monos which means alone, and γάμος, gamos which means marriage. According to the Ethnographic Atlas, of 1,231 societies from around the noted,186 were monogamous,453 had occasional polygyny,588 had more frequent polygyny. Many societies that we consider monogamous in fact allow easy divorce, in many western countries divorce rates approach 50%. Those who remarry do so on average 3 times and remarriage can thus result in serial monogamy, i. e. multiple marriages but only one legal spouse at a time. In all, these account for 16 to 24% of the monogamous category, the prevalence of sexual monogamy can be roughly estimated as the percentage of married people who do not engage in extramarital sex.
The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample describes the amount of sex by men and women in over 50 pre-industrial cultures. The amount of sex by men is described as universal in 6 cultures, moderate in 29 cultures, occasional in 6 cultures. The amount of sex by women is described as universal in 6 cultures, moderate in 23 cultures, occasional in 9 cultures. These findings support the claim that the amount of extramarital sex differs across cultures. Recent surveys conducted in non-Western nations have found cultural and gender differences in extramarital sex
