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-# Some history #
-## A history of kinship ##
-Ryan Schram
-ANTH 2654: Forms of Families
-July 31, 2014
-Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/2654/1
-## Recap ##
-There's lots of reasons to study kinship:
-* It raises questions about human nature.
-* It seems to explain the social structure of small societies.
-* Ideas about family often reveal implicit ideas about gender and
-  morality.
-* "Multiculturalism" usually has something to do with the fact that
-  different cultures have differ concepts of family, relatives, and
-  their relationships.
-You should choose one reason why you're studying it. What questions do
-you want answered?
-## He invented kinship ##
-Many ideas about kinship in anthropology trace back to the work of
-**Lewis Henry Morgan**. Morgan gives the first justification for
-studying kinship as a system of a society.
-Every society has its own way of dividing itself into groups and
-deciding how these groups can relate to each other. The terms we use
-to label relatives are classifications of people.
-## Morgan's definition of kinship ##
-For Morgan, kinship is a "system of consanguinity and affinity."
-**Consanguinous**: related by blood, either through the mother or the
-father.
-**Affinity**: related by marriage, i.e. a spouse and all of the
-spouse's consanguineous relatives. Roughly equivalent to English
-'in-law'.
-## Set sail for kinship ##
-W. H. R. Rivers is another "discoverer of kinship" in anthropology.
-Rivers collected information about cultures by going out on long
-expeditions. It was a time before "fieldwork."
-He found that he could gather a clear picture of a society as an
-organized whole if he just asked a person to name all of their
-relatives, and to trace their family tree back as far as one could
-remember. He called it **the genealogical method**.
-Patterns of which relative married which relative were linked to
-different types of social institution.
-## Culture shock ##
-Rivers helped create contemporary anthropology based on cultural
-relativism. For him, marriage forms like **polyandry** and **child
-marriage** were just as strange as **cousin marriage** among
-upper-class British families.
-## A puzzle ##
-Take a piece of paper and write the term. What do you call:
-* What is your "native language"?
-* Your **mother's sister's children**?
-* Your **mother's brother's children**?
-* Your **mother's children** (besides yourself)?
-* Your **father's sister's children**?
-* Your **father's brother's children**?
-* Your **father's children**? (besides yourself)?
-You can share answers with neighbors. How many different terms do we use?
-## X and || ##
-Because having two types of collateral relatives is so common around
-the world, anthropologists use English etic (analytical) terms for
-them:
-**Cross-cousins** are the children of your parents' //opposite-sex//
-siblings.
-**Parallel cousins** are the children of your parents' //same-sex//
-siblings. (And...?)
-## And more ##
-{{:natgeo.seri.sib.png|Lynn Johnson, Vanishing Voices Photo Slideshow, National Geographic, 2012}}
-## The axiom of amity ##
-How to define kinship has been very controversial, as we shall
-see. Many anthropologists tend to implicitly gravitate toward one
-definition, though. It was formulated by **Meyer Fortes**, who writes:
-> [K]inship concepts, institutions, and relations classify, identify,
-> and categorize persons and groups. ... [T]his is associated with
-> rules of conduct whose efficacy comes, in the last resort, from a
-> general principle of kinship morality that is rooted in the familial
-> domain and is assumed everywhere to be axiomatically binding. This
-> is the rule of **prescriptive altruism** which I have referred to as the
-> principle of kinship amity and which Hiatt calls the ethic of
-> generosity. (Fortes 2004 [1969]: 231-232)
-## References ##
-Fortes, Meyer. 2004 [1969]. Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy
-of Lewis Henry Morgan. London: Routledge.
-Johnson, Lynn. 2012. Seri Cousins (Photograph). Vanishing Voices
-Photo Gallery, National Geographic (July). http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/vanishing-languages/rymer-text