Domain Of Kinship Research Articles

Menstrual kinship: Bonds of Intimacy and Care Work of Women in Central Kerala

ABSTRACT This paper explores menstruation as a domain of kinship within and across three generations of women in central Kerala, India. Based on fieldwork, it shows that certain gendered practices of intimacy and care work in the context of menstruation produce kinship bonds among them, which the authors enunciate as ‘menstrual kinship.’ In the past, it was shared chiefly among consanguineal and affinal kinswomen and same-caste women, and became conspicuous only during public menarche rites and the separation of menstruating women. Presently, menstrual kinship extends to women outside the natal and marital family, often overturns the traditional perspectives of menstruation and actively contributes to maintaining the contemporary ‘invisibility’ of menstrual phenomena. The paper posits that regardless of its gendered nature and time-tethered transformations, ‘menstrual kinship’ has always existed as a realm that can release menstruation from conventional discourses of patriarchy and caste and aid in retrieving women’s phenomenological experiences and voices.

WHAT IS KINSHIP ALL ABOUT? AGAIN. CRITIQUE OF THE CAMBRIDGE HANDBOOK OF KINSHIP, EDITED BY SANDRA BAMFORD

The world of anthropology has witnessed a recurring rhetorical title:“What Is Kinship All About?” and now this article titles itself “What is Kinship All About? Again.” Why? Whereas we have over a century’s worth of ethnography and theory focusing on the centrality of kinship in human society and in anthropological theory, in 2019 a Handbook is published that names itself “Kinship” but, despite its claim and to the contrary, it is not about kinship at all. The Handbook editor explicitly states that it is about “conceiving kinship,” with kinship reduced to gendered social relatedness. In response, we re-affirm the centrality of kinship as a domain universal in human societies by way of a critique of the Handbook and a comprehensive review of its contributing chapters. Countering the Handbook’s denialist — or in Harold Scheffler’s famous term, dismantling — position, we bring to the fore the already determined universal properties that define the boundaries of the kinship domain and the logical properties that uni-versally define the category of kinship.

What is Kinship About? Again. Critique of the Cambridge Handbook of Kinship, Edited by Sandra Bamford

The world of anthropology has witnessed a recurring rhetorical title:“What Is Kinship All About?” and now this article titles itself “What is Kinship All About? Again.” Why? Whereas we have over a century’s worth of ethnography and theory focusing on the centrality of kinship in human society and in anthropological theory, in 2019 a Handbook is published that names itself “Kinship” but, despite its claim and to the contrary, it is not about kinship at all. The Handbook editor explicitly states that it is about “conceiving kinship,” with kinship reduced to gendered social relatedness. In response, we re-affirm the centrality of kinship as a domain universal in human societies by way of a critique of the Handbook and a comprehensive review of its contributing chapters. Countering the Handbook’s denialist — or in Harold Scheffler’s famous term, dismantling — position, we bring to the fore the already determined universal properties that define the boundaries of the kinship domain and the logical properties that uni-versally define the category of kinship.

Arabic Dialects of Lamomea and Pudahoa at Students in Gontor 4 and 7 Southeast Sulawesi

Background:
 The symptom of using two languages in the local dialect of the Arabic speaking community in Southeast Sulawesi can be seen as an interesting phenomenon. This study aims to identify and reveal: (1) The Arabic language of local dialect “Pudahoa” at Pondok Putra 7 and “Lamomea” at Gontor Putri 4 in Southeast Sulawesi; (2) Coding variations in the communication of Arabic language in the local dialects of Lamomea and Pudahoa; and (3) the use of local Arabic dialects of Lamomea and Pudahoa.
 Methodology: 
 This research was conducted in the speaking community of Southeast Sulawesi who uses the local Arabic dialect located in Konawe Selatan at two focuses: (1) Arabic Lamomea; and (2) Arabic Pudahoa speaking community. The method used in this research is descriptive method qualitative. The descriptive method is an attempted research method to describe and interpret objects according to the circumstances.
 Findings: 
 This study found: first, the Arabic variation used in social interactions in Gontor Putri 4 is Arabic in the Lamomea dialect. Meanwhile, the Arabic variation used in social interactions in Gontor Putri 7 is Arabic in the Pudahoa dialect. The variations of code-switching that occur in the speech communities of Gontor Putri 4 and Gontor Putra 7 with the linguistic repertoire that exists in the community include first, code-switching in the form of language translation and second, code-switching in the form of speech level code-switching. Furthermore, the codes found in Arabic spoken by the Gontor Putri 4 and Putra 7 speaking community are in the form of phrases. Mix this code in the form of an Indonesian phrase into a sentence or speech. Lamomea and Pudahoa dialect Arabic as a subordinate standard language have several functions. Third, the use of Arabic in the local dialects of Lamomea and Pudahoa consists of the formal domain, kinship domain, religious domain, transactional use, social environment, informal environment, and non-formal domain.
 Conclusion: 
 There are variations of code-switching, and code-mixing in the Arabic speech communities of Lamomea and Pudahoa, Tthe Lamomea and Pudahoa dialects have local and regional characteristics and functions as a means of internal communication, a symbol of community identity and as a means of communication in formal, informal and non-formal situations. The author hopes that there will be further research that focuses on how patterns of influence between Arabic and local culture.
 Keywords: Arabic language form; coding variations; the dialect use.

Adopting the Stranger as Kindred in Deuteronomy

Adopting the Stranger as Kindred in Deuteronomy

Responding to a 100-Year-Old Challenge from Fisher: A Biometrical Analysis of Adult Height in the NLSY Data Using Only Cousin Pairs.

In 1918, Fisher suggested that his research team had consistently found inflated cousin correlations. He also commented that because a cousin sample with minimal selection bias was not available the cause of the inflation could not be addressed, leaving this inflation as a challenge still to be solved. In the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (the NLSY79, the NLSY97, and the NLSY-Children/Young Adult datasets), there are thousands of available cousin pairs. Those in the NLSYC/YA are obtained approximately without selection. In this paper, we address Fisher's challenge using these data. Further, we also evaluate the possibility of fitting ACE models using only cousin pairs, including full cousins, half-cousins, and quarter-cousins. To have any chance at success in such a restricted kinship domain requires an available and highly-reliable phenotype; we use adult height in our analysis. Results provide a possible answer to Fisher's challenge, and demonstrate the potential for using cousin pairs in a stand-alone analysis (as well as in combination with other biometrical designs).

Gregory of Nyssa’s Engagement with Conceptual Metaphors

Abstract This essay explores what Gregory of Nyssa is doing when he claims in Against Eunomius that his use of the language of “father,” “son” and “begetting” for the divine is supported by the “apprehension of ordinary people” and by the “judgement of nature.” It uses conceptual metaphor theory in order to show that while Gregory recognised the role of ordinary human language in comprehending the divine, and so engaged with normal conceptual mappings from the domain of kinship, he also sought to transform those mappings in order to transform peoples’ thought processes and thus how they conceptualised the divine.

The Role of Social Parameters in the Choice of Address Forms used in Kinship domain in Punjab, Pakistan

This study examines the role of social parameters in the choice of address forms used in kinship domain in Punjab, Pakistan. The study targeted 140 respondents in order to test the impact of social factors along with the regional differences in the choices of address forms in kinship domain. Statistical analyses are done by applying t-test for gender in relation to choices of address forms and ANOVA for age, income, education and social class. The study finds out that there is a strong connection of different social parameters not only with language use and practice but also in choices and use of address forms especially in kinship relationships. Moreover, it is highlighted that gender does not influence in the choices of address forms, even the participants belonging to young and middle categories show no significant difference with regard to the choices of address form despite the fact that all the factors and parameters exert influence on the choices of address forms. Hence address forms as being one of the major traits of language and society is affected by all the social factors around and regional differences are also most important as they give identity and ethnicity to the society.

Family in mind

In the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in remote Western Australia children play a guessing game called mama mama ngunytju ngunytju ‘father father mother mother’. It is mainly girls who play the game, along with other members of their social network, including age-mates, older kin and adults. They offer clues about target referents and establish mutual understandings through multimodal forms of representation that include semi-conventionalized drawings on the sand. In this paper we show how speech, gesture, and graphic schemata are negotiated and identify several recurrent themes, particularly focusing on the domains of kinship and spatial awareness. We discuss the implications this case study has for understanding the changing nature of language socialization in remote Indigenous Australia. Multimodal analyses of games and other indirect teaching routines deepen our understandings of the acquisition of cultural knowledge and the development of communicative competence in this context.

An exploration of trans* kinship as a strategy for student success

Although the notion of queer kinship has been well discussed within literature on queer individuals, it has not been used as a lens to make sense of how trans* college students successfully navigate rigidly gender dichotomous collegiate environments. Using interview data from the National Study of LGBTQ Student Success, this study explores the narratives of 18 trans* students concerning their experiences of success in college and the role of queer kinship in supporting their success. Analysis documented three domains of kinship (i.e. material, virtual, and affective), which promoted students’ success.

An Ethnosemantic Study of Affinal Kinship Terms In Arabic and Arab Culture

This study explores the affinal (marriage kinship) relations and terminologies in Arab culture ethnosemantically. The affinal kinship terminologies represent the second basic taxonomy of kinship relations in every culture. The study includes a qualitative analysis by adopting the ethnosemantic or Cultural Domain Analysis (CDA) approach to fulfil the aims of this study. This approach helps researchers to identify and discuss the main terminologies of affinal kinship domain used in Arab culture. The study is based on data collected from the Holy Quran and some Arabic philology books. The study of this social domain in Arab culture is very useful to perceive and transfer people’s culture to other communities. Moreover, recognizing and understanding certain culture’s domains and norms may help people from other cultures avoid miscommunication or misunderstanding of other’s cultures and help use the suitable items based on certain contexts. The findings of this study emphasised the importance of studying this domain as a socio-cultural phenomenon that may help distinguish the main terminologies of marriage relations in Arab culture.

What Kinship Is—And Is Not

Despite proclamations to the contrary, kinship is alive andwell, as attested by recently published books focusing onkinship and by major sessions on kinship held as part of thelast several AAA meetings. Papers in these sessions havediscussed topics ranging from the connection between pastand present research on kinship to new research addressingfundamental questions regarding what constitutes kinship.ThelatteristhesubjectofthisshortbookbyMarshallSahlins.The two chapters making up the book present his takeon what kinship is and what it is not—hence the title of thebook.Theunderlyingpremiseisthatkinshipisgroundedin“mutuality of being” (p. 2), whereby “kinfolk are membersof one another, intrinsic to each other’s identity and exis-tence”(p.62).Unlikebiologicalrelations,where“relation”isourconstructusedtoexplorethebiologicalconsequencesarising from biological reproduction, mutuality of being in-vokesthewidespreadview,asevidencedbySahlinsthroughnumerous quotes, that kinship begins with the perceptionof connectedness, or mutuality of being, between persons.Sahlins directs our attention to the view expressed in manygroups that there is no fully contained, completely isolatedself. Thus, kinship, he states, does not begin with a self–otheroppositionthatassumestheselfexistsseparatelyfromthe other but, rather, with a conjoined self and other, orwhat he refers to as the “kinship I” (pp. 35–36), using anexpressionborrowedfromJorgenJohansen’s(1954)ethno-graphic account of the Maori. The “kinship I” becomes aself–other opposition (p. 33) in which the other is dividedand structured by the relations identified through a kinshipterminology (p. 29). From this perspective, the self existsin the other and exists in each of its divisions; that is, mu-tuality of being determines the domain of kinship, therebycounteringDavidSchneider’s(1972)simplisticclaimthattheontologicalsimilaritiesinAmericankinshipwithnationalismandreligionmeanthatkinshipdoes notexist(pp. 15,60).Thefirstchapterleadsustotheradicalandcontroversialconjecture,takenupinthesecondchapter,thatratherthankinshipbeingderivedfrombiologicalreproductionthroughextension and metaphor, it is the reverse: “the relations ofbirtharereflexesofthegreaterkinshiporderandareincor-porated within that order ... what is reproduced in thebirthisasystemofkinshiprelationsandcategoriesinwhichthechildisgivenaspecificpositionandpositionalvalue”(p.65). Calling what people say about reproduction “theoriesof procreation,” Sahlins says, already presumes that what isbeing said is merely their attempt to account for the bio-logical process of reproduction: “It is as if these were justsomanymistakenideasofthephysiologyofconception”(p.74). Instead, he argues, we should begin by understandingthat what is being said is not a treatise on the physiologyof conception but, rather, an account of how a child is be-ing situated in a “structured field of kinship relations” (p.74) through conception and birth. It is not the degree ofconcordance between their “theory” and our biological ac-count that we should focus on, he explains, but what theyare saying about how the biological reality of conceptionand birth is the vessel, as it were, for contents expressinghow a child becomes situated in a field of social relations.The vessel—the biological process of reproduction—doesnot engender kinship, and if we strip it away, we are leftwith the contents, namely kinship, as Sahlins quotes fromEduardo Viveiros de Castro (2009:241): “Kinship here [inAmazonia] is what you have when you ‘do without’ a bio-logicaltheoryofrelationality”(p.89).Thedistinctionbeingmade is similar to what Jane Goodale (1994) reports forthe Tiwi in her book,

Toward an Anthropology of Ingratitude: Notes from Andean Kinship

AbstractIn this article I examine gratitude and ingratitude as valuable analytical tools for determining how social inequalities inform kinship practices. Accusing one's kin of ingratitude reveals the edges and fault lines of kinship, as well as closely related expectations aboutwhatshould be given,howit should be given, and how it should bereceived. As such, this essay follows in an esteemed anthropological tradition of unifying analyses of the gift and of kinship. It argues that expressions of and talk about gratitude and ingratitude closely index dimensions of social relations such as gender, generation, and social class, and simultaneously reveal tensions within kinship relations where duty and obligation are contested. Ethnographic examples are drawn from fieldwork in Ayacucho, a small city in the Peruvian Andes, where informal fostering and the fraught relations between grown children and their aging parents provide two related arenas for expressions of ideas about gratitude and ingratitude. Analyzing these two examples, I argue for gratitude and ingratitude as analytical heuristics, useful to identify and focus upon dimensions of relations understood to fall within the domain of kinship, and potentially useful in other settings as well.

Saúde e relações de gênero: uma reflexão sobre os desafios para a implantação de políticas públicas de atenção à saúde da mulher indígena

This article presents some contrasts that exist between the discourses of public policies concerning women's health care, especially with respect to indigenous women, and the ethnological discourse which emphasizes the specificity of gender relations within indigenous societies. We worked on the assumption that the development of these public policies as well as the organization of health care services offered, which in fact are necessary, have a transforming effect on prevailing gender relations within Amerindian Societies. On the one hand, gender relations between indigenous people are associated with the domains of kinship and corporeality. On the other hand, the process of creating public policies, by means of biomedical intervention and the medicalization of the female body, constitutes a powerful tool for body modeling and the construction of subjectivities contributing to making women worthy of citizenship. The female gender is under discussion and its content is being negotiated.

The Place of Kinship in the Social System: A Formal-and-Functional Consideration With an Appendix on Descent and Alliance

This papers examines the recent controversy as to whether there is any universally defined domain of kinship in sociocultural systems from the point of view of the philosophy of science, in particular, the classical positivism (e.g., of Radcliffe-Brown and of Murdock) that I show to have motivated the question. It also examines the American version of the controversy, as with Schneider, and shows that, again, the question arises because of essentially the radical empiricism of cultural particularism and its methodological focus. It then proceeds to evaluate the question from a cognitive-cum-formalist perspective, and goes on the argue that Lounsbury’s approach is not only also positivist-behaviorist in its foundations but also unwilling or unable to consider kinship as a domain having regard to its function within the whole social system and therewith in fact inadequately formalist, having regard to genealogical organization. I proceed to take especial not of the fact that, uniquely, kinship is a system of social relations that is what I cal pure-relational, that being the functional basis of its universal definition. Finally, as an appendix, I generalize the idea of alliance to the structural organization of all kinship systems.

Kin term diversity is the result of multilevel, historical processes

AbstractExplanations in the domain of kinship can be sought on several different levels: Jones addresses online processing, as well as issues of origins and innateness. We argue that his framework can more usefully be applied at the levels of developmental and historical change, the latter especially. A phylogenetic approach to the diversity of kinship terminologies is most urgently required.

Sanma Told Me

Through the biographical narratives of a Kolam woman of a tribal village in western India, the article delineates experiences of violence which the victim is unable to articulate in her own world. Cultural discourse might simultaneously violate and obliterate comprehension of violence from the victim’s perspective. In such situations, what is experienced as violence by the woman constitutes is lawful activity in the eyes of the community. The article pithily dwells upon the duality of sexual norms in the village which has consequences for women’s agency and (in)ability to resist violence. It looks at the community’s inclination for boundary maintenance which is threatened through its women’s transgressive sexual acts. The fall-out is continual de-legitimacy for the concerned woman to invoke the communitarian justice system. This can happen even among communities practicing liberal gender norms. Resistance to cultural violence does require support systems outside the kinship domain. It does necessitate secular interventions; an unconditional legitimation of secular reasoning cannot, however, be warranted because it might have implications for erasing existing egalitarian norms.

Nepali Sign Language and Nepali: Social and Linguistic Dimensions of a Case of Inter-Modal Language Contact

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BETWIXT KIN AND COMMUNITY

Based on ethnographic accounts of Muslim survivors of ethnic strife in three cities of western India, and in particular on the voices of women, this paper draws attention to the impacts of such violence on the domains of kinship and family. It explores the implications of violence for the dislocation and dismembering of families, and the fracturing of educational and occupational aspirations of family members. While the kin group forms the first circle of support for survivors, there are also clashes of interest that must be handled. Muslim women in India, in particular, face some specific problems. Their skill levels are generally low and their capacity for mobility, because of community constraints, is hindered. The increasing ghettoization of Muslims in urban India, due to the threat of violence, further confines women survivors and their families to certain spaces and specific neighbourhoods. Women need to access state support and find new avenues of livelihood to support their families. At this very juncture, they may feel the weight of community norms more sharply. As the paper shows, the demands of family and community may be at odds and women have to tread a wary path in the battle to survive and retrieve a life for themselves and their children in the aftermath of violence.

Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Culture Change

In 1978, the world's first “test-tube” baby was born via in vitro fertilization (IVF). The past 30 years have seen the rapid evolution of many other assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs)—some are simple variants of IVF, whereas others bridge the fields of assisted reproduction and human genomics. As ARTs have evolved over time, so have social, cultural, legal, and ethical responses to them. Indeed, ARTs are a key symbol of our times, representing the growing prominence of biotechnologies in the configuration of individual, familial, and collective identities around the globe. This review highlights the scholarship of more than 50 anthropologists who are studying the effects of ARTs in many areas of social life, including the traditional anthropological domains of kinship, marriage, and the family, gender, religion, and biomedicine. Their research bespeaks both the destabilizing and the generative impacts of ARTs at the interface between science and society.