Kinship Patterns Research Articles

Your place or mine? A phylogenetic comparative analysis of marital residence in Indo-European and Austronesian societies

Accurate reconstruction of prehistoric social organization is important if we are to put together satisfactory multidisciplinary scenarios about, for example, the dispersal of human groups. Such considerations apply in the case of Indo-European and Austronesian, two large-scale language families that are thought to represent Neolithic expansions. Ancestral kinship patterns have mostly been inferred through reconstruction of kin terminologies in ancestral proto-languages using the linguistic comparative method, and through geographical or distributional arguments based on the comparative patterns of kin terms and ethnographic kinship 'facts'. While these approaches are detailed and valuable, the processes through which conclusions have been drawn from the data fail to provide explicit criteria for systematic testing of alternative hypotheses. Here, we use language trees derived using phylogenetic tree-building techniques on Indo-European and Austronesian vocabulary data. With these trees, ethnographic data and Bayesian phylogenetic comparative methods, we statistically reconstruct past marital residence and infer rates of cultural change between different residence forms, showing Proto-Indo-European to be virilocal and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian uxorilocal. The instability of uxorilocality and the rare loss of virilocality once gained emerge as common features of both families.

Kinship, Migrations and the State

Anthropologists have long studied ‘exotic’ kinship patterns in distant places that differedfrom what was seen as the traditional nuclear family. The second half of the twentiethcentury witnessed a number of changes (new patterns of birth and marriage, new reproductive technologies, the increased visibility of step- and adoptive elations) that changed scholars’ perceptions, convincing them that the traditional—even in Europe and North America—was no longer a helpful concept in understanding contemporary family dynamics. Accordingly, anthropologists reformulated their analytical tools to take stock of the variety of contemporary understandings of family life, placing the emphasis not on sexual procreation and blood connections, but on an enduring sentiment of diffuse solidarity: relatedness (Carsten 2000).

Hitchcock and Race: Is the Wrong Man a White Man?

SO MUCH SCHOLARSHIP HAS APPEARED ON Alfred hitchcock that Thomas Leiten has written that makes sense speak of Hitchcock studies as a field of study (Hitchcock and Company i). Yet representation of race and ethnicity in has been neglected. Only two essays, James Morrison's Hitchcock's Ireland: The Performance of Irish Identity in Juno and Paycock and Under Capricorn and Richard Allen's John and Half-Caste: Identity and Representation in purport treat this important topic in any kind of detail. Morrison treats Irish identity not as a cultural phenomenon but rather as a political one. That is, identities are framed in relation political borders within which characters operate (Ireland and Australia, respectively) and their relationships British colonial power. Methods of communication, stereotypes, food, kinship patterns, cultural roles, and other folkways are largely ignored. Allen's essay investigates cinematic adaptation of Clemence Dane's Enter Sir John. In Dane's novel, murderous villain's (Handel Fane) racial identity as a half-caste assures his guilt and thereby plays a more significant narrative role than in Murder! (1930). Allen argues that decision emphasize Fane's sexual identity while reducing his racial background a MacGuffin represents the achievement of work while simultaneously pointing to limits ofthat achievement. Hitchcock uses racial/racist theme of novel complicate idea of an overly simplistic notion of sexual Identities, but in so doing, he leaves casual racism of 'half-caste' moniker unresolved (123). The Wrong Man (1956) employs a similar strategy by tempering Manny Balestrero's (Henry Fonda) Italian background even as it preserves his ethnic name, ethnicness of his Italian relatives, and his Catholic beliefs. Whereas Murder! retreated from a more radical statement about ethnic/racial inequality in favor of an interest in sexual, The Wrong Man Anglicizes Manny moderate film's challenge toward stereotypical association (especially in Hollywood films) between Italian ethnicity and criminality. In so doing, film, which levels a strong critique at 1950s American conformity, ultimately conforms itself by refusing offer a protagonist who is both innocent and blatantly ethnic. Unfortunately, ethnic and racial aspects of this and other Hitchcock films has been largely ignored by Hitchcock scholars, who have tended marginalize these issues in favor of an interest in representation of gender norms, psychoanalytic aspects of his work, and formal mastery of his films. The Wrong Man is one of many Hitchcock films that deals significantly with issues of race and ethnicity, and investigation of these topics should be a primary concern of Hitchcock studies. The Wrong Man is a downbeat film about a middle-class Italian American wrongly accused of robbery. After being falsely charged, Balestrero passively accepts injustices that befall him because he feels he does not have means or right protest. Rather than encouraging audiences sympathize with his plight, film castigates oppressive conformity that resulted from and, in rhetoric of Senator Joseph McCarthy and others, supposedly assured security of 1950s (Sterriti 66-67).1 As Donald Spoto writes, [t]o view The Wrong Man primarily as condemnation of a harsh and impersonal judicial system is miss its wider scope and limit its provocative potential . . . [Hitchcock's] mistrust and fear are directed at whole of society, at tenuous psychological structures we build as a defense against that society (The Art of Alfred Hitchcock 288). In some ways, then, Manny Balestrero is similar one of his literary contemporaries, Tom Rath. The protagonist of Sloan Wilson's 1955 best-selling novel The Man in Gray Flannel Suit is similarly obsessed with kowtowing (at least at start of novel) society's expectations. …

Structured Inequalities: Factors Associated with Spatial Disparities in Maternity Care in India.

Research on India documents considerable heterogeneity in health and health care across states. However, while regional differences are well established, factors underlying these differences have received little attention. This paper seeks to explain disparities in delivery care across districts by focusing on three factors: (1) Marriage and kinship patterns; (2) District wealth; (3) Governance and quality of services. Using data from nationally representative India Human Development Survey 2005 (IHDS) it examines the probability that the 11,905 women who had a child between 2000 and 2005 delivered in a hospital or received care from a doctor or a nurse while delivering at home. The results suggest that 47% of the variation in delivery care in India is between districts while 53% is between women within district. Although compositional differences in education and household wealth explain some of the variation between districts, marriage and kinship patterns, district wealth and governance each has a significant impact on shaping between-district variation in maternity care.

Changes in family and kinship networks consequent on the demographic transitions in England and Wales

ABSTRACTThe SOCSIM micro-simulation model is used to investigate how kinship and family patterns in Britain changed as people passed through the ‘First Demographic Transition’, starting in the late nineteenth century, and the ‘Second Demographic Transition’, from the 1960s. Certain types of kin, such as former partners, became more common, and others, such as ever-born siblings, less so. An ageing of generational relationships is observed: events that formerly occurred early in life, such as the experience of one's parents' deaths, are being postponed. Patterns of re-partnering are leading to more partial relationships involving step- and supplanted parents, half-siblings, former partners and stepchildren.

Early modern English kinship in the long run: reflections on continuity and change

ABSTRACTThe article highlights the significance of alliances of blood and marriage in early modern England and beyond, including both positive and negative relations among kin. Examining different historiographical approaches, it emphasizes the role of kinship in explanations of historical change and continuity. Rather than focusing on the isolated nuclear family or, conversely, on an alleged decline of kinship, it highlights the importance of enmeshed patterns of kinship and connectedness. Such patterns were not only important in themselves (whether culturally, socially, economically, or politically), it is suggested, but they also invite new comparisons with other early modern societies, and in the long run. Even patterns typical of present-day ‘new families’ and ‘families of choice’, or aspects of the present-day language of kinship may bring to mind some similarities with notions of kinship and related ‘household-family’ ties characteristic of the early modern period, the article proposes.

Introduction: Women, Intersectionality and Diasporas

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Our use of ‘ethnicity’ encompasses, but is not limited to phenotypical markers (race) as markers defining an ethnic group. It is informed by Schermerhorn Schermerhorn, R. A. 1970. Comparative Ethnic Relations, New York: Random House. [Google Scholar]'s (12) definition of an ethnic group as “a collectivity … having a real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, a cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of their peoplehood … [such as one or a combination of] kinship patterns, … religious affiliation, language, … nationality, phenotypical features [– and] some consciousness of kind among members of the group”. 2. Who used secondary analysis of documents to support what is essentially a theoretical analysis. Additional informationNotes on contributorsSirma BilgeAn Assistant Professor of Sociology at Université de Montréal, Sirma Bilge is also the director of the Intersectionality Research Pole at the Centre for Ethnic Studies of Montreal Universities (CEETUM). Her work engages with articulations of gender, sexualities and ethnicity within the politics of nation and race. She is currently conducting research on matrimonial practices among young people from migrant background in MontrealAnn DenisAnn Denis is a Professor of Sociology at Université d'Ottawa, Canada. Her current and recent research examine the effect of state policies on women (and their work) in the Commonwealth Caribbean and among immigrants in Canada, the use of the Internet by minority young people in Barbados and francophone Ontario, and the effects of society-centred educational practices on women studying engineering. The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology: Conflict, Competition, Cooperation(Sage), co-edited with D. Kalekin-Fishman is a recent publication. Presently a member of the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association (2006–10), she was its Vice-President, Research (2002–2006) and remains an active member of its research committees on women (RC32) and on ethnicity (RC05)

Starting again in rural west China: stories of rural women across generations

Rural China is being remade in the wake of a massive exodus of young people to work in the cities and coastal areas. The core rural population is now middle-aged, and is caring for both parents and grandchildren. In this process, women and men are creating new patterns of kinship and social ties across distance and generations. This article draws on research that combined household analysis with focused life-history methods to explore these departures through a focus on three illustrative cases from upland west China.

A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492 – 1640

If the importance of Portuguese merchants in the Spanish Empire is well known to scholars of early Spanish America, nonetheless their economic activities, complex and wide-ranging trade and kin networks, and family and household structure have not been examined systematically. Until the appearance of this relatively short but highly informative and suggestive volume by Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, the Portuguese for the most part remained shadowy and marginal figures in the Spanish Empire. This book goes far toward filling the gaps in our understanding of the role and impact of the Portuguese. While the demise of the Portuguese merchants at the hands of the Inquisition that targeted them as Spanish-Portuguese relations began to fray in the 1630s has received attention from such scholars as Alfonso Quiroz, the larger presence and experience of the Portuguese “Nation” in the Spanish Empire has not. Although the traditional separation of the histories of Spain and Portugal probably accounts in large part for this neglect, this book reminds us that the two early modern empires and their peoples were closely intertwined for decades and demonstrates the usefulness of the broader approaches of Atlantic or transnational history for dealing with the development of the expanding early modern world.Studnicki-Gizbert introduces his study by bringing to the fore some of the ambiguities that seem inevitably to attach to the Portuguese Nation, which he defines as primarily a maritime and expatriate community of mixed Jewish and Christian origins and identity, whose members lived and advocated an ideology of “open international trade, religious toleration, and a naturalized vision of the economy” (p. 12) that could place them at odds with their sometimes reluctant hosts. The expulsion of Portuguese merchants from the Spanish Empire that resulted from Portugal’s secession in 1640 did not mean the demise of the Nation. On an individual basis many Portuguese who had settled in Spanish America (and Spain itself) had assimilated, while the mercantile/maritime community began to shift its focus of interest toward the developing British and Dutch empires. The latter group constitutes the main focus of this book. The Portuguese who worked as artisans, local traders, or became involved in agriculture or mining in the Spanish Empire remain largely in the background in this study.What we have is a full and detailed examination of the functioning and organization of the Portuguese mercantile and maritime community and of how that group came to play a prominent and crucial role in the economy of the Spanish Empire. The empire was far more international and varied in character than the Spanish Crown desired well before the kingdom of Portugal was brought under the Spanish monarchy in 1580 — indeed, from its inception. The Portuguese not only offered their maritime and commercial expertise and long experience in the African slave trade, they also maintained vital connections to other spheres of international trade in Europe and Asia. Despite complaints about contraband, for a long time the benefits of the Portuguese presence in the Spanish Empire were simply too valuable to be dismissed.Although perhaps the examination of the operation of the Atlantic trade networks and markets constitutes the core of the book, the author offers a fascinating and surprisingly full picture of the internal organization of the Nation in terms of the structure and functioning of mercantile houses and the business and kinship connections that individuals and families maintained, which allowed them to forge an international community that was both strong and elastic. Diverse in terms of regional origin in Portugal and religious background, the Nation’s economic interests, dependence on mutual trustworthiness, and practice of gift giving underwrote a community that above all was rooted in its collective identity rather than in any one place. Households themselves reflected the distinctive character of the Nation, encompassing not only the customary servants, slaves, and apprentices but sometimes more than one family unit.This beautifully written book, based on research in a range of sources and archives that have provided the author with an unusually intimate picture of many of the merchants he examines, is a welcome addition to the literature on the early modern Spanish Empire and its connections with the Portuguese world. It might have been useful to see some comparison of patterns of kinship, household composition, mobility, and collective behavior with those of other groups, which probably would show that some of those patterns were less distinctive than suggested. The early modern Spanish Empire, after all, was settled not by Spaniards but by Basques, Extremeños, Canary Islanders, Congolese, and the like who relocated and retained their distinctiveness by emphasizing ties of kinship, origin, and collective interest. Notwithstanding the absence of such comparisons, however, this is a balanced, multifaceted study of a group that maintained its communal identity and viability in face of shifting political trends and religious intolerance.

Isolation and characterization of microsatellite loci in the beaver (Castor canadensis)

We have isolated and characterized 10 microsatellite loci in the beaver (Castor canadensis). Sixty individuals from southern and central Illinois were screened at each locus. All loci exhibited moderate levels of polymorphism, ranging from five to 13 alleles per locus with average heterozygosity ranging from 0.317 to 0.867. Locus Cca5 deviated significantly from HWE (P<0.001). The locus pair Cca4/Cca5 was shown to be in linkage disequilibrium in southern Illinois, but not in the central Illinois population. The remaining eight loci will be useful in investigations of mating and kinship patterns in beaver populations in Illinois.

A New Sociology for a New History? Further Critical Thoughts on the Eurasian Similarity and Great Divergence Theses

In West and the Rest Revisited (2006), I offered a critical assessment--theoretical as well as substantive--of recent revisionist scholarship that rejects standard explanatory accounts of the rise of the European powers to global dominance in the early modern period. (2) While differing on select points of interpretation, revisionists are in broad agreement on two fundamental claims: (a) the advanced organic across Eurasia were following comparable developmental paths, and (b) the European breakthrough to hegemonic ascendancy was both late and fortuitous, decisively facilitated by energy and resource contingencies rather than endogenous developments. Neither postulate is compelling, either as sociology or as history. To subscribe to the revisionist narrative requires the unwarranted relegation of two securely established analytical principles: that social formations are pervasively integrated and interdependent structures of institutional and cultural configuration; and that the historical processes variably reproducing and transforming those structures are not random or irregular, but unfold in path-dependent sequences that give rise to catenated trajectories of varying temporal duration. A viable historical social science is one that attends, connectively, to the dynamically coinciding dual logics of the sociological and the historical--a slighting of either, or both, will invariably skew or subvert the proffered analysis. According to proponents of the Similarity thesis, the leading powers of the early modern period--Ming and Manchu China, Tokugawa Japan, Mughal India, the Ottomans and Safavids, and the western Europeans--were all functioning on the basis of fundamental comparabilities in productivity, living standards, commercial vitality, urban dynamism, and knowledge systems. But even on the intensely contested assumption that these novel empirical claims of equivalencies are plausible, the revisionist optic fatally marginalizes all the many institutional and cultural differences--in political structures, modes of war-making, legal juridical arrangements, educational systems, kinship patterns, rural-urban interdependencies, class and status hierarchies, regnant worldviews, technological skill-levels, scientific comprehension of natural processes, etc. - that bore directly and indirectly upon the growing capacity of the European powers to establish coercive relations of dominance over much of the globe, beginning with limited ventures in mercantile brigandage at the end of the 15th century and continuing on to full-blown imperialism and colonization in centuries thereafter. As a comparative strategy for world history, a removal or displacement of the most centrally constitutive variables of social life not only injudiciously narrows and tilts our explanatory focus, it issues in highly misleading assimilations of societies that were keyed to profoundly differing institutional and cultural specifications. Revisionists accomplish this conflation by shifting their focus to a level of abstraction that is higher-order, yet more restricted in content In preference to the established multi-dimensional classifications (feudal, patrimonial, tributary, bureaucratic prebendalism, bourgeois-capitalist, proto-industrial, etc.), revisionists subsume all the major Eurasian powers under the arching rubric of advanced organic societies, a one-dimensional categorization that indexes a common reliance on biomass resources and animal muscle-power that prevailed prior to any significant exploitation of fossil fuels. The energy factor, indisputably important, is thereby incautiously inflated to yield a new, coal-based binary of the before and after kind, which yields a reductive comparative sociology lacking in institutional and cultural concreteness. (3) On the premise that purported East-West differences in social organization have been overdrawn, and that surprising similarities were holding across Eurasia up to c. …

The Importance of Initiatory Ordeals: Kinship and Politics in an Inca Narrative

Among all the Inca sovereigns whose memory had been preserved by the Spanish chroniclers, Yahuar Huacac holds a unique position. He is famed for having shed tears of blood as a child when a foreign lord kidnapped and maltreated him. Surprisingly, his sufferings ended with matrimonial alliances binding the Inca and the main actors of this drama, all important figures of three foreign chiefdoms. Through both a historical and an anthropological approach, this article analyzes the narrative's structure of interwoven ritual events and kinship patterns. It examines how the stages of the heir's journey over many territories forged a distinctive relationship between the Inca elite and the provincial lords, enlightening the meaning of the final unions.

Family, religion and economic performance: A critique of cultural determinism

Arguing that some attitudes that may constitute an obstacle to the development process are culturally funded, cultural determinism pleads that underdevelopment is essentially generated endogenously, in other words, that people in developing countries, with their beliefs and their attitudes, are the more liable for the poverty in which they live. The simplicity of these arguments has seduced a large number of scholars but what seems to be a cultural brake on economic development could be explained otherwise. This critique of cultural determinism's arguments attempts to supply an alternative version of the interaction of culture and development, from which power, class, domination and the international division of labour will not be excised. In order to simplify this study only two of the cultural features most often referred to will be brought into focus: religion and family and patterns of kinship.

Etika Berbangsa dan Bernegara melalui Peran Bahasa dalam Kajian Analisis Ilmu Antropologi

This paper explains about language function with functionalism approach. In general eth- nic group is known as a tribe or community with the same identity or tradition. Identity of the ethnic group includes patterns of kinship, marital, religion, home architecture, settle- ment, language etc. Language is one of the identity and becomes a collective identity of ethnic. But language can be a nation identity not just an ethnic identity. One of the charac- teristic of Indonesia is Bahasa Indonesia as a national identity or national language. The mass media like television broadcasting (TVRI and private TV) are the important channels to promote the socialization of using Bahasa Indonesia correctly. Key words: language, function, integration, identity

Family continuity in England and Japan

ABSTRACTThis article examines generational continuity and kinship patterns in Willingham (England) between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and in Kami-shiojiri (Japan) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Willingham few families continued to survive in a given locality for more than a couple of generations in the male line. Yet at the same time local testators left bequests to a wide range of kin in their wills, indicating that, despite the mobility of the population, kinship ties remained important and were acknowledged. For Kami-shiojiri, the almost continuous series of Shumon Aratame-cho (religious faith registers) reveals a gradual change towards smaller and simpler household structures (Ie). In addition, occasional abrupt increases in the numbers of households and in the numbers of messuages (dwelling units) imply that the community as a whole and/or the local overlord did sometimes intervene to reconstruct sections of the village economy and the use of household labour. Households in Kami-shiojiri were larger and more complex than those in England and the population was much more stable, with the mobility rate about half that reported for England. The extent of variation in inheritance patterns within both populations is also discussed, showing that some families persisted for several generations in Willingham and that in Kami-shiojiri more than a third of cases of change of headship of the household, involved a successor who was not the eldest son of the previous head.

Women, Kinship, and Inheritance: Northamptonshire 1543-1709

To assess the role of women in early modern society, this article will examine the evidence to be found contained in probate documents, in particular surviving wills. Historians have utilized the data contained within wills as a successful method to investigate kinship, inheritance, religion, and many other social patterns prevalent in the early modern period.1 To undertake this study of women in early modern Northamptonshire, the evidence collected from the will documents will indicate, through the items bequeathed, where women fitted within the inheritance process, how this reflects on their role within early modern families and communities, and if there were any marked differences between the inheritance, kinship, and community patterns to be found between the wills of men and women.

Children's Perspectives on Their Relationships With Grandparents Following Parental Separation: A Longitudinal Study

AbstractFollowing parental separation, children's closeness to grandparents has been reported to be linked to their family situation and differences in adjustment. This relationship has not been investigated longitudinally. This study investigated children's relationships with grandparents over time in different family settings, and associations with intergenerational relationships. Data from 385 children, with longitudinal analyses on 140, were collected at two time points over a five‐year period. Associations between closeness of the child–grandparent relationship and adjustment were not found at the later time point. There was a mean drop in frequency of contact over time, but not in closeness. However, there was stability of individual differences in both frequency of contact and closeness; closeness to the maternal grandmother was particularly stable for children living with a single mother. Intergenerational links were found with the mother's own childhood experiences, particularly in single‐mother families. Following parental separation, the matrifocal bias in kinship patterns was accentuated.

Racial Differences in Caregiving Patterns, Caregiver Emotional Function, and Sources of Emotional Support Following Traumatic Brain Injury

Compare white and African American caregivers of people with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) regarding caregiving patterns, emotional function and life satisfaction, and preferred supports. Prospective, observational study; 1, 2, or 5 years post-TBI. Six TBI model systems. Two hundred fifty-six caregivers (195 white and 61 African American). Brief Symptom Inventory-18, Satisfaction With Life Scale. Races differed as to kinship patterns, with more white caregivers including spouses and more African Americans including "other relatives." African Americans spent significantly more time in direct caregiving, and reported more depression. African American TBI survivors were significantly more disabled than whites, which appeared to account for emotional function differences. Whites were more likely to use professional services for emotional support. Across races, TBI caregiver emotional health is affected by the functional level of the survivor. African American caregivers may be at risk for worse emotional consequences due to worse survivor outcomes, yet may underutilize professional services.

Blood Is Thicker than Water: Policing Donor Insemination and the Reproduction of Whiteness

On the most general level, this essay addresses the ways race is deployed in biomedical solutions to infertility. Szkupinski Quiroga begins with general assertions about fertility technology. She then explores how fertility technology reinforces biological links between parents and children and argues that most options reflect and privilege white kinship patterns and fears about race mixing. She illustrates these observations with interviews she has collected.

Un caleidoscopio social. Familia, parentesco y mestizaje en la campaña de Buenos Aires en el siglo XIX

The paper studies patterns of family and kinship in the rural areas of the province of Buenos Aires in the 19th century . It intends to approach to the role ...