Kinship Studies Research Articles

Population and forensic analysis of 9 non-CODIS markers in Slovak population.

Genetic analyses of STR markers provide data for several important applications, including criminal caseworks, kinship analyses and population studies. In this study, we describe the parameters of nine STR markers (D2S1360, D3S1744, D4S2366, D5S2500, D6S474, D7S1517, D8S1132, D10S2325, D21S2055) in Slovak population and compare them with several European and worldwide populations. Since these markers are not commonly used in forensic practice, our data might provide subsidiary discriminatory power in the most demanding criminal examinations, where additional markers need to be analyzed. Moreover, we performed the MDS analysis and constructed a phylogenetic tree representing genetic relationships between several European populations based on Nei's DA distance. We show that the analysis of just 9 markers is sufficient for reliable clustering of different European populations and their separation from the populations from other geographical areas. Taken together, our data provide a reliable dataset characterizing the Slovak population, which might serve as a basis for criminal, population and kinship studies.

Who Is He Calling WEIRD?

Abstract In The WEIRDest People in the World, Henrich offers something of a big-think, global, social-science history that covers everything from psychology experiments to anthropological narrative, economic argumentation, and kinship studies, all grounded in a purported history of religious and family law. The book seeks to persuade that the West is cognitively different from the rest of the world and that its uniqueness explains every fundamental aspect of its modern trajectory—its wealth and education distributions, the progress and spread of its innovations, the presence or absence of trust outside its local communities, its formal institutions of democratic governance, and its beliefs about fairness and equality. Even more important for historically oriented readers, the book seeks to uncover how this major cognitive development emerged. The quantitative methods that the book employs to support its sweeping claims, however, are flawed, and its version of European church- and family-law history is inconsistent with the consensus view of specialist historians.

CROW-OMAHA KINSHIP: REVITALIZING A PROBLEM OR GENERATING A SOLUTION?

The article discusses the long-standing Crow-Omaha problem in kinship studies with a focus on the volume Crow-Omaha: New Light on a Classic Problem of Kinship Analysis (2012), edited by Thomas Trautmann and Peter Whiteley. While successful in restoring the importance of the Crow-Omaha problem to kinship studies and contributing to the revival of “traditional” kinship studies in anthropology, the book misses an opportunity to advance a solution to this problem. Drawing on a global database of kinship terminologies and the author’s own treatment of the Crow-Omaha problem in The Genius of Kinship: The Phenomenon of Human Kinship and the Global Diversity of Kinship Terminologies (2007), the article uses empirical material from multiple language families represented in the Trautmann & Whiteley volume to demonstrate the im-portance of alternate-generation equivalences, Bifurcate Collateral grouping and sibling termi-nologies in the evolution of “Crow-Omaha skewing.” Methodologically, it is recommended to shift kinship terminological analysis from using representative “case studies” to drawing on large-scale databases of global kinship-terminological variation, from discussing narrow “types” to discussing kinship terminologies as systems, from anthropology-only approaches to interdisciplinary studies marrying anthropology and linguistics, from semantics-only approaches to approaches combining semantics, etymology and speech pragmatics. &nbsp

REPLY

My reply continues the discussion of Crow-Omaha skewing, Alternate-Generation equations, Bifurcate-Collateral and Bifurcate Merging kinship terminological types in the contexts of the contributions by Trautmann & Whiteley, Read, Parkin, Lea and Ensor. Special attention is given to the logical pitfalls in the definition and usage of the notion of “crossness” and to the need to re-focus on a more accurate notion of “merging.” Empirical evidence for the transition from Alternate Generation equivalences to Crow-Omaha and from Bifurcate Collateral to Bifurcate Merging is revisited. Further information is provided regarding correlations between Alternate Generation equivalences and Crow-Omaha skewing, on the one hand, and patterns of sibling and cousin terminologies, on the other hand. Among the topics of general methodological and theoretical interest, my reply specifically addresses the scope of kinship studies and the methodology of integrating anthropology and linguistics in the study of kinship terminologies. Finally, the author presents an update on the “Out-of-America” theory of human kinship evolution in the light of recent advances in population genetics and ancient DNA analysis.

Incest, Classified

Abstract The prohibition on incest, a topic so key to kinship studies, has not featured prominently in literature on Tibet. This article draws attention to a previously unreported section of writing devoted to the topic of incest, composed by the Tibetan ‘prime minister’ Sangye Gyatso (Sangs rgyas rgya mtsho, 1653–1705), one of the principal architects of the Tibetan state. Sangye Gyatso sets out what purports to be a threefold classification of incest, traditional to Tibet, and considers how aspects of it are to be interpreted. The present article focuses on some of the significant issues raised by this piece. Among these are questions about the context and circumstances of its appearance, the status of incest as a category in historical Tibet, and the place of religious and state authority in the social domain.

Rebecca Louise Carter, Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City

American Religion 2, no. 2 (Spring 2021), pp. 136–138 Copyright © 2021, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.2.08 Book Review Rebecca Louise Carter, Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019) Ansley Quiros University of North Alabama, Florence, USA Prayers for the People took Rebecca Louise Carter over a decade to research and write, but it is certainly a book for our moment. As Americans confront the disaster of COVID-19 and the ongoing tragedy of racial injustice, Carter’s central question—what does it mean to grieve well?—is both historically and spiritually pressing. Conducting ethnographic research of religious communities in New Orleans, Carter seeks to examine how religious communities “worked against the violent ruptures of life in Black families and communities” and “asserted Black humanity , in this world and the next.” She examines the pervasive facts of environmental racism, poverty, and violence in post-Katrina New Orleans, focusing not solely on those oppressive systems and structures but also on the “systems and structures of Black humanity”—Black Humanity even in death (6). In doing so, Carter rightly asserts that struggles for systemic justice always require recognition of individual human dignity. To pursue justice in New Orleans, Carter argues through her examination of religious communities, demands love, care, and community. These are deeply personal as well as religious pursuits. The writing itself reflects the book’s argument, shifting from sociological, anthropological, and historical reviews into personal recollections and interviews throughout. Ansley Quiros 137 Carter’s analysis includes several different congregations and spiritual traditions in the Crescent City: white Catholics in Uptown, a Vodou sosyete in the Bywater, a small Episcopal congregation in Treme, and Liberty Street Baptist Church, a Black Baptist congregation led by Pastor Samuel and a group of Black women. Carter catalogues how these New Orleans congregations engage in various forms of grieving death and commemorating life. Father Richard places a rose for every victim of New Orleans’ violence on the steps of the Mayor’s office. Catholics engage in “Peace Prayer,” calling for God to bless “the Crescent City and crush the head of Satan” (73). Martine calls upon Ogou to correct imbalances in an elaborate ceremony. Black Baptists hold a Yes We Care! rally. Different congregations throughout the city do different things, but each, Carter maintains, employs a religious framework in mourning and agitating. In doing so, mourning and agitating become religious work. Prayers for the People, while including diverse congregations and religious traditions, focuses primarily on Liberty Street Baptist Church, centering the experiences, commitments and theological vision of Black women. Placing the church within the tradition of the Black Social Gospel and the theological civil rights struggle, Carter sees the current efforts of Liberty Street as an ongoing declaration of Black Somebodiness in a culture of dehumanizing racism. The church, under the (male) leadership of Pastor Samuel, emphasizes traditional values of nonviolence and biracial cooperation and benevolent relief. And yet, it is through the women of Liberty Street that Carter reveals the significance of the dead; they are Somebody too. Employing the interpretive frame of kinship studies, Carter claims “the labor they performed, therefore, was about repairing family, social, and spiritual bonds—a restorative kinship that affirmed value among the living, between the living and the dead, on earth, and in God’s eternal kingdom” (20). These women, the Black Mothers of Liberty Street, many of whom themselves had lost children, chart a spiritual and communal path necessary for healing. In sharing their stories and the stories of their communities, the Mothers carved out an autonomous space within the church and “developed a distinct knowledge—with God and Christ at the center—of social and spiritual relatedness, its severing, and its potential restoration” (167–168). Carter, through her presence at these meetings and subsequent interviews, tells these stories in moving and powerful ways. Hearing from Miss Vivian and Odette and Mrs. Adams, the interpretive frame takes on distinctive female voices to great effect. In sum, Carter not only centers the Black Mothers in the analysis, but she lets them speak for themselves. And they create not only a process...

Marriage quandaries in Central Asia

Abstract Many Central Asians speak of marriage as important and self-evident despite the fact that marriage in practice across the region presents a more complicated story. There is not only an extensive array of practices indicated by the single term marriage and a wide variety of things accomplishes by its conclusion and duration, but many non-marital sets of relations in Central Asia similarly realise what marriage does. This may lead one to question whether there is any sense in trying to pin marriage down at all. Yet, this tension — the flexibility of marriage in form and function, and its overlap with nonmarriage on the one hand, and its abiding importance and, at times, self-evidentiary nature, on the other — we suggest, lies at the heart of marriage-as-practice in Central Asia. Following recent turns in kinship studies, and long-standing feminist traditions, this paper envisages marriage as a relational practice of legitimization rather than pinning it down as a particular content. We argue that by focusing on the act of getting married in particular, its particular efficacy, as well as the disputes, questions, and conflicts that sometime arise as a result – in short, the quandaries of getting married – we get not only at this tensional nature of marriage, but at the everyday concerns and major societal issues wrapped up in marriage in Central Asia.

Kinship as fiction: exploring the dynamism of intimate relationships in South Asia

ABSTRACT This special issue brings together emerging studies on kinship in South Asia and explores the idea of kinship as ‘fiction’ through ethnographic analysis of intimate relationships. Anthropology had long considered kinship as ‘natural’ or ‘biological’, thereby rendering other relations as ‘real’ or ‘fictive’. However, the recent ever-expanding scope of the ‘new kinship studies’, through the mapping of socio-technological changes, including the development of new reproductive technologies, the expansion of a diverse marriage system, and the global reconfiguration of care work, has brought a new dynamism to the discipline. Drawing both on traditional South Asian kinship studies and on more recent theories in anthropology, care work, medicine and science and technology studies, Kinship as Fiction offers insights on how ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are related, translated, and regenerate each other by changing their meanings and forms. Fiction plays an important role in shaping reality, by making emerging worlds comprehensible, and helping us to imagine relations differently. This special issue investigates how particular ‘fictions’ are narrated and enacted within the constraints of reality, and how reality is, in turn, generated by fiction in the context of kin and other intimate relationships.

General Introduction

The journal, Kinship, is dedicated to the study of kinship in all of its facets, is international in scope and will publish original work in English, though publications in other languages, as is the case in this issue, will be considered on a case-by-case basis. In this issue of Kinship, there are two articles which reflect the nature of kinship research in both its more traditional format with focus on the social context of kinship relations and in a cross-disciplinary attempt to find a common ground between kinship as it is understood from a social and cultural perspective with kinship as it is understood from a biological perspective.

Normativity and Belonging: Reflections about Critical Adoption Studies

These informal reflections on the past, present, and possible futures of adoption and kinship studies explore connections and tensions among familial norms, disciplinary boundaries, and narratives of belonging.

Medicalized Masculinities: Tales of (In)Fertility, Sperm Donation, and Fatherhood

Employing an intersectional approach—drawing on cultural and new kinship studies, (medical) anthropology, gender and media studies—this article analyzes how the 2013 MTV series Generation Cryo as cultural text deals with medicalized masculinities and (in)fertilities. It asks in what ways masculinities and also fathers, fathering, and fatherhoods are (re)presented and negotiated in a story which has sperm donation by an anonymous donor and the donor siblings and/in their respective families at its center. In the show, essentially an (auto)biographical narrative, all families emphasize social parenthood over genetic inheritance, yet there are also deep-seated insecurities (re)triggered by the donor who is literally and metaphorically a present absence transforming into a potential family member, thus shaking family tectonics and challenging familial/familiar gender and family roles. Generation Cryo is a story about donor conceived children, but also about clinically infertile men and their social roles as fathers, their struggles to narrate and embody individual forms of masculinities in the face of cultural normative templates of hegemonic masculinities— complex practices constantly oscillating between genetic essentialism and social parenthood.

Kinship Practices Among Alternative Family Forms in Western Industrialized Societies.

This paper discusses how kinship is construed and enacted in diverse forms of the family that are now part of the culturally pluralistic family system of Western societies. The study is the second in a pair documenting changes over the past century in the meaning and practice of kinship in the family system of Western societies with industrialized economies. While the first paper reviewed the history of kinship studies, this companion piece shifts the focus to research explorations of kinship in alternative family forms, those that depart from the standard nuclear family structure. The review was conducted running multiple searches on Google Scholar and Web of Science directly targeting non-standard family forms, using search terms as "cohabitation and kinship," "same-sex family and kinship," and "Artificial Reproductive Technology and kinship," among others. About 70 percent of studies focused on the United States, while the remaining 30 percent focused on other industrialized Western societies. We identified three general processes by which alternative family forms are created and discussed how kinship practices work in each of them. The first cluster of alternative family forms comes about through variations of formal marriage or its absence, including sequential marriages, plural marriages, consensual unions, single parenthood, and same-sex marriages and partnerships. The second cluster is formed as a result of alterations in the reproduction process, when a child is not the product of sexual intercourse between two people. The third cluster results from the formation of voluntary bonds that are deemed to be kinship-like, in which affiliation rests on neither biological nor legal bases. Findings from this study point to a broad cultural acceptance of an inclusive approach to incorporating potential kin in "family relationships." It is largely left to individuals to decide whether they recognize or experience the diffuse sense of emotional connectedness and perceived obligation that characterizes the bond of kinship. Also, family scripts and kinship terms often borrow from the vocabulary and parenting practices observed in the standard family form in the West. Concurrently, the cultural importance of biology remains strong. The study concludes by identifying important gaps in the kinship literature and laying out a research agenda for the future, including building a demography of kinship.

Group structure and kinship in beluga whale societies

Evolutionary explanations for mammalian sociality typically center on inclusive-fitness benefits of associating and cooperating with close kin, or close maternal kin as in some whale societies, including killer and sperm whales. Their matrilineal structure has strongly influenced the thinking about social structure in less well-studied cetaceans, including beluga whales. In a cross-sectional study of group structure and kinship we found that belugas formed a limited number of distinct group types, consistently observed across populations and habitats. Certain behaviours were associated with group type, but group membership was often dynamic. MtDNA-microsatellite profiling combined with relatedness and network analysis revealed, contrary to predictions, that most social groupings were not predominantly organized around close maternal relatives. They comprised both kin and non-kin, many group members were paternal rather than maternal relatives, and unrelated adult males often traveled together. The evolutionary mechanisms that shape beluga societies are likely complex; fitness benefits may be achieved through reciprocity, mutualism and kin selection. At the largest scales these societies are communities comprising all ages and both sexes where multiple social learning pathways involving kin and non-kin can foster the emergence of cultures. We explore the implications of these findings for species management and the evolution of menopause.

Siblingship beyond siblings? Cousins and the shadows of social mobility in the central Philippines

AbstractThis article examines cousinship as a border zone that encompasses distance and intimacy, sameness and difference, and which mediates and is mediated by other kinship ties. It investigates how cousinship may bear traces of discord afflicting preceding generations; how it may further or augment them, or allow their repair; and how it is shaped by multiple and contending ideals. It does so in the context of social mobility in post‐1945 central Philippines. Integrating ‘old’ and ‘new’ kinship studies, it analyses cousinship beyond consanguineous marriages; revisits the paradigm of siblingship that has dominated the anthropology of kinship in Southeast Asia; and attends to how inequalities and enmities arise, and are absorbed, within kinship.

Kinship and a counter‐hegemonic social order: former revolutionaries in southern Oman

AbstractCritical reinterpretations of kinship studies questioned earlier ideas that kinship relations reflect and reproduce a dominant social order. ‘New’ kinship studies have nevertheless shown how even non‐traditional family forms can reproduce traditional ideas about relatedness, values, and social hierarchies. Promising grounds for resisting ongoing tendencies to link kinship with conservative social reproduction arise from better understanding the circumstances under which kinship relations reproduce a counter‐hegemonic social order. Kinship practices of former militants of a defeated revolutionary liberation movement in Dhufar, Oman, make visible veterans’ networks and relations which transgress dominant tribal, ethnic, racial, and gendered hierarchies. These practices show how, even in inauspicious circumstances of political defeat and marginalization, kinship relations can reproduce a counter‐hegemonic social order – as well as a social afterlife of defeated revolution.

In memoriam: Napoleon A. Chagnon

Anthropologist Napoleon A. Chagnon was a central figure in the development and foundation of evolutionary approaches to human behavior. We highlight his ethnographic fieldwork, contributions to studies of kinship and marriage, and his foundational role in the development of evolutionary approaches to human behavior. As a holistic anthropologist Chagnon led anthropology toward the integration of cultural and evolutionary theory. Finally, his leadership was central in the foundation of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. Ricardo, a Brazilian Protestant missionary who was assisting the scientific team and who has worked with the Yanomami for over 25 years … told me to run and get my camera. “There's going to be a fight,” he said. Then he turned to leave. “Aren't you going to stay?” I asked. “Nah, happens all the time. You stay, you're an anthropologist, should be interesting. Call me if anyone gets hurt.”

Omissions and Silences in My Navajo Fieldwork: From Kinship Studies to Gendered Life Histories

Using long-term research in a Navajo community as an example, this paper examines how the social construction of anthropological research (including theoretical frameworks and writing strategies) s...

Greek History

Pride of place in this review goes undoubtedly to Sally Humphreys’ monumental study of kinship in ancient Athens. A work in progress for four decades, it is finally published in two volumes of almost 1,500 pages. The book's coverage is vast: the first volume focuses on interactions among kinsfolk (legal, social, economic, and ritual), while the second volume explores the various Athenian corporate groups which employed kinship as their organizing principle (phratries, gene, tribes, and trittyes) and provides an exhaustive discussion of kinship networks attested across all Athenian demes. As a result of its size and encyclopaedic coverage, I suspect that most readers will approach this work in a piecemeal fashion, looking for a particular phenomenon or searching for a particular kinship network; the lack of a detailed introduction or conclusions – features that would have been essential in a work of this size and ambition – does not help in this respect. But this work needs to be assessed as a whole, for three main reasons. The first is that households were the main organizing units of Athenian society, while most Athenian groups were organized on a kinship principle. Their roles were crucial, and they need to complement the social models of Athenian society we employ, alongside class and status. The second reason is that Humphreys makes a very good job of exploring the various contradictory tendencies at work in how Athenian kinship operated: the interests of male heads; of wives, children, and relatives; of wider kinship networks; and of the political community. The third is the combination of literary, epigraphic, and material evidence of Athenian kinship, which reveals in often impressive ways the contradictions and gaps of our various sources: not only will this work be essential reading for those working on Athenian oratory, archaeology, or economy, but its accumulated detail offers the basis for writing a novel history of Athenian society. Of course, a work gestated for forty years will also show the unavoidable flaws of its piecemeal construction; but these are largely of secondary importance, compared to the value of the end product.

Trends in Contemporary Queer Kinship and Family Research

There have been great advances in socio-legal queer rights in recent years and many of these have clustered around partnership and parenthood. Whilst these rights are seemingly progressive and welcome, they have not come without a cost. Cultural studies and queer theorising have critically engaged with, and effectively critiqued, these advances. However, in many ways empirical research on “same-sex parenthood” has largely glossed over the problematic of contemporary equality rights and focussed instead on the opportunities presented. Research in this vein typically instantiates heteronormative gender and sexuality through insufficient attention to everyday experiences and the ways in which these queer kinship. Geopolitical and socio-cultural contexts are used as scene-setting rather than being operationalised to prise apart the intersections of public/private intimacies. A genealogy imperative is defining families, with queer practices of conception invoked to separate one family from the next. We may now be better able to understand how we relate to and engage with others and the social world around us, but homogeneity simultaneously occludes the specificity of experience. The clustering of sample-defined groups erases within group differences and obscures the structuring factors that underpin academic scholarship. In this piece, therefore, we ask: In these precarious and paradoxically permissive times, whose lives matter in same-sex parenthood research? To what extent have familial discourses shut down sex and sexuality debates in studies of queer kinship? What exactly, if anything, makes same-sex families queer?

Through the Stomach to the Heart

The concept of families of choice was introduced almost three decades ago by Kath Weston (1997). She used it to describe the situation of the LGBTQ community in the era of the HIV/AIDS crisis, when the relations with families of origin had been heavily tested and proved to fail, whereas relations with friends were the primary source of care and support for the sick and dying, as well as their partners. Since then, contemporary non-heterosexual families are understood as their queer descendants and often the term “families of choice” is used synonymously. However, whereas much had been written about the ideologies of queer kinship, the sphere of the daily, ordinary, and often imperceptible practices of kinning, when nothing exceptional is happening (like a disease or family crisis) has still not been sufficiently examined. Therefore, it could be argued that the debate on queer kinship is rather conceptual and abstract with its focus on normativity/antinormativity (Wiegman and Wilson 2015), whereas the sphere of ordinariness and everydayness, where most of the queer kinning actually happens, is being neglected and marginalised in the discussion on queer kinship. In the paper, we explore this unmapped territory of queer kinship studies and specifically take a closer look at the material and everyday dimensions of kinship. To do so, we use the data gathered within the ethnographic research done within the Families of Choice in Poland-study (2013–2016, PI: Joanna Mizielińska). In this project, during thirty days of observation and several thematic interviews, done with twenty-one families, we were able to capture an in-depth picture of how the kinning practices are performed in daily life. In the paper we explore practices of silent intimacy (Jamieson 1998), focusing on food sharing practices among partners, but also between them and their families of origin that not always fully accept and support their relationship. In critical dialogue with Anglo- American scholarship on queer kinship, which built on and extends Weston’s classic work, we want to demonstrate that changing focus from its antinormative centrality towards embracing the ordinariness (Martin 1997) and everydayness of queer kinning, might not only contribute to developing the field, but also help us to understand the complexity of relational lives.