Kinship Networks Research Articles

Keterlekatan (Embeddedness) Tindakan Ekonomi Antara Tukang Kredit Dengan Client Dalam Peminjaman Uang (Studi pada Masyarakat di Jorong Sungai Tarab, Kecamatan Sungai Tarab, Kabupaten Tanah Datar)

This study aims to explain the form of embeddedness of economic action between “Tukang Kredit” and clients in lending money to the community in Jorong Sungai Tarab, Kec. Sungai Tarab, Kab Tanah Datar. The approach used is a qualitative approach with a descriptive type. The theory used is Granovetter's theory, namely the concept of embeddedness. The technique of withdrawing informants using purposive sampling technique with the number of informants 14 people. Data collection methods with observation, interviews, and document studies. The unit of analysis is individual. Data analysis used was developed by Miles and Huberman, namely data collection, data reduction, data presentation and conclusion drawing. Based on the results of the study, the embeddedness of economic action between loan sharks and clients in lending money is due to social relationships and social interactions based on personal relationships that last a long time from time to time so that from these economic actions there are the same values, such as exchange and reciprocity, trust, kinship, and social networks so that it can be said to be embeddedness in a relational form, this habit occurs when the perpetrator sees an opportunity to carry out economic action in Jorong Sungai Tarab, Kec. Sungai Tarab.

‘You Know What the Truth Is? There are No Touareg Evacuées Here’: On Crisis and Categories of Migration

This paper analyses the practices of (im)mobilities and the accompanying emotions to question the exceptionalisation of crisis and migratory categorisations. Focusing on Kel Tamasheq (aka Tuareg) mobile livelihoods and their fluid interconnections with kinship networks and emotions across time, it argues that the multidimensionality of causes behind a migratory project, and the importance of historically contextualising the relation between a crisis, here the ‘Malian crisis’, and regional patterns of (im)mobilities, reveal the arbitrariness of making crisis exceptional and migratory categories uniquely discreet. This paper is based on a 10-month ethnography among Kel Tamasheq in Bamako.

Indigenous Spirituality, Health, and Well-Being in the Young: Yarns With the Victorian Aboriginal Community.

The extant literature has scant detail about everyday spiritual practices that aid Indigenous young people. This paper systematically explores Indigenous Spirituality, health, and well-being through Elder-governed yarns conducted via Zoom with 44 Aboriginal Elders, Healers, and Senior and Junior people involved in health and well-being of the Victorian Aboriginal community. These yarns were analyzed through an innovative, constructivist, multi-perspectival discursive grounded theory method. Key findings are that Spirituality is crucial for health and well-being, leading to a clear mind and at-peace "center" in a person. Aboriginal spiritual practices reflect the unique characteristics and essential rhythms of Country. Spiritual development is incremental and increases the obligations and responsibilities a person has to community and Country and leads to increased caring for Country. This paper provides rich detail about practical spiritual techniques to aid Indigenous young people and their kinship networks. It has the potential to shape future policy.

Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis reveals ancestry and genetic diversity of cultivated and wild grapevines in Croatia

BackgroundCroatia is a geographically small country with a remarkable diversity of cultivated and spontaneous grapevines. Local germplasm has been characterised by microsatellite markers, but a detailed analysis based on single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) is still lacking. Here we characterize the genetic diversity of 149 accessions from three germplasm repositories and four natural sites using 516,101 SNPs to identify complete parent-offspring trios and their relations with spontaneous populations, offering a proof-of-concept for the use of reduced-representation genome sequencing in population genetics and genome-wide association studies (GWAS).ResultsPrincipal component analysis revealed a clear discontinuity between cultivated (V. vinifera subsp. sativa) and spontaneous grapevines, supporting the notion that the latter represent local populations of the wild progenitor (V. vinifera subsp. sylvestris). ADMIXTURE identified three ancestry components. Two sativa components are alternatively predominant in cultivars grown either in northern Adriatic Croatia and Continental Croatia or in Dalmatia (i.e. central and southern Adriatic Croatia). A sylvestris component, which is predominant in accessions from spontaneous populations, is a minor ancestry component in cultivated accessions. TREEMIX provided evidence of unidirectional migration from the vineyards to natural sites, suggesting that gene flow has gone preferentially from the introduced domesticated germplasm into local wild populations rather than vice versa. Identity-by-descent analysis indicated an extensive kinship network, including 14 complete parent-offspring trios, involving only cultivated accessions, six full-sibling relationships and invalidated a presumed pedigree of one of the most important varieties in Croatia, ‘Plavac Mali’. Despite this strong population structure, significant association was found between 143 SNPs and berry skin colour and between 2 SNPs and leaf hairiness, across two previously known genomic regions.ConclusionsThe clear genetic separation between Croatian cultivars and sylvestris ruled out the hypothesis that those cultivars originated from local domestication events. On the other hand, the evidence of a crop-to-wild gene flow signals the need for an urgent adoption of conservation strategies that preserve the residual genetic integrity of wild relatives. The use of this reduced-representation genome sequencing protocol in grapevine enables an accurate pedigree reconstruction and can be recommended for GWAS experiments.

“Someone Who Is Going to Preserve Your Surname and Clan Name”: A Sesotho Cultural Perspective on Male Partner Involvement in Maternal and Newborn Care in the Free State, South Africa

In the global public health discourse, involving men in maternal and neonatal health is regarded as crucial for positive outcomes in both health and development. In South Africa, health interventions designed to promote male partner involvement among low-income indigenous populations have been framed within social constructivist notions of masculinities and have produced mixed outcomes. This has necessitated calls to explore alternative approaches, including the need to decolonise men and masculinities studies in Africa. As part of one phase of formative research for a mixed-method project aimed at adapting a male involvement intervention for the context of Sesotho-speaking men and women in the Free State, we applied a multi-site case study research design and collected qualitative data using focus group discussions and key informant interviews. Verbatim-recorded transcripts were translated, transcribed, and thematically analysed with NVIVO 14. The results indicate that customary practices in pregnancy, delivery, and newborn care are not static and vary between families based on belief systems, socioeconomic status, geographical setting (peri-urban/rural), and kinship networks of care. Therefore, these practices and beliefs should be understood, affirmed, and contested within the complex African-centred material and immaterial worldviews on personhood in which they were generated, transmitted, rejected, or adopted. It is recommended that a decolonised approach to male partner involvement in this context must be cognisant of the intersections of racial and gendered power relations, contestations in beliefs and practices, the resilient effect of colonialism on indigenous gender systems, as well as contemporary global entanglements that inform North–South power relations on the best practices in maternal and newborn health in the public health sector in South Africa.

Entrepreneurship and Kinship: An Integrative Review of a Nascent Domain

Contrary to the widely accepted adage ‘do not engage in business activities with relatives’, individuals from Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani backgrounds are achieving significant progress, while individual groups experience stagnation. While prior research offers substantial insights into the relationship between kinship and entrepreneurial ventures, there exists a paucity of information regarding the mechanisms through which certain kin individuals attain success while others do not. The principal inquiries revolve around the question, ‘In what ways do kinship networks contribute to entrepreneurial success?’ Furthermore, within a multicultural and heterogeneous framework, how might kinship networks serve as essential resources that promote entrepreneurial development, or do they instead pose additional challenges to such advancement? To address these inquiries, this study conducts an integrative review of entrepreneurship through the conceptual framework of kinship (kin-entrepreneurship), a notion distinctly from emerging disciplines. The contextual backdrop of this study is firmly anchored in the rising incidence of business failures and their resultant ramifications for sustainable economic development on a global scale. By employing an integrative review methodology that encompasses both bibliometric and content analyses of extant literature, adhering to the PRISMA guidelines, this research elucidates the fundamental components relevant to kin-entrepreneurship. In tackling this issue, the present investigation explores the trends, trajectories, and potential futures concerning the nexus of kinship and entrepreneurship. A bibliometric analysis was conducted on a dataset comprising 292 scholarly articles focused on kin-entrepreneurship, published between 1980 and 2023, sourced from the Scopus and Web of Science databases. Significant findings highlight “kinship-based business influencers” and “entrepreneurial environment and consequences”, as crucial themes. Subsequent to the discovery of the themes, this paper advocates for a paradigm shift from a narrow familial perspective on business to a more expansive kinship viewpoint, which can enhance comprehension of the complex dynamics within business environments where kinship-based business influencers are multifaceted, affecting economic performance (where entrepreneurs capitalize on these affiliations for economic advantage), decision-making (which improves business sustainability through resource allocation among kin), and employee relations (as kin connections foster both formal and informal employment opportunities) for entrepreneurs. Consequently, this study posits that kinship-oriented business dynamics play a crucial role in influencing entrepreneurial decision-making by offering social capital, resources, and strategic guidance, which are essential for mitigating existing entrepreneurial attrition rates and, in turn, are fundamental for fostering economic development.

The Social Contagion of Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies through Evolutionary Game in Networks

Emerging technologies are leading the fourth industrial revolution, bringing profound changes to modern life. However, the contagion of public risk perceptions pertaining to these technologies may result in new social stability risks according to the social amplification of risk framework (SARF). As such, understanding the formation and contagion mechanisms behind public risk perceptions of emerging technologies is critical to promoting their increased receptivity. Based on an evolutionary game theoretical approach to complex networks, this paper constructs a social contagion model of the risk perception of emerging technologies and uses simulations to analyze the influence of factors such as individual cognition and social environment. Results indicate the following: (1) the rate of risk perception contagion gradually increases with the level of individual risk perception and trust in communicators; (2) the risk perception contagion rate gradually decreases as the level of risk governance participation increases; and (3) comparing different social networks, kinship networks have a greater effect than social media networks on risk perception contagion.

Kinship networks and financial inclusion nexus: the mediating effect of extended social cohesion among poor microentrepreneurs post COVID-19

Financial inclusion has been a major tool for poverty alleviation in Africa and, as such, it has become a topic of great interest among scholars working on the difficulties of African microentrepreneurs to access financial resources. Thus, this research examines whether extended social cohesion mediates the relationship between kinship networks and financial inclusion of poor microentrepreneurs post COVID-19 in the unbanked rural sub-Saharan Africa. Analyzing data from a sample of 304 microentrepreneurs of Uganda, we find that extended social cohesion resulting from social capital significantly affect the relationship between kinship networks and financial inclusion as it acts as substitute for the lack of physical collateral. The theoretical contribution of this research is that, it introduces the social cohesion theory, a theory developed in sociology, in the literature of microcredit finance and shows that social cohesion can serve as collateral, of which the absence has often prevented microentrepreneurs from having access to microcredit.

Betrayed, Beaten, Banished: The Stigma of Being a Rural Tongqi in China.

In China, an emerging social issue involves a subset of rural women who, because of family and culture, become inadvertently matched up with and married to closeted men who have sex with men (MSM). These women-referred to as Tongqi-often discover they are in a loveless marriage, but any effort to change their situation results in intense backlash, discrimination, and stigma from families, village communities, and even government and healthcare institutions. This study explores the experiences of Tongqi, examining the influence of social interaction, community relationships, and macrostructural factors that coalesce to create an environment of chronic enacted stigma. In-depth interviews were conducted with 59 rural Tongqi, 11 of whom contracted human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) from their spouses. The findings reveal the significant role of extended kinship networks and macrostructural elements, such as hukou (household registration) and government officers, as well as village-level lineage structures. Informant data highlights how lineage relationships, interwoven with gender practices, contribute to the enacted stigma impacting the physical and psychological health of Tongqi. Tongqi report psychological effects such as an array of symptoms reflecting post-traumatic stress, chronic depression, and attempted suicide. Tongqi also report adverse physical health concerns involving reproductive health, unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and pregnancy complications. These findings helped produce possible policy recommendations to address the most pressing issues faced by Tongqi.

Refuge in the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean: Spaces of containment or places of choice?

Abstract After the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the European Union became fixated on keeping refugees from the Middle East out of Europe. By 2015, with the mass influx of Syrians, Iraqis, and others, seeking safety across the Balkans, the European response was an extraordinary effort to push back and contain these displaced people within the Eastern Mediterranean region through physical barriers, bilateral agreements, and the establishment of refugee camps. This paper suggests that Europe’s efforts to keep displaced Syrians and Iraqis out of Europe were misguided. That is, contrary to what much of the European main media reported at the time, relatively few of those displaced Syrians and Iraqis had a strong desire to seek asylum in Europe. Rather, depending upon socio-economic and kinship networks, and historical ties developed over 500 years of Ottoman suzerainty, they preferred to remain in the region following long-established transnational socio-economic networks and kinship ties.

Antagonism and Shared Survival of Fish and Fishermen in the Lofoten Islands

Abstract This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork and collected oral histories in 2019 in the Lofoten islands, as well as on archival research. I investigate the complex creation of kinship networks between humans and skrei in the Lofoten islands. I argue that the constant struggle to survive for both fish and fishermen embedded in larger capitalist ecologies of exploitation creates a symbolic shared substance between fish and fishermen, which, despite the often-unequal antagonistic nature of their relationships, allows us to rethink of definitions of kinship between humans and nonhuman others.

The end of Mexico–US migration as we knew it – or back to the future?

Over the last decade, scholars have declared the collapse of the Mexico–US system of undocumented migration. The H2 visa programme, a regime of managed sojourning is replacing the system of unauthorized cross-border mobility. In fiscal year 2023, the US government issued nearly 370,000 H2 temporary work visas to Mexicans. This temporary migrant labour programme is also bringing back circulation, temporary legal stays, and mostly male cross-border mobility – features that are akin to the old Bracero Program (1942–64). We contend that the restoration of these legal and sociodemographic dynamics undermines critical pillars of the system of undocumented labour mobility, limiting and reorienting the role of social networks, and potentially ending the way Mexico–United States has functioned for the past half century. We use ethnographic, interview and survey data to analyse the expansion of this new regime of highly mediated cross-border mobility, the ascent of the brokerage apparatus, and its effect transforming the social infrastructure of migration. We ask, specifically, how does the H2 temporary migrant labour programme constrain and diminish kin and hometown-based social networks, previously seen as ‘the engine of migration’? How does the shift from migrant networks to a brokerage apparatus impact trust, reciprocity and the development of migratory social capital? How is the new regime changing the experience of migration – substituting risk and adventure for certainty and routinized movement? How does the H2 temporary migrant labour programme revert the locus of social reproduction of the labour force back to sending communities, preempting integration at the destination? We frame the answers to these questions in the emerging migration industry and infrastructures paradigm, which examines to the role of migrant and non-migrant actors in the facilitation, control and overall mediation and structuring of cross-border mobility.

Black Families’ Social and Cultural Capital During COVID: Families Talk About Coping and Supports

We used NVivo for inductive semantic coding of 619 Black caregivers’ qualitative responses from the RAPID Survey regarding about they were coping with the challenges of COVID-19. Kinship networks and religion/spirituality were the two most frequently mentioned coping strategies followed by government financial support (e.g. stimulus money, food stamps), workplace flexibility (e.g. working from home or taking time off), engaging in COVID-related health behaviors (e.g. social distancing), and maintaining an optimistic outlook despite the challenges.

Vaccination homophily in ego contact networks during the COVID-19 pandemic

Vaccine hesitancy is an inevitable risk for societies as it contributes to outbreaks of diseases. Prior research suggests that vaccination decisions of individuals tend to spread within social networks, resulting in a tendency to vaccination homophily. The clustering of individuals resistant to vaccination can substantially make the threshold necessary to achieve herd immunity harder to reach. In this study, we examined the extent of vaccination homophily among social contacts and its association with vaccine uptake during the COVID-19 pandemic in Hungary using a contact diary approach in two cross-sectional surveys. The results indicate strong clustering among both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. The most powerful predictor of vaccine uptake was the perceived vaccination rate within the egos’ social contact network. Vaccination homophily and the role of the interpersonal contact network in vaccine uptake were particularly pronounced in the networks of close relationships, including family, kinship, and strong social ties of the ego. Our findings have important implications for understanding COVID-19 spread dynamics by showing that the strong clustering of unvaccinated individuals posed a great risk in preventing the spread of the disease.

Infants and toddlers in the United States with more close relationships have larger vocabularies.

Young children learn language from their caregivers, family members, and friends. However, with few exceptions, contemporary developmental scientists have studied language input and language learning through the lens of the primary caregiver and the nuclear family, rather than the infants' broader communities. In many communities-and increasingly in the United States-nonnuclear family structures are common, and extended kin, fictive kin, and intergenerational relationships are relied upon for child care. Understanding children's relationships within kinship networks can allow for more inclusive depictions of children's social interactions and their language experiences. We drew upon methods used by researchers studying social networks to assess U.S. infants' and toddlers' network composition. Results showed that young children with a greater number of close relationships (but not those with larger networks overall) had larger vocabularies, after controlling for age and socioeconomic status. These findings suggest that distributed models of child-rearing are an influential factor in early language growth and call for increased attention to social networks for understanding children's developmental trajectories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The big heroine genre: motherhood and the maternal body in postsocialist Chinese television

This article explores the feminist social critique in the ‘big heroine’ drama, a newly emerged genre of television that focuses on empowering yet dramatic stories of urban women in contemporary...

Communist General Mircho Spasov and the Rise of Lawlessness. Psychoanalysis, Language and History

Using the linguistic turn in psychoanalysis (J. Lakan, J. Kristeva), the author analyzed the unpublished autobiographical memories of State Security General Mircho Spasov, a mass murderer responsible for the eitsblishing of communist concentration camps. His memories are compared with his personnel file in the State Security. The lack of a father, the suicidal mother who abandoned him, the alienation from kinship, religious and institutional symbolic networks lead to a rethinking of the punishing in a rewarding social situation with the help of communist anti-language, conspiratorial publicity and the grandiose utopia for an all-powerful, self-sufficient, phallic "Mother Communist Party". Sado-masochic pre-Oedipal regression is associated with early narcissistic trauma and the problem of the Other – eroticizing the power over Others and the power of the Others. The analysis is supported by the similar biographical profiles of the Head of State Todor Zhivkov, a friend of Mircho Spasov, and his col-league from the State Security – the terrorist Mitka Grubcheva.

Brown Gathering

Abstract Through a sustained engagement with The Precarious Life of the Parol, an installation art exhibition by the Filipinx artist Diane Williams, this essay theorizes “brown gathering”: a quotidian practice of archiving that mobilizes the kinship networks of minoritarian subjects as an affective and circulatory infrastructure of collecting, preserving, and (re)signifying the objects of brown life. Brown gathering simultaneously attests to the intimacies of state violence and the practices of minoritarian subjects. In Parol, named after a Filipinx Christmas ornament of Spanish and native origin, Williams turns toward this curatorial practice of making art with trash objects as a way to reckon with the archival absences of Philippine history. This investigation of Williams’s pieces, all made from trash objects that her family donated to her, concerns three categories: skeletal frames (wood and wire), used to explore archives of excess and mess; plastics, used to speak about the temporality of diaspora; and discarded food containers (SPAM cans and sauce mixes), used to theorize the politics of the brown body. These objects, like the brown subjects that signify them, are testaments to the ongoing plunder of empire and to what empire jettisons around the world.

When women left their patrie: transborder mobility, women’s sexual agency, and moral panic in Turkey

ABSTRACT The labor exchange agreements signed between Turkey and several European countries in the 1960s resulted in a large population move to Europe. While the majority of workers were men, the share of women had increased over the years. Initially overlooked, women’s transborder mobility came under public scrutiny from the mid-1960s onwards. Migration scholarship has demonstrated that sending states may impose restrictive policies on women’s transborder mobility to regulate their sexuality. However, this research often relies on a binary model (travel bans/no bans) where attention is paid mostly to cases in the former group. Under the rubric of moral panic, this paper offers an analytical framework to explore how control over women’s sexuality can be maintained in contexts where no travel bans are adopted. Drawing on archival research, this study reveals that women’s mobility triggered a moral panic in Turkey, prompting various political demands for prohibitive policies, which were met with state reluctance. Still, the disciplinary control over women’s sexuality was maintained through a transnational network of ethno-national kin, spontaneous and independent of any state authority. While it was not designed to fill any power vacuum, the network effectively exercised disciplinary control over numerous Turkish women, employing discursive and punitive practices.

Comparative study of kinship network community detection approaches

This study employs five community detection methods on a rooted tree network with 600 nodes and 599 edges based on the Galo tribe’s kin naming system in Arunachal Pradesh, India. The network was originally assumed to be made up of three communities, which the algorithms were able to further divide into smaller groupings. The Louvain approach produced the most balanced distribution of community sizes, with skewness and kurtosis values close to zero, implying that the detected communities were reasonably evenly distributed in size and without major outliers. However, the Louvain algorithm found 25 communities, which is more than the network’s previously reported three communities. Further investigation may be required to integrate some of these communities in order to obtain the original known communities. Overall, this study highlights the importance of selecting an appropriate community detection algorithm for a given network and research question.