Ritual and Fictive Kinship

I hypothesize that the terminological space provides a framework for defining the world of kin without presupposing that the kinship world is genealogical. Cultural rules of instantiation give kin terms genealogical reference and thereby the problem of presuming parenthood defined via reproduction as a universal basis for kinship is circumvented. The terminological space is constrained by general, structural properties that make it a “kinship space” and structural equations that give it its particular form. A mapping from the terminological space to the genealogical grid can be constructed under a straightforward mapping of the generating symbols of the terminological structure onto the primary kin types. This implies that it will always be possible to provide a genealogical “meaning” of the kin terms. Whether the genealogical “meaning” so constructed has cultural salience is at the heart of Schneider’s critique of kinship based on a presumed universal genealogical grid.

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2018

Kinship is a universal of human societies, built around systems of self-centric, reciprocal social relations. In all societies, societal members are conceptually organized, to one degree or another, through structured, reciprocal systems of relations. Kinship systems are broad in their scope and interdigitate with religious, economic, political and other social systems. The kinship relations that are part of a kinship system include, in their cultural meaning, the rights and obligations of kin, including expected (through not always realized) mutually supportive behavior by kin. The system of kin-term relations provides a kinship framework within which individuals formulate how they interact with their kin and a basis for interpreting the meaning and implications of the behavior of their kin to them. The kinship framework may also involve a culturally formulated ideology regarding the role and nature of the respective contribution of male and of a female to the formation of an offspring and to its emotional and mental make-up. Despite a biological mode of reproduction being a constant for all humans, local ideologies and accounts of reproduction vary extensively across human societies; hence these idea systems cannot simply be reduced to epiphenomena of biological reproduction. A group’s ideas about procreation, along with its ideas about kinship relations in general, provide for the social identity of a newborn offspring through the family social unit (ranging in form from single parent to extended family) into which it is born and to its position in an already existing network of kinship relations into which it is entering through kinship relations recognized at birth. Kinship relations also provide an idiom through which forms of social organization are expressed in human societies—especially in pre-state societies—whether the society is a small, hunter​-gatherer group or a large, modern industrial state.

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2nd edition), 2015

Kinship terminologies consist of the terms used to reference culturally recognized kinship relations between persons. These terms have been assumed to identify categories of genealogical relations (despite ethnographic evidence to the contrary), and kinship terminologies are classified using differences in genealogical referents of kin terms. Recent analysis, however, by building on ethnographically validated procedures for computing kin relations from kin terms without reference to genealogy makes evident the underlying generative logic for the structure of kinship terminologies. Making the generative logic of terminologies explicit provides a more rigorous comparative basis for the study of kinship terminology systems.

Kinship, one of the universals of human socie-ties, involves systems of reciprocal social relations. All societies conceptually organize societal members, to one degree or another, through structured, reciprocal systems of relations. The relations making up a kinship system are broad in their scope and interdigitate with religious, economic, political and other social systems. Kinship relations incorporate, as part of their cultural meaning, rights and obligations of kin, including expected (through not always realized) mutually supportive behavior by kin. The system of kinship relations serves as a conceptual framework within which individuals formulate their behavior towards their kin and it provides a basis for interpreting the meaning and implications of the behavior of their kin to them.

CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research - Zenodo, 2021

Kinship is the essential premise of organizing individuals into social groups, roles, and categories. It serves as the premier universal and fundamental aspect of all human relationships and relies on blood and marriage ties. Hence, Kinship is vital to an individual and a community's well-being because different societies connote Kinship differently. They also set the rules governing Kinship, which are sometimes legally defined and sometimes implied. This paper focuses on the cultural approach to the study of Kinship. Somebody can explore the cultural approach to kinship study through David M. Schneider's powerful framework, American Kinship: A Cultural Account, published in 1968. It was a part of the more extensive debate on the nature of Kinship. It bore on the anthropological definition of Kinship, and it explains whether or not it was necessary to refer to Kinship's biological dimension. Schneider examined Kinship as a cultural system that is based on shared symbols and meanings. This type of analysis became known as the culturalist approach. He offered a two-part answer to the question of how North American culture defined a relative. The study is based on approximately 100 interviews. Two symbolic kinship orders included nature and the law. In terms of character, relatives shared natural, biogenetic substances as symbolized by the indigenous word 'blood.' In terms of regulation, relatives were persons who followed a particular code of conduct. North American Kinship involved an opposition between two sets of symbols; first being the kinship 'by blood,' which was material, permanent and inalienable, and the second one is the kinship 'by marriage,' based on a human imposed order and referring to morals, law, and custom.

Introduction to the Science of Kinship, 2021

Kinship is a human universal. Every known human society has a system of relationships that anthropologists recognize as the counterparts of their own ideas of parents and their children. Through them, each person becomes part of a wider network of kinship relations that provides the main part of their initial protection, food, shelter, and introduction to human culture and social organization. We now know what terminologies are and why the efforts to analyze them have been so confused. There are distinct sets of terms, as anthropologists recognized, but that is not what is most important. What is most important are the ideas that make up the definitions of the terms. These are systematically interrelated and have a definite logical structure. We represent this by what we call a kinship map. Our method for eliciting it is an adaptation of frame analysis that has long been used in linguistics and other fields. This is an experimental method, in exactly the same sense the methods of biology or chemistry are experimental. Second, we have a method for analyzing this logical structure, showing precisely what it is for any kinship map, and to a large extent also why it is this and not something else. We represent this logical structure by the kin term map, in contrast to the kinship map. The method for eliciting the kinship map was developed by Murray Leaf. The method for exposing and analyzing the kin term map was developed by Dwight Read.

2014

This article is part of a longer study in progress on the relationship of language use and society with regards to kinship terminology. The article first gives some frame to the study by briefly introducing the concept of kinship, next different descent patterns in societies to be followed by categorization patterns of kinship terminology (Morgan) in Hungarian and Japanese. It is assumed that kin terms are valuable clues to the nature of a kinship system in a society as well as to the social statuses and roles of kinsmen, of the roles of men and women. Changes in kinship terminology also reflect to a certain extent changes of a given society. What is kinship? Kinship refers to the culturally defined relationships between individuals who are commonly thought of as having family ties. All societies use kinship as a basis for forming social groups and for classifying people. However, there is a great amount of variability in kinship rules and patterns around the world. In order to understand social interaction, attitudes, and motivations in most societies, it is essential to know how their kinship systems function. In many societies, kinship is the most important social organizing principle along with gender and age. Kinship also provides a means for transmitting status and property from generation to generation. It is not a mere coincidence that inheritance rights usually are based on the closeness of kinship links. Kinship connections are based on two categories of bonds: those created by marriage (affinal relatives: husband, wife, mother-in-law, father-in-law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law) and those that result from descent (consanguinal that is 'blood' relatives: mother, father, grandparents, children, grandchildren, uncles, aunts and cousins), which is a socially recognized link between ancestors and descendants. A third category of bond, referred to as fictive kinship, is used to create links to people who otherwise would not be kinsmen. Godparenthood is an example of fictive relationships in European cultures. This kind of bondness has been particularly important for instance in Hungarian culturewhere in village-communities this kind of relatedness meant a base for community cooperation, solidarity and mutual help. People often use different kin terms when addressing someone directly in contrast to when they are referring to them in a conversation with someone else. In Japanese culture for instance this distinction is clearly recognized by making a sharp difference between terms of address and terms of reference (okaasan versus haha, or otousan versus chichi).