Kinship can also refer to a principle by which individuals or groups of individuals are organized into social groups, roles, categories, and genealogy using kinship terminologies. Family relationships can be represented concretely (mother, brother, grandfather) or abstractly by degrees of kinship (distance of kinship). A relationship may be relative (e.g., a father versus a child) or reflect an absolute (e.g., the difference between a childless mother and woman). The degree of kinship is not the same as that of legal inheritance or succession. Many ethical codes regard kinship as obligations between relatives that are stronger than those between strangers, as in Confucian filial piety. Schneider`s critique is widely recognized,[44][45][46] and marks a turning point in the anthropological study of social relations and interactions. Some anthropologists have advanced kinship studies by distinguishing between biological and social aspects, which was triggered by Schneider`s question; The symbols used here to express kinship are more commonly used in algebraic logic to develop a calculus of relationships with sets other than humans. Claude Lévi-Strauss argues in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) that the incest taboo requires the exchange of women between kinship groups. Lévi-Strauss thus shifted the focus from ancestral groups to stable structures or relationships between groups that created preferred and prescriptive marriage rules. [33] Marriage is a socially or ritually recognized legal union or contract between spouses that establishes rights and obligations between them, between them and their children, and between them and their parents-in-law. [20] The definition of marriage varies by culture, but it is primarily an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are recognized.
In a broader sense, marriage is seen as a cultural universality. A broad definition of marriage includes those who are monogamous, polygamous, same-sex and temporary. While normal kinship terms, discussed above, refer to a relationship between two entities (e.g., the word “sister” refers to the relationship between the speaker or another entity and another female entity that shares the parents of the former), the terms of trirelational kinship – also known as triangular, triadic terms, ternary and shared kinship – refers to a relationship between three different entities. These are common in Australian Aboriginal languages in the context of Australian Aboriginal kinship. In some societies, kinship and political relationships are organized around belonging to corporate-organized dwellings rather than ancestry groups or lineages, as in Windsor House. The concept of domestic enterprise was originally proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who called it “home companies”. [15] [16] The concept has been applied to understand the organization of societies from Mesoamerica and Maluku to North Africa and medieval Europe. [17] [18] Lévi-Strauss introduced the concept as an alternative to the “Corporate Kinship Group” among cognatic kinship groups in the Pacific region.
Socially significant groups within these societies have different members, since kinship is counted bilaterally (by both father and mother kinship) and only reunite for short periods of time. Ownership, genealogy and residence are not the basis of the existence of the group. [19] See full definition of kinship in the dictionary of English language learners Kinship, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is a “system of social organization based on real or perceived family ties.” But in sociology, kinship involves more than family ties, according to the Sociology Group: If kinship involves only blood ties and marriage, then kinship defines how family relationships are formed and how family members interact with each other. But if, as Schneider argued, kinship involves a number of social ties, then kinship – and its rules and norms – regulates how people from particular groups, or even entire communities, interact with each other in all aspects of their lives. In many societies where kinship ties are important, there are rules, even if they can be expressed or taken for granted. There are four main headings that anthropologists use to categorize ancestry rules. They are bilateral, unilinear, ambilineal and of dual descent. [9] Our study focuses on the social and political role of Bronze Age women as agents of cultural hybridization and change, we can also argue that the integration of high-ranking women from outside into the kinship group following marriage exchanges may have been crucial for the emerging elite of the 2nd millennium BC. Schneider preferred to focus on these often ignored processes of “performance, forms of doing, different codes of conduct, different roles” (p. 72) as the most important components of kinship. His critique quickly prompted a new generation of anthropologists to rethink the way they conceptualized, observed, and described social relations (“kinship”) in the cultures they studied.
A more flexible view of kinship has been formulated in British social anthropology. Among attempts to move away from universalizing hypotheses and theories about kinship, Radcliffe-Brown (1922, The Andaman Islands; 1930, The Social Organization of Australian Tribes) was the first to assert that kinship relations are best regarded as concrete networks of relationships between individuals. However, he went on to describe these relationships as typical of nested interpersonal roles. Malinowski (1922, Argonauts of the Western Pacific) described patterns of events with concrete individuals as participants that emphasized the relative stability of institutions and communities, but without insisting on abstract systems or kinship models. Gluckman (1955, The judicial process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia) balanced the emphasis on institutional stability against processes of change and conflict, derived from a detailed analysis of cases of social interaction to derive rules and assumptions. John Barnes, Victor Turner, and others associated with Gluckman`s Manchester School of Anthropology have described patterns of real-world network relationships in communities and fluid situations in urban or migratory contexts, as in J.`s work.