Introduction

What is kinship? According to Ernest Gellner, it “… refers neither to a set of roles, statuses and relationships (i.e. the social aspect of kinship) nor to the physical kin position (i.e. location in a network of biological relationships)” (Harris, C. C. 1990:28). It is not an object of study. Rather, it is the study of the relationship between the social and biological aspects of behavior (Gellner 1973:171). This approach contrasts with the more traditional ones where ‘kinship’ is treated as a particular set of social relationships based on “objective” biological relationships.

An alternative way of thinking about this approach to kinship is “… something anthropologists do” (Trautmann 1987:4). This is what I will emphasize in the following pages. I view kinship as a modern science involving participant observers examining human behavior. There is no presumption that kinship is something “out there” existing as “kinship-in-itself.”

The central concern of kinship is researching and analyzing the fundamental relations of social behavior: parentage and marriage. These relations have played an essential role in human history and continue to be an important part of social life today. Human behavior cannot be fully comprehended without understanding the roles that parentage and marriage have played in the past and continue to play today. Furthermore, successfully predicting the future of society requires a basic understanding of these relations.

Parentage and marriage relations have always adapted to their social and cultural environments and, today, this process is occurring with increasing rapidity. The changes occurring at present are not inconsequential since kinship relations directly affect biological reproduction and cultural continuity. One has only to consider the rising usage of assisted reproductive technologies, the increasing role of males in parenting, and the spreading legality of same sex marriages in western countries. The study of these phenomena, if it is to be of any consequence, must be able to analyze the changes and provide an adequate grasp of their significance.

Over the past two centuries, anthropologists have witnessed and recorded a remarkable diversity in the way people establish and utilize kinship relationships. This variety in the ethnographic record is a testimony to the flexible nature of human social behavior. It also demonstrates how humans can adapt parentage and marriage to different physical and cultural environments. The process of adaptation very often occurs slowly over many generations but it can occur rapidly, even within two generations. Today, an increased tempo in the process of adaptation is underway in many parts of the world. As a result, the composition of families and households is changing dramatically. To understand the factors underlying this process and to be aware of its future implications are fundamental challenges for the student of kinship today. One purpose of this book is to provide the basic tools and information necessary to achieve these goals.

assisted reproductive technologies

One major factor in the changing landscape of today’s family life is the growing use of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). Reproductive technologies introduced in the latter part of the twentieth century have created new forms of parentage and have led to reconsiderations of the fundamental nature of human interaction. One of the impacts of these technologies has been to make it possible to separate sex from human reproduction. Increasing numbers of women are now conceiving children without sexual intercourse. Fertile males, on the other hand, are producing descendants without direct social interaction with females. Furthermore, Australian researchers in 2001 reported they had found a way to fertilize an egg without using sperm thereby making it possible for an infertile male to produce children. ARTs have created situations in which children born from the same female are not genetically related to each other, a child has two biological mothers, and children being born long after the death of their parents. These new situations have introduced a degree of uncertainty about the nature of human social relationships. What does ‘mother’ mean, for example, if one woman donates an egg for in vitro fertilization, the deoxyribo nucleic acid (DNA) in the nucleus of the egg is replaced with that from a second woman, a third has the embryo implanted in her womb, and a fourth adopts the child at birth. Which of these women is the “mother?” Perhaps, all four should be considered the mother of the child. What then are the social and legal responsibilities of each mother? These questions are difficult to answer when our traditional views of the basic relationships between humans no longer apply. The use of in vitro fertilization, embryo transfer, gamete intrafallopian transfer, surrogacy, sperm banks, and frozen embryos, has forced us to reconsider the nature of parentage. For one, it forces a reconsideration of the relationship between the social and physical aspects of human family life.

increased interest in kinship

The attempt to understand the nature of parentage and marriage relationships has been a central part of anthropological research for over a century and a half. Since the emergence of modern kinship in the 19^th century, theoretical frameworks within the discipline have changed but there have been the consistent goals to determine the essential characteristics of parentage and marriage and to understand the impact these relationships have upon human social life. Current rethinking of the basic assumptions in kinship due, in part, to the use of ARTs is a continuation of the efforts to achieve these goals.

There are a number of factors that have contributed to the revitalization of the study of parentage and marriage. One is the growing awareness, due to developments in global transportation and communication technologies, of the worldwide spectrum of family relationships. Computers, books, movies, and television have brought the variety in cultural practices to the attention of large numbers of people in a more intense way then ever before. This, in turn, has piqued interest in determining why there are these differences, what difference they make in life in general, and what fundamental nature they may share. Similarly, the dramatic increase in cross-cultural marriage occurring in places such as the United States today has also produced questions about parental and marital relationships. When a man and woman with different cultures marry, they face the challenges of deciding how they will interact as husband and wife and how to raise their children. These issues are normally subsumed within the fabric of a single culture and are taken for granted by most participants. In multicultural marriages, however, the couple has to decide these fundamental social issues and, in so doing, often ponder the essence of fundamental family relationships. Other factors influencing kinship in recent years have been the changing roles of males and females, the growing public debate about same-sex unions, increasing numbers of transnational adoptions, and the rising interest in pursuing family genealogies. In the United States, in particular, genealogical research has resulted in an increased awareness in the differences between the way families were constituted in the past and today. Some genealogists, for example, have found out that in their family history it was not uncommon for first cousins to marry.

Legislators and lawyers, in trying to enact or interpret legislation in the face of the new family situations of the twenty-first century, have discovered that this requires innovative thinking about the fundamental relationships in social behavior. Today, for example, reproduction without sexual intercourse is becoming a widespread phenomenon and lawmakers find themselves without precedents in dealing with the contemporary social, political, and economic issues involved in parentage and marriage. New rules and fresh ways of looking at fundamental human relationships are required. An excellent way to meet these needs is provided by the anthropological approach in kinship.

the anthropological approach

Anthropologists have gathered data from a worldwide assortment of cultures and have developed theories and methods for examining a great diversity of social behavior. In the following pages, the reader will be introduced to family and marriage patterns from a variety of cultures. It is not possible, of course, in a single book of this sort to illustrate all of the diversity of human behavior and, instead, only some ethnographic data have been selected to provide details. I have left it up to the reader to gather more detailed information, if so desired, and have provided a bibliography for the researcher to be able to begin exploring the diverse world in which marriage and parentage play a vital role. The variations in human life described in this book offer the reader the opportunity to see the range of adaptations in family and marriage life that have occurred and to apply them to the contemporary issues in one’s own situation. Systems of parentage and marriage that differ greatly from contemporary western systems have applicability to understanding the contemporary situation in the western world and potentially represent ways future relationships can develop almost anywhere. By examining alternative systems, comparisons can be made that give the reader an idea of what is possible and where a particular system fits in the range of potential behavior. Comparison also provides an opportunity for one to become much more aware of the characteristics of one’s own system. Parental and marriage relationships are so often taken for granted that people are unaware of how they operate or how important they are in their lives. By examining other cultures, one can become more cognizant of this aspect of their own culture, develop a better sense of where their system fits in the range of human behavior, and begin to see how it affects their lives. This is one of the major advantages of an anthropological approach.

basics

In the book, The Anthropology of Kinship, Chapter 2 introduces and describes the basic tools utilized in this book. It presents the basic diagrams and terms of kinship. The diagram is an essential tool for investigating family and marriage relationships and the chapter provides the reader with the necessary expertise to be able to create and to correctly interpret one. Different from genograms and genealogical diagrams, kinship diagrams do not always attempt to display each individual related to a person. A symbol may be used to represent a category of relatives. A group of brothers, for example, may be designated by a single triangle in the diagram. This is in contrast to diagrams used in genealogies, for example, in which an attempt is made to indicate each relative of a person.

Labels are used to differentiate different kinds of parent-child relationships. With the use of these labels, distinct physical and cultural relationships can be described and differentiated. If necessary, for example, the female contributing nuclear DNA to an embryo, the woman providing mitochondrial DNA, and the gestational mother can all be distinguished. These, furthermore, can be diagrammed separately from an adoptive mother. The diagrams make no assumption that the “natural” relationship between a child and its parent is physical or cultural. They are designed to allow an investigator to spell out the different way relationships between relatives have been constructed in a social setting. This is particularly useful when people, such as the Nuer, permit extramarital relationships and recognize both the physical father (genitor) and cultural father (pater) of a child. It also helps to avoid the traditional model in which one female parent and one male parent plus a notion of shared substance contributed by each to their offspring constitutes the “nature” of human family relationships. This allows a greater freedom to carefully examine the implications of the ARTs and explore the many variations in family structure now appearing in modern households.

Special terms and phrases (e.g. “kin type,” “filiation,” “affinity,” “ego,” “parallel-cousin,” “first cousin once-removed,” etc.) are introduced and defined in the chapter to help facilitate communication and understanding of the subject. Special terminology is a characteristic of any developed discipline and the student needs to learn a set of basic vocabulary in order to be able to talk efficiently about the subject and understand the written results of research produced by the experts. In this case, it is also useful for the student to understand the terminology to appreciate the different ways peoples around the world classify their relatives. That way, for instance, the assumption can be avoided that all ‘cousins’ are alike. To recognize what a “first cousin once-removed” means, furthermore, is useful to those who want to determine the distance between relatives as defined within the judicial system of the United States.

filiation

‘Filiation’ is the term used in the following pages to designate the abstract notion of a basic parent-child relationship. Anthropologists in the past have used the terms, ‘consanguineal,’ ‘genealogical,’ and ‘filiation,’ to denote the relationship of parentage. Unfortunately, these have often assumed a particular model of parent-child relationships in which the child is seen to be physically related to a particular male and a particular female parent. ‘Consanguineal’, for example, is derived from the Latin for ‘blood’ and implies that a shared substance defines the parent-child relationship. Americans often speak of “blood relatives” and mean this to describe a relationship characterized by shared genetic substance transmitted to offspring from both a male parent and a female parent. This biological model of parentage has been the focus of critical discussion in kinship recently (see Franklin and McKinnon 2001 for a good overview) and it has become clear that its usage at the fundamental level of analysis predisposes investigators and is not even appropriate for aspects of modern genetics. It would be best to avoid using it in the overall framework for contemporary investigations of family and marriage relationships. Although, one cannot avoid the fact that “…kinship helps to constitute what it describes…” (Franklin and McKinnon 2001:2), one does not have to establish a privileged status in analysis of a particular view of the nature of parentage. The designation of the fundamental relationship between parent and child should not imply a particular framework but be capable of representing a number of different possibilities. Thus, even though in anthropology it has been traditional to consider filiation almost universally as bilateral (Robinson 1962:121), I have selected a different definition of ‘filiation.’ In this book, ‘filiation’ represents any kind of culturally recognized parental relationship. Rather than create a distinct term when a great deal of technical vocabulary already exists in kinship, I use the familiar term ‘filiation’ without the condition that it “… in all societies is, by definition, bilateral—a child is the descendant of his pater, and mater, social father and mother (Buchler and Selby 1968:69) [emphasis added]. There is, furthermore, no implication in this book that filiation requires the sharing of a physical substance between parent and child, that it is universally recognized as a connection between a child and two parents of different sex, or that it is based upon sexual intercourse between those two people. (see, for example, Lambert 2000 for alternative ways of viewing filiation) In the following pages, ‘filiation’ designates the general concept of a relationship between parents and children. No particular interpretation is implied. The culturally specific interpretations of this general concept will be designated by speaking of bilateral, patrilineal, and matrilineal relationships plus their complements. These are used to indicate the distinct ways people around the world interpret and utilize filiation.

descent groups

In The Anthropology of Kinship, chapters three through six, three different types of filiation are described and the groups based upon these types are discussed. ‘Descent’ indicates “…criteria and processes by which group membership is determined by reference to one or both parents” (Buchler and Selby 1968:69) and the groups formed on the basis of these criteria and processes are descent groups. Bilateral filiation, the system in which parent-child relationships pass through people of either gender and extend to a virtually unlimited network of kin, is discussed in Chapter 3. A descent group based upon this type of filiation can include any person linked through either males or females to a particular ancestor or ancestral couple. One example of this type of social group is the Scottish clan and I describe how membership is determined and the implications of tracing relatives through ancestors and descendants regardless of their gender. I also discuss some of the boundary problems that exist in such groups. There is a degree of uncertainty in deciding who is, and who is not, a relative, for example.

The nature of family relationships changes when connections are primarily constructed through descendants or ancestors of one gender and not the other. Chapter 4 examines patrifiliation, parent-child relationships based upon parental connections with fathers, and the descent groups, such as patrilineages and patriclans, based upon them. In societies with patrilineages and patriclans, children join the descent group of their father and normally it is only the children of the sons who also belong to the group. Occasionally, a woman is recognized as a father, and she also transmits membership in her father’s social group to her children. Descent groups based upon patrifiliation serve as major social divisions within some societies and play a central role in regulating social behavior. The chapter describes these descent groups and discusses their role in social behavior. The chapter also describes how patrifiliation plays an important role in some societies in determining patterns of inheritance. The transmission of last names among contemporary English speakers is one example discussed.

Chapter 5 describes and discusses matrifiliation plus matrilineages and matriclans; social groups based upon matrifiliation. In these social groups, membership is recruited through mothers. Sometimes matrifiliation is rationalized by a model of conception that gives the father a minor or no role in conception. Australian aborigines, for example, are well known to have had a system of beliefs that did not include the idea that a male provided any material substance in the conception of a child. A child was produced by a spirit entering the womb of a woman. At one time, this notion about conception and the corresponding descent groups among the people that held them were thought to represent an early matriarchal stage in human development (Bachofen 1861). Anthropologists no longer accept this idea and the chapter approaches the subject from the modern point of view. It treats matrifiliation as one variation of human adaptation widely found both in historical and modern societies (Lowie 1970, Stockard 2002) and examines the impact it has upon social behavior.

Chapter six describes social systems in which both types of gender-based filiation serve simultaneously as the basis for significant social groups in a society. When that occurs, links through males provide the basis for one set of descent groups and links through females another set. A child will become a member in a patrilineage and a matrilineage simultaneously and, although it may appear, at first, that this mix of male and female filiation is similar to bilateral filiation, this combination is very different both in structure and social impact. For one, cousins may be treated differently. People with bilateral filiation may make little distinction, if any, between first cousins descended from two brothers, two sisters, or a brother and sister. In societies with social groups defined by matrifiliation and patrifiliation, however, important distinctions are made between cousins who are the children of two brothers or two sisters, on the one hand, and those who are the children of a brother and sister on the other. Children of two brothers or two sisters are often treated as siblings while the offspring of a brother and those of a sister are often thought of as potential spouses. This chapter provides a clear explanation of why these distinctions sometimes exist and how they work.

Filiation and descent groups continue to play an important role in determining social behavior today throughout the world. It is important to note that the different types of filiation are often found together in a society and can be used for different purposes. The appropriateness of classifying a society in terms of a single label has been questioned for some time (Leach 1961:4) and it has also been clearly pointed out that people in societies characterized by one or other of these types are using more than one way of reckoning relationships (Pospisil 1963). Sometimes ethnographers fail to look deeply enough into the social situation and report only one type of filiation or descent, ignoring other existing relationships. The Bangangté of Cameroon, for example, at one time were characterized as a patrilineal society but more thorough research revealed that both matrilineal and patrilineal relationships exist (Feldman-Savelsberg 1966).

The Anthropology of Kinship does not assume that any one form of filiation exists in all societies and recognizes that more than one kind of filiation may exist at any particular time within a society. It also recognizes that major transformations can occur with different types of filiation in a society becoming more or less emphasized. Emphases can shift as the culture adapts to changing environmental, economic, political, or religious conditions. This approach can help the researcher discover more accurately the characteristics of filiation and its impact upon human behavior. It can also help the student better understand how family and marriage practices change over time.

sex and marriage

Traditional western notions of the proper or natural relationship between intercourse, marriage, and reproduction have been upset by the use of ARTs. Several people not married to each other are sometimes involved in the reproduction of a human being and there may not be any sexual intercourse involved. But these conditions are not viewed as something extraordinary or unnatural in other societies around the world and by looking at the way sex and marriage is treated in these places can provide some insights into how the new relationships of the 21^st century can be treated. A number of societies around the world separate sexual intercourse from reproduction, at least conceptually, and we can see how this is constructed and what impact it has upon social behavior. One effect is that distinct rules for governing sexual intercourse and for governing selection of marriage partners exist. Intercourse is not restricted to the confines of marriage and marriage is not seen simply in terms of sexual reproduction. Anthropologists have recognized that, in order to develop reasonable theories about the regulation of marriage and sexual intercourse in other societies, each must be considered in its own terms and analyzed separately (Fox 1967). This approach is now necessary to deal with parentage and marriage in western societies.

Chapter 7 in The Anthropology of Kinship follows this procedure and looks separately at social regulations governing marriage and those governing sexual intercourse between relatives. It first discusses the regulations governing sexual relationships between relatives found around the world. Some form of sexual regulation, found either in the form of laws or taboos, is universal. One common regulation is a prohibition of sexual intercourse between relatives. The relatives forbidden from having intercourse vary from society to society and over time within a society. The variety has proven difficult to account for and a daunting challenge to scientists trying to develop an adequate theory of sexual regulation. There is no single explanation of the incest taboo accepted by all. The chapter describes laws and taboos found around the world governing sexual intercourse and discusses the major explanations for them.

Chapter 7 also examines marriage as a major social mechanism and looks at how the structures of societies are affected by it. Arranged marriages and the systems of cousin marriage, in particular, are described and analyzed. Claude Lévi-Strauss’ (1969) analysis of systems of cousin marriage made popular the idea that they were mechanisms for social cohesion. I discuss this idea, pointing out where it succeeds and where it fails, and suggest an alternative understanding for systems of cousin marriage. The chapter also deals with the laws against cousin marriage in the U.S., showing how the marriage laws reflect basic cultural values.

All societies have rules governing the marriage of relatives. These are clearly distinct in some places from the rules governing sexual intercourse. In the traditional South of the United States, for example, there were at one time a complex set of social norms defining appropriate relationships between African- and European-Americans. A male of European descent was forbidden to marry a female of African descent but sex between the two was permitted. The rules were different for a female of European descent and a male of African descent. Neither marriage nor intercourse was tolerated. In a very different case from northern Australia, it was proper for Tiwi males to marry young girls but no sex was expected to occur at the time of the marriage.

The regulations of the marriage of relatives, like sexual regulations, vary greatly over space and time. There is no single accepted theory that accounts for the wide variation in the relatives that are prohibited from marrying. One idea, based upon biological notions, proposed that prohibitions prevent the degeneration of offspring due to inbreeding (Morgan 1958). Another one treats marriage regulations as a mechanism for establishing alliances among divisions of a society (Tylor 1889, Lévi-Strauss 1969). But these, like all others, have failed to account for the data. The major theories of marriage regulation are reviewed and the variety in regulations found worldwide are described. The reader will see that fathers and daughters have been permitted to marry in some societies while in others the range of prohibitions is extended to very distant cousins and even to in-laws.

The forms of marriage are discussed in Chapter 8 of The Anthropology of Kinship. Marriage where only one spouse at a time is permitted is contrasted with marriage in which a person is permitted to have more than one spouse at a time. These forms of marriage are examined from the point of view of both the males and females involved. One of the failures in past kinship studies has been the use of a unisex biased approach. Social institutions have been examined primarily or only from the male’s point of view. This book attempts to avoid this bias and approaches social interaction from both perspectives whenever possible. This is essential with plural marriage, in particular, since the different perspectives lead to very different results. Even in the simple case of determining the number of plural marriages in a society, the demographic results vary when you look at the data from the different perspectives. For example, in societies that permit a man to have more than one wife at the same time it has been stated that most people are “monogamous” (Murdock 1949). But this is only true for the men. If, as I illustrate in the chapter, you look at the society from the point of view of the women, the reverse is true. In fact, for a number of societies in which men are permitted to marry more than one wife at the same time, most married people are in non-monogamous households.

The history of the federal law prohibiting polygamy in the U.S. is discussed in Chapter 8 and the rationale for the existence of this law today is explored. This issue, of interest in itself, also has a bearing upon the controversy over same-sex marriage. By comparing the rights conferred by these laws with those of the institution of marriage, the reader is provided with a better understanding of the pros and cons involved in the debates on this issue and an enhanced image of the American view of the nature of marriage. While there are as many views about the nature of marriage as there are explanations for the incest taboo, this chapter focuses upon marriage as a social institution and explores the question, “Why marry?” something that is being asked by a growing number of young people today. Same-sex marriage, marriage ceremonies, and divorce are also discussed in this chapter. A comparison of the statistics from different societies around the world suggests a major factor affecting the frequency of divorce in a society. I examine this factor and relate it to the discussion of marriage as an important social mechanism.

families and households

One category of relatives is “family”. Its makeup and function has varied over time and in different cultures. The forms the family has taken and the changing family’s role in human society are discussed in The Anthropology of Kinship. The discussion in Chapter 9 includes the comparative cultural data of anthropologists and the findings of recent historical research both of which have helped to overturn several widely held myths about the nature of the family, its development over time, and its interrelationship with economic and social components of culture.

The family in one way or another has often been blamed for many of the ills perceived in today’s society. The President of the United States, for example, in his State of the Union address for 1992 stated that “the dissolution of the family” was responsible for the country’s urban economic and cultural crises (Quoted in Coontz 1992:256). “Family values” has been a much-heralded phrase in recent years but what these should be and what impact they may have upon other aspects of culture is clearly open for discussion. They have traditionally been seen in the U.S. as strong, long-lasting emotional bonds between parents of the opposite sex and characterized by piety between parents and children. Today, this traditional view is being reconsidered, especially in homosexual households, where a family based upon mutual love and devotion to children does not need to have parents of opposite sex. The primary issues involved are examined and some insights from the comparative analysis of family structures around the world are considered.

An important distinction for kinship analysis is that between family and household. The family is ordinarily defined in terms of close emotional, filial or affinal ties while a household is defined by locality. Family members may be dispersed over a wide area and it is not uncommon today for people in the United States, for instance, to have close relatives living in widely separated parts of the country. In my case, for example, I have a brother in New Mexico, a son and daughter-in-law in Iowa, another son in California, an adopted daughter in Kansas City, in-laws in New York, and a sister with seven children in Israel. I consider all of these individuals members of my family. My household, in contrast, today consists of my wife and myself. Previously, it consisted of the pair of us and the young woman we adopted from the Comoro Islands. This woman resided with us while she was getting her undergraduate degree at our local university.

Families contain members that often remain interrelated over their lifetimes while households are fluid institutions that change through marriage, divorce, remarriage, and as children mature and leave. The heart of the household is usually a family, however, and societies have rules governing the makeup of households by family members. These rules affect the composition of households, creating diverse forms from simple units containing a husband-wife or parent-child dyad to complex units containing multiple families. The Anthropology of Kinship examines the rules of residence found throughout the world and compares the types of households produced by them. Awareness of the alternative ways domestic activities can be structured provides an opportunity to understand some of the issues involving households in the U.S. The recent growth of households with children and no parents in the U.S., for example, an effect of recent welfare legislation that forces single parents to work, can be compared with similar situations in other societies around the world. Like other people in other cultures, some single parents in the U.S. today have a network of family members providing support in raising the children while the parent is working and absent from their residence.

language and kinship

The reader is introduced in chapter 10 of The Anthropology of Kinship to the different ways people use language to classify their relatives. This use of language provides an excellent example of how people follow cultural rules for organizing their behavior without any awareness of the rules themselves. Ask English speakers why they make no distinction in their terms of reference between a father’s brother and a mother’s brother and they will likely tell you that it is the “natural” way to classify relatives. But what is natural to some is not to others. By comparing the systems of terminology, one becomes more aware of what possibilities exist and how one’s system gets to become “natural.” Anthropologists have pointed out that, although there are large number of possible ways in which people can classify their relatives, there are a relatively few systems. In this chapter, six systems are described and they are analyzed by reference to a small number of rules related to the wider context of family and marriage relationships in which they exist.

The analysis of kinship terminology remains an important part of kinship although the original purpose for the anthropological analysis of terminological systems no longer applies today. Investigators once analyzed these systems in order to uncover early forms of social organization. It was thought, for example, that the classifying of all same-gender relatives of the parents’ generation reflected an early period of human social organization characterized by promiscuous sex (see Morgan 1958, for example). This particular conclusion has long proven false and the idea that some kinship terminological systems today reflect an early stage in human evolutionary development is no longer accepted. Terminological systems, like all aspects of family and marriage life, can change over time and no single one of them can be taken at face value to represent some supposed early form of behavior. This point may be emphasized by the fact that New Englanders, Czechs, and the !Kung San of southwestern Africa all have been noted to have the same system of kinship terminology (Murdock 1967). Like many Americans and Europeans, the traditional foraging people of southwestern Africa refer to their mother’s and father’s brothers by a single term. They also use a single term for their cousins and use separate terms for their mother, father, and siblings.

The study of the way language is used to organize family relationships takes on a new significance today. It can help those trying to decide what terms are appropriate for the non-traditional relationships currently found in blended families and same-gender households. Often it is difficult to decide what to call a person who doesn’t fit into the traditional pattern of the family. For example, if my mother who bore me is married to a woman and both share responsibility in raising me, do I call both 'mother'? To answer this question, it is useful to know what the application of a term to a number of relatives including the female parent signifies. I examine this phenomenon and discuss whether or not it would be appropriate in English speaking households in which a female couple is raising children. Today, English speakers have become more aware of the need to reexamine the meaning of the basic terms of kinship and to explore alternative possible usages of the terms, ‘mother’ and ‘father,’ in particular.

kinship in the future

The final chapter of The Anthropology of Kinship examines some of the changes now occurring in filial and affinal relationships. There are a large number of families today that do not conform to the traditional forms of the family. “In 2001,” for example, “there were more than four million gay and lesbian couples living in the equivalent of domestic spousal relationships, raising about four million children from one or both partners’ previous marriages or children who have been adopted” (Ball 2002:70). The chapter also discusses the way assisted reproductive technologies: such as in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, embryo transfer, the use of sperm banks, the freezing of embryos, have produced relationships without precedent and are affecting our ideas and laws concerning parentage and marriage. Court cases involving these new arrangements are also described in this chapter to illustrate some of the legal issues now appearing in the U.S. and the difficulties the legal system is having in resolving fundamental issues concerning parentage. In one case, for example, a man sues for parental rights to a child produced through artificial insemination with his sperm when the child was raised by a lesbian couple. In this case and many others, it is difficult to find historical precedents within the culture to help decide the appropriate or proper behavior between the individuals involved. It is also difficult to determine what impact decisions may have on the society. The chapter points out that the new relationships developing in the western world sometimes have precise counterparts in other cultures around the world. Comparisons of the parallel situations can help illuminate what alternatives exist and what impact they may have upon society.

The new technology of reproduction can be expected to impact a variety of social institutions. For one, increased use of ARTs can be expected to decrease the number of adoptions. Infertile couples often turn to them instead of adopting a child to produce a family. The ARTs also have raised several legal issues and can be expected to do so even more in the next several decades. The court cases involving ARTs mentioned in Chapter Eleven provide the reader with the opportunity to see how the ARTs are affecting traditional notions about the nature of parentage and marriage. The court cases also serve as a focal point for a discussion about what legislation is required to ensure the appropriate use of the technologies and avoid unwanted social consequences.

Existing legislation, such as the British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (HFEA) of 1990, is also mentioned in this chapter. This Act defined for the British legal system what ‘mother’ means. It legislated that the woman who carries a child is to be legally treated as the mother whether or not she was genetically related to the child. Some feminists and anthropologists in the U.S. have argued that pregnancy creates a fundamental mother-child bond which establishes the woman who carries the child to term and not the woman who provides the egg as the primary mother (Shanley 1993, Fox 1993). But others believe that there are primary bonds established between a genetic parent and the child and it is these bonds that should be considered as the primary ties in legal issues involving rights and responsibilities between parents and their children. Whether the biological or the cultural tie should be the primary emphasis of parent-child relationships is considered in this chapter. All the options are explored: whether one or the other is primary, whether both must be taken into consideration or whether neither is ultimately appropriate. At present, there is no consensus regarding this important matter.

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