ANTHRO 110g MIDTERM review

Chinese MBD>FZD marriage

Patrilocal post-marriage residence

Joint family
o Fragile
o Partible inheritance, patriarchy >> brothers, sisters marry out
o Wives not particularly attached to joint family, dont like sharing,
concerned about own immediate family
Stem family
o Primogeniture (first born)
o Disinheritance of other siblings
o Single stem
o Unilineal (patrilineal) relationships decent follows one line
Lineage = corporate group, property holding organization,
exclusive
Patrilineal: authority and decent same
MBD: Better relationship with mother in law if daughter in law is niece
o Matrilateral cross-cousin marriage
o Man marries woman from same group as his mother
o Position of wife-giver and wife-taker lineages maintained over the
generations
o Women move in one direction through the social structure
FZD: Daughter in law is stranger. She can have revenge on next generation
daughter in law (granddaughter of husbands mother)
o Patrilateral cross-cousin marriage
o Delayed, direct exchange: women given in one direction, returned in
the next
o Man marries woman from same lineage as his grandmother
o Women move in one direction in one generation, in the opposite
direction in the next generation

Chinese families can be stem or joint depending on the stage of the domestic cycle. Usually, they
are held together by joint families, but again, joint families are weak when the parents die.

Trobriand Islanders (off the Coast of New Guinea, near Australia)

B. Malinowski
Urigubu: after ya harvest men take half to deposit in sisters husbands store
house >> secures matilineage, respect/pride in community
FZD
Avunculocality (post marital mothers brother residence)
Oedipus complex like effects on mothers brother
matrilineal

Sister exchange

Iroquois kinship terms

LH Morgan, lawyer Iroquois Indians hired v. US Govt

Matrilineal
Parallel cousins = siblings, aunts/uncles=parents
Gather info, find publish 6 different types of kinship systems

Joint/nuclear/stem family

Extended family as opposed to conjugal or nuclear family

Patrilocal / matrilocal post marital residence
avunculocal >>creates community of men living together related to one another by
mothers and sisters

Nuclear husband/wife/kids, monogamous, bilateral, socially patrilineal

bias (last name), neo-local pattern (independent of parents)
Stem family primogeniture, eldest sibling inherits everything, younger siblings inherit
nothing
Joint family partible inheritance every sibling of the particular gender has a share in
the estate of his parents
Patrilineal family privileges the sons in inheriting the estates of the father, all brothers
have equal share in the estate of their parents, women do not enjoy a share (women
marry out into the husband's and therefore and do not stand to inherit from their parents)
Joint family tends to fall apart after the death of the parents, fragile, they tend to
fragment, and tend to undergo fenjia (or division of property)
inmarrying women don't have obligation to their husband's lineage, their attitudes are
more reflection of concerns with their own offspring and their branch of the family and
looking after affairs of their own particular households, rather than unity or maintenance
of the joint family
Family division and divorce are traumatic experiences based on family and property
It takes a significant amount of resources to sustain a joint family
only the incredibly wealthy can sustain a joint family
Domestic cycle family would start out with husband and wife, they have three sons,
they would each get married and we have a joint family, but then for one reason or
another, the family would divide and joint family would become three independent nuclear
families, and then each of these nuclear families would have a child, and that would
become stem, etc. and evolve into joint family and split again, so that even in a society
where joint family is preferred, from one generation to the next, it changes.
Nuclear stem and then nuclear to stem to nuclear stem and then go to joint depends

Exo v endogamy

Arranged marriages controlled by families

Political alliance > love
E Taylor- exogamy = process of marrying someone from outside its group
o Establish broader network of relationship
o Thrives better than endogamy
Endogamy = marrying within group
o isolationist

Levi Strauss daughter exchange structure >> marry cross cousin on both
sides
Daughter exchange >> bilateral cross cousin marriage
Moieties = two groups, look to marry someone within other group
Cross cousin marriage reaffirms ties
Omaha: dispersed marriage patterns marriage with third cross cousins

Language and culture

Language= a system of learned arbitrary verbal patterns capable of the

communication of complex ideas and experiences
Culture=inventory of learned behaviors (Boasian)
o Lang predisposition of culture >> needed to transmit meaning to other
generations
o Culture determines the content of language
Can change, grow but complete
o an individuals ability to change it limited by mutual intelligibility
o Ex) dialects
o Form in isolated geographically/socially community
o Forms of mass communication counter act dialect
o Spoken changes more than written >>illiteracy, writing more
permanent
Duality of pattern (defines humans from animals) a code where elements lack
significance apart from environment with other code elements
o [p]it vs [p]ot
o Same elements can combine and recombine to form meaning
Phoneme: minimally distinguishable sounds that convey meaning in a
language
o How a given language selects from many possible sounds a select
number of sounds and gibes them minimal contrastive significance
Ex) Spanish rolled r not significant in English
o [p]at different from [b]at
o ex music, dna
o
Phonetics
o [p] = puh >> bilabial, aspired, voiceless stopped sound
Sapir Wharf hypothesis
o Reality is out there
o Lang teaches us to focus on the things of cultural significance
o Provides categories by means of which we understand the world
o Lang structures the way we think

American structuralism
o
o
o
o

Lange v parole
Lang medium of social exchange
We choose parole (speech patterns) but limited by grammar
grammar unconscious agency in parole

subconscious patterns
phonemic can be grouped in different combinations for different meanings
subnative phoneme to produce second lang phoneme creates accent
o greater fluency, better render phoneme sounds in own terms
each language has distinct phoneme (bits of sounds with meaningful
significance)

Schools of anthropological thought

Marriage patterns

French structuralism (notice habit build modeled) Claude Levi Strauss

o Focus on mind structure, what people think
o Culture=system of idea/set of rules of how

Materlineality primal promiscuity evolutionary Darwin to Boasian cultural relativism)

Kwakiutl marriage patterns

Parents negotiate marriage >> hierarchical org by age

Groomsman dress as warriors and visit brides dad with pay in blankets
>>patriarchy
And capture the bride as in war >>emphasis on war, debt repay, formation of
allies
Brides father pays back debt after birth of child >>status oriented
Payment continues exchanged back an forth between families >>reciprocity

Culture: knowledge, law, morals, habits, art, belief, morals, customs