1. Kinship Practices

2. Enculturation/ Socialization and the Life Cycle
The main agents of SOCIALIZATION (enculturation) – family, school, peer groups, the mass media, and the work (particular attention to gender socialization) .
The main stages of life cycle identified as:1) infancy; 2)childhood and adolescence, 3) young and mature adulthood, and 4) old age
Anthropological notions of “social birth” and “social person”
Social death vs. biological death

3. Anthropology and the Study of Kinship Practices
Kinship (family, marriage, gender) forming the basis of the discipline;
‘comparable to logic in philosophy and the nude in art’

4. ex. degrees of “relatedness” - Kinship and Biology
Kinship: a symbolic idiom that refers to biological ties which people use to organize their social lives.
Kinship and Fieldwork
ex. degrees of “relatedness”
- Kinship and Biology
Ex. mating vs. marriage; births vs. descents; blood metaphor
- Kinship terms

5. Kingship and Kinship
人生如白驹过隙， 所以好富贵者，不过欲各积金钱，厚自娱乐，使子孙无贫乏耳。卿等何不释去兵权，出守大藩，择好便田宅市之，为子孙立永久不可动之业，多置歌儿舞女，日夕饮酒相欢，以终天年，朕且与卿等约为婚姻，君臣之间两无猜疑，上下相安，不亦善乎？

8. Kinship & Politics: Blood is thicker than water?

9. What is the Family?
A definition of the family that avoids Western ethnocentrism see it as a group composed of a woman and her dependent children, with at least one adult man joined through marriage or blood relationship.
The family may take many forms ranging from a married couple with their children (conjugal family) as in North American society to a large group of several brothers and sisters with the sisters’ children (consanguineal family) as in sw India among the Nayar (the Mosu people of SW China).
The particular form taken by the family is related to particular social, historical, and ecological circumstances.

11. Functions of family Nurturance of children
Nurturing children traditionally has been the adult female’s job, although men also may play a role, and in some societies mane are even more involved with their children than are women.
Economic Cooperation
Dependence on group living for survival is basic human characteristic. Economic activities of men and women complement each other. An effective way to facilitate economic cooperation between men and women and to provide for a close bond between mother and child is through the establishment of residential groups that include adults of both sexes.

12. The role of family from the functionalist perspective (Talcott Parsons)
Primary socialization (how children learn the cultural norms of the society into which they are born)
Q: is family the primary socializing agency?
Personality stabilization (the role family plays in assisting adult family members emotionally).
Enculturation

13. Family and household
Households are task-oriented residential units within which economic production, consumption, inheritance, child rearing, and shelter are organized and implemented.
Unlike family, the household is universally present. Most households in fact constitute families (family as the core of the household), although other sorts of households may be present as well (e.g., single-parent household in North America).
Ex 1: Among the Nayar, married men and women are members of separate households, meeting periodically for sexual activities.

14. Family Forms Nuclear Family Married couple + Child(ren)
Extended Family
Three or more generations

15. The nuclear family is widespread, but not universal.

16. Kinship Symbols

18. The extended family
A collection of nuclear families, related by ties of blood, that live together in one household (which might include grand parents, mother and father,, brothers and sisters, perhaps an uncle and aunt, and a stray cousin or two.

19. Residence Patterns Patrilocal residence:
a woman goes to live with her husband in the household in which he grew up.
Matrilocal residence:
a man leaves the family he grew up to go live with his wife in her parents’ household.
Neolocal residence:
a married couple forms a household in a separate location. This occurs where the independence of the nuclear family is emphasized.

20. Industrialization and Family Organization
North America
Neolocal residence pattern
patterns of residence and family types vary with socioeconomic class (ex. extended families as a response to poverty)
The divorce rate rose steeply between 1970 and 1994

21. Family units in complex societies
Families are changing to include stepparenting, “reconstituted families,” gay and lesbian families, single-parenting, divorce, and separation.
Each of these dynamics represents a shift away from the traditional notion the nuclear family and calls attention to transformations that can best be understood in relations to the times in which they are emerged.

23. Gay/lesbian family in the US
Alternative to traditional nuclear family through adoption or the new reproductive technologies.

24. Industrialization, State, and Family Planning: China
Single Child Family Policy / Birth Control
Biological anthropologists vs. Sociocultural anthropologists
Demographic Transition :
low infant mortality rate
low birth rate

31. Readings M. Wolf, Uterine Families and the Women’s Community.
P. L. Kilbride, African Polygyny: Family Values and Contemporary Changes
Rubie Watson, The Named and the Nameless.
V. Fong, China’s One-Child Policy and the Empowerment of Urban Daughters