----2. Worksheet. Care & Kin in different cultures

Care from mother's brother in other cultures

In a previous worksheet, we considered how your mother's brother is responsible for your care among the Musuo of China. It is not just among the Musuo. In many cultures, your mother's brother, not your father, is responsible for providing affectionate care for you. In other societies he is the stern disciplinarian. Why is it one or the other? Anthropologist Levi-Strauss thought he had the answer. The following diagram explains:

Generation

Observe that:

•  the husband - wife - brother all belong to one generation (highlighted in green)
• the son (nephew) belongs to another generation (highlighted in blue)

Notice how, among the Trobriand Islanders:

• within one generation, one relationship is + and one is  -
• between the generations, one relationship is - and one is +

The same applies for the Cherkess:

If the husband-wife relationship is good, brother-sister will be bad. And vice versa.

If the uncle-nephew relationship is good, father-son will be bad. And vice versa.

Kinship puzzles

Each of the following questions draws you into the relational logic of kinship. Lévi-Strauss argued that kinship systems are structured around oppositions—and that the avunculate (maternal uncle–nephew relationship) is key. Based on what you know about his theory, answer the following questions:

https://lms.latrobe.edu.au/draftfile.php/113682/user/draft/53432222/question-set-537892.h5p

Takeaway

Levi-Struass contends that patterns of kinship and care are not something we choose or even are aware of. It runs along pre-determined structures that were here before we were born and will remain after we die. But does Levi-Strauss's structural analysis of kinship truly provide insight into patterns of care?

Discussion

1a. What about your family? Which of these kinship structures does it most closely resemble? Who has what kind of caring duties? 

OR

1b. Which kind of kinship structure do you think would suit your personality best? Who would have the caring duties?

 OR

1c. Think about someone who has cared for you in a meaningful way—this could be a relative, friend, neighbour, teacher, or anyone else important in your life. How does your relationship with them fit (or not fit) into the kinship structures we’ve studied? What might this tell us about how care helps create kinship, even beyond biological or traditional family roles?

2. In Caring & Family, Winarnita and Herriman describe how care is shaped by migration, religion, and transnational family life. Marriage migrants to the Cocos Islands organise care across households, generations, and national borders.Does this reading support or challenge the idea that care and kinship are always culturally “natural”?

3. Buch (2015, 238-239) writes:

"leading scholars such as Borneman (2001, p. 43) ... argue that studies of kinship may be productively reoriented away from concerns about marriage, sexuality, and gender toward “a concern for the actual situations in which people experience the need to care and be cared for and to the political economies of their distribution.”

Do you think the study of kinship should focus more on care and how economics and politics affects how family organise it? Or should it remained focus the classic concepts like marriage, sexuality, and gender?

 

Further Research

Lévi-Strauss asks us to think about how cultures organise relationships between brothers and sisters. But what counts as an appropriately “close” sibling relationship is itself cultural. In some Polynesian societies, brother–sister relationships could be extraordinarily important and intimate. Among elite Hawaiians, this could extend to sexual relationships and marriage between very close kin, including siblings. Weiner (19892, 81-82) writes that "Among the elite, great care was taken to ensure the highest and purest genealogical connections". As a result "sibling marriage was recognized as the most appropriate act for procreation." This produced children of immense power with "a child born to a very high- ranking brother and sister accorded the highest sanctity". As a result:

Sibling intimacy among Hawaiian Islanders was not disguised; it was an overt fact of the political order at the highest level of society. Samuel Elbert reported that seventeen marriages of blood relatives of high rank were noted in the tales and chants he examined, of which "ten were between brother and sister." Keopuolani, the first and most sacred wife of Kamehameha I, was born with divine rank because her parents were sister and half-brother to each other and their mother was of the highest rank. In fact, the sanctity and mana that surrounded Keopuolani were so powerful that if a man inadvertently came into contact with her or her possessions, he would be killed.

Like me, your immediate reaction to this might be the horror of what we see as incest. But as anthropologists we need to push past this and ask a more important question: how much of what feels natural about kinship has actually been produced by culture? Imagine you had grown up learning that brother–sister marriage was honourable, strengthened your lineage, and was appropriate for people of the highest rank. Would it still feel inherently wrong? 

 

Weiner, Annette B.. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While Giving, University of California Press, 1992.

 

William Ellis's sketch of Keopuolani's 1823 funeral procession.