3 Anthropology
Anthropology involves the “study of mankind”. It is extremely diverse, draws on many intellectual traditions and covers state-society relations, gender roles, marketing systems, migration, ethnic conflicts and religious change. Early anthropology paid special attention to kinship, but it now receives less attention, partly because of an increased interest in modern societies where kinship does not dominate every sphere of activity. This section draws on mainstream cultural and social anthropology which is concerned with the empirical study of culture and social structure mainly, though not exclusively, in non-Western societies.
3.1 Explanatory framework
Cultural anthropology has no universally shared explanatory framework equivalent to natural selection in evolutionary psychology or constrained maximisation in economics. Anthropologists do, nevertheless, share some common aims, interests, and methodologies. They generally look for holistic explanations, and routinely invoke economic, political, social, and cultural forces in their analysis. At the same time, of all the social sciences, anthropology has the greatest interest and expertise in culture—in shared symbols, norms, and frames of reference. Anthropologists pay special attention to the cultural causes and effects of phenomena (Greenhalgh 1995). Anthropologists spend long periods conducting participant observation, typically using extended fieldwork, but they also use surveys and archival research.
There has long been an implicit division of labour within the social sciences whereby sociologists study Western societies, and anthropologists study non-Western ones. Although the most sophisticated anthropological research in New Zealand has dealt with Maori (eg Firth 1959, Metge 1995), ethnographic studies of Pakeha have been done (Sawicka and Urry 1997). Distinguished anthropologists have also studied kinship in the United Kingdom and the United States (Firth, Hubert and Forge 1969, Schneider 1980).
Anthropologists have typically been more interested in differences than in similarities, particularly in those practices that differ markedly from those of modern Western societies. A notable example is Geertz, who has suggested that anthropologists should be “merchants of astonishment” who “hawk the anomalous, peddle the strange” to demonstrate that practices that Westerners take for granted or see as natural are in fact culturally specific and socially constructed (Geertz (1984 cited in Pinker (1995: 411)).
The richness of anthropological observations of families across cultures provides evidence of the enormous variation that exists in the formation, structure and behaviour of families. It also allows theories of the family, which might implicitly be specific to a particular culture, such as a modern, industrialised, Western society, to be tested for their general applicability in other societies.
3.2 Family formation and structure: Family systems
Anthropology does not have a unified theory of how families form and are structured. Rather, it emphasises the mutually reinforcing nature of different dimensions of families that make up kinship systems. Anthropologists typically compare families of different cultures across a number of different dimensions, including co-residence rules, patterns of authority, descent, marriage, property and kinship terms.
Different cultures have different rules about who should live with whom. Some require newly married couples to live with the parents of the groom, for instance, while others require them to live with the parents of the bride. There are also less familiar arrangements, such as having all the adult males of the village live together in one type of house, and adult females and children live together in another type of house (Yanagisako 1979: 165)
The mutual rights and obligations of kin also vary. In some places and eras parents are expected to choose their children’s spouses, for instance, while elsewhere they are not. In the medieval Chinese law code, household headship passed from the father to the eldest son on the father’s death. Although the Vietnamese code was largely based on the Chinese code, it prescribed that headship passed to the mother (Ta Van Tai 1981).
In many societies (though not those originating in Northwest Europe) descent lines are a fundamental aspect of social structure. These lines generally run from father to son, but sometimes run from mother to daughter, or take other forms. Social descent is not the same as biological descent. Most societies, for instance, permit adopted children to carry on the descent line, and in some places children born to a man’s wife years after the man has died are considered to belong to the man’s descent line (Townsend 1997).
There have historically been a variety of marriage types, from monogamy, to polygamy and polyandry. Societies also differ in who is considered a potential marriage partner. In much of northern India, for instance, women are expected to marry a stranger from a different village, while in southern India, women are expected to marry cousins whom they may have known since childhood (Dyson and Moore 1983).
Particularly among peasants, much property has traditionally been exchanged through non-market transactions among kin. In many African societies, for instance, the kin of the groom make a substantial payment of cattle to the kin of the bride as part of a marriage (a payment known as “bride price” or “bride wealth”). In most parts of China, the family of the bride transfers resources to the bride and groom (a dowry).
The terms people use to address kin generally group people together in socially significant ways. In Vietnam, where descent lines running from father to son are vitally important, people use an almost entirely different set of kin terms for referring to kin related through the father’s side and kin related through the mother’s side. In contrast, the British and their offshoots, who do not have strong descent lines, use the same terms for kin on both the fathers’ and mothers’ sides.
Different aspects of kinship in a given society are often to some extent mutually supporting. The fit between descent ideology and kinship terms in Vietnam and in English-speaking societies has already been noted. Another example is that, in traditional China, land, authority, and descent all passed from fathers to sons. Anthropologists have accordingly found it useful to refer to kinship systems. The study of how the different aspects of a kinship system evolve together in response to environmental conditions, state action, demographic change, and other influences is major part of anthropology.
The idea of a family system can be illustrated with the example of the kinship system of mid-20th century northeast Thailand. Following marriage a man was expected to move into the household of his wife. This household would be composed of the wife’s parents and unmarried brothers and sisters. The newly married couple would remain in the wife’s parents’ household until another of the wife’s sisters married and brought in a husband, at which point the couple would establish their own household, often in the same compound as the wife’s parents. The last sister to marry would remain in the parents’ household until the parents’ deaths, receiving the house in exchange for old age support. Parents passed rice land to their daughters, generally before the parents died. The large payment, which grooms made to the mother of the bride at the time of the marriage, is often interpreted as a payment for access to this land. Although the wives owned the land, the husbands were considered to be the household heads. As in most of Southeast Asia, the northeast Thai kin system did not have formal descent lines (in anthropological jargon, descent was “bilateral”.) Kinship terminology did, however, make some distinctions between kin on the mother’s side and kin on the father’s side (Keyes 1975).
The concept of family systems needs to be handled with care. Descriptions of family systems, such as the one presented for northeast Thailand, usually refer to cultural ideals. Practice often departs from the ideal. Sometimes the reasons for the transgression are idiosyncratic: a son might refuse to live with his parents, for instance, because of a family feud. Sometimes the reasons are systematic: high mortality or low fertility can mean that crucial kin roles are not filled, preventing a family from conforming to the cultural ideal. This is one reason why, for instance, few Chinese families have ever been able to conform to the ideal of four generations under one roof.
Compared to early theorists (see for example Radcliffe-Brown and Forde 1950) anthropologists now posit a looser fit between the different aspects of a kinship system. They emphasise, for instance, that a family with a patrilineal descent rule in one society may differ significantly from a patrilineal family in another society. Sometimes different parts of a family system can pull in different directions, as in northeast Thailand where the principle that the male household heads supervised production was in tension with the principle that the females owned the land. Anthropologists have accordingly criticised demographic historians who try to use data on household composition to make inferences about other aspects of the family (Laslett 1971, Yanagisako 1979).
Contemporary anthropologists also emphasise that family systems vary between social classes. An extreme example is the difference between the patrilineal descent rules of the Thai royal family and the bilateral rules of their subjects. A less extreme example is that of dowry in India, where only wealthier castes traditionally paid dowries—though more recently the practice has been emulated by poorer castes.
