Kinship

Having a close kinship with one’s homestead can make everything a lot easier and less stressful. “The herds symbolize the unity of the homestead groups and the continuity of the various matrilines” (93). But a Navajo man will have considered and “identify all the animals…

Analyzing Kinship in a Cross Cultural Context In the Western world, there are common ideologies on what is considered a “normal” family. The idea of the Nuclear family with one mom and one dad raising their own kids is still considered to be the ideal family. However, in many societies, such as the Nandi people in Kenya and the Andean people in Ayacucho Peru, kinship is more important than biology. In Toronto, social organizations still only cater to the Western ideologies of who is best to…

Kinship care is the full-time care and nurturing of a child by a relative or someone who has a significant emotional relationship with the child. If children must be separate from their parents, either voluntarily or by court order, kinship care should be the first placement option explored by the child welfare agency. The Federal Government endorsed this practice most recently in the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008. Placing children in Kinship care helps…

Fraternity on the Frontlines: Fictive Kinship and the Great War Noting how “[i]n every combatant country there emerged groups of people whose business it was to help each other recover from [the First World War’s] traumatic consequences,” Jay Winter borrows anthropology’s idea of ‘fictive kin’ to denote close relationships between “particular groups of survivors, whose bond is social and experiential…as opposed to those linked by blood bonds or marriage” (47, 40). Winter argues for a link that…

David M. Schneider best presents the idea of American Kinship and how we view those in relation to us. He recognizes that all around the world there are different languages and naming categories, yet as a human race we understand those various definitions and are able to relate our own classifications to them. Schneider uses the word “relative,” (others may use, folks, people, family) to define a relationship though blood or marriage. On my kinship chart I placed my relatives, those related to…

Placement in foster care is typically classified as kinship or non-kinship care. The relevant literature defines the concept of “kinship” as, the care of children by relatives or, in some jurisdictions, close family friends (Foster Care Statistics, 2015). On the other hand, non-kinship care is the care of children by strangers. Non-kinship care still is the most popular form of placement. The premise of non-kinship care, was typically based on the distrust of family members as a whole. Social…

Kinship provides Indigenous Australians with a strong and intricate social structure. Fryer-Smith (2002) describes Kinship as a complex social system which is essential to provide Indigenous Australians with an extended support structure. This support structure is broken down into a classification system called Kinship (p. 2:14). By employing this system of Kinship Indigenous Australians can determine their position in relation to another person within a society. Each of these positions have…

Liao and White (2014) surveyed 785 families who adopted or had guardianship of a child in foster care between July 1997 and June 2004. A total of 527 kinship families and 256 non-kinship families participated. In the succeeding study, the kinship families were underrepresented as there were 592 non-kinship and 166 kindship families. Centers for Disease Control surveyed participated via the State and Local Area Integrated Telephone Survey (SLAITS) program, Merritt and Festinger…

In her 1975 book The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex, anthropologist, activist and theorist of sex and gender politics, Gayle Rubin attempts to illustrate the origins and causes of female oppression. She does so by examining the social relations responsible for doing so as well as offering a detailed account of her social structure she refers to as the "sex/gender system” which she explains as "the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality…

Culture is a way of life for a group of people—behaviors, beliefs and values are all shaped by culture. Culture is a relative concept because different cultural groups think, feel and act differently. There is no scientific way of proving one group is superior or inferior to another. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz described culture as a “web of significance”—what he means by this is that culture is a semiotic concept. Culture, as seen by Geertz, is not “complexes of concrete behavior patterns”…