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Chapter 2 The Role of Kinship in Human Life Contemporary scientific knowledge informs us that genetic traits are transmitted by reproduction and birth, natural processes that form the building blocks of family and kinship in American society. Whereas science and biomedicine regard genetic transmission as a universal and natural biological process that takes place in all living things, conceptualisations of family and kinship are culturally produced. In fact, as long as we remain wrapped in our cultural mantles, we may fail to see that our most profound beliefs and practices, which we take for granted as natural , including those of family arid kin, are historically and culturally created . Kinship is arguably the most primordial relationship that human beings construct. People the world over infuse strong feelings intoprimary ties of family and kin. But even a succinct cross-cultural and historical excursion reveals the culturalbasisof our kinship and family relationships . Whereas men and women copulate, reproduce, and transmit their genes to their offspring in all societies, they variouslysort, perceive, and interpret their connections to them according to cultural and historical contexts. Levi-Strauss pointed out long ago that "a kinship system does not consist of the objective ties by descent or consanguinity that obtain among individuals; it exists only in human consciousness, it is an arbitrary system of ideas, not the spontaneous development of a factual situation."1 Because biological processes of genetic transmission are closely intertwined with cultural conceptualizations of family and kinship, I want to raise in this chapter several issues discussed in the anthropological literature regarding the understanding of family and kinship from a crosscultural perspective. I use referencesto selective cultures to discuss some debates concerning the definition of kinship. Then in the next chapter I move to a discussion of contemporary mainstream American family and kinship beliefs and practices as they have developed historically. I conclude the discussion of family and kinship by examining briefly the new reproductive technologies associated with the new genetics because they have led to a reexamination of traditional meanings of kinship and family . The issues addressed in these two chapters are important because even a condensed exploration of the multifaceted dimensions of family and kinship from a cross-cultural perspective sharpens our grasp of our own cultural conceptualizations and constructions and discloses the extent to which concepts of genetic inheritance both mold and reflect American cultural understandings of family arid kinship. Anthropological Studies of Kinship in the Past and Present From its inception as a new discipline in the nineteenth century, anthropology advanced the notion of the cultural nature of family and kinship. The study of kinship was firmly established by LewisHenry Morgan, who in 1846 collected ethnographic materials among the Iroquois and was astonished to find that their kinship conceptualizationsdiffered from his own. He stated, "I found among them in daily use,a system of relationship for the designation and classification of kindred, both unique and extraordinary in its character, and wholly unlike any with which we are familiar."2 The Iroquois possessed what Morgan termed a classificatory system of kinship that fused collateral with lineal relatives, in contrast to the descriptive system that he knew as an American. Europeans and Americans now, as in Morgan's time, distinguish between their lineal and collateral relatives,that isbetween their father and their father's brother, whom they call "uncle," and their mother and their mother's sister, whom they call "aunt." The Iroquois, however, did not distinguish between parents and their siblings, regarding their father's brother as their father and their mother's sister as their mother. On the basis of his Iroquois discoveries, Morgan concluded that the family was, indeed, founded on a community of blood, but that one of the earliest acts of humanity was to categorize blood kinship relations into lines of descent that were basic valued relationships. Morgan believed, as did most anthropologists who followed his interest in kinship, that a people's kinship was the folk expression of their understanding of biological relationships . For example, following Morgan, Lowie asserted that "biological relationships merely serve as a starting point for the development of sociological conceptions of kinship."! Those who came after Morgan unquestioningly accepted his view that kinship ties were universally based on blood relationships; that societies whose lives were organized around kinship relationships tended to stress unilirieal descent by emphasizing either the maternal side (matrilineal descent) or, in a majority of societies, the paternal side (patrilineal de22 Setting the Stage [3.145.183.137] Project MUSE...

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