Introduction:
Anthropological studies have directed a great deal of attention to the structure and meaning attached to kinship for several reasons.
- First, kinship is a fundamental aspect of human life.
- Second, kinship provides the most important basic structures to individuals in all types of societies.
- Third, kinship connections individuals within a single generation.
- Fourth, kinship links up individuals across generations.
- Fifth, kinship defines the placement of individuals in specific categories of relatives;
- Sixth, kinship guides people in labeling one another and facilitating social cultural communication and exchange of ideas,
- Seventh, kinship fixes up the rights, duties interests, attitudes and values of relatives toward one another.
- Eighth, kinship stipulates whom one can marry or one cannot marry, from whom one can have protective care, respect, and security, from whom one can inherit the property, from whom one can inherit political office and authority and in whose company one can enjoy friendly familiarity as near or total equality.
- Ninth, kinship not only separates individuals after marriage, and individuals on the basis of generation, age, sex, consanguinity, and ancestry but also unites them into categories and articulates the categories into a complex totality,
- Finally, kinship provides continuity, stability and definiteness to the society.
When one realizes the importance of kinship in the various contexts of human life, one can understand how crucial it is to human existence. Ties of friendship may be temporary; economic links may not last long; political relations may be ephemeral; religious links may be abandoned; but under no circumstances kinship links may be ignored. Even if one wants to severe the links, the kinship identity persists. Blood is thicken than water. One is born into this world with a bond to one’s mother and one’s father. Kinship is a primary bond between people, and the one most resistant to change. The ties of kinship are binding, creating from the most part, inescapable- claims and obligations. Therefore kinship has occupied a place of primary in anthropological studies, over the past one hundred and fifty years, “a huge body of literature has accumulating which probably accounts for more than; half the total literature of anthropology” .
Diversity of Meaning:
Anthropologists present a divided house on the meaning given to the term kinship. Some anthropologists limit the term to consanguine relationships, that is, relationships based on ties of blood. These who favour such meaning are called “descent theorists“, The “descent theorists” include the British social anthropologists. Their intellectual lineage starts from W.W.R. Rivers (1924) and goes through Rad Cliffe Brown (1931, 1935, 1950), Evans-Pritchard (1940). Meyer fortes (1945, 1949, 1953, 1957) and their followers.
The “alliance theorists”, on* the other hand, emphasize that kinship includes not only consanguine relationships but also affinal relationships, that is relationships based on marriage. The “alliance theorists” include several French and American anthropologists. Their Intellectual lineage commences from the Belgian-born French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1945, 1969) and goes through Louis Dumont (1950, 1971) and embraces several American anthropologists like Kroeber (1938), Gifford (1929), Murdock (1949), Schneider (1965), Keesing (1970, 1971), Kelly (1974), Strathern (1968, 1973, 1979) and others. The viewpoints of both the “descent theorists” and the “alliance theorists” are examined in the Following pages.
Different definitions:
Descent theorists
- Rivers (1924) defines kinship as the “social recognition of biological ties”
- RadCliffe Brown (1950), kinship is “a social relationship” “based on descent”
- Evans Pritchard , Meyer Fortes , Luey Main and several anthropologists kinship is a relationship based on cultural defined principle of consanguinity .
Alliance theorists
- Claude Levi-Strauss as well as Louis Dumont define kinship as a totality of relationships governed by the rules consanguinity and affinity,
- Miller -Kinship refers solely to the relationships based on descent and marriage
- Howard says that kinship means “social relation based on cultural recognition by descent and marriage .