Social Anthropology II: Kinship — Definition, Descent, Terminology, the Matrilineal Puzzle, Joking and Avoidance, Lineage, Clan, Phratry and Moiety, and the Types of Kinship System; and Economic Anthropology — the Malinowskian, Formalist, Substantivist and Marxist Theories, Livelihood and the Division of Labour, Production, Distribution and Consumption, Reciprocity, Gift and Barter, and the Kula, the Potlatch and the Jajmani System

Kinship is the socially recognised set of relationships based on descent (consanguinity, "blood") and marriage (affinity), together with the rights, duties and sentiments attached to them; it is a cultural construction of biology, not biology itself, which is why a society may recognise adoption, deny paternity or treat all of a clan as brothers. Anthropologists distinguish the pater (social father) from the genitor (biological father) and the mater from the genetrix, and chart relations with a standard notation — Ego, F (father), M, B, Z (sister), S, D, H, W, and compounds such as MB (mother's brother), FZ, MBD. G.P. Murdock counted, for any individual, seven or eight kinds of primary relative in the two nuclear families of orientation and procreation, 33 kinds of secondary relative (the primary relatives of primary relatives, such as FF or MB) and 151 kinds of tertiary relative. Descent is the rule that affiliates a person to a group of kin through one or both parents. Unilineal descent traces membership through one sex only: patrilineal (agnatic) through males, as in most of north India, among the Nuer and the Tallensi; matrilineal (uterine) through females, as among the Khasi and Garo of Meghalaya, the Nayar and the Mappila of north Kerala, the Bunt of coastal Karnataka, the people of Lakshadweep, the Trobrianders, the Ashanti and the Hopi. Double descent recognises both, for different purposes — the Yakö of Nigeria (Daryll Forde) held land through patrilineages and movable wealth through matrilineages. Cognatic or bilateral descent traces kinship equally through both parents, producing the ego-centred kindred rather than bounded groups, as in most of Europe and South-East Asia; ambilineal descent lets each person choose either parent's group (the Polynesian ramage). Descent groups nest by scale. A lineage is a unilineal group whose members can trace their actual genealogical links to a known founding ancestor; lineages may be segmentary, dividing and uniting at different levels according to context, as among the Nuer, whose politics Evans-Pritchard (1940) explained by the principle of segmentary opposition. A clan (sib; in India often gotra, kili, killi or bansh) is a larger unilineal group whose members believe in descent from a common ancestor — often a totem, an animal or plant — without being able to trace the links; clans are usually exogamous. A phratry is a group of related clans, usually exogamous, and a moiety is one of two halves into which a whole society is divided by descent — "dual organisation" — as among the Todas (Tartharol and Teivaliol), the Iroquois and many Australian peoples. Descent theory (Radcliffe-Brown; Meyer Fortes, "The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups", 1953) made the corporate descent group the key to social structure, adding Fortes's "complementary filiation" to the other parent's kin; alliance theory (Lévi-Strauss, Louis Dumont, Rodney Needham, Edmund Leach) made the exchange of spouses between groups the key.

Lewis Henry Morgan's Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871), built from questionnaires sent across the world, founded the study of kin terms. Morgan divided terminologies into descriptive, which distinguish lineal from collateral relatives (father from father's brother), and classificatory, which merge them (calling the father's brother "father" and his children "brothers" and "sisters"), and read the classificatory systems as survivals of earlier group marriage — a conclusion no longer held, though the distinction survives. Alfred Kroeber ("Classificatory Systems of Relationship", 1909) replaced Morgan's historical speculation with the logic of the terms: eight principles by which any terminology discriminates relatives — generation, relative age within a generation, lineal versus collateral, the sex of the relative, the sex of the speaker, the sex of the connecting relative, consanguinity versus affinity, and the condition (alive or dead) of the connecting relative — and argued that terms reflect psychology and language rather than social institutions, against Rivers, who tied them to marriage rules. Robert Lowie (1928) classified terminologies by how they treat the parents' generation into four types: generational (father and father's brother and mother's brother all "father"), bifurcate merging (father = father's brother, but mother's brother distinct), bifurcate collateral (all three distinct) and lineal (father distinct; father's brother = mother's brother, "uncle"). G.P. Murdock (1949) named six types by how they treat cousins, which remain the standard. In the Hawaiian system all cousins are called by the same terms as brothers and sisters; in the Eskimo system cousins are distinguished from siblings but not from each other (the English system; bilateral societies with neolocal nuclear families); in the Iroquois system parallel cousins (children of father's brother or mother's sister) are called siblings while cross-cousins (children of father's sister or mother's brother) have separate terms; the Omaha system is Iroquois-like with patrilineal skewing — mother's brother's children are called by the terms for mother's brother and mother, disregarding generation; the Crow system is its matrilineal mirror, with father's sister's children called "father" and "father's sister"; and the Sudanese (descriptive) system gives every kind of cousin a separate term. In India, Louis Dumont ("The Dravidian Kinship Terminology as an Expression of Marriage", 1953) showed that the south Indian terminology is organised by the opposition of kin and affines: cross-cousins are potential spouses and are called by affinal terms, parallel cousins are siblings, and the categories repeat in every generation — terminology and cross-cousin marriage expressing each other. Irawati Karve's Kinship Organization in India (1953) mapped four zones: a northern zone (Indo-Aryan speaking, exogamy of clan and village, no cross-cousin marriage, many descriptive terms), a southern zone (Dravidian, cross-cousin and uncle–niece marriage, classificatory terms), a central zone of mixed practices and an eastern zone (Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman speakers, often with clan organisation and some matriliny).

The matrilineal puzzle is Audrey Richards's name ("Some Types of Family Structure amongst the Central Bantu", in African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, 1950) for the structural problem of matrilineal societies. In almost all of them authority over persons and property is held by men, while descent and succession pass through women: a man's heirs are therefore not his own children, who belong to their mother's group, but his sister's children, over whom he has authority as mother's brother. A matrilineal group must keep control of its women and their children while those women marry men of other groups, so the claims of the husband-father and the brother-uncle compete. Societies resolve the puzzle in different ways, each with its own strains: by avunculocal residence, so that a boy grows up with his mother's brother (the Trobrianders, where boys move to the maternal uncle's village at adolescence, while fathers keep a strong affective tie and give their sons gifts — Malinowski's "Father in Primitive Psychology", 1927); by matrilocal or uxorilocal residence, keeping the women at home and bringing in husbands who remain outsiders (the Khasi, among whom the youngest daughter, the ka khadduh, inherits the ancestral house and property while authority lies with her maternal uncle, and the Garo, among whom the heiress's husband, the nokrom, is ideally her father's sister's son and lives with her parents); by duolocal residence, husbands visiting and never residing, as among the traditional Nayar, where the taravad of a woman, her children and her brothers under the eldest male, the karanavan, was the unit, until the Madras Marumakkathayam Act of 1933 and the Kerala Joint Hindu Family System (Abolition) Act of 1975 dissolved it; and by weakening the marriage bond, as in the high divorce rates of many matrilineal peoples. David Schneider and Kathleen Gough (Matrilineal Kinship, 1961) generalised the analysis, and Leela Dube (Matriliny and Islam, 1969) studied the combination of matriliny with Islamic law in Lakshadweep.

Joking and avoidance relationships are Radcliffe-Brown's analysis ("On Joking Relationships", 1940; "A Further Note on Joking Relationships", 1949). A joking relationship is "a relation between two persons in which one is by custom permitted, and in some instances required, to tease or make fun of the other, who in turn is required to take no offence" — permitted disrespect that may extend to obscenity or horseplay. An avoidance relationship is its opposite: restraint so strict that the two may not speak to, look at or touch each other. Radcliffe-Brown explained both as solutions to the same structural problem — a relation that combines attachment with a potential for conflict, typically between a person and the kin of his or her spouse, or between members of adjacent generations. Where the tension is dangerous and the parties are unequal, avoidance separates them; where they are equals, joking turns hostility into play — "a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism". The classic joking pairs are a man and his wife's younger sisters and younger brothers (in India the jija–sali and jija–sala relation), a woman and her husband's younger brother (devar–bhabhi), and grandparents and grandchildren; the classic avoidance pairs are a man and his mother-in-law (widespread from Australia to the Navaho) and, in north India, a woman and her husband's elder brother (the bhasur or jeth, before whom she veils herself), and a man and his son's wife. Among the Santal and other tribes the joking includes sexual banter that may anticipate the sororate or the levirate, which is why joking between potential spouses is read as expressing marriageability. Fred Eggan, Robert Lowie and later Mary Douglas extended the analysis; the relationships are a good test of how kinship structures emotion as well as rights.

Economic anthropology studies how people in different societies provide for their material needs — how they produce, distribute and consume goods and services — and how these activities are embedded in kinship, politics and religion. It grew out of the encounter of anthropology with economics: Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) set the kula against the "economic man" of the textbooks, and Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935) showed that Trobriand yam gardening was organised by kinship, magic and display, with men growing yams for their sisters' households (urigubu); Raymond Firth's Primitive Economics of the New Zealand Maori (1929) and Primitive Polynesian Economy (1939) applied economic reasoning to Tikopia; and Melville Herskovits's The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples (1940), reissued as Economic Anthropology (1952), gave the field its name. Four theoretical positions divide it. The Malinowskian position is functionalist: economic acts serve needs and social ends, and are understood through the institutions they belong to. The formalist position (Firth, Edward LeClair, Harold Schneider, Scott Cook, Frank Cancian) holds that the concepts of formal economics — scarcity, choice between alternatives, maximisation of value — apply in every society, provided "value" includes prestige and social goods as well as material ones. The substantivist position (Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944, and "The Economy as Instituted Process", 1957; George Dalton; Paul Bohannan; Marshall Sahlins) holds that the economy in the "substantive" sense — the provisioning of material wants — is "embedded" in social institutions in non-market societies, where the market principle does not dominate, and that it is integrated by three modes: reciprocity (between symmetrical groups), redistribution (to and from a centre — chief, temple, state) and market exchange; the formalist–substantivist debate of the 1960s was its defining quarrel. The Marxist position (Claude Meillassoux, Maurice Godelier, Emmanuel Terray; Eric Wolf's kin-ordered, tributary and capitalist modes in Europe and the People without History, 1982) analyses societies by their modes of production — forces and relations of production — the control of labour and surplus, and the articulation of pre-capitalist modes with capitalism. Livelihood and subsistence take four broad forms, each with its division of labour by sex and age. Foragers — hunter-gatherers such as the !Kung San (Richard Lee), the Hadza, the Chenchu, Birhor, Kadar and the Andaman islanders — live in small mobile bands; men mostly hunt and women mostly gather, and Lee's figures showed that gathered plant foods supplied most of the !Kung diet for a few days of work a week, the basis of Sahlins's "original affluent society" (Stone Age Economics, 1972). Pastoralists — the Nuer and Maasai, the Toda with their sacred buffalo dairies, the Gaddi, Bakarwal, Raika and Van Gujjar of India — herd animals, often by transhumance; men manage the herds and women the dairy and the camp, though the Toda dairies were male ritual preserves. Swidden (shifting, slash-and-burn) cultivators — jhum in the north-east, podu in Odisha and Andhra, bewar among the Baiga, and Harold Conklin's Hanunóo of the Philippines (1957) — clear and burn a forest plot, cultivate it for a few years and leave it fallow; men clear and women sow, weed and harvest, which Ester Boserup (Woman's Role in Economic Development, 1970) called the "female farming system", contrasted with the male-dominated plough agriculture of settled cultivators, whose division of labour in India also follows caste. Production involves land, labour, technology and ownership (communal, lineage, household or private); distribution follows the modes of reciprocity, redistribution and market; consumption is shaped by status and ritual as well as need — conspicuous consumption (Thorstein Veblen), prestige feasts and the levelling mechanisms, such as the Mesoamerican cargo system, by which wealth is turned into honour.

Marcel Mauss's The Gift (Essai sur le don, 1925) is the foundation of the anthropology of exchange. From the kula, the potlatch and the Maori concept of the hau — the "spirit of the gift" that wishes to return to its source — he argued that gifts are never free: they create three obligations, to give, to receive and to reciprocate, and form "total prestations" that are at once economic, legal, moral, religious and aesthetic, binding persons and groups. Marshall Sahlins (Stone Age Economics, 1972) arranged reciprocity along a scale of social distance: generalised reciprocity, giving without reckoning or a fixed return, among close kin (sharing within a household); balanced reciprocity, a return of equivalent value within a set time, among more distant kin and friends; and negative reciprocity, the attempt to get something for nothing — haggling, theft, raiding — with strangers and enemies. Barter is the direct exchange of goods for goods without money, bargained for their use value; "silent" or "dumb" barter between groups who avoid meeting face to face (between Mbuti and their Bantu neighbours, or along ancient coasts) is its extreme. Paul Bohannan's study of the Tiv of Nigeria (1955, 1959) showed three ranked spheres of exchange — subsistence goods, prestige goods (brass rods, cattle, fine cloth) and rights in people, above all women in marriage — within which goods were "conveyed" freely but between which "conversion" was morally marked, and he traced the collapse of the spheres when general-purpose money arrived. The kula, which Malinowski described in 1922, links the islands of the Massim, off the eastern tip of New Guinea, in a ring along which two kinds of valuables travel in opposite directions between lifelong partners: soulava, long necklaces of red shell discs, move clockwise, and mwali, white shell armbands, move anticlockwise. Each is received from one partner and in time given to another; it is kept, displayed and named but not used, and the prestige lies in the famous valuables that pass through one's hands. Beside the ceremonial exchange, the voyagers carried on ordinary trade, gimwali, which is barter and is sharply distinguished from kula; the expeditions required magic, canoe-building and political alliance. The potlatch (from Chinook jargon patlatsh, "to give") of the Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka'wakw) and other peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America, recorded by Franz Boas from 1886, was a feast at which a chief, with his kin group's support, distributed — and in the competitive potlatches of the late nineteenth century destroyed — blankets, canoes, fish oil and engraved "coppers" to validate a title, a marriage or a succession, putting rivals under obligation to return more. It was banned by the Canadian government from 1885 to 1951. It has been read as the pursuit of prestige and status (Boas; Ruth Benedict's "megalomaniac" Kwakiutl in Patterns of Culture, 1934), as an ecological mechanism redistributing food between groups with fluctuating resources (Wayne Suttles, Stuart Piddocke, 1965), and as Mauss's agonistic total prestation. The jajmani system of north Indian villages, named and described by William Wiser in The Hindu Jajmani System (1936) from Karimpur in Uttar Pradesh, is a set of hereditary relations between patron families (jajman), usually landholders, and the families of service castes (kamin or praja) — priest, barber, washerman, potter, carpenter, blacksmith, leather-worker, sweeper — who serve them and are paid in shares of the harvest and in gifts at births, marriages and festivals rather than by the piece. Wiser read it as reciprocal, functional interdependence; Thomas Beidelman (A Comparative Analysis of the Jajmani System, 1959) as a feudal system of exploitation by the dominant landholders; Louis Dumont (Homo Hierarchicus, 1966) as the economic expression of a hierarchy of purity and impurity in which even payments had a ritual dimension; and Harold Gould and Pauline Kolenda as a mixture of the two. Similar arrangements are the baluta of Maharashtra and the aya of the south. The system weakened with cash wages, markets and the mobility of service castes in the twentieth century.