About
The journal Kinship offers a scholarly site for research publications dedicated to the ethnography and theory of kinship and covers current systematic efforts using new data or new ideas, including the use of these data and ideas to revisit and rework earlier assumptions in the field. It covers a wide range of kinship-based cross-cultural practices ranging from incest to marriage, to avoidances, to kin terms, to succession, to contemporary forms of motherhood, fatherhood, and family, and more. The journal Kinship, as the design of the front cover seeks to convey, is dedicated to the study of kinship in all of its facets, is international in scope, and will publish original work in English, though publications in other languages will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2025
Articles
- CRITIQUE OF PROFESSOR ISABELLE CLARK-DECÈS’S DENIAL THAT DRAVIDIAN KINSHIP SYSTEMS IN INDIA FORM WELL-DEFINED CROSS-COUSIN MARRIAGE SYSTEMS
Professor Dr. Clark-Decès’s research on Tamil kinship and marriage challenges Dumont’s alliance theory and Lévi-Strauss’s idea of marriage as reciprocal exchange between distinct social groups. Clark-Decès argues that there is nothing systematic or stable about the kin and affine distinction or the principle of opposition in the Tamil kinship and that the general vocabulary for kinship in the Tamil language shows the Tamil kinship to be about ownership rights rather than reciprocity, and that the Tamil marriage pragmatics portray inherent entitlement and violence rather than a spirit of equality and mutuality. Further, that the so-called cross-cousin marriage rule is not really indiscriminate but is marred by elitism based on side, seniority, rank and hierarchy, that the uncle-niece marriage is the most common and most favored marriage is said to provide the ultimate evidence that Tamil kinship is woman-centered, woman-powered and where females prevail and men willingly surrender. For all of these reasons and more, Clark-Decès insists that the structural approach taken in the past, showcasing reciprocal alliance as the cornerstone of Dravidian kinship, must be discarded.
The responder, Ruth Vaz, is a Tamil woman and she presents her view on the kinship, marriage and social organization of her own people, the Kallar of Thanjavur district in Tamil Nadu State of south India. She provides ample data affirming the fundamentality of the principle of opposition in Dravidian kinship and of the cross-cousin marriage alliance among her people. She challenges Clark-Decès’ exegeses of the meaning of kinship in Tamil and provides a corrective by offering her own exegeses of the word for kinship in Tamil. She exposes the distortions in the professor’s portrayal of the Tamil Mother’s Brother and rejects the heavily biased and misleading conclusions made by Prof Dr. Clark-Decès. The responder also provides additional data from the Hill Madia kinship system of the central Dravidian variety to show how every major claim made by the professor is misguided by unreasonable biases.
- RETHINKING XINGUANO KINSHIP: ELEMENTS FOR COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF A MULTIETHNIC NETWORK
The existence of kinship relationships across the entire Upper Xingu has been recognized as a key element of interethnic relations in this region since the time of the expedi-tions by Karl von den Steinen, in this region. The pattern of long-term repetition of marriages has seemingly contributed to the development of structurally very similar terminological systems among the Upper Xingu indigenous peoples (distinguishing them from their other neighbors) and to the generalization among them of a “relatives” condition. Although almost all monographs on the region have devoted some space to kinship, in general, and forms of marriage, in particular, there are few detailed studies on the subject, and available genealogical data are even more scarce. The objective of this article is to resume the discussion on the role of marriages in the production of Upper Xingu sociality based on the analysis of a genealogical network document-ed among the Kalapalo, one of the Carib-speaking peoples of the Upper Xingu. By implementing the computational tools, PUCK and Pajek, the goal is to describe this network by focusing on the types of marriage circuits that occur and their relative frequencies. This descriptive exercise has two specific objectives: 1) study how the results relate to already proposed models on Xinguano kinship and 2) examine the marriage circuits formed by interethnic alliances in or-der to better understand their actual frequency and question the extent to which these circuits intercorrelate. Thus, I expect to develop a model of this network according to its intrinsic proper-ties and to provide a more concrete view of the marriage dynamics in the Upper Xingu based on the Kalapalo case.