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Week 9 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 9 — Who Belongs to Ego's Group? Reading the Kinship Set — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Cultural Anthropology Free sample edition
Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 8 of the term — work four short problems from the kinship set and the market's family-run stall, read them as an anthropologist, and explain descent to someone who has it mixed up.

This week you met kinship as cultural, consanguineal and affinal kin, kinship diagrams and kin-type strings, patrilineal, matrilineal, and bilateral descent, lineage and clan, three kinship terminology types, and chosen and fictive kin. In this assignment you work four short problems, interpret each one, and explain this week's ideas to someone who has them mixed up. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Ethnography Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles. It builds on Week 3's genealogical method and its rule to record roles, never names.

The task

The kinship set is a three-generation diagram centred on ego, constructed for this course and describing no real family. In words: ego's four grandparents (FF, FM, MF, MM); ego's father F, his brother FB and sister FZ, each married (FBW, FZH); ego's mother M, her brother MB and sister MZ, each married (MBW, MZH); and ego, ego's brother B and sister Z, and four cousins, FBS, FZD, MBD, and MZS. Kin-type strings read outward from ego, so FZD is father's sister's daughter. From the set and the running fieldwork site, an illustrative, unnamed weekly neighborhood farmers' market of 24 stalls (illustrative):

  • if the society were patrilineal, ego's patrilineage would be FF, F, FB, FZ, ego, B, Z, and FBS, 8 people; if it were matrilineal, ego's matrilineage would be MM, M, MB, MZ, ego, B, Z, and MZS, 8 people;
  • FBS and MZS are parallel cousins, and FZD and MBD are cross cousins;
  • the family-run stall has three generations: the founding grower and her late husband, whose family's farm the stall sells from; their son and his wife, and their daughter and her husband; and the son's daughter and the daughter's son. The founding grower says the farm "came from my husband's side".

A friend sees your notes and says, "Matrilineal means women are in charge, and family is only blood anyway." Your job is to answer the way an anthropologist would, starting from a few plain numbers.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

  1. In the illustrative kinship set, ego's diagram holds 4 grandparents, 10 positions in the parents' generation, and 7 positions in ego's generation. How many positions does the kinship set hold in all?
  2. In the illustrative kinship set, ego's patrilineage holds 8 people and ego's matrilineage holds 8 people, and 3 people (ego, B, and Z) belong to both lists. How many people belong to either list?
  3. In the illustrative kinship set, ego has 4 cousins, and 2 of them (FBS and MZS) are parallel cousins. What percent of ego's cousins are parallel cousins?
  4. At the running fieldwork site, an illustrative farmers' market, the family-run stall has 8 roles across 3 generations, and 2 of those roles are in-laws (the son's wife and the daughter's husband). What percent of the stall's roles are in-laws?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

  • Problem 1: describe the set in words, generation by generation, using kin-type strings, and name the four in-married spouses in the parents' generation (FBW, FZH, MBW, MZH) as ego's affinal kin, related by marriage rather than by birth.
  • Problem 2: explain why FZD is outside ego's patrilineage although FZ is inside it, and why MBD is outside ego's matrilineage although MB is inside it, using who passes membership on, and say why patrilineal descent does not shut daughters out of the lineage.
  • Problem 3: name which terminology type calls parallel cousins brother or sister and cross cousins by a separate term (bifurcate merging), and say how many of ego's six relatives in ego's generation are called brother or sister under lineal terminology and under generational terminology.
  • Problem 4: describe the stall as a three-generation diagram in words with roles, never names, and explain why the founding grower's remark that the farm came from her husband's side is a clue about how land passed, not proof of a descent rule.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your friend thinks matrilineal means women are in charge and that family is only blood. Write a 3–5 sentence message that tells matrilineal descent from rule by women, using the Trobriand Islanders of the 1910s, among whom a man's heir was his sister's son; explains that kinship is cultural, with one example of fictive or chosen kin; and names one limit, such as that the kinship set is a classroom model and the stall notes come from one illustrative visit. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a cousin who says that in an illustrative family business "the oldest son always inherits, so sons are the only real members of the family." Model answer: "In that business the shop passes to sons, which is how ownership moves, but daughters are still family members, and in a patrilineal pattern they belong to their father's group for life; they do not pass that membership to their own children. Who inherits the shop and who counts as family are two different questions. One caveat: one family's habit about a shop does not tell you the rule a whole society follows."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the figures in the problems without guessing which figures or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

  • the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
  • your message to the friend, telling matrilineal descent from rule by women with the Trobriand case of the 1910s and explaining that kinship is cultural, with one limit; and
  • a one-line restatement of the figures you used, so your answers are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled kinship diagram described in words with a short explanation. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Describe the kinship set and the market only as the course describes them, name people only by role, and do not borrow a custom, a kin term, or a detail about any real people from another source without citing it. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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