Week 9 Discussion — Who Counts as Kin? — Traditional alternative (no AI)

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

Hook

Think about the people you would invite to a family birthday party, and who might be hurt if you left them off the list. 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.

Your discussion question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: At the running fieldwork site, an illustrative weekly farmers' market of 24 stalls, three generations work the family-run stall, and the founding grower says the farm "came from my husband's side". Some would say that remark, with the son's family now on the farm, is enough to read the stall family as following a patrilineal pattern, at least for land. Others would say one remark about one farm is a clue about how land passed, not a descent rule, and that many families trace kin through both parents while passing property down one side for other reasons. Which reading do you find more convincing, and why? Use descent (patrilineal, matrilineal, or bilateral) and draw the stall with roles, not names, and say what you would need to observe or ask to settle it.

Option B: Many teams, clubs, and workplaces call their members "family". Some argue such a group really is kin in the anthropological sense, because kinship is cultural, and fictive and chosen kin carry real duties without birth or marriage. Others argue the word stretches too far, because a team's ties can end the day someone leaves, carry no rights across generations, and can be used to ask people for more than the group gives back. Using one group you know (a team, a club, a workplace, a congregation, a friend group), where do you land? Use fictive or chosen kin and consanguineal or affinal kin, and say what each side gets right.

There is no single right answer. Both questions are open, because who counts as family is decided by people, not read off a chart. Pick the option you actually care about, and tell us your reasoning.

Expectations

Activity format: one initial post followed by two substantive peer replies. Plan on about 45 minutes across the two deadlines; your instructor sets both due dates in Canvas.

Working on your own: this version of the discussion is written entirely from your own reasoning, in your own words.

Your initial post — by the first due date (early in the module week):

• Say which option you chose.
• For Option A, say whether the founding grower's remark is enough to read the stall family as patrilineal, describing the stall by roles; for Option B, say whether a group you know that calls itself family is kin in the anthropological sense.
• Use descent terms, or fictive, chosen, consanguineal, and affinal kin, correctly.
• Give your judgment, with a reason, and give the other reading its strongest case.
• Length: roughly 150–250 words if written. You may instead record your post as audio or video (about two minutes) and attach a transcript; both forms are scored by the same rubric.

Your replies — by the second due date (the end of the module week):

• Reply substantively to at least two classmates.
• A substantive reply does more than agree: point out where a classmate treated a clue as a rule or read matrilineal as matriarchal, offer the strongest case for the reading they did not take, or name the evidence that would settle their case. "Nice point!" on its own does not count.

What a strong post looks like:

I chose Option B. My campus running club calls itself a family, and members drive each other to races and check in when someone is injured. Those duties are real, so I read the club as chosen kin, people who choose to be family to one another. The other side has a point, though. When a senior graduates, most of those ties fade, and nobody inherits anything, which is unlike consanguineal or affinal kin. I land in the middle: the club works like kin while you belong to it. I would still want to ask former members whether the ties lasted after they left.

Notice how it names people by their roles, uses the week's terms precisely, gives the other reading its due, and says what it would still check. That is the bar.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The three criteria below look at your initial post and your peer replies.

Post early if you can — the best threads happen when people have time to reply before the second due date.

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