Week 9 — Kinship and Descent

Welcome to your Week 9 Start Here page.

Why this matters

A nursing student who asks who counts as family and a pre-law student reading an inheritance case both meet this week's question: who belongs, and who decides?

In plain language

Every family has to answer a question that sounds simple: who counts as one of us? Anthropologists call the answer kinship (the ties a society recognizes as family). This week you will learn to draw those ties on paper and name each relative in a short code. You will see how a descent rule (a rule that places a person in a group through a parent) changes who belongs to your group. You will also see how the words people use for cousins differ from one language to another, and why a godparent or a teammate can count as family too.

• Already covered: Weeks 1 to 8 gave you the perspective, culture, fieldwork, language, making a living, exchange, and governing.
• This week: kinship as cultural, kinship diagrams, descent, and cousin terms.
• How they connect: Week 3's genealogical method collects the ties you now draw.
• Where we're going next: Week 10, Marriage, Family, and Households.

Focus

Who counts as family, and how does a descent rule decide who belongs?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• [ ] tell kin by birth, by marriage, and by choice apart
• [ ] read and write kin-type strings such as FZD
• [ ] find a patrilineage and a matrilineage and tell matrilineal from matriarchal
• [ ] sort parallel and cross cousins under three terminology types

To-do

Plan your week

1. Read Chapter 9 (about 35 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
3. Do the Ethnography Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: read FZD aloud and say whose line she belongs to.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor if a step snags.

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