Week 10 — What Does a Marriage Join? Couples, Residence, and Exchange — Traditional alternative (no AI)

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

Assignment 9 of the term — work four short problems from the kinship set and the market, read them as an anthropologist, and explain marriage exchanges and residence to someone who has them mixed up.

This week you met marriage defined across societies, exogamy and endogamy, bridewealth, bride service, and dowry, monogamy and polygamy, five residence rules, descent versus residence, and household forms. 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 9's kinship set and descent rules, on Week 6's forms of exchange and the obligations of the gift, and on Week 3's 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. Kin-type strings read outward from ego, so FZH is father's sister's husband. The running fieldwork site is an illustrative, unnamed weekly neighborhood farmers' market of 24 stalls. From the set and the market:

• in the parents' generation of the kinship set, ego's father F, his brother FB and sister FZ, and ego's mother M, her brother MB and sister MZ, are each married (FBW, FZH, MBW, MZH, and F and M to each other), so the generation holds 10 positions;
• if the society were patrilineal, F would belong to ego's patrilineage of 8 people (FF, F, FB, FZ, ego, B, Z, and FBS), and M would belong to her own father's (MF's) patrilineage;
• at the family-run stall, the founding grower and her late husband are the first-generation couple; their son and his wife moved onto the family farm after they married, and their daughter and her husband live in town;
• on Visit 1, observers coded 50 exchanges at the market, and 8 of them were generalized reciprocity.

A friend sees your notes and says, "Bridewealth is basically buying a wife, and every married couple moves in with the husband's family 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, the parents' generation holds 10 positions, and every position belongs to a married couple of 2 people. How many married couples are in the parents' generation?
2. At the running fieldwork site, an illustrative farmers' market, the family-run stall has 1 married couple in the first generation and 2 married couples in the second generation. How many married couples does the stall family hold across those two generations?
3. At the illustrative market's family-run stall, 1 of the 2 second-generation couples moved onto the family farm after they married, which is patrilocal in the model's terms. What percent of the 2 second-generation couples are patrilocal?
4. On Visit 1 to the illustrative market, observers coded 50 exchanges, and 8 of them were generalized reciprocity, the kind of giving with no count kept that is usual among close kin. What percent of the 50 coded exchanges were generalized reciprocity?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: describe the parents' generation with kin-type strings, naming the five couples (F and M, FB and FBW, FZ and FZH, MB and MBW, MZ and MZH) and the four in-married spouses (FBW, FZH, MBW, MZH), and explain why, if the society were patrilineal, the marriage of F and M joins two patrilineages, as a rule of lineage exogamy would require.
• Problem 2: describe the three couples by roles, never names, name the son's wife and the daughter's husband as affinal kin to the founding grower, and explain why the son's wife living on her husband's family's farm does not change the kind of tie she has to the founding grower.
• Problem 3: name the son's couple as patrilocal and the daughter's couple as neolocal in the model's terms, explain why one couple's move is not proof of a family rule, and say where ego's parents in the kinship set would live under patrilocal residence and under matrilocal residence.
• Problem 4: explain how a marriage exchange carries the gift's three obligations (to give, to receive, and to give back) and so binds two families, and state who gives and who receives in bridewealth and in dowry.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your friend thinks bridewealth is buying a wife and that every couple moves in with the husband's family. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains bridewealth as goods from the groom's kin to the bride's kin that recognize a transfer of rights and bind two families; names one residence rule other than patrilocal, such as the daughter's neolocal household at the stall; and names one limit, such as that the kinship set is a classroom model and the stall notes come from one illustrative family. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coworker who says that "a household and a family are the same thing, so roommates do not count as a household." Model answer: "A household is the people who share a home and daily life, such as meals, space, and costs, whether or not they are related. Four roommates who split the rent and the groceries are a household, even though none of them is family by birth or marriage. Family and household answer two different questions: who you are related to, and who you live with. One caveat: one apartment does not tell you how households work everywhere."

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, explaining bridewealth as recognizing a transfer of rights and binding two families, naming one residence rule other than patrilocal, and naming 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 marriage custom 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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