Wykad 6

Last time we talked about:

Claude Levi-Strausss structuralism: 1. 2. 3. 4. Deep structures of culture; human thought structured into contrastive pairs Kinship system the single most important social institution Incest Taboo and exchange of women Kinship and descent: exogamy and endogamy, the kinship atom, the avunculate

Ways of reckoning descent: patrilinear, matrilinear, cognatic Kinship and inheritance: primogeniture, ultimogeniture

Has kinship survived in modern societies?

Max Weber (1919): industrialization weakens kinship bonds leading to the growth of anonymous bureaucratic organization Traditional societies Kin-based organization Loyalty and solidarity to specific persons obliged to help each other out but it is appropriate to treat different kin differently status is ascribed and connected with ones kinship particularistic treatment

Modern societies Bureaucratic organization Loyalty to the law, contractual obligations follow rules and principles that regulate treatment of others status is achieved: stress on individual achievement universalistic principles: equal

Kinship has been replaced by metaphoric kinship ideologies

Nationalism presents the nation as a metaphoric kinship group. Like lineage ideologies, it is based on a contrast us vs. them and although internally egalitarian and universalistic, it favors particularism in relation to other nations Nation may serve as a de facto lineage in judicial context, if a citizen dies with no personal heirs, the state inherits the estate

Immagined communities

Although we have become: citizens, taxpayers wageworkers TV audiences

Kin-based forms of organization continue to be important

Poland, 23 July 5 August 2012 Nepotism scandal in Poland discovered

After the dismissal of the Minister of Agriculture Marek Sawicki of the Polish Peasant Party (PSL), the political scandal in Poland still goes on jobs were given to supporters, relatives and friends of high-ranking Polish politicians.

Conjugal and consanguineal families Conjugal families

Independent nuclear family: a married couple with children Polygamous families: as aggregates of nuclear families

Polygamous family
1. polygynous families: multiple wives with a single husband; popular in societies that support themselves by growing crops and where women do the bulk of the farmwork 2. polyandrous families: multiple husbands of a single wife In both cases economic cooperation between husbands and wives

Consanguineal families Consisting of women, their dependent offspring and the womens brothers (see matrilineal
descent)

Married men and women do not live together as members of one household Men commute for sexual activity with their wives Economic cooperation between sisters and brothers Extended families: part conjugal, part consanguineal Popular in agrarian societies before industrialism

 A small nuclear family was a part of a larger extended family with brothers, sisters, and
uncle and aunt, a cousin or two

Extended family
Living on the same farm (even if in separate houses) they cooperated on a day-to-day basis in economic activities with close relatives necessary for economic survival (Maine coast communities: farming and

Emergence of the nuclear family

4th century A.S.: the Roman Catholic Church prohibited close marriages; discouraged adoption; condemned polygyny, concubinage, and divorce. This prohibition strengthened the conjugal ties NUCLEAR FAMILY replaced the consanguineal ties but also ensured that large numbers of people would be left with no male heirs (20 % of people have girls only). This facilitated the transfer of private property

Nuclear family The industrial revolution

Migration Isolation from other kin The nuclear family as a refuge from the unfriendly world of contracts, legal consequences, temporary and contingent. The f.

1960s a revival of and reinvention of extended family living The levirate and the sororate
The levirate the wife marries one of the brothers of the dead man it provides security for widow and children the husbands family right to her sexuality and her future children preservation of the status quo

The sororate when a man marries a sister of his dead wife

Serial monogamy and female-headed households

 a form of marriage common in North America: a series of partners in succession women who bear children by men who are not married to them; paternity not established in
50 % cases; fathers fail to live up to their obligations

upon divorce, or separation children more often than not remain with their mothers; within a
year their standard of living drops 73 % whereas the mens increases 42 %

Serial monogamy and female-headed households

Under those conditions, (poor) women seek male support owing to the difficulties of supporting themselves Single mothers disadvantage in the workplace: As stay-at-home moms and wives to their husbands, they perform unpaid work; after separation and divorce they find out that they lack skill, experience and can perform low-paying jobs (plus pay discrimination) Affected by cutbacks in social welfare; their purchasing power is declining

That same search for structure led Lvi-Strauss Myth as the object of interest for anthropologists
Levi-Strauss notes that many different cultures present similar myths, their structure remains the same Myths have the deep structure, that is, the underlying structure which exists in groups

Myth as language
Myth is not only conveyed by language, it also works like language: myths comprise individual mythemes, analogous to individual units of language, morphemes and phonemes. Like morphemes and phonemes, mythemes only take on meaning when combined in particular patterns Myths

Myth and the Hollywood western Will Wright (1975), Sixguns and society
Much of the narrative power of the Western is derived from its structure of binary oppositions. Inside society/Outside society Good/Bad Strong/Weak

Civilization/Wilderness

All myths have a similar sociocultural function within society: to magically resolve its problems and contradictions
mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution (Levi-Strauss 224) To fully understand the social meaning of a myth, it is necessary to analyse not only its binary structure the progression

The classic western: sixteen narrative functions

1. 2. 3. 4. The hero enters a social group. The hero is unknown to the society. The hero is revealed to have an exceptional ability. The society recognizes a difference between themselves and the hero; the hero is given a special status. 5. The society does not completely accept the hero. 6. There is a conflict of interests between the villains and the society. 7. The villains are stronger than the society; the society is weak. 8. There is a strong friendship or respect between the hero and a villain. 9. The villains threaten the society. 10. The hero avoids involvement in the conflict. 11. The villains

Myths are stories we tell ourselves as a culture in order to banish contradictions and make the world understandable and therefore habitable; they attempt to put us at peace with ourselves and our existence. Shane (1953)
the story of a stranger who rides out of the wilderness and helps a group of farmers defeat a powerful rancher, and then rides away again, back into the wilderness in the classic Western the hero and society are (temporarily) aligned in opposition to the villains who remain outside society.