The kinship network and social change.

1. One of the most important areas of social science is the study of the family as the basic social unit for reproduction, residence and economic life in nearly all societies. But family structures and family relationships (kinship) do have different forms in different parts of the world. In this lecture I will discuss some of the main patterns.

2. The basis of the family is biological:

(i) women produce children,

(ii) to do so they have to have sex with men。

(iii) usually brothers and sisters/parents and children do not mate with each other, so the regulation of sex means establishing links (marriage) with other groups. There are a few unusual cases in which brothers and sisters did mate with each, notably Egypt under Greek and Roman rule from about 300 BC to 70AD – but it is unusual. (The usual explanation is that children who grow up together find each other boring and look for other partners.)

(iv) while children are young they are dependent, and it is the mother who does most of the work of rearing them;

(v) because men are larger and stronger than women, in most historical societies they have tended to control women's labor and reproduction.

3. However, in addition to these biological factors, there are also problems related to property and how to pass it down between the generations. There are three basic variations:

(i) Most of the property is controlled by men and is passed down from father to son: women marry men in other groups and so do not inherit property from their fathers. The result is "patrilineal" systems in which closely related men (fathers, sons, brothers) live together with their wives and children. Where these men have a common ancestor they are sometimes called a "lineage". This kind of system is found in China, the middle east and many parts of Africa. It is particularly found among pastoral societies where men do most of the work of raising the large animals, which involves moving around. This is difficult for women looking after children. Most pastoral societies are patrilineal becaue men tend to leave their livestock to their brothers or sons.

(ii) The property is divided more evenly between men and women on the death of their parents, so that women control some property of their own. These are called "bilateral" or "cognatic" kinship systems, and are typical of Europe, though they are also found in some parts of South Asia and Africa. Lineages do not develop, as people have many ancestors, and so the social structure is based on nuclear families related through ties of marriage.

(iii) In a few societies in West and Central Africa and parts of South Asia, property was traditionally passed on through mother-child links, even though it is still controlled by men. This means that usually a man inherits property from his brother mother's brother rather than his father -- whose property will go to his own sister's sons. This kind of system is usually called "matrilineal". There are other problems -- i.e. should women live with their brothers or husbands, and should children live with their fathers or their mothers' brothers? Often residential structures are unstable and both women and children move around between houses frequently. Many of these systems have broken down into cognatic systems as parents and children have increasingly lived together, and as fathers have passed on their property to their own children. A good example are the Nyar of southern India, among whom brothers and sisters used to live together: the Nyar were a military caste, so many of the young men moved backwards and forwards on military service. The result was that women underwent a symbolic marriage ceremony when young, and then had children by lovers. Under these circumstances matrilineal kinship worked quite well, but the system broke down when the military structure changed. Another good example are the Ashanti of Ghana, where, even today in the rural areas brothers and sisters live together, with a man’s wives coming to stay with him in rotation. Children inherit houses and land from their mother’s brothers. But nearer the towns, it has long been more common for men and their wives to live together permanently with their children.

4. In the 19th century it was believed (by Morgan, Engels and others) that kinship systems had developed through similar stages in different parts of the world, from matrilineal to patrilineal and cognatic systems, and from “primitive promiscuity” with no proper marriage arrangements, to polygamy and then monogamy. Naturally the 19th century thinkers assumed that European and American kinship patterns were the most advanced! This is for the most part conjecture: it is supported by only some of the evidence from certain parts of the world. It is probably true that in early hominid society, as among chimpanzees, mother-children links were strong and mating may not have given rise to strong male-female relationships. It is also true that among some groups (such as the Nyar) matrilineal kinship has given way to other forms. But otherwise there seem to be few links between type of kinship organisation and level of social development. The Nyar case, and many others, show that kinship institutions can change quite rapidly when the economic and political conditions are right, and may have done so many times throughout history. Simple hunter-gatherer societies like the Southern African Bushmen and Eskimos have kinship systems rather like those of the modern English or Americans. Kinship systems are obviously linked to the economy, and to labor and property relations.

5. The British anthropologist, Jack Goody, has, however, suggested that there is a broad difference between the kinship systems of Africa and Eurasia, which can be linked to the population density and the type of agriculture. (He carried out this work using the ethnographic survey of societies compiled by Murdock, in which the social characteristics of a large number of different societies were entered into a computer, to see which of the social characteristics seemed to be linked to each other. There are a lot of problems with using this technique, for instance in defining what a “society” is, and the problem that some societies, like China, are much larger than others! However his results are still an interesting basis for future research.) In Africa, Goody argues, the main problem is typically that of mobilising labour and so African systems often have the following features:

(i) early marriage for women

(ii) polygyny so that nearly all the women are married nearly all the time while they can produce children

(iii) a tolerant attitude to premarital sex

(iv) various forms of widow inheritance

(v) high rates of divorce (often because the marriage does not produce children) followed by remarriage. Women who cannot produce children therefore often have a succession of husbands.

6. In Europe and Asia on the other hand land is more valuable, and rights over land are often passed on through women. The problem is not one of labour but of access to land, and making sure land is passed on to suitable people. In these areas the marriage systems look rather different from those in Africa with

(i) rather later marriage for women,

(ii) monogamy (one wife) rather than polygamy

(iii) restrictions on sex before marriage and restrictions on the remarriage of widows

(v) lower rates of divorce and in some cases (Catholic countries in Europe) no divorce is permitted at all.

7. In both cases, marriage often involves transfers of property. In Africa, when a man marries a women, his kin group often make large payments, in money or livestock, to the kin group of the wife, in return for her labour and reproductive services. This is usually called bridewealth. Notice that in matrilineal societies, all that the husband gets is sexual and some of his wife’s labour services -- when she is living with him. Marriage payments in matrilineal societies tend to be rather low! In Europe and Asia on the other hand, a different system has been historically important: the women is often given property by her parents as her share of the inheritance, which is put together with the property of her husband to start a new economic unit. This is usually called a dowry system, and is more of a system of inheritance, than payment for a husband by the bride’s family. Payments of both kinds may of course go up or down depending on the economic conditions. An interesting question is what has happened to marriage payments in the rural areas of China, with the economic reforms of the 1980s!

8. In situations of social change, kinship takes on new functions. I can give three examples:

(i) my own work Yoruba traders from Nigeria working in Ghana in West Africa during the early 20th century, when the Ghana economy was growing because of cocoa. They went to Ghana first as labourers, and having found that there were trading opportunities, they went back there with cloth from Nigeria to sell. They used junior relatives to transport the cloth and help sell it, and when these relatives got married, they paid for the marriage expenses and set them up as independent traders. The new traders in turn used their own junior relatives until by the late 1960s the Nigerians controlled a large part of the Ghanaian retail trade. By this time the Ghanaian economy was in decline, and the Ghana government ordered all the African aliens to leave the country. The Yoruba, mainly because they were the best organised of the alien groups, were the most important group to leave, and about 250,000 people left.

(ii) the example of the Chinese from Hong Kong in Britain and America, who have used lineage relations to set up businesses, especially in the restaurant trade. Like the Yoruba these groups also used family links to establish their businesses. Many of them have now moved to Europe, and North America, and some of them are starting to think about investments in China when Hong Kong rejoins China in 1997.

(iii) the Italian Mafia in America who have used marriage links between families to organise criminal activities in most of the major cities -- see the film "The Godfather" and American magazines about the "five families" in New York. The USA labour market is interesting in that it has always relied on large numbers of migrants. However, some of these migrants, like the Jews, Italians, and Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Koreans) have been very successful economically while others (black Americans from the southern states, Hispanics from Latin America) have not. One of the most interesting cases is that of the Italians. Most of the migrants came from the poorer areas of southern Italy, including Sicily, and many of them were involved with the Mafia, a loose-knit alliance of families providing the basis of cooperation, capital accumulation and trust. Many of the migrants were involved in quite legal occupations -- restaurants, shops selling Italian food, etc. -- but others were involved in the illegal occupations of gambling, prostitution, money lending, and protection rackets. In the 1920s the Mafiosi made a lot of money out of selling alcohol at a time when it was banned (the period of "Prohibition"), and they have since become involved in the trade in drugs. The Mafia families have also become involved in legal as well as illegal businesses, and many of the families are no longer involved in the illegal businesses at all, even though many of them were acquired with money obtained illegally. (Many of the early gangsters were in fact Jewish, but nearly all the Jewish families moved into other occupations quite early.) In some Italian-American families, he illegal activities still continue, and because the families can bribe police, lawyers and politicians, as well as using violence to prevent anybody giving evidence against them in court, it is very difficult to stop them.

5. A final question is why some ethnic groups are so successful in business while others are not. This is a very difficult question but some possible factors are:

(a) whether the migrants have skills for which they can find a market -- e.g. tailoring in the case of the Jews, restaurants in the case of the Chinese, Italians and Asians

(b) whether using these skills allows capital accumulation to take place, to form the basis of trust -- you generally trust people you think will be able to repay you, and when all your relatives are poor it is difficult to trust anybody!

(c) whether there are family structures which will allow the development of large groups of relatives which cooperate in work, exchanging information and in capital accumulation

(d) Once groups are established in particular sectors of the labour market, they gain a competitive advantage which makes it difficult for other groups to break in, unless the nature of the labour market changes or the state breaks up their monopoly -- for instance, by sending particular groups of immigrants home.

9. What this discussion shows is that questions about the family and about family links in the modern world are linked to questions about ethnicity and the relationships between ethnic groups. There are two questions here:

(i) Why do some ethnic groups maintain a strong ethnic identity, or sense of being different, while others do not?

(ii) Why do outsiders see an ethnic group as having a particular kind of identity.

These are very complex questions and the answers differ in different cases within the same society. In the US for instance, the situations of the Blacks and the Chinese or Italians are quite different for historical, cultural, and present-day economic and political reasons.

Part of the reasons may lie in strong family links, as with the Chinese or Italians discussed above. But part of the reasons, as in the case of the Blacks, may also be the discrimination and exclusion against members of the group by the rest of society. The Chinese and Japanese at various periods in the US also suffered from this discrimination, though this may now be less of a problem for these groups than it is for the Blacks because of their perceived economic success. Economically the Blacks are still in a relatively weak position as a group, though individuals have been very successful. Poverty, homelessness and unemployment in the US are in many cities largely Black problems.