Kinship is the most basic principle of organizing individuals into social groups, roles, and categories. Some form of organization based on parentage and marriage is present in every human society. In nonindustrial societies kinship units normally have a wide array of functions. They often serve as basic units of production, political representation, and even as religious bodies for the worship of spiritual beings. Kinship networks in modern industrial societies are often less important because the roles that kin relationships served have been partly replaced by state organized social services, state legal systems, insurance, and the market economy. This exercise is about you constructing an ego centered kinship diagram with you as the ego. You need to use the basic symbols shown to the right that anthropologists use to construct kinship diagrams. Your family graph should extend at least 3 generations back and as many forward as currently exist (i.e. your kids or those of other family members). You can create this graph on the computer or by hand. If the latter, it might take a draft copy first and then a clean final version and try to write small since the diagram might take a large sheet of paper or several sheets. By each symbol please list a given name (1st name) and the surname (last name; i.e., John Doe). After the chart is finished you need to provide a narrative answer to the following questions: (1) How is kinship in your family organized? Is it patrilineal, matrilineal, bilateral or some other pattern as discussed in the textbook? (2) How significant is kinship in your daily life? Do you depend on relatives often or hardly at all? What are the reasons/purposes that you depend on kin? (3) If you aren’t depending on your kinship network all that much, then who do you depend on? And (4) Does kinship play a role in where you have moved to live and will it play a role in the future?
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