Program 17: Lesson 15 - Kinship and Descent, pt.2

After Viewing & Study Activities

Maybe you want to see it again. And maybe you want to pay attention, not to all the terms and concepts, but also to what's going on on the screen. Because there was a lot of action there that reveals the character of the people and the importance they place on kinship and descent and their reliance upon their relatives.

There are lot of terminology, things in that Lesson, and the only way to know if you understand them is to try the Study Activities in your Study Guide. Take those tests, and write the answers down on another piece of paper so you can come back and take the test again. Especially if you got several things wrong, you want to look at what you got wrong, and study again.

There's a lot of people that we saw on the video and we looked at a number of societies from here and there, especially from the Kypseli in Greece, the Yanomamo and the Hopi and the Navajo.

But, I hope you really enjoyed meeting for the first time the instructor who wrote our Textbook, Dr. William Haviland, and got to enjoy his personality and understood what he said about the importance of studying kinship.

We also learned some of the concepts that we're reminded of in our Study Guide and Textbook.

Like, the concept of "Eskimo terminology." ¨Terminology, the terms you use to call your relatives with. Eskimo, because, well, the Eskimos use it, but so do we.

Eskimo kinship terminology is the one we often take for granted. Where you call the relatives on your own generation who aren't your brother and sister, by a single term, "cousin." And you use the terms, "aunt" and "uncle," for your mother's and your father's brothers and sisters, kind of lumping together a whole category of people.

We have a couple of other terminology systems, and you really have to study the diagrams to understand how they work.

Basically, the "Omaha kinship terminology system" is very different. And it's used by a number of other people around the world besides the Omaha. It's based on "patrilineal descent."

You call some of your cousins, "brother" and "sister." And you call other cousins by other kinship terms. In the same way, you call some of your aunts and uncles, "mother" and "father." It denotes which relatives are closest to you in the patrilineal kinship system.

Another concept we looked at was that of "Crow kinship terminology." And this is the terminology system used by the Hopi, by the Navajo and by other people who have a strong "matrilineal" kinship system.

Again, you call some of your cousins, "brother and sister." And you call some of your aunts and uncles, "mother and father." And this ties together those relatives that you feel strongest about: Those members of your own "matrilineal" system.

It's not important that you be able to draw a diagram and denote the kinship term for each person in the diagram. But it is important that you understand which is "matrilineally" focussed and which is "patrilineal."

And that's something that you may need to develop a system of "flash cards," and take some quizzes on to straighten out in your own mind.

There is another terminology system, the "Iroquois system." We won't mention that here, but it's in your Study Guide and your Textbook, and you need to take a look at it.

Let's also look at some of the Suggested Activities for this Lesson in the next part.