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Kinship

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Kinship is a culture’s way of establishing and recognizing the relationships between a family or group of people. It can define their roles, obligations, interactions between each other, and the rights among the group. According to Chegg.com, “Kinship and family ties may be defined through genetic relationships, adoption, or other ritualized behavior such as marriage and household economies. Kinship systems range in size from a single, nuclear-family to tribal or intertribal relationships” (2014). There are many different varieties of kinship and how they are addressed within many cultures. There are six different types of kinship in anthropology (Schwimmer, 2001). The two cultures being addressed in this essay are the Crow kinship and the Iroquois kinship.

The Crow, also called the Absaroka or Apsaalooke, are a tribe of Native Americans who historically lived in the Yellowstone river valley. Women within these tribes have a highly significant role (Crystallinks.com, 2012). The Crow people are of a matrilineal line. They are a matriarchal tribe and in marriage the husbands moving in with the wife’s family. Following the matrilineal line, Crow kinship further addresses the women within the family. Relatives in the kinship diagram on the mother’s side have descriptive terms whereas the father’s side has more classificatory terms. A relatively distinctive note in the Crow kinship that is different from other kinship disgrams is that they do not distinguish between generations (Schwimmer, 2001). According to Brian Schwimmer in Systematic Kinship Terminologies, the Crow Kinship

“Employs a bifurcate merging pattern but applies a skewing rule to lump relatives within his father's matrilineage. Thus father's sister's son gets the same term as father and father's sister's daughter, the same term as father's sister. The relatives of the subject's father's

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