Kindship exercise. Mapping Kinship Relationships. Social Essay

Mapping Kinship Based on Kenneth Guest’s (2015) “Mapping Kinship Relationships: Tracing Your Family Tree” from Cultural Anthropology Fieldwork Journal (Norton)
 Kinship can be constructed on the basis of biology, marriage, necessity, and/or choice. Each culture has its own preferred strategies for building kinship and identifying relatives. These strategies change over time—sometimes gradually and sometimes more quickly—but societies continue to have widely shared ideals for family life. In this exercise, you will trace your own family tree. In this exercise, you will reflect on how kinship relationships have been constructed in your family. You can use your existing knowledge, interview family members, look through family records and other documents, search public records, and use a growing number of online tools, such as genealogy websites, to gather the information you need to complete this fieldwork exercise. The kinship chart shown above is of a typical “nuclear family.” You can consider how closely your own family fits this pattern and why it might not fit it at all. Using the symbols above, you can create a kinship diagram that other anthropologists will be able to read. Your tree begins with a central character— you! You are referred to as “ego” and serve as the starting point for tracing kinship relationships. INSTRUCTIONS 1. Create a kinship diagram of your family using all the information you are able to access. Like the model provided, your tree should include at least two generations (more are welcome!). Label each person using the symbols provided above, genealogical categories (e.g. aunt, uncle, cousin) and, if you wish, the kinship terms used in your culture (e.g., in Turkish, there are special terms for older brother [abi] and older sister [abla]). 2. Families are full of stories, interesting people, uneven power dynamics, and even hidden mysteries. Your family tree may reflect educational patterns, geographic relocations, and inheritance flows. What patterns does your family tree reveal? What circumstances have shaped it? (oneto-two paragraphs) 3. The processes of preserving and cutting off or just “forgetting” kinship relations is related to broad range of circumstances. Some branches of your family tree may be vibrant, while others might be missing altogether. Has someone been cultivating and/or pruning your family tree? Why might this be? (one-to-two paragraphs)