Systems of Kinship

What is Kinship?

Kinship refers to ties that are socially recognised, majorly originating from biological relationships. It is the trait of persons recognised by the relationship: either through blood (consanguinity) or marriage (affinity). Kinship plays a crucial role in the formation and maintenance of social structure and social system. Critically, social recognition is more important than biological fact: even when the biological fact is absent, social relations can exist (adopted children); and even when biological fact is present but not socially recognised, a child is called illegitimate.

Kinship relations are classified along generational lines:

• Primary Lineals: Father-Son (direct one-generation link)
• Secondary Lineals: Grandfather-Grandson (two-generation link)
• Tertiary Lineals: Great Grandfather-Great Grandson

Family: Definitions and Types

G.P. Murdock defines the family as a group in which both relations of affinity and consanguinity (or adoption) are found. He studied 250 societies and argued the elementary family is found universally, with four defining characteristics: common residence; economic coordination; reproduction with socially approved sexual relations between adults of both sexes; and socialising children born to or adopted by the adults.

Exception to Murdock's universality claim (Cai Hua's study of the Na, 1997): The Na of China have no fixed co-resident husband-wife pair: men visit women's households at night and have no domestic role. Zambian families in Africa also deviate significantly. Murdock's family is therefore not truly universal.

Anthony Giddens offers a simplified definition: a family is a group of persons directly linked by kin connections, adult members of which assume responsibility for caring for children. He emphasises commitment over traditional structural features, and argues that in contemporary society "forever love" has transformed into "love till further notice": what he calls "plastic love."

Types of Family

Type	Description
Conjugal / Companionate	Deliberately avoid having children: also called DINK (Double Income No Kids)
Nuclear	Children born out of monogamous families; the standard modern form
Compound	Children born from polygamous families
Lineally Extended	Three or more generations under one roof
Laterally Extended	Two or more couples of the same generation
Extended Joint (Henry Maine)	Property held jointly; the classic Indian joint family
Reconstituted	Spouses live with children of both previous and current marriages
Single-Parent	One adult cares for children alone
Dual-Career (Rhona and Robert Rapoport, 1969)	Both partners work full-time outside the home
Homosexual Parents' Family	Same-sex parents raising children
Commune Living	Groups of unrelated people sharing resources and child-rearing

Families can also be classified by: descent (patrilineal, matrilineal, bilateral, e.g. Nairs of Malabar and Khasis of Meghalaya are matrilineal); residence (matrilocal, patrilocal, neolocal, duolocal, avunculocal); authority (patriarchy, matriarchy, filiocentric); and name (patronymic, metronymic).

Functions of Family

Murdock (Social Structure) identifies four functions: economic, reproduction control, regulating sexual relations, and socialising children.

Talcott Parsons identifies two basic functions that no other institution can replace: primary socialisation of children and stabilisation of adult personality. He argues that industrialisation led to the nucleation of the family because: specialised skills are now required; tasks are less labour-intensive; geographical and social mobility is high; universalistic values conflict with the particularistic values of extended family networks.

Ronald Fletcher describes the multifunctional family in which basic functions persist but other functions are being reinvented rather than simply lost.

Functions for the individual: physical, emotional, psychological, and economic security; legitimate means of sexual gratification; entertainment; readymade status; and initial socialisation.

Functions for society: reproduction (providing members); cultural transmission; mechanism of social control; unit of economic production.

Critiques and Dysfunctions of Family

• Marx / David Cooper (Death of Family): Family assures conformity, making individuals submit to exploitation. Family is an ideological conditioning device in an exploitative society.
• R.D. Laing (Politics of Family): Studies schizophrenic children and concludes the disorder is caused by the excessive expectations of parents.
• Edmund Leach (A Runaway World): Family members expect too much of each other, producing emotional stress and conflict.
• Feminist critique: Family legitimises the exploitation of women: household work goes unnoticed; family legitimises sexual abuse and domestic violence. Murray Straus: "the marriage licence is a hitting licence."
• Jordan Peterson: Families can fail to prepare children for the harsh realities of the world, making them vulnerable to bullying.

Family in India

Indological View: David Mandelbaum considers the joint family one of three distinguishing characteristics of Indian society (alongside the caste system and the village). Henry Maine and O. Mailey studied the traditional Indian joint family and termed it patriarchal. Irawati Karve noted the prevalence of the idea of one roof, one kitchen, one property, one deity: while acknowledging differences across Dravidian, tribal, lower-caste, and non-Hindu families.

AM Shah's Household Dimension: Shah argued that the proper unit of study should be the household, assessed along four dimensions: commensal (eating together), co-resident (living together), coparcenary (sharing property), and co-ritual (sharing religious practices). His field studies found two types: simple and compound.

Pauline Kolenda: Nuclear family is becoming more prevalent, but average household size is increasing due to declining death rates and greater longevity. Households have lifecycles: fission → fusion → fission. Stem family exists (parents reside with one married child). Rural household size is larger than urban; regional differences persist: North India has larger joint families than South India.

IP Desai (studying Mahua, Gujarat) and KM Kapadia found half of families are still joint. RP Mukherjee concluded Indian families are still functionally joint. Shah, Kolenda and others broke the myth of joint family disintegration in India.

Contemporary trends in India: Marriage still an important milestone; caste is still active but class is becoming more important; live-in relationships increasing in urban areas; divorce rate rising; joint family has retained sentimental value; girl's choice is increasingly considered; elderly confined to rituals; rise of filiocentric families and the "six-pocket syndrome" (grandparents and parents lavishing resources on a single child).

Marriage

Marriage is the social institution that gives sexuality social recognition: the institutionalising of sexual relations into a framework of rights and obligations. A minimal sociological definition: a social arrangement in which individuals and groups acquire certain rights over each other, kinship rights (sexual rights, generician) and domestic rights (household cooperation).

Types of Marriage

Type	Description	Notes
Classical Monogamy	Marriage is sacred; the bond is not dissolved; women have no right to divorce or remarry	Traditional Hindu and Catholic contexts
Serial Monogamy	Marriage as a contract; remarriage possible but only one spouse at a time	Dominant form in modern Western societies
Polygyny	One man, multiple wives; rights shared by women; more prevalent; outcome of patriarchy	Allowed in Islam (up to 4 wives)
Polyandry	One woman, multiple husbands; fraternal polyandry: co-husbands are brothers (e.g. Pandavas)	Re-emerging in Punjab, Haryana, UP due to shortage of women
Levirate	Upon death of husband, woman marries husband's younger brother	Common in several communities
Sororate	Upon death of wife, man marries wife's younger sister	e.g. Mopola Muslims
Cross-Cousin Marriage	Marriage between children of mother's brother or father's sister	Common in South India; prohibited in North India among Hindus
Parallel-Cousin Marriage	Marriage between children of mother's sister or father's brother	Prohibited in Hinduism; allowed in Islam

Functions of Marriage

• Biological: regulates sexual urges
• Social: provides framework for procreation
• Cultural: transmits values across generations
• Economic: governs inheritance
• Psychological: provides emotional expression and bonding
• In India: marriage is also a Dharma, a moral and religious duty

Hindu Marriage: Sacrament, Contract and Commerce

Classical Hindu thought treats marriage as a samskara, a sacrament and not a contract. K.M. Kapadia (Marriage and Family in India, 1955) and P.H. Prabhu (Hindu Social Organisation) set out its three aims: dharma (religious duty), praja (progeny, above all a son to perform the ancestral rites) and rati (pleasure), with dharma the highest and rati the lowest. As a sacrament the union was:

• Religious: completed by sacred rites before the fire, such as kanyadan, panigrahana and saptapadi (the seven steps), not by the consent of the parties
• Indissoluble: no divorce, and a bond believed to continue after death, which is why widow remarriage was forbidden among the upper castes

The contractual turn. The Special Marriage Act 1954 provided civil marriage across caste and religion. The Hindu Marriage Act 1955 made monogamy compulsory, set minimum ages and allowed judicial separation and divorce, and a 1976 amendment added divorce by mutual consent. Consent, choice and dissolution, the marks of a contract, thus entered Hindu marriage. Yet Section 7 still makes a Hindu marriage complete only with customary rites such as the seventh step of saptapadi, and in Dolly Rani v. Manish Kumar Chanchal (2024) the Supreme Court described Hindu marriage as a samskara and held that registration without the required ceremonies does not make a valid marriage.

From ritual to commercial: factors behind the change

• Dowry inflation: M.N. Srinivas ("Some Reflections on Dowry", 1984) distinguished traditional dowry, gifts given to a daughter, from modern dowry, a groom price set by the groom's education and job, which spread to castes that once paid bride price as they Sanskritised. The Dowry Prohibition Act 1961 and the dowry death provisions of criminal law have not stopped it, and the NCRB still records thousands of dowry deaths every year.
• A market in partners: matrimonial columns and websites sort candidates by caste, salary, height and complexion, so a match is negotiated like a transaction between families of equal status.
• The wedding industry: planners, destination weddings and lavish display make the wedding a site of conspicuous consumption.
• Individualism and women's education: love and semi-arranged marriages, live-in relationships and rising urban divorce weaken the idea of an unbreakable sacred bond.
• Skewed sex ratios: in Haryana and Punjab a shortage of brides has produced cross-region marriages in which brides are brought, and sometimes bought, from poorer states (Ravinder Kaur).

Assessment. Marriage in India remains sacred in form and near universal in practice: horoscope matching, kanyadan and saptapadi persist, and divorce rates stay low by world standards. Its content, however, is increasingly contractual and commercial, and Ravinder Kaur and Rajni Palriwala (eds., Marrying in South Asia, 2014) show how globalisation has made it a site of status competition. The sacred and the commercial now coexist.

Lineage and Descent

Descent is the principle whereby a child is socially affiliated with the group of his or her parents. Lineage refers to a kin group in which members have a common ancestor whose identity is known: it is the principle upon which inheritance is based. Family is the smallest descent group compared to lineage.

Types of Descent

Unilineal Descent (one line recognised):

• Patrilineal Descent: male line (most prevalent worldwide)
• Matrilineal Descent: female line (Nayars of Kerala, Khasis of Meghalaya)

Why patrilineal descent is more prevalent (Robin Fox): Every kin group must fulfil four conditions: men are needed to impregnate women; women are needed to bear and rear children; enough men are needed for food and property management when women are pregnant; incest must be avoided. The patrilineal system is the easier solution: own group's women are sent out; other group's women are received for mating and kept subordinate so as not to threaten group unity. Patriliny and patriarchy thus went hand in hand historically.

The Matrilineal Puzzle: In matrilineal systems, own group's males are sent out; other group's males are received. Since incoming (affinal) men have lesser group unity, problems arise during childbearing and rearing. Solutions: the Na of China and the Nayars of Kerala practise "visiting husbands", the biological father has no social role; the mother's brother (maternal uncle) acquires a crucial role in child-rearing and inheritance.

Other Descent Types:

• Bilateral Descent: both sides recognised equally and symmetrically; rising with birth control, reduced muscular labour requirements, and technology equalising men and women's work
• Double Unilineal Descent: both sides recognised but unequally; one line governs movable property, the other immovable property (Yako of Nigeria)
• Ambilineal Descent: individual can choose which line to affiliate with (Samoa, Margaret Mead's study)
• Parallel Descent: sons inherit from father, daughters from mother (Saha tribe)

Descent Groups

• Agnates: kin connected from father's side; form Patrilineal Descent Groups
• Uterines: kin connected from mother's side; form Matrilineal Descent Groups
• Clans: unilineal descent groups subdivided into lineages; exogamous (one cannot marry within one's clan since the clan traces descent from a common ancestor)
• Lineages: subgroups within clans tracing descent from a known real ancestor; help determine claims over immovable property and subcaste identity
• Kindred: bilateral kin groups; rising in modern industrial societies

Functions of Descent Groups (in simple societies)

• Marriage regulation: rules of exogamy govern who may marry whom
• Economic cooperation: loans, land held in common
• Agricultural cooperation during sowing and harvesting
• Religious practices: clan deities (Kul devatas); solidarity during death
• Political cohesion and dispute resolution by lineage heads (panchayats)
• Legacy: good name commanded by the group

In modern industrial societies, descent groups are giving way to kindred groups, which remain active in celebrations, mourning, loans, babysitting, and providing networks for business and job opportunities.

Patriarchy and Sexual Division of Labour

Patriarchy refers to the condition in which men achieve and maintain social, cultural, and economic dominance over women: both within and outside the family. The term was introduced by Weber (originally meaning rule by the father or male head), but now means authority and dominance of males over various aspects of existence in both public and private spheres. The Sexual Division of Labour (SDOL) is the segregation of work based on gender, where men are mostly given public roles and women are mostly given private (domestic) roles.

Theories Explaining SDOL

Sociobiological (Biological): Men have stronger spacio-visual skills; women have developed linguistic skills: different brains produce different talents. Critique: no conclusive evidence exists for this claim.

Sociobiological (Evolutionary: Robin Fox): SDOL is the result of millions of years of adaptation. Men: hunters; women: childbearing and rearing. Differences in body types mean men are more suited for outside, muscular tasks.

Functional (Murdock): SDOL is the most convenient way of organising tasks (based on study of 250 societies). Parsons: women are more expressive and do adult personality stabilisation. Delinquency studies: delinquency results from lack of motherly support.

Feminist Critique:

• Jessie Bernard: criticises Parsons: the family serves male personality stabilisation, not gender-neutral adult personality stabilisation
• Ann Oakley: criticises Murdock: incorrect to say women are unsuitable for public tasks (India: construction site workers are mainly women; Pygmies: no post-natal dependence on men; Israel: large participation of women in the army). SDOL is socially created.
• Margaret Mead (Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies): Study on tribes of Papua New Guinea found both men and women doing equally stern tasks with similar personalities, sometimes with home-loving men, a society exactly opposite to the West, proving SDOL is culturally variable. Critique (Deborah Gewertz, 1981): found evidence men dominated women, controlled their produce, and made all important political decisions. Mead used subjective descriptions.
• Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex, 1970): Sexual inequality is the most fundamental inequality; criticises Marx for overlooking it. Because of SDOL, women are confined to the domestic sphere where their work is not valued (it doesn't fetch profits). Even when women work outside, they still work at home: double exploitation. R.D. Barron and G.M. Norris (1976) later explained women's position at work through the dual labour market: a primary sector of well-paid, secure jobs with promotion, dominated by men, and a secondary sector of low-paid, unstable, part-time work to which women are largely confined. Firestone argued technology could eventually free women from biological reproduction.

Sylvia Walby: Theorising Patriarchy

Six structures of patriarchy:

• Different emoluments: women receive lower wages for equivalent work (public patriarchy)
• Beauty ideals defined from the male point of view, even inflicting painful procedures on women
• Male control over female sexuality: virginity and chastity as female virtues
• Women as primary source of domestic labour: unpaid and unrecognised
• Violence: private, public, workplace, mental, and physical
• The state: a systematic bias towards men's interests in its policies and actions

Indian Legal Milestones

• 1937: widows gained the right to seek claim in husband's property
• 1956: daughters became equal co-heirs with sons (but daughters had to seek the right; sons were natural heirs)
• 2006: both daughters and sons are natural heirs of property

Strong filial ties often prevent women from dragging brothers to court despite the legal equality. Key dimensions of contemporary patriarchy: private vs. public sphere distinction; paid vs. unpaid (domestic) work; unequal salaries for the same work; gender-typing of jobs (pink-collar work); glass ceilings for women contrasted with glass elevators for men (Karuna Ahmad).

Kandiyoti's Patriarchal Bargain

Deniz Kandiyoti, in "Bargaining with Patriarchy" (Gender and Society, 1988), argued that women are not passive victims of patriarchy. They work out strategies within a given set of constraints to maximise their security and life options. She called these strategies patriarchal bargains, and showed that they differ with the form patriarchy takes:

• Sub-Saharan Africa: wives keep separate crops, income and responsibilities, so they resist openly when husbands try to claim their labour.
• Classic patriarchy (North Africa, the Muslim Middle East, South and East Asia, including northern India): a girl is married young into her husband's patrilocal extended household, where she is subordinate to all the men and to the senior women, above all her mother-in-law. Her hardship is temporary, since she will one day control daughters-in-law of her own. So she invests in her sons and their loyalty, and gains a stake in the system that subordinates her.

Women therefore often defend the patriarchal order. When it is undermined by market forces, nuclear households and the independence of young men, the old bargain breaks down, and women may cling to propriety and male protection rather than lose what the bargain promised.

Application to marriage in India

• Mother-in-law and daughter-in-law: the young bride accepts the ghunghat, restricted movement and heavy housework in the expectation of authority later. As mothers-in-law, women then enforce purdah and dowry demands on the next bride.
• Son preference: since sons secure a woman's status and old age, women themselves often favour sons, which feeds sex-selective abortion.
• Hypergamy and dowry: families pay dowry to marry daughters into higher-status households, trading the daughter's labour and obedience for standing and protection.

Gendered division of work. The bargain now extends to paid work. Many educated women win permission to work outside the home by preserving the family's respectability and continuing to do most of the housework and care. A job becomes acceptable only if it does not disturb domestic duties, so women choose teaching, government service or work close to home, accept slower careers, and present their earnings as a contribution to the family rather than a claim to equal authority. The bargain buys some autonomy but leaves male authority intact.

Critique. The concept can make women appear complicit in their own subordination and underplays open resistance, such as the women's movement against dowry and domestic violence. It also sorts patriarchy into broad regional types and gives less attention to caste and class differences among women.

Is the Domestic Division of Labour Changing?

The gender-based domestic division of labour assigns housework, cooking and the care of children and the elderly to women, and paid work outside the home to men. Functionalists such as Parsons saw this as natural, with women in expressive and men in instrumental roles. As more women take up formal employment, sociologists ask whether men now take a larger share of work at home.

• Willmott and Young (The Symmetrical Family, 1973): in their London studies, couples increasingly shared tasks, leisure and decisions. They predicted a steady march towards equal roles.
• Ann Oakley (The Sociology of Housework, 1974): in her interviews with 40 London housewives, only a minority of husbands did much housework or childcare. Men "helped" when asked, and responsibility stayed with women.
• Arlie Hochschild (The Second Shift, 1989): in American dual-earner couples, employed women came home to a second shift of housework and childcare, adding up to roughly an extra month of work a year compared with their husbands.
• Duncombe and Marsden: women also carry the emotion work of keeping relationships going, a "triple shift".
• Jonathan Gershuny: men's share of domestic work is rising, but slowly, a "lagged adaptation" to wives' employment.
• Rhona and Robert Rapoport: even in dual-career families, where both partners pursue careers, the wife usually kept the main responsibility for home and children.

Indian evidence. Promilla Kapur (Marriage and the Working Woman in India, 1970) found educated working wives caught in role conflict between the expectations of the family and those of the job. The NSO Time Use Survey 2019 found that women who did unpaid domestic work spent about 299 minutes a day on it, against 97 minutes for men. Change is visible in urban dual-career homes, where men shop, take children to school and share some childcare, and the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act 2017 raised paid maternity leave to 26 weeks and required crèches in larger establishments. But much of the change comes from hiring paid domestic workers, usually poorer women, rather than from husbands sharing the work.

Patriarchy at home and at work. Walby's shift from private to public patriarchy captures the present pattern: women gain access to paid work but face lower pay, gender-typed jobs and glass ceilings while still carrying the domestic load. The domestic division of labour is changing in degree rather than in kind, and faster among educated urban couples than among rural and working-class households.

Contemporary Trends in Kinship

• Diversity in family forms is growing: no single dominant model
• Marriage is losing appeal; rising divorces and separations; sanctity of marriage declining; law has made divorce easier; stigma of divorce vanishing
• Giddens: "forever love" changing into "love till further notice", plastic love
• Eugene Litwak: modified extended family (Willmott: dispersed extended family), common residence may not exist but kinship ties are maintained via internet, telephone, and air travel (frequency less but quality more)
• William Goode: achieved status and individualism are rising, working against familial norms and conventional role bargains
• Edmund Leach's "cereal packet image" of the family (1967) and Barrie Thorne's critique of the monolithic family (Rethinking the Family, 1982): the ideal image obscures the reality of a plurality of family forms
• Elizabeth Roberts and Wilmott and Young: industrialisation actually led to growth of the extended family through shared childcare and mutual help, a direct counter to Parsons
• Shah and Kolenda demolished the myth of joint family disintegration in India

Queer Kinship

Traditional kinship theory rests on two foundations: biological descent (consanguinity) and heterosexual marriage (affinity). Queer kinship refers to the ties of family and relatedness that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people build outside, or against, these foundations.

• Kath Weston (Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, 1991): in fieldwork in the San Francisco Bay Area, she found gay men and lesbians, often rejected by their families of origin, building "chosen families" of partners, friends, former lovers and children. Kinship here rests on choice, love and lasting care rather than on blood.
• David Schneider: his American Kinship (1968) and later critique of kinship studies treated kinship as a cultural system of symbols rather than a fact of biology, opening the way for queer kinship studies.
• Judith Butler: in "Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?" (2002) she argued that recognising only heterosexual marriage denies legitimacy to other forms of intimacy and care.
• Janet Carsten: replaced "kinship" with "relatedness", ties made through feeding, living together and caring.

How it challenges traditional kinship: it separates kinship from procreation and from marriage, makes family a matter of choice, blurs the line between friend and kin, and uses adoption and assisted reproduction to create parenthood without a heterosexual couple.

Indian illustrations

• Hijra gharanas: hijras are organised in houses (gharanas) headed by gurus, with chelas as disciples. Serena Nanda (Neither Man nor Woman, 1990) and Gayatri Reddy (With Respect to Sex, 2005) show the guru-chela tie working as a lineage, with mothers, daughters and grandmothers, inheritance and succession, a kinship made without birth or marriage.
• Same-sex couples: Ruth Vanita (Love's Rite, 2005) documented same-sex weddings and joint suicides of women couples in India, showing couples reaching for the language of marriage.
• Law: NALSA v. Union of India (2014) recognised transgender persons as a third gender, and Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India (2018) decriminalised consensual same-sex relations. In Deepika Singh (2022) the Supreme Court accepted that family can take atypical forms, including queer relationships. But in Supriyo Chakraborty v. Union of India (2023) it declined to recognise same-sex marriage and left the matter to Parliament.

Critique. Chosen families can be fragile and are easier to sustain for the urban middle class. Queer kinship also borrows the idioms it challenges: hijra gharanas have a strict hierarchy of their own, and many same-sex couples seek marriage itself. Yet it confirms that kinship is a social and cultural construction rather than a biological given.

David Morgan: Family Practices

David Morgan, in Family Connections (1996) and Rethinking Family Practices (2011), argued that family is better understood as something people do than as a structure they belong to. "Family" works more as an adjective describing practices than as a noun naming a fixed group. Family practices are the everyday, often routine activities through which people create and sustain family relationships: cooking and eating together, caring for children and the old, sharing money, celebrating festivals, visiting and keeping in touch.

• Active: family is made and remade through action, not simply given by blood or law
• Everyday and regular: ordinary routines matter more than formal rules
• Fluid: family practices overlap with practices of gender, work, age and friendship, so family has no sharp boundary
• History and biography: personal practices are shaped by wider social change and in turn reshape it
• The actor's view: people themselves decide whom they count as family

Strengths. The approach escapes the single nuclear family model of Murdock and Parsons. It covers step-families, single-parent and same-sex families, and families spread across distance. Indian examples include migrant workers and children abroad who "do family" through remittances, video calls and visits at festivals, and separated households that remain functionally joint by sharing rituals and resources.

Critique

• It can blur family into friendship and other intimate ties, so the concept loses its edge.
• It stresses agency and underplays structure. Law, property, the labour market and patriarchy limit what people can do, and in India caste endogamy and inheritance law shape family practices whatever individuals prefer.
• It says little about power and inequality inside the family, such as who does the cooking and caring.
• Janet Finch ("Displaying Families", 2007) added that practices must also be displayed to and recognised by others to count as family, and Carol Smart widened the field to "personal life" to include ties beyond the family.