Family, Kinship, Gender and Marriage

Avunculate and kinship terms

The avunculate is the kinship relationship between a mother's brother and his sister's son, in which the maternal uncle holds a recognised avuncular role toward the nephew, and it is a bond found in many kinship systems. It must be kept apart from residence patterns, which describe where a married couple lives, such as virilocal, neolocal or matrilocal residence, and from cross-cousin relations, which link cousins rather than an uncle and nephew. Kinship terminology is the set of terms used to address and refer to relatives, and anthropologists treat these terms as reflecting the structure of kin groups and marriage rules. Lewis Henry Morgan's distinction between descriptive and classificatory terminologies connected terminology with social structure, and Irawati Karve applied the same logic to the kinship terms used in India.

• avuncular — relating to an uncle, especially a mother's brother. e.g. The avuncular bond gave the boy a second guardian in the village.
• cross-cousin — a child of a mother's brother or father's sister. e.g. Cross-cousin marriage was preferred in that community.

Lévi-Strauss kinship theory

Claude Lévi-Strauss treated kinship as a system of relations rather than as a collection of families, and he took as its fundamental unit the atom of kinship, which is not the nuclear family alone but a structure that also includes the affinal tie carried by the wife's brother. This unit is the basis of alliance theory, in which marriage is understood as an exchange of women between groups that creates lasting ties between them. The atom rests on the universal incest taboo, which requires that spouses be sought outside the immediate family and so generates alliances with other lines. In his typology of elementary structures, restricted exchange denotes a direct reciprocal exchange between two groups, so that one group gives women to the other and receives women in return. Generalized exchange, by contrast, involves three or more groups in a cycle in which women move in one direction only, so the two forms must not be confused.

• affinal — relating to kin acquired through marriage. e.g. An affinal tie linked the two households after the wedding.
• incest taboo — a prohibition on sexual or marital relations within a forbidden category of kin. e.g. The incest taboo is found in almost every known society.

Descent systems (patriliny)

Patriliny is a system of tracing kinship descent and, usually, inheritance and succession through the male line, so that a person belongs to the lineage of the father and his male ancestors. It must be distinguished from patriarchy, which denotes male authority and unequal power within the family, and from patrilocality, which refers to a married couple residing with or near the husband's family. Lineal descent, which is a related concept, refers to kin linked by a direct line of ancestors and descendants, such as parents, grandparents and children, whereas collateral kin such as siblings and cousins and affinal kin related through marriage fall outside it.

• patriliny — descent reckoned through the father's line. e.g. Under patriliny the family name passes from father to son.
• patrilocal — residing with the husband's family after marriage. e.g. A patrilocal bride moves into her husband's household.
• lineal kin — relatives in a direct ascending or descending line. e.g. A grandparent is a lineal kin of a grandchild.

Feminisation of poverty thesis

The feminisation of poverty thesis holds that poverty is increasingly concentrated among women, and it is supported by evidence that households headed by women tend to have higher poverty rates than male-headed households across much of the developing world. The thesis also explains this disadvantage through the gendered allocation of resources within households, where nutrition and healthcare are distributed unequally, reflecting the perceived lower short-term and long-term value of girls and women. Its explanation differs from culture of poverty theory, which locates poverty in the values and behaviour of the poor themselves, and from accounts of labour market informalisation, which describe the spread of informal employment without focusing on gender.

• feminisation of poverty — the increasing concentration of poverty among women. e.g. The feminisation of poverty shows up clearly in female-headed rural households.
• investment value — the expected economic return a family gains from a child, which may lead to unequal care for sons and daughters. e.g. Families with a high investment value for sons often under-invest in daughters.

Honour killings and feminist critique

The term honour killing describes the murder of a woman or girl by family members who claim that her conduct has damaged family honour, and feminists and women's rights activists have objected to the term on several grounds. The central objection is that the idea that women embody male honour makes violence against them, and even their murder, appear justifiable, which turns a crime of patriarchal control into a supposed defence of family status. Critics also note that the label has been associated with the supposed uniqueness of Asian societies and with communities portrayed as archaic and unwilling to modernise, which stereotypes these groups and hides the similar gender violence found in many societies. For this reason many feminists prefer to describe such killings as gender-based or patriarchal violence.

Fictive kinship and compadrazgo

Fictive kinship refers to relationships that are treated as kinship without any blood tie or marriage, and they are created through ritual, social obligation or close personal intimacy. Compadrazgo, found in Latin America, is a classic example: at a child's baptism a bond is created between the child's parents and the godparents, who become the child's spiritual parents and are bound by reciprocal duties of kin-like obligation. Fictive kinship also appears in everyday speech, where people use family terms for close neighbours or friends to express affection and mutual obligation.

• compadre / comadre — the godparent and the parent of a child in a compadrazgo relation, who address each other with a kin-like term. e.g. After the baptism, the two families became compadres.
• godparent — a person who sponsors a child at baptism. e.g. The godparent promised to guide the child in faith.

Dowry law and women's activism

Dowry deaths, in which married women are killed or driven to suicide over demands for dowry, became a central concern of women's groups, who investigated how legal and institutional actors classified such deaths as suicides. Activists pointed out that designating the family as a private domain placed domestic violence beyond effective protection, and that the law, police, medical system and family could together conceal the real cause of death. Feminist scholars also argued that gender and women's issues were being absorbed into class analysis, and they sought to extend the Marxist concept of labour to include domestic production, showing that women's work and their position in the workforce are marginal and vulnerable. The lesson for law is that it must be sensitive to the cultural and economic contexts of women's lives.

Household dimension of the Indian family

A. M. Shah distinguished the household, understood as a unit of common residence and economic cooperation, from the family, a broader kinship and relational category, and he treated the two as related but analytically separate. He argued that Indological models of the Indian joint family as an ideal type had become an obstacle to sociological study of actual family structure and change, so that empirical research should describe household composition rather than assume a fixed form. Change in household form does not follow a simple linear path in which joint families are split into nuclear families by modernisation, because household forms vary and transform in more complex ways. His classification of households into simple and complex types is a descriptive tool for household composition and does not resolve the older elementary and joint family classification.

Levirate marriage

Levirate is the custom in which a widow marries her deceased husband's brother, and in Hindu society it is recognised in classical texts as a legitimate form of remarriage for a widow. It is distinct from other marriage forms: polygyny is the marriage of one man to several wives, endogamy is marriage within a specified group such as a caste, and polyandry is the marriage of one woman to several husbands. Sororate, the marriage of a widower to his deceased wife's sister, is a related custom that is often discussed alongside levirate.