Exam Prep Ch.11 Kinship, Marriage, And The Family 3e

Chapter 11 Test Bank

Multiple Choice

1. The social system that organizes people in families on the basis of descent and marriage is
2. patriarchy.
3. kinship.
4. the extended family.
5. the nuclear family.
6. Which of the following refers to the family into which one is born and raised?
7. Traditional family
8. Natal family
9. Nuclear family
10. Family of procreation
11. The family formed by a married couple and their children is called the __________ family.
12. natal
13. traditional
14. nuclear
15. extended
16. Most families function as groups of real people who work together toward common ends. Such family groups are referred to as
17. natal family.
18. extended family.
19. nuclear family.
20. corporate group.
21. If you live in a household with your mom and dad, your grandfather, as well as your aunt and two cousins, you live in a __________ family.
22. nuclear
23. traditional
24. extended
25. unnatural
26. When social norms dictate that someone from a particular clan must marry outside of that clan, anthropologists say that the clan is
27. a corporate group.
28. endogamous.
29. exogamous.
30. a lineage.
31. Matrilineal descent is traced through which relative?
32. The father
33. The mother
34. The mother’s brother
35. The father’s mother
36. In a kinship system with matrilineal descent, a man inherits his rights to land and clan wealth from the
37. father.
38. mother.
39. mother’s brother.
40. father’s mother.
41. A clan that reckons descent through both their mother and father is called a __________ clan.
42. unilineal
43. patrilineal
44. matrilineal
45. cognatic
46. The nuclear family
47. includes the parents of your parents.
48. includes fictive kin.
49. is formed by a married couple and their children.
50. includes people who live together.
51. When a woman marries more than one man she is practicing
52. polygyny.
53. polyandry.
54. adultery.
55. matrilineality.
56. Families that are corporate groups
57. function as groups of real people who work together toward common ends.
58. live together.
59. love each other.
60. share common descent through a single ancestor.
61. Unilineal descent is traced through
62. a single line of descent.
63. the mother.
64. the father.
65. both parents.
66. Descent traced through the mother's line is
67. matrilineal.
68. matrilocal.
69. patrilineal.
70. patrilocal.
71. Which of the following did not spur changes to the “traditional” nuclear family of the 1950s United States?
72. More women in the workforce
73. Fewer children
74. More divorces
75. The spread of suburban housing
76. Judaism is traced through the mother’s line. It is an example of a
77. matriarchal culture.
78. matrilineal culture.
79. unilineal culture.
80. cognatic clan.
81. __________ demonstrated that kinship terms are more than labels or descriptors—they convey the specific nature of relationships, rights, and responsibilities that exist between kin.
82. A.L. Kroeber
83. Margaret Mead
84. Franz Boas
85. Hortense Powdermaker
86. Which of the following is not a typical reason for marriage cross-culturally?
87. Politics
88. Economics
89. Genetics
90. Public recognition
91. A surrogate mother is a woman who
92. agrees to have an embryo implanted in her womb.
93. adopts a child at birth.
94. acts like a mother to an orphan.
95. raises another woman’s child.
96. Why were American birth rates low from 1942 to 1946?
97. Most young married men were serving in the military.
98. The majority of household incomes were low because of the Great Depression.
99. There was legislation in place that discouraged or prohibited many people from having children.
100. Americans were not having sex.
101. Clans come in three types: matrilineal, patrilineal, and
102. cognatic.
103. acephalous.
104. nuclear.
105. corporate.
106. __________ is the school of thought that studied how patterns of child-rearing, social institutions, and cultural ideologies shape individual experience, characteristics, and thought patterns.
107. Poststructuralist theory
108. Biosocial anthropology
109. The culture and personality movement
110. Developmentalist anthropology
111. Which of the following do Americans traditionally inherit patrilineally?
112. Land
113. Height
114. Wealth
115. Surnames
116. When descent is based in a single line it is referred to as __________ descent.
117. matrilineal
118. patrilineal
119. unilineal
120. cognatic
121. Rules of inheritance are important because they
122. prevent the disintegration of the natal family.
123. reinforce the social stratification embedded in the family.
124. serve to keep wealth and property in the family.
125. allow governments to enforce and regulate kinship ties.
126. Samir is interested in building a visual representation of family relationships. He wants to construct a(n)
127. kinship chart.
128. ethnohistory tree.
129. genealogical archive.
130. familial map.
131. Matrilineal descent is typically difficult for Americans to grasp because it feels so unnatural to us. What explains this feeling that matrilineal descent is unnatural since as Americans we also recognize that we are descended from one mother and her parents?
132. Our kinship system is bilateral, recognizing descent through both mother and father, so it seems strange to recognize only one of these lines.
133. We usually get our surnames from our mother, giving our kinship system a matrilineal bias.
134. Although women can now own property, be breadwinner and head of a household, and can earn more than a husband, many Americans still think of the ideal family as centered on the mother.
135. Our kinship system is based on innate biological orders for nurturing.
136. What do anthropologists call the structural process of forgetting whole groups of relatives?
137. Ethnic forgetting
138. Ethnic amnesia
139. Genealogical forgetting
140. Genealogical amnesia
141. What is the combined effect of having surnames that are inherited from a child’s father and having a woman take her husband’s surname at the time of marriage?
142. Land or real estate automatically goes to the couple’s sons rather than the daughters.
143. It is easier for the family to forget the surnames of women after several generations.
144. It prevents women from having any control over the family’s wealth.
145. Children disavow their matrilineal kin.
146. Women who practice polyandry tend to marry
147. two or more male cousins.
148. a father and his sons.
149. two or more male friends.
150. two or more brothers.
151. Which of the following is known as the “Westermarck effect”?
152. A birth defect that occurs among children of siblings
153. A birth defect that occurs among children of cousins
154. The psychological revulsion against having sex with close relatives
155. The psychological state where people are sexually attracted to their close relatives
156. In vitro fertilization (IVF) births account for approximately how many live births in the United States today?
157. 1 percent
158. 3 percent
159. 5 percent
160. 7 percent
161. Which technology led to what is referred to as the “sexual revolution” in the 1960s?
162. Television
163. Condoms
164. In vitro fertilization
165. Birth control pills
166. Anthropologists think of bride price as being about not buying anyone but compensation for rights in women—her labor, her support for family affairs, her looking after children, and rights of sexual access. What other social payment is structurally most dissimilar to a bride price payment from this perspective?
167. A series of child price payments
168. A father’s purchase of a new car for his daughter when she goes off to college
169. A countergift for a bride price payment, usually of much lesser value than the original bride price payment
170. An American Valentine’s gift, given by a college student to his girlfriend
171. When cultural anthropologists examine families in different cultures, they use cultural analysis to understand all of the following except
172. why it makes sense for people to get married or not to get married in terms of the economic costs of establishing a separate household.
173. the genetic differences among different members of the extended family.
174. how popular media in the society being studied shapes people’s expectations of married life.
175. who looks after children in typical households.
176. Which of the following is not an anthropological concern that arises with in vitro fertilization (IVF), surrogacy, adoption, and the high rate of divorce and remarriage in American society?
177. Whose names should be listed on the birth certificate as mother and father
178. The psychological effects of deviations from the nuclear family
179. What the child should expect of his or her relationship with the biological parents, surrogate mother, adopted parent, and all of the possible siblings
180. How the child should address each of these relatives
181. Why are soap operas and telenovelas and their popular consumption so interesting to anthropology?
182. They derive a lot of their plot lines from classic ethnographies.
183. They usually depict the opposite of idealized family life.
184. They are often censored by national governments, demonstrating the government’s regulation of family life.
185. They rely on cultural assumptions about family life and are fictional depictions of the family dynamics that are so important to so many people.
186. A cultural anthropologist interested in changing family structures in the United States would be least interested in studying
187. nuclear families.
188. political messaging around “traditional” family values.
189. natal families.
190. genetic drift.
191. An anthropologist interested in how technology affects kinship would be most likely to study
192. how much money families are spending on weddings.
193. which genetic diseases can be discovered and treated while a fetus is still in utero.
194. people who used the same anonymous sperm donor connecting online and planning family reunions.
195. religious bans on family planning methods such as condom use.
196. If you were an anthropologist studying polyandry, which of the following examples would be of most interest to you for your research?
197. Contention among former South African president Jacob Zuma’s many wives
198. The popular television show, Big Love, which depicts a Mormon family who practice polygyny
199. Recent adaptations in American home-building to appeal to multigenerational families living under one roof
200. The common practice of two brothers marrying one woman in Sherpa communities of Nepal

True/False

1. Since the early nineteenth century, the traditional American family has consisted of a husband, a wife, a few children, and perhaps a pet.
2. True
3. False
4. Nuclear family units occur in and are important to nearly every society around the world.
5. True
6. False
7. One of the key functions of family is controlling and managing its members’ wealth.
8. True
9. False
10. Weddings and marriages are usually less about the couple than about relationships with the couple’s social network, including friends and family.
11. True
12. False
13. The incest taboo, or the prohibition against marrying within the nuclear family, is a human universal.
14. True
15. False
16. Nearly all cultures around the world give a similar importance to biological relatedness as the basis for defining a family.
17. True
18. False
19. Though the incest taboo is almost universal cross-culturally, there is no definitive biological explanation for its existence.
20. True
21. False
22. Forgetting large portions of relatives is usually done on purpose when people want to distance themselves from a certain part of their broad extended family.
23. True
24. False
25. Studies have shown that marriage is mostly about sex.
26. True
27. False
28. The social system that organizes people in families based on descent and marriage is called patriarchy.
    1. True
    2. False
29. Polyandry is the practice of one man having more than one wife.
    1. True
    2. False
30. A visual representation of family relationships is called a kinship chart.
    1. True
    2. False
31. Anthropologists call family groups that consist of larger groups of relatives beyond the nuclear family extended families.
    1. True
    2. False
32. A special group of relatives who are all descended from a single ancestor is called a tribe.
    1. True
    2. False
33. Similar to clans, lineages tend be composed of people who are directly descended from known ancestors.
    1. True
    2. False

Short Answer

1. For most of our history American kinship has had a patrilineal bias, but in most American families women play a key role in keeping the families together. Using anthropological approaches to kinship, how do you explain this difference?
2. Extended families are important in America as they are in most societies. In the United States, what economic and political goals can be accomplished by organizing a household around an extended family?
3. What are the social consequences that arise from having a system of unilineal descent rather than a cognatic system such as in the United States?
4. There are many different systems that people around the world use to classify their kin. Regardless of the system, most people suffer from some sort of genealogical amnesia. How and why does this “amnesia” occur? What are its consequences?
5. Although romance novels and romantic comedy films routinely emphasize that people should marry for love, there are many other reasons for marriage. Identify three of these other reasons why people might want to marry, whether they are in love or not. Could one be in love and still marry for these other reasons?
6. What kind of American corporate kin groups are found today? More than one-third of all households are single-person households. Can these individuals belong to corporate kin groups?
7. When we hear people talk about the traditional American family, we understand they are simplifying the ways that families have historically been organized. What cultural factors are behind these unrealistic simplifications?
8. Dowry is often used in India to make a daughter more attractive to possible husbands, while bride price is used to compensate a family for the work and children of one of their daughters. Explain how both of these payments unite families but in different ways.
9. How would the culture and personality movement theorists characterize the practices of surrogacy and in vitro fertilization?
10. Describe three new technologies that have shaped how people think about family. Are these technologies and family structures visible in the society where you live?

Short Answer Key

1. For most of our history American kinship has had a patrilineal bias, but in most American families women play a key role in keeping the families together. Using anthropological approaches to kinship, how do you explain this difference?
   1. What Are Families, and How Are They Structured in Different Societies?
   2. The most common clans and lineages in non-industrial societies are patrilineal, such as those found among the Omaha Indians, the Nuer of South Sudan, and most groups in the Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In these societies, clan members claim to be descended through males from the same ancestor (Figure 11.3). These clans are unilineal (based on descent through a single descent line, in this case males). Most Americans will easily understand patrilineal descent because in the United States we have traditionally inherited our surnames patrilineally—that is, taking on the family name from the father.
2. Extended families are important in America as they are in most societies. In the United States, what economic and political goals can be accomplished by organizing a household around an extended family?
   1. What Are Families, and How Are They Structured in Different Societies?
   2. Family groups may also consist of larger groups of relatives beyond the nuclear family, which anthropologists call extended families. Extended families may live together and function as a corporate group, or they may merely acknowledge ties with one another. In nineteenth-century America, for example, it was common for households to include a nuclear family at its core, as well as some mix of elderly parents, a single brother or sister, the orphaned children of the wife’s sister, and perhaps another niece or nephew. Nowadays, for many Americans only special events like funerals, weddings, and family reunions bring large extended families together.
3. What are the social consequences that arise from having a system of unilineal descent rather than a cognatic system such as in the United States?
   1. What Are Families, and How Are They Structured in Different Societies?
   2. The most common clans and lineages in non-industrial societies are patrilineal, such as those found among the Omaha Indians, the Nuer of South Sudan, and most groups in the Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In these societies, clan members claim to be descended through males from the same ancestor (Figure 11.3). These clans are unilineal (based on descent through a single descent line, in this case males). Most Americans will easily understand patrilineal descent because in the United States we have traditionally inherited our surnames patrilineally—that is, taking on the family name from the father.
   3. Anthropologists have also observed matrilineal clans and lineages that reckon descent through women, and are descended from an ancestral woman (Figure 11.4). In these societies, such as the Trobriand Islanders discussed in other chapters, every man and woman is a member of his or her mother’s clan, which is also the clan of their mother’s mother. Other members of this clan include the mother’s brother and the mother’s mother’s brother. In matrilineal societies, a person’s strongest identity is with his or her relatives in a mother’s clan and lineage.
   4. A third kind of clan is the cognatic clan (or bilateral clan), such as is found among the Samoans and several other communities of Central Polynesia. Samoans reckon descent through both the mother and the father, allowing people to be members of both their mother’s and their father’s clan. The main difference between a cognatic clan and a unilineal clan is that in cognatic clans one can be a member of any of several clans, and in some societies multiple membership is possible or even typical. Matrilineal and patrilineal clans, in contrast, are naturally bounded by who a person’s mother or father is, respectively.
4. There are many different systems that people around the world use to classify their kin. Regardless of the system, most people suffer from some sort of genealogical amnesia. How and why does this “amnesia” occur? What are its consequences?
   1. What Are Families, and How Are They Structured in Different Societies?
   2. Another thing kinship terminologies do is help people keep track of their many relatives by assigning categorical terms. But nobody can keep track of everybody. Each society has kinsmen vital to keep track of, while others, usually more distant relatives, are forgotten. Anthropologists refer to this structural process of forgetting whole groups of relatives as genealogical amnesia. In the United States, our cognatic lineage system fosters that amnesia. There are simply too many relatives to keep track of across generations, and about the only thing that can keep us from “forgetting” those connections is regular social interactions, or, if you’re into genealogy, discovering those connections through census records, church documents, and other archival materials.
5. Although romance novels and romantic comedy films routinely emphasize that people should marry for love, there are many other reasons for marriage. Identify three of these other reasons why people might want to marry, whether they are in love or not. Could one be in love and still marry for these other reasons?
   1. Why Do People Get Married?
   2. For at least two centuries, American pastors, priests, and rabbis have preached that sex is reserved for marriage, as it is primarily for procreation. Yet the reality of ­American life is that sexual behavior is not limited to married couples, and marriage is about a lot more than sex. In this section we explain some of the reasons people have for getting married, as well as some of the diverse forms that marriage can take.
   3. For most Americans, marriage is about love and sex, and we take for granted our individual right to choose a marriage partner. But in most societies around the world, marriage is about cultivating political and economic relations between families. In such contexts, a common belief is that marriage is too important to be left to the whims of an individual, and so accepted practice is for family members to choose an individual’s marriage partner.
   4. Marriage also provides social recognition of the ties between the couple, if not also their families, as well as social legitimacy to the children. The importance of public recognition partially helps explain why same-sex marriage has become a key political issue in the past decade in many societies, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Argentina. Whoever is getting married, weddings proclaim to the world that the couple is united and brings the two families ­together to acknowledge the couple as a unit.
6. What kind of American corporate kin groups are found today? More than one-third of all households are single-person households. Can these individuals belong to corporate kin groups?
   1. What Are Families, and How Are They Structured in Different Societies?
   2. One important feature of nuclear and natal families is that they usually function as corporate groups, which are groups of people who work together toward common ends, much as a corporation does. The family’s goals are not just the goals of one family member, but of the group as a whole. In every society around the world, families are supposed to look after the needs of all members of the family—parents, children, and any other family members who happen to be in residence.
7. When we hear people talk about the traditional American family, we understand they are simplifying the ways that families have historically been organized. What cultural factors are behind these unrealistic simplifications?
   1. What Are Families, and How Are They Structured in Different Societies?
   2. During the late 1960s and 1970s these young postwar families grew up, children moved out, and some couples divorced. These changes paralleled changes in the economy as women began to join the workforce in larger numbers, lowering wages for entry-level jobs. By the 1980s it was hard for young American families to get by on one salary. Two-income households brought in more wages but put stress on couples, who still needed someone to cook their meals, clean their houses or apartments, and look after their children. Family size dropped significantly, so nowadays families tend to have one or two children rather than three or four. Divorce has also become much more common than ever before in American life, and today only half of American households are headed by a married couple. When divorced couples with kids get remarried, the composition of a family (with multiple sets of stepparents and stepsiblings)—and especially the obligations individuals in the family have to each other—can get quite complicated.
8. Dowry is often used in India to make a daughter more attractive to possible husbands, while bride price is used to compensate a family for the work and children of one of their daughters. Explain how both of these payments unite families but in different ways.
   1. How Do Families Control Power and Wealth?
   2. As with bridewealth payments aimed at paying for rights in women, “childwealth” payments are another kind of payment to a woman’s family, intended to buy rights in the woman’s children. Such payments compensate the woman’s family for a child who belongs to a different clan and allow the father to recruit the child to his clan. This sort of transaction over children is most typical in societies with patrilineal clans, rather than in those with matrilineal clans, where the children belong to their mother’s clan and typically live with her. In some societies, childwealth payments can be paid all at once, but the power of these transactions can best be understood in societies like the Daribi of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, where payments may take place over many years. Anthropologist Roy Wagner (1967, 1969) described these gifts as countering the rights and claims of the child’s uncle (mother’s brother) over these children. This uncle could claim the child to his clan if the payments were not made. Because so many transactions between clans are about creating alliances, the ongoing series of payments preserve and perpetuate the relationship between the child’s father and the uncle. In this case, the payments in the form of gifts define and bind the two clans, just as they link the two men in an ongoing alliance. Both men get something from the relationship, including assistance from the other when needed.
   3. Another traditional form of marriage payment occurs in the highly stratified communities of India. Here, high-caste families traditionally gave a dowry consisting of a large sum of money—or in-kind gifts of livestock, furniture, or even electronics—to a daughter to ensure her well-being in her husband’s family. Sometimes the dowry was given, at least in part, to the husband as a way of attracting a prosperous and hardworking husband. The Indian government outlawed the practice of dowry in 1961, but in many parts of the country the practice continues as before.
   4. In recent years abuses of dowry have become common, reaching more than 3,000 incidents a year, attracting the attention of the Indian government, state governments, and international human rights groups. In these cases, members of the husband’s family threaten the bride if more dowry is not forthcoming. In the most severe cases, the men’s families have even killed the bride because her family would not contribute more dowry.
9. How would the culture and personality movement theorists characterize the practices of surrogacy and in vitro fertilization?
   1. What Are Families, and How Are They Structured in Different Societies?
   2. Nearly a century ago, the anthropologist Margaret Mead began studying how families raised children in different cultures. Between the 1930s and the 1950s, Mead was associated with a loosely connected group of scholars known as the culture and personality movement, whose focus was on how patterns of child­rearing, social institutions, and cultural ideologies shaped individual experience, personality characteristics, and thought patterns (Hsu 1972). They asserted that how a child is bathed, fed, and attended to in the first years of life shapes that child’s approach to the world into adulthood.
10. Describe three new technologies that have shaped how people think about family. Are these technologies and family structures visible in the society where you live?
    1. How Are Social and Technological Changes Reshaping How People Think About Family?
    2. In the 1960s, the birth control pill allowed women in Western countries like the United States, France, and Great Britain an unprecedented level of direct control over their sexuality. This technological development contributed to a so-called sexual revolution centered around the desire for “casual sex.” For all the entanglements of kinship discussed previously, the prospect of having a child does not facilitate casual sex!
    3. By the 1980s, the technological cutting edge shifted away from efforts to prevent pregnancy to efforts to improve fertility and overcome infertility. Some couples also sought to create families through adoption, only to find that there are few babies available to be adopted. In recent decades, anthropologists interested in matters of kinship have become attuned to the fact that these new social and technological developments have begun to complicate people’s understandings of kinship relations.