Declining Odds: Kinship, Women's Employment, and Political Economy in Rural Mexico

Some women in San Cosme Mazatecochco, a rural community in central Mexico, whose families have more diverse networks and a slight economic advantage, use the community's flexible kinship system to get more secure employment. But their ability to do so is limited by the larger political economy. As the Mexican economy deteriorates for working-class Mexicans and the class system becomes more closed, more women participate in the labor force and more women have marginal employment, [political economy, kinship, women, class, Mexico]     

Social network structure in wintering golden‐crowned sparrows is not correlated with kinship

Stable social organization in a wide variety of organisms has been linked to kinship, which can minimize conflict due to the indirect fitness benefits from cooperating with relatives. In birds, kin selection has been mostly studied in the context of reproduction or in species that are social year round. Many birds however are migratory, and the role of kinship in the winter societies of these species is virtually unexplored. In a previous study, we discovered striking social complexity and stability in a wintering population of migratory golden‐crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia atricapilla) – individuals repeatedly form close associations with the same social partners, including across multiple winters. Here, we test the possibility that kinship might be involved in these close and stable social affiliations. We examine the relationship between kinship and social structure for two of the consecutive wintering seasons from the previous study. We found no evidence that social structure was influenced by kinship. Relatedness between most pairs of individuals was at most that of first cousins (and mostly far lower). Genetic networks based on relatedness do not correspond to the social networks, and Mantel tests revealed no relationship between kinship and pairwise interaction frequency. Kinship also failed to predict social structure in more fine‐grained analyses, including analyses of each sex separately (in the event that sex‐biased migration might limit kin selection to one sex), and separate analyses for each social community. The complex winter societies of golden‐crowned sparrows appear to be based on cooperative benefits unrelated to kin selection.     

A good man is hard to find: overseas migration and the decentered family in the Tongan Islands

The impact of widespread international labor migration on the family in Tonga is examined. The author describes how migration has affected gender and kinship relations. She also examines the ways in which church and state ideologies encourage the development of the nuclear family, while overseas labor migration creates a need to maintain extended support systems among family networks.     

The problems of odontogenic kinship analysis in prehistoric anthropology in the example of aplasia/hypodontia

Prehistorians have been seeking information about kinship in burial complexes for decades. During the last few years paleoanthropologists have once again applied themselves to the resolution of that problem. Many of them favour epigenetic variants as the basis for their kinship analyses. Teeth and maxillary bones seem well suited to be investigated in view to this question. The author discusses whether hypodontia and numerical variants of teeth still meet the criteria demanded of epigenetic variants today. Using the complex odontological feature of hypodontia and its variants as a model, the article shows that by including and interpreting new and little-known facts the amount of information gained from this feature can be increased considerably, as can its value towards kinship analysis. More odontological features have to be added and suitable methods have to be developed. The employment of odontological features for kinship analyses is then likely to be a success.     

Synergistic effects of kinship, sex and rank in the behavioural interactions of captive stump-tailed macaques

In almost all non-human primate species kinship, sex and rank bias the patterning of interactions among subjects, seemingly in a way that favours the individual's fitness. A number of studies have been done in order to study separately the effects of these variables, concluding that an adequate model of interactions cannot be developed assuming preponderance of a single variable. The 'willingness' of one animal to interact with another can be explained as the result of assessing the possible outcomes (proximate and/or ultimate) of the interaction. The interrelationship of variables such as kinship, sex and rank, among others, provides the actors with a basis for deciding their rates of social interactions. The following study was done to assess whether kinship, rank and sex exerted independent, additive effects in the within-group distributions of eight social behaviour categories of captive groups of stump-tailed macaques. We found that the three variables synergistically affected the patterning of all behavioural categories. This suggests that the pay-offs of social interactions do not vary linearly, being intrinsically correlated with the actors' attributes so that uncertainty in the choice of a potential partner is minimized.     

The Comanche Kinship System in Historical Perspective1

Abstract

An historical study of the Comanche kinship system throws new light on processes of kinship change. The Comanche are an unique group which underwent a long neriod of acculturation with little or no change in its system of kinship termirnology. Before the turn of the 18th century the Conanche were closely associated with the Northern Shoshoni of the Great Basin. In earlier times the Comanche, like the Northern Shoshoni, had a culture similar to the Westerr; Shoshoni groups of later periods, Toward the end of the 18th century both the Comanche and the Northern Shoshoni acquired the horse; this event produced numerous changes in Comanche culture, Later, when the Comanche migrated to the Southern Plains, further changes took place in their social organization.

In spite of these changes, the Comanche system of kinship terminology rermained remarkably stable. Both in pre-Plains and pre-horse times the Comanche had a balanced division of labor, bilocal residence, bilateral groups of kin, bilateral descent, and Hawaiian nomenclature. After their acquisition of the horse and their migration to the Plains, the bicentered division of labor became natricentered; and bilocal residence changed to natrilocal, But Comanche descent remained bilateral and ownership, private and individualized. This suggests that the stability of the descent and ownershin systems made for stability in kinshio terminology.     

Juvenile greylag geese (Anser anser) discriminate between individual siblings

Social species that maintain individualised relationships with certain others despite continuous changes in age, reproductive status and dominance rank between group members ought to be capable of individual recognition. Tests of "true" individual recognition, where an individual recognises unique features of another, are rare, however. Often kinship and/or familiarity suffice to explain dyadic interactions. The complex relationships within a greylag goose flock suggest that they should be able to recognise individuals irrespective of familiarity or kinship. We tested whether six-week-old hand-raised greylags can discriminate between two of their siblings. We developed a new experimental protocol, in which geese were trained to associate social siblings with geometrical symbols. Subsequently, focals were presented with two geometrical symbols in the presence of a sibling associated with one of the symbols. Significant choice of the geometrical symbol associated with the target present indicated that focals were able to distinguish between individual targets. Greylag goslings successfully learned this association-discrimination task, regardless of genetic relatedness or sex of the sibling targets. Social relationships within a goose flock thus may indeed be based on recognition of unique features of individual conspecifics.     

Garden labor exchange among the Ye'kwana

The Ye'kwana Indians of southern Venezuela engage in extensive garden labor exchange. Approximately 40% of a household's labor is committed to gardens owned by other households. Owing to a number of situational constraints inherent in Ye'kwana household organization and garden ownership, individuals are not free to benefit other individuals directly. For example, if an individuals labors in another household's garden he benefits all members of the household who feed from that garden. Knowledge of these constraints led to the formulation and succesful testing of a simple inclusive fitness model that predicts that mean relatedness between households is correlated with the intensity and balance in exchange. In addition, it is argued that the Ye'kwana system of garden labor exchange is a form of reciprocity biased by kinship.     

Synergy from reproductive division of labor and genetic complexity drive the evolution of sex

Computer experiments that mirror the evolutionary dynamics of sexual and asexual organisms as they occur in nature were used to test features proposed to explain the evolution of sexual recombination. Results show that this evolution is better described as a network of interactions between possible sexual forms, including diploidy, thelytoky, facultative sex, assortation, bisexuality, and division of labor between the sexes, rather than a simple transition from parthenogenesis to sexual recombination. Diploidy was shown to be fundamental for the evolution of sex; bisexual reproduction emerged only among anisogamic diploids with a synergistic division of reproductive labor; and facultative sex was more likely to evolve among haploids practicing assortative mating. Looking at the evolution of sex as a complex system through individual-based simulations explains better the diversity of sexual strategies known to exist in nature, compared to classical analytical models.     

Inclusive fitness and differential productivity across the life course determine intergenerational transfers in a small-scale human society

Transfers of resources between generations are an essential element in current models of human life-history evolution accounting for prolonged development, extended lifespan and menopause. Integrating these models with Hamilton''s theory of inclusive fitness, we predict that the interaction of biological kinship with the age-schedule of resource production should be a key driver of intergenerational transfers. In the empirical case of Tsimane’ forager–horticulturalists in Bolivian Amazonia, we provide a detailed characterization of net transfers of food according to age, sex, kinship and the net need of donors and recipients. We show that parents, grandparents and siblings provide significant net downward transfers of food across generations. We demonstrate that the extent of provisioning responds facultatively to variation in the productivity and demographic composition of families, as predicted by the theory. We hypothesize that the motivation to provide these critical transfers is a fundamental force that binds together human nuclear and extended families. The ubiquity of three-generational families in human societies may thus be a direct reflection of fundamental evolutionary constraints on an organism''s life-history and social organization.     

Cooperative pastoral production — the importance of kinship

While there is a general assumption that labour has a positive effect on pastoral production, studies that have quantified this relationship have been characterized by ambiguous results. This is most likely related to the fact that possible cooperative pastoral production has been little explored in the literature, although it is well documented that nomadic pastoralist households share and exchange labour in so-called cooperative herding groups. Consequently, this study aims at investigating possible cooperative labour-related effects on production among Saami reindeer herders in Norway by using kinship relations as a proxy for cooperation. This study found that cooperative labour investment is important for Saami reindeer herders, but that the effect of kinship and labour needs to be understood in relation to each other. When assessing the effect of labour and kinship simultaneously, both labour and genealogical relationship had positive effects on herd size. We also found a positive interaction between kinship and labour suggesting that high levels of relatedness coupled with a large potential labour pool had an increasingly positive effect on herd size.     

Making Kin Out Of Others In Amazonia

This article analyses the process of producing kinship among various Amazonian peoples, focusing primarily on the Wari', a Txapakura-speaking people living in Western Amazonia (Brazil). It argues that the production of kin cannot be related exclusively to the domestic or intra-tribal domain, since kinship emerges through a constant dialogue with non-human entities. By examining the significance of alimentary taboos associated with couvade practices in a number of groups, it shows that the new-born is made human by means of the production of its body as a human body in contraposition to animal bodies.     

Nonmarket Labor Processes in an Advanced Capitalist Economy

In advanced capitalist economies, the treatment of labor as a commodity suggests that labor's cost and availability depend on market mechanisms. Although neoclassical economic thought recognizes the influence of collective bargaining and labor legislation on the cost and availability of labor, economists generally pay scant attention to the ways informal and formal relations of power, along with myths of sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality, combine within labor processes in advanced capitalist economies to influence the cost and availability of labor. This article presents data on the labor processes in the North Carolina seafood processing industry and compares them to the labor processes accompanying the annual, seasonal importation of legal alien farm labor by U.S. agricultural producers. The labor processes of the former rest on kinship and informal social relations while those of the latter rest on formal political authority. The analysis suggests that, even in advanced capitalist economies, employers faced with labor supply problems do not rely on market mechanisms but instead tap formal and informal systems of authority to assure supplies of labor, and support their behaviors with myths of sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality. The article concludes with a discussion of these behaviors in the context of post-World War II international divisions of labor.     

Estimation of inbreeding,kinship and genetic distances from surnames--coastal population of middle Dalmatia,Croatia

This work was dedicated to the investigation of the population structure of the middle Dalmatia settlements: Jesenice, Mimice, Zivogos?e and Zaostrog by surname distribution study and applying the isonymous method. The surnames of males and females in marital pairs were analyzed as well as of their first and second-generation ancestors on the sample of a total of 3,024 examinees. The analyses of surnames pointed to the rates of inbreeding, kinship and genetic distances of the populations. Although the values of the inbreeding coefficient are high in all the four settlements, the inbreeding coefficient is exceptionally high in Mimice. A total kinship coefficient for the four settlements speaks also in favor of the high rate of kinship in the examined settlements, i.e. of the high rate of the reproductive isolation of the whole region during the analyzed period. The reasons for such high coefficients are natural features of the examined region (the mountains of Mosor, Biokovo and Rili?), poor traffic connection of this region in the past, the patrilineal mode of inheritance and the demographic specifics of the population. The matrix of genetic distances between examined settlement pairs reveals that Mimice, a settlement with the highest share of isonymous marriages, shows the greatest distances in comparison to the other settlements. On the other hand, Jesenice, Zivogos?e and Zaostrog are characterized by small genetic distances, which is the fact that speaks in favor of their genetic homogenization and "openness" toward interpopulational migrations, i.e. the gene flow.     

AMBUSH: A Computer Program for Stochastic Microsimulation of Small Human Populations

A new generation of computer simulation programs for exploring problems in demography, kinship ties, descent groups, and other kinds of connectivity in small human populations is now available for use. AMBUSH is a simulation package which may be useful for simulating effects of fertility and mortality schedules, rules of marriage and kinship, density-dependent infanticide, and other features of closed breeding groups, and their stochastic variability. The program, described here, is available from the authors . [microsimulation, demography, kinship, connectivity]     

Genetic epidemiology of Down's syndrome in Shetland

Summary Pedigrees of all known cases, on Shetland, of Down's syndrome, cytogenetically confirmed as trisomy 21, and of a control for each patient matched by birth date, sex and birth place, were traced over a minimum of eight generations. Mean kinship coefficients in all pairs of Down's syndrome patients and in all pairs of controls were similar. The kinship between the father and mother of each case shows that the parents are more closely related than the general level of relationship in the population, suggesting some recessive element in the etiology. It is argued that the effect of the resulting increased homozygosity would be to prevent the loss of the conceptus that occurs in the majority of trisomy 21 conceptions.     

The Foundation of Kinship

Men's hunting has dominated the discourse on energy capture and flow in the past decade or so. We turn to women's roles as critical to household formation, pair-bonding, and intergenerational bonds. Their pivotal contributions in food processing and distribution likely promoted kinship, both genetic and affinal, and appear to be the foundation from which households evolved. With conscious recognition of household social units, variable cultural constructions of human kinship systems that were sensitive to environmental and technological conditions could emerge. Kinship dramatically altered the organization of resource access for our species, creating what we term "kinship ecologies." We present simple mathematical models to show how hunting leads to dependence on women's contributions, bonds men to women, and bonds generations together. Kinship, as it organized transfers of food and labor energy centered on women, also became integrated with the biological evolution of human reproduction and life history.     

The Influence of Kinship on Familiar Natal Migrant Rhesus Macaques (Macaca mulatta)

In most primate species, females remain in the natal group with kin while males disperse away from kin around the time of puberty. Philopatric females bias their social behavior toward familiar maternal and paternal kin in several species, but little is known about kin bias in the dispersing sex. Male dispersal is likely to be costly because males encounter an increased risk of predation and death, which might be reduced by dispersing together with kin and/or familiar males (individuals that were born and grew up in same natal group) or into a group containing kin and/or familiar males. Here we studied the influence of kinship on familiar natal migrant rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) on Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico, by combining demographic, behavioral, and genetic data. Our data suggest that kinship influences spatial proximity between recent natal immigrants and males familiar to them. Immigrants were significantly nearer to more closely related familiar males than to more distantly related individuals. Within a familiar subgroup, natal migrants were significantly closer to maternal kin, followed by paternal kin, then non-kin, and finally to males related via both the maternal and paternal line. Spatial proximity between natal immigrants and familiar males did not decrease over time in the new group, suggesting that there is no decline in associations between these individuals within the first months of immigration. Overall, our results might indicate that kinship is important for the dispersing sex, at least during natal dispersal when kin are still available.     

Facial resemblance increases the attractiveness of same-sex faces more than other-sex faces

Our reactions to facial self-resemblance could reflect either specialized responses to cues of kinship or by-products of the general perceptual mechanisms of face encoding and mere exposure. The adaptive hypothesis predicts differences in reactions to self-resemblance in mating and prosocial contexts, while the by-product hypothesis does not. Using face images that were digitally transformed to resemble participants, I showed that the effects of resemblance on attractiveness judgements depended on both the sex of the judge and the sex of the face being judged: facial resemblance increased attractiveness judgements of same-sex faces more than other-sex faces, despite the use of identical procedures to manipulate resemblance. A control experiment indicated these effects were caused neither by lower resemblance of other-sex faces than same-sex faces, nor by an increased perception of averageness or familiarity of same-sex faces due to prototyping or mere exposure affecting only same-sex faces. The differential impact of self-resemblance on our perception of same-sex and other-sex faces supports the hypothesis that humans use facial resemblance as a cue of kinship.     

Spatial genetic structure in two congeneric epiphytes with different dispersal strategies analysed by three different methods

Three different approaches were used to assess the kinship structure of two epiphytic bryophytes, Orthotrichum speciosum and O. obtusifolium, that have different dispersal strategies. The two species were sampled in a 200 ha landscape where species occurrence and host trees had been mapped previously. Local environmental conditions at sampled trees were recorded and kinship between individuals was calculated based on amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP)-marker data. We did not detect any association between AFLP-markers and investigated environmental conditions. In both species, significant kinship coefficients were found between individuals up to 300-350 m apart which shows that both species have a restricted dispersal range. The spatial kinship structure was detected with both autocorrelation analysis and generalized additive models (GAMs), but linear regression failed to detect any structure in O. speciosum. Although the dioecious O. obtusifolium is currently the more common species it may, none the less, due to its restricted dispersal range and reproduction mode, become threatened in the future by current silvicultural practices which enhance the distance between host trees and decrease their life span. Finally, GAMs seem most appropriate for analysing spatial genetic structure because the effects of local environmental conditions and spatial structure can be analysed simultaneously, no assumption of a parametric form between kinship coefficient and distance is required, and spatial data resolution is not lost in the arbitrary choice of distance classes characterizing autocorrelation analysis.