The Old Kinship Studies Confronts Gay Kinship: A Critique of Kath Weston

Kath Weston's highly-acclaimed analysis of gay kinship is examined in the light of the old kinship studies, especially the notion of focality. The verdict is quite contrary to Weston's, viz. that gay kinship and the idea of gay families are structural derivatives of heterosexual kinship and heterosexual families. Weston's work is shown to be part of a larger collectivist project in kinship theory in which key concerns in semantic theory are ignored.     

Dividends of Kinship: Meanings and Uses of Social Relatedness.; New Directions in Anthropological Kinship.

Dividends of Kinship: Meanings and Uses of Social Relatedness. Peter P. Schweitzer. ed. New York: Routledge, 2000. 221 pp.
New Directions in Anthropological Kinship. Linda Stone. ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. 352 pp.     

Kinship and covariance

Price's (1970) covariance theorem can be used to derive an expression for gene frequency change in kin selection models in which the fitness effect of an act is independent of the genotype of the recipient. This expression defines a coefficient of relatedness which subsumes r(Wright, 1922), b(Hamilton, 1972), ρ (Orlove &; Wood, 1978), and R(Michod &; Hamilton, 1980). The new coefficient extends the domain of Hamilton's rule to models in which the average gene frequency of actors differs from that of recipients.     

Kinship and Cooperation

Chagnon’s analysis of a well-known axe fight in the Yanomamö village of Mishimishiböwei-teri (Chagnon and Bugos 1979) is among the earliest empirical tests of kin selection theory for explaining cooperation in humans. Kin selection theory describes how cooperation can be organized around genetic kinship and is a fundamental tool for understanding cooperation within family groups. Previous analysis on groups of cooperative Lamaleran whale hunters suggests that the role of genetic kinship as a principle for organizing cooperative human groups could be less important in certain cases than previously thought (Alvard Human Nature 14:129–163, 2003b). Evidence that supports a strong role for genetic kinship—groups are found to be more related than expected by chance—may be spurious because of the correlation between social structure and genetic kinship. Reanalysis of Chagnon’s data using matrix regression techniques, however, confirms that genetic kinship was the primary organizing principle in the axe fight; affinal relations were also important, whereas lineage identity explained nothing.     

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 Rebirth of Kinship

Kinship was one of the key areas of research interest among anthropologists in the nineteenth century, one of the most hotly debated areas of theory in the early and mid-twentieth century, and yet an area of waning interest by the end of the twentieth century. Since then, the study of kinship has experienced a revitalization, with concomitant disputes over how best to proceed. This special issue brings together recent studies of kinship by scientific anthropologists employing evolutionary theory and quantitative methods. We argue that the melding of the evolutionary theoretical perspective with quantitative and ethnographic methodologies has strengthened and reinvigorated the study of kinship by synthesizing and extending existing research via rigorous analyses of evidence.     

Symbolic Kinship Program

This paper discusses a computerized algorithm to derive the formula for the likelihood ratio for a kinship problem with any arbitrarily defined relationships based on genetic evidence. The ordinary paternity case with the familiar likelihood formula 1/2(q) is the commonest example. More generally, any miscellaneous collection of people can be genetically tested to help settle some argument about how they are related, what one might call a ``kinship' case. Examples that geneticists and DNA identification laboratories run into include sibship, incest, twin, inheritance, motherless, and corpse identification cases. The strength of the genetic evidence is always described by a likelihood ratio. The general method is described by which the computer program finds the formulas appropriate to these various situations. The benefits and the interest of the program are discussed using many examples, including analyses that have previously been published, some practical problems, and simple and useful rules for dealing with scenarios in which ancestral or fraternal types substitute for those of the alleged father.