Cogealing divinity: time, worship and kinship in South Indian Hinduism

Daily worship in Hindu temples is characterized by regular repetition. This article juxtaposes iconography and mythology; field data on worship in a Murukan temple in Kalugumalai, South India; and analytic concepts from western and Indian metaphysics, to examine what Gell termed the 'ritual manipulation of time'. In Hindu cosmology, the materialization of divinity – a prerequisite for worship – is inseparably linked not only to the emergence of time but also to the devolution of divinity into gendered forms. Because gender differences play a central role in iconography, mythology and worship, Hinduism provides a rich cultural resource for debating the morality and practice of human kinship, sexuality and procreation. Not only are there significant homologies between human and divine kinship behaviour, but human marriage patterns in South India display the same blend of repetitive yet changing oscillation as do daily and annual temple liturgies.     

Group structure, kinship, inbreeding risk and habitual female dispersal in plural-breeding mammals

In most plural-breeding mammals, female group members are matrilineal relatives but, in a small number of species, all adult females are immigrants who are seldom closely related to each other. Some explanations of contrasts in female philopatry suggest that these differences are a consequence of variation in resource distribution and feeding competition, whereas others argue that they reflect variation in the risk of close inbreeding to philopatric females. However, neither explanation has been tested against quantitative comparisons. Here, we use quantitative comparisons and phylogenetic reconstructions to show that contrasts in female philopatry in plural breeders are associated with the risk that a female's father is reproductively active in her group when she starts to breed, supporting the suggestion that habitual female dispersal has evolved to minimize the risk of inbreeding.     

Interlocked: kinship,intimate precarity,and plantation labour in India

This article examines the employment of kinship relations in sustaining the plantation economy and in perpetuating the precariousness of child labourers who later became temporary workers in the tea plantations of Kerala, South India. Kinship ties locked diverse workers into a moral obligation of care that could easily be manipulated by plantation management as a form of labour control. Plantation capitalism, therefore, sustained itself not only through overt forms of violence but also through manipulating the precarity of employment in relation to intimate forms of love, care, and obligation that were bound up with kinship ties. Kinship networks of different kinds need to be understood as integral to the plantation society and as occupying a fundamental place within the capitalist order of plantations. I observe that the entangled relationship between workers’ precarity and plantation capitalism can be understood only if we pay attention to what I call the intimate precarity produced by the employment of kinship networks within plantation capitalism.     

Cardiometabolic risk markers in Indian children: comparison with UK Indian and white European children

Objective

UK Indian adults have higher risks of coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes than Indian and UK European adults. With growing evidence that these diseases originate in early life, we compared cardiometabolic risk markers in Indian, UK Indian and white European children.

Methods

Comparisons were based on the Mysore Parthenon Birth Cohort Study (MPBCS), India and the Child Heart Health Study in England (CHASE), which studied 9–10 year-old children (538 Indian, 483 UK Indian, 1375 white European) using similar methods. Analyses adjusted for study differences in age and sex.

Results

Compared with Mysore Indians, UK Indians had markedly higher BMI (% difference 21%, 95%CI 18 to 24%), skinfold thickness (% difference 34%, 95%CI 26 to 42%), LDL-cholesterol (mean difference 0.48, 95%CI 0.38 to 0.57 mmol/L), systolic BP (mean difference 10.3, 95% CI 8.9 to 11.8 mmHg) and fasting insulin (% difference 145%, 95%CI 124 to 168%). These differences (similar in both sexes and little affected by adiposity adjustment) were larger than those between UK Indians and white Europeans. Compared with white Europeans, UK Indians had higher skinfold thickness (% difference 6.0%, 95%CI 1.5 to 10.7%), fasting insulin (% difference 31%, 95%CI 22 to 40%), triglyceride (% difference 13%, 95%CI 8 to 18%) and LDL-cholesterol (mean difference 0.12 mmol/L, 95%CI 0.04 to 0.19 mmol/L).

Conclusions

UK Indian children have an adverse cardiometabolic risk profile, especially compared to Indian children. These differences, not simply reflecting greater adiposity, emphasize the need for prevention strategies starting in childhood or earlier.     

Analytical DNA fingerprinting in lions: parentage, genetic diversity, and kinship

The application of hypervariable minisatellite genomic families to the reconstruction of population genetic structure holds great promise in describing the demographic history and future prospects of free-ranging populations. This potential has not yet been realized due to unforeseen empirical constraints associated with the use of heterologous species probes, to theoretical limitations on the power of the procedure to track genic heterozygosity and kinship, and to the absence of extensive field studies to test genetic predictions. We combine here the technical development of feline-specific VNTR (variable number tandem repeat) families of genetic loci with the long-term demographic and behavioral observations of lion populations of the Serengeti ecosystem in East Africa. Minisatellite variation was used to quantify the extent of genetic variation in several populations that differed in their natural history and levels of inbreeding. Definitive parentage, both maternal and paternal, was assessed for 78 cubs born in 11 lion prides, permitting the assessment of precise genealogical relationships among some 200 lions. The extent of DNA restriction fragment sharing between lions was empirically calibrated with the coefficient of relatedness, r, in two different populations that had distinct demographic histories. The results suggest that reliable estimates of relative genetic diversity, of parentage, and of individual relatedness can be achieved in free-ranging populations, provided the minisatellite family is calibrated in established pedigrees for the species.     

Social networks,support cliques,and kinship

Data on the number of adults that an individual contacts at least once a month in a set of British populations yield estimates of network sizes that correspond closely to those of the typical “sympathy group” size in humans. Men and women do not differ in their total network size, but women have more females and more kin in their networks than men do. Kin account for a significantly higher proportion of network members than would be expected by chance. The number of kin in the network increases in proportion to the size of the family; as a result, people from large families have proportionately fewer non-kin in their networks, suggesting that there is either a time constraint or a cognitive constraint on network size. A small inner clique of the network functions as a support group from whom an individual is particularly likely to seek advice or assistance in time of need. Kin do not account for a significantly higher proportion of the support clique than they do for the wider network of regular social contacts for either men or women, but each sex exhibits a strong preference for members of their own sex.     

Male affiliation, cooperation and kinship in wild chimpanzees

Long-term field research has revealed that male chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, affiliate and cooperate in several contexts. Assuming close genetic relationship among males, affiliative and cooperative behaviour have been hypothesized to evolve through the indirect effects of kin selection. We tested the hypothesis that matrilineal genetic relatedness affects patterns of male social affiliation and cooperation in an unusually large community of chimpanzees at the Ngogo study site, Kibale National Park, Uganda. Field observations indicated that six behavioural measures of affiliation and cooperation among 23 adult males were significantly correlated with each other. Sequences of the first hypervariable portion of the mtDNA genome revealed that three pairs of males and one quintet shared mtDNA haplotypes. Matrix permutation tests using behavioural and genetic data showed that males that affiliated and cooperated with each other were not closely related through the maternal line. These findings add to a growing body of empirical evidence that suggest kinship plays an ancillary role in structuring patterns of wild chimpanzee behaviour within social groups. Copyright 2000 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.     

Managing uncertainty: information and insurance under the risk of starvation

In an uncertain world, animals face both unexpected opportunities and danger. Such outcomes can select for two potential strategies: collecting information to reduce uncertainty, or insuring against it. We investigate the relative value of information and insurance (energy reserves) under starvation risk by offering model foragers a choice between constant and varying food sources over finite foraging bouts. We show that sampling the variable option (choosing it when it is not expected to be good) should decline both with lower reserves and late in foraging bouts; in order to be able to reap the reduction in uncertainty associated with exploiting a variable resource effectively, foragers must be able to afford and compensate for an initial increase in the risk of an energetic shortfall associated with choosing the option when it is bad. Consequently, expected exploitation of the varying option increases as it becomes less variable, and when the overall risk of energetic shortfall is reduced. In addition, little activity on the variable alternative is expected until reserves are built up early in a foraging bout. This indicates that gathering information is a luxury while insurance is a necessity, at least when foraging on stochastic and variable food under the risk of starvation.     

Kinship,a-kinship,anti-kinship: Variation in the logic of kinship situations

Where contrasts between rural/urban, non-industrial/industrial, simple/complex et cetera societies are drawn, a corresponding contrast in the importance of kinship as an organising principle is more or less explicitly implied. Similarly, the weight put upon kinship is assumed to vary inversely with technological and/or social evolution. The analytical and practical effects of these assumptions are examined with reference to situations involving kinsmen in Lesotho (Southern Africa), in other non-industrial societies, and in middle-class Great Britain.The paper aims (a) to account for the unexpected non-use of kinship as a consistent organising principle in Lesotho, and (b) to demonstrate that kin-ties are nowhere consistently used since they are social resources whose existence will be exploited, ignored or denied as the logic of particular situations demands; that relations between kinsmen in any society may be governed by any one of three different kinship principles—kinship, a-kinship or anti-kinship.By corollary it is argued that the real significance of kinship can neither be read off an evolutionary continuum, nor denied on the grounds of inconsistent usage.     

Occult return,divine grace,and saabui: practising transnational kinship in postsocialist Guinea

In the Republic of Guinea, where transnational migration has become a critical path to prestige among young urbanites, migrant success abroad is intimately connected to the cultivation of kin ties at home. For performing artists, who were the darlings of Guinea's Socialist Revolution (1958‐84), the experience of migration is uniquely linked to the fall of the socialist state and to the precarity of urban life in contemporary Africa. This article describes how Guinean artists manage distance and uncertainty through three practices: occult aggression, grace‐seeking, and patronage (saabui), which together illustrate the contours and limitations of kinship's efficacy in transnational space. By exploring transnational kinship as an intersubjective and productive practice that can extend beyond obligation or solidarity and into the realm of magic, this article proposes new ways of conceptualizing what it means for migrants to maintain significant connections across national borders.     

Ancestral kinship and cancer in Lastovo Island, Croatia.

The aim of this study was to compute the average kinship coefficient of cancer cases in an extreme isolate (Lastovo Island, Croatia) and to compare it to the corresponding value for the island's unaffected population. Kinship estimates were obtained by Wright's path method (phi) based on pedigree reconstruction and Lasker's coefficient of relationship by isonymy (Ri) based on surname distribution. A total of 76 cancer cases were recorded on the island between 1971 and 1995. The unaffected control population of 1144 persons was obtained from the population census in 1971. The data on five ancestral generations were collected from parish registries preserved in the local church, and included 5484 persons born on the island between 1750 and 1970. Both Wright's path method and Lasker's isonymy method indicated significantly greater kinship of female cancer cases than of the unaffected population. Cancer cases with increased values of Ri among them and Ri among their ancestors included cancers of the ovary, colon, brain, breast, and prostate and leukemias. This study confirms the role of heredity and common ancestry in the development of cancer, providing a rough insight into their relative importance for specific cancer sites.     

Social dynamics of mammals: Reproductive success, kinship and individual fitness

Apparent altruism, in which an individual seemingly decreases its evolutionary fitness by assisting others, can confer benefits if the individual assists kin. Thus, an animal can increase its total or inclusive fitness by producing offspring (direct fitness) and/or helping kin to reproduce (indirect fitness). Although kin selection has been suggested as the mechanism underlying the formation of mammalian societies, many species act as if they attempt to maximize the direct fitness component of their inclusive fitness.     

One family: defining kinship in the neighbourhoods of Kumasi,Ghana

This article investigates how the concept that ‘people from one place are one family’ creates an a priori category of relatedness among otherwise unrelated neighbours in Kumasi, Ghana. A connection between spatial and kinship relations is indicated in the common saying, but unlike similar connections elaborated in other locales, residents often do not share activities such as cooking or cultivating prior to making claims to being ‘one family’. Through interviews and the resolution of a neighbourhood dispute, I show that the assumption that co‐residents are family can precede – and instantiate – the practices that indicate shared family. I argue that the equivalence between place and family is a fundamentally ethical equivalence that renders the actions of selves and others evaluable according to a common understanding of what is good for communities.