Exam 10: Families, Kinship, and Descent

What kind of kinship is most common in the contemporary United States?

The higher proportion of expanded family households among poorer Americans has been explained as an adaptation to poverty.

Recent census data reveal that more U.S. women are now living without a husband than with one.

This chapter offers a brief overview of kinship-related demographic changes in the United States and Canada. How have kinship arrangements changed? How do these changes relate to other cultural changes? Do you find any of the current trends surprising? If so, why?

In Arembepe, Brazil, a degree of community solidarity was promoted, for example, by the myth that everyone was kin. However, social solidarity was actually much less developed in Arembepe than in societies with clans and lineages. Why?

"Anthropologists spend much of their time studying trivia like kinship." Do you agree with this statement? If so, why? If not, why not?

Contemporary North American adults usually define their families as consisting of their husbands or wives and their children. In contrast, when middle-class Brazilians talk about their families, they mean their parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and on, down to their children. They rarely mention the spouse. Which of the following is among the reasons for this stark cultural contrast?

What is the name of the postmarital residence pattern in which the married couple is expected to establish its own home?

According to genealogical kin types used by anthropologists to study kinship relations, what kind of relative is ego's mother's brother?

In the United States, the ratio of marriages to divorces doubled between 1960 and 1980, and the divorce rate reached 55% in 2010.

Although the nuclear family remains a cultural ideal for many Americans, nuclear families accounted for just 22.5 percent of American households in 2007. In fact, other domestic arrangements outnumber the traditional U.S. household more than four to one. All of the following are among the reasons for these trends EXCEPT that

In some systems of kinship terminology, lineal and collateral relatives are grouped together under the same kinship terms, and in others they are not. In terms of the sociocultural setting in which these terminologies exist, discuss reasons for the differences.

What is the name of the family in which a child is raised?

In what kind of kinship calculation are kin ties traced equally through males and females?

After reaching an all-time low for the 20th century in the 1970s, the nuclear family is now making a rebound, accounting for a greater number of U.S. households each year.

Industrialization increases mobility, which plays a major role in the disappearance of extended families in the United States.

A bifurcate merging kinship terminology distinguishes between collateral and lineal relatives.

Members of a clan are descended from a common apical ancestor.

U.S. kinship calculation is bilateral, traced equally through males and females; for example, father and mother.

In a bifurcate merging kinship system, which of the following would be called by the same term?