#bilinealdescent

[gwanth1002]

Bilineal and Patrilineal Descents

My father’s grandfather moved to the United States from Germany sometime in the late 20th century. Decades later, little is known of the origins or ancestry of my fathers’ side of the family before immigration to the United States. In the 1960s, my grandfather was scouring a flea market and came upon the above pictured crest, and promptly bought it for $3 and painted “Pfister” across the banner. Or so that is the story that has been passed down in my family now for three generations. My grandfather passed the crest to my uncle (older than my father) who then passed it to my father, who gave it to me. In this way, my family name (and this crest with it) is passed down patrilinealy.

While my family seems to typically measure our descent bilineally, in that we don’t only measure descent as coming from the males in the family, there is definitely a strong sense of appreciation for the family name “Pfister” and its passage from generation to generation that was instilled in my father and uncle by my grandfather. Perhaps growing up a first generation American with little connection to extended family, my great-grandfather gave more important to the family name as one of the only things connecting his family to the family still in Germany. So its almost novel how a strong appreciation for a family name and giving weight to its ancestral importance resulted in a feaux family crest purchased at a flea market.

Nuclear & Extended Households

This weekend my parents visited for a day and at one point we got on to the topic of kinship when I was talking about my classes. I make note that the form of the household is a very fluid notion. Most of my life, I’ve lived in a nuclear household including my parents, and earlier in my life, my older sister. However, for a few months while I was in high school, my grandmother lived in our home making an extended household with three generations of the family under one roof. For a time, I lived at my uncle’s house, thus making his home an extended one through my presence. As family comes, goes, changes, and expands, households are often subject to change of state.

(right picture: mother and father)

[gwanth1002]

Kinship System, Bilineal Descent, and Nuclear Household

A kinship system is the predominant form of kin relationships in a culture and the kinds of behaviors involved. As we live in a western culture here in America, we primarily think of kinship as relations through birth. We have a system of bilineal descent, in which descent is traced through both parents. Pictured above is my friend Glen with his parents Glen and Kerri. His parents visited this weekend to watch his lacrosse game. These three individuals, along with his sister Ashley (not pictured) represent a nuclear household comprised of two married adults and two children. This is a very common way of setting up a household in the US. In other cultures, however, there are many more variations of the way families are set up. 

In my high school Spanish classes, we compared some hispanic cultures with our own. We found that it was much more common for these cultures to have extended households (more than one set of parents and children living together) because it is common to live in a house with extended family, and not just the nuclear family. In these cultures, the responsibility of raising children can be more shared among different family members, not just the parents.

There are laws as well as customs in the US that make Glen’s family a common example of a typical family. American law prohibits polygamy, so each marriage can only involve two spouses. While seemingly obvious in America, other countries allow for multiple spouses, which changes the way families are organized and responsibilities distributed. In addition to laws, it is typical of US culture to have a family unit comprised of two parents and children. However, as mentioned in Chapter 8 of Miller’s Cultural Anthropology, changes in laws concerning who can be married legally have expanded, along with our culture’s tendency to accept non-”typical” family structures, both in terms of marriage and children.