Kinship
The structuralist view of kinship was laid out in Lévi-Strauss' grand statement: Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (The Elementary Structures of Kinship). In this, he combined Mauss' ideas about the importance of gifts in primitive societies with the role of the incest taboo in forcing exchanges of mates outside of closely related family groups. The resulting exchange of women is asymmetric in that men have power over women which is not reciprocated. The resulting social structures provide a framework for treating the oppression of women as a social construct rather than being a matter of biology.
Read more about this topic: Exchange Of Women
Famous quotes containing the word kinship:
“The spiritual kinship between Lincoln and Whitman was founded upon their Americanism, their essential Westernism. Whitman had grown up without much formal education; Lincoln had scarcely any education. One had become the notable poet of the day; one the orator of the Gettsyburg Address. It was inevitable that Whitman as a poet should turn with a feeling of kinship to Lincoln, and even without any association or contact feel that Lincoln was his.”
—Edgar Lee Masters (1869–1950)
“The little lives of earth and form,
Of finding food, and keeping warm,
Are not like ours, and yet
A kinship lingers nonetheless....”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)