ANTH/WMNS 326 Cross cultural families and households
17 Feb.: Matriliny, patriliny, gender, generation
Required readings: Peters, Pauline (1997) "Against the Odds: Matriliny, land and gender in the Shire Highlands of Malawi." Critique of Anthropology. 17(2):189-210. Sage.
http://coa.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/17/2/189Hong Zhang (2005) "Bracing for an Uncertain Future: A Case Study of New Coping Strategies of Rural Parents under China's Birth Control Policy." The China Journal, 54: 53-76. JSTOR. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20066066
Tonight: exploring different descent systems, how they change and how we might answer an essay question about this.
Example of an essay question: What cultural conditions permit a specific descent system to operate in a society? Explain with respect to the information in the articles by Peters and Zhang.
How to proceed: review the readings and brainstorm possible answers
- e.g. economic formation, political structure, gender roles, etc.
Build a tentative thesis statement: I argue that the type of descent system that exists in a society is closely linked to _________, because [when we see change in ________ the descent system also changes.]
Set out definitions for the terms necessary to answer this question.
- matriliny, uxorilocal
- patriliny, patrilocal, liangbian dianli
- other?
Set out context; that is, what information does a reader of your essay need if she or he has not read the articles? As you think about writing the paper, set out key points of information and decide whether they are relevant or not and where they go (context or evidence sections)
-
Peters: people of Shire highlands of Malawi;
- live in villages, agricultural
- ? were exposed to patriarchal ideas through colonial government, missionaries
- ? government policy both before and after independence was aimed at men
- nevertheless, people continue to follow a matrilineal descent model, although greater emphasis on conjugal union and the effective matrilineal group is smaller than before
- ? family access to labour power
Zhang: small rural village in China
- unlike most of Han China, which was patrilineal and patrilocal, here there has been a significant minor tradition of uxorilocality
- under China’s birth control policy, fertility dropped, leading to smaller families and changes in marriage patterns with rise of liangbian dianli, decline of uxorilocality, and slight decline of patrilocality
- ? changes in China’s economy – factories, education, migration
- ? changes in gender roles – increasing value for daughters
Present evidence: This is the information that you will present, explaining how it supports your argument. Thus, what you put here depends on your argument. Each paragraph should deal with a specific element of your argument.
- one way to proceed is to let the sources guide the presentation (type A); this is NOT as powerful as ensuring that your argument guides the presentation (type B).
- in type A, you would explain the evidence from Peters, and then the evidence from Zhang.
- in type B, you would pull out the reasons that you think BLANK is the key factor in descent systems and present each reason in a separate paragraph with supporting evidence from both authors.