Iroquois Kinship Research Paper

446 Words2 Pages
The Iroquois Kinship Adam Smith Ant 101 Prof. Akerele May 30, 2011 When we think of kinship we think of family, marriage. And all the good stuff. Kinship all deals with divorce as well. So when I started doing my paper on the kinship of the Iroquois Indians it was a bit confusing to me to understand. Doing the Iroquois kinship I learned a lot about them that I didn’t know. When it comes to kinship the women in the Iroquois determine the kinship. When they get married the groom moves into the brides longhouse. The kids they have become part of her family or clan as they call it. Louis Morgan wrote a book called Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. In this book he “identifies the Iroquois as one of the six major kinships” (Morgan, 1871). In our text they even showed charts of how they trace family of the Iroquois. It pretty much shows each side of the family. In the Iroquois you are permitted to marry your parallel cousin, but you may marry your cross cousin. In other words it’s basically like saying that you cannot marry your first cousin. You are however allowed to marry you second, third cousin and so on. Here is a sample of the chart I got from the text (Nowak, 2010)…show more content…
There is no conflict, no need to have a judge or fighting over who gets what. All a woman has to do is set the males belongings outside on the step of the longhouse, and when the male returns and sees it he know the marriage is over. The way the kinship of the Iroquois works I really don’t think it affects much on how they live and go about their everyday life. Everything is simple and it is all up to the woman on what goes on and what

More about Iroquois Kinship Research Paper

Open Document