They used matrilineal descent groups to trace their ancestors and select marital partners. Their right to use land also came from these groups. Women were as equal as men in a way that gave them power over what happened in the group. As a social structure, the Iroquois tribe was a well planned, close knitted family. As a member of the tribe, everybody was related by blood or marriage.
For the next 175 to 200 years, the Iroquois managed to dominate other Native American groups and to remain free of both British and French rule. did you know? • Both the U.S. Constitution and the founding charter of the United Nations are based on ideas found in the Iroquois constitution, known as “The Great Binding Law.” • Iroquois women had many more rights than colonial American women. • More than 50,000 Iroquois live in the United States today. The Iroquois Way of Life The league’s The totem, or tribal symbol, of the Iroquois “The World on the Turtle’s Back” is an Iroquois (GrPE-kwoiQ) creation story filled with conflict and compelling characters.
After performing an investigation of the Tiwi, it is evident that the matrilocal residential pattern is characterized by the kinship system and gender roles within the culture. Before making a comparison of the Tiwi to the Yanomamo, it is important to discuss background information regarding the aboriginal society and its values. The primary researcher for the study of the Tiwi of North Australia is Charles William Merton Hart, who studied the Tiwi people from 1928 to 1929. In his fieldwork The Tiwi of North Australia, Hart discusses social organization and ritual among the thousand Tiwi of the Melville and Bathurst Islands. The Tiwi, who lived on the two islands in the Arafura Sea off the coast of the North Territory, were completely isolated from the mainland of Australia for 6,000 years until the eighteenth century.
It was assumed that the nuclear families members should be biologically related and it should be based upon heterosexual love and marriage. Additionally there should be a sexual division of labour based on natural differences. This implies Parson’s expressive role, (a functionalist perspective) that women should be primarily responsible for childcare and domestic responsibilities within the home. It also implies whilst women take upon this role, men take upon Parson’s instrumental role to be the breadwinner (the economic function) and head of home. The nuclear family is presented as being the most acceptable way of being and it is the nuclear family that has been prevalent in the mass media.
Document 3: Excerpt from the Seneca Falls Convention: Declaration of Sentiments adopted in 1848 1) Identify two main complaints stated in the Declaration of Sentiments. After women become married, their husband holds all their rights, a right to an education, voting, getting a job. If women earn money- the men get to take it and she is taken from her rights to own property. Document 4: Cartoon 1) According to the cartoon, how would women’s suffrage affect society? Women would be free to do what they want, and it seems that the men would have taken the women’s roll and stayed home to watch the children and to do house chores.
Increase of family mobility> separation from kinship networks. Cult of domesticity: the notion that true womanhood centers on domestic responsibility and child bearing. Post-WWII Family Model nuclear family idealized- only attainable by white middle- and upper-class families. Real wages increase in the 1950's. divorce rate decrease.
Kinship and the Iroquois Tribes Unlike most North American cultures, the women in the Iroquois nations have an elevated position within their society. This paper will briefly describe the Iroquois culture and look at their kinship system. Then I will show how this kinship system affects their religion/beliefs, marriage and leadership within the Iroquois culture. I will also compare the Iroquois kinship to my own, to determine the similarities and differences. The word “Iroquois” really refers to the language of this collection of five tribes and not a name for an individual tribe (U.S. Histroy, n.d., para.2).
Murdock suggested that by living in a family which consisted of a mother, father and their biological child/ children, society would be enhanced ass teaching and learning the norms and morals of society would be best with a world which consisted of nuclear families. Since Murdock was a functionalist, he belied that the essential building block of society were the functionality of the economy, reproduction, sex and socialisation. George Murdock along with other functions had a consensus view that nuclear families accommodates the four key functions because it would stabilise satisfaction of the sex drive which would lower social disruption that could be caused by sexual tension. Another key factor was socialisation, specifically primary socialisation, which Murdock believed would be best in a nuclear family as primary socialisation is during the childhood of children, where they learn the norms and values of life, nuclear families were seen as the best setting for this. The functionalist view is extremely positive on its views for family’s and households due to their belief on the importance and influence nuclear families have on society.
KINSHIP Kinship can be divided or organized in many different fashions or varieties based on the customs of the people one is trying to obtain the kinship from. One of the primary types of learning kinship is tracing through unilineal kinship. Unilineal kinship is tracing family descent from one person through a single side of their family. There are two types of unilineal kinship, these are patrilineal and matrilineal. Patrilineal lineage is used primarily in male dominated cultures, such as the Yanomamo, through this technique ancestry is traced through the one’s father’s side and all of his primary relatives.
Native American traditional family composition consists of extended family members made up of blood and non-blood relatives. The nuclear family consisted of a woman, her husband, and their children. Many tribes practiced polygamy, in which a man had two or more wives, while other tribes were monogamous. Jonathan’s tribe practiced monogamy. Native Americans developed societies with well-defined roles, responsibilities, religious rites, ceremonies, social behavior in which group involvement, support and consensus plays a major role.