Iroquois Kinship Essay

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Iroquois Kinship System | | | | There are many different cultures in this world and I would like to briefly talk about the Iroquois kinship system. Kinship implicates how people sort each other and how the customs affect people’s behavior whether it’s within parents, children or marriage. I will describe three specific examples of how the kinship of the Iroquois culture impacts the way this culture behaves and compare this culture to my own society. Let’s start with in the Iroquois’ culture. The Iroquois tribes are a food-producing society that lived in North America, mainly in upstate New York. Their main crops were primarily corn, beans, and squash. The Iroquois were horticulturalists and spent little to no time hunting and gathering. The men cleared and burned the forest while women planted, weeded, and harvested the crops. The role of the Iroquois women was very important because of their labor. As the cultivators within the tribe, they were involved in many extra tribal conflicts. The women also owned the maize or Indian corn or seeds; this gave them power within Iroquoian society. If the women were against a conflict or raiding activity, they withheld maize from the warriors, which meant the men could not go to war. Since the Iroquois is a matrilineal group, the eldest female of the family makes all final decisions on resources and property. Matrilineal means blood lines that are traced through the mothers, and not the fathers, which means that a child is the same clan and tribe as their mother, no matter who the father is. Iroquois married certain members of their family. They could marry cross cousins, but could not marry parallel cousins, which was called a sibling exchange system. Parallel cousins were considered too closely related. Parallel cousins are the children of a parent's same–sexed sibling. The Iroquois recognize two

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