Stephen Brady and Dr. Janis Nuckolls, visiting professor of Anthropology
Kinship studies was a central concern of socio-cultural anthropology for decades. The centrality of kinship within the discipline was due to the traditional anthropological practice of studying social structure among small-scale societies. Social anthropologists found that kinship provides people with an effective form of organization in the absence of a state. In many small-scale societies, descent determines the economic, political, religious, and social position of individuals. By the second half of the twentieth century kinship studies faced a rapid decline within social anthropology, in part because some anthropologists found that kinship studies were based on Western presuppositions about the biogenetic nature of filial relatedness. Kinship studies within anthropology was largely nonexistant during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Recent years have seen a resurgence of kinship studies among anthropology spurred by interest in gender studies and new reproductive technologies. In studying kinship, contemporary anthropologists try to describe the ways in which people understand their own filial interrelations. These relations can be both biological and social. In this study I have tried to take up these contemporary concerns in the context of Nahuala, a Maya town in the Guatemalan highlands. I argue here that the K’iche’ of Nahuala understand their own filial relations according to several modes. Individual K’iche’ families combine these common modes of relatedness in complex and idiosyncratic ways according to their own experience and understanding.
The first mode of relatedness by which the K’iche’ understand their filial connections is very much like the Western notion of biogenetics. The younger generation of K’iche’ attend school and learn about basic genetic principles. Older members of the K’iche’ community get the same information from educational radio programs, so nearly all the K’iche’ in Nahuala understand that physical and psychological attributes pass from parents to children throught the medium of genes. They also believe that the physical material of kinship is produced through sexual intercourse. This biological mode of relatedness is very much like Western ideas of relatedness because these same Western notions are taught to the K’iche’ in school and other educational mediums.
The K’iche’ of Nahuala also organize their filial connections according to a legal mode of relatedness. After a child is born, the parents must go to the municipal building to inscribe the child’s name in the city records. The parents are then issued a kind of birth certificate. This process is very important because parents only have a legal responsibility for their children if all of the relevant names and information is recorded in the city office. Normally children in Nahuala inherit their parents land upon the death of their parents or their own marriage; parents are legally required to provide an inheritance for their children, but if the relevant records do not exist, parents have no legal obligation to their children and may not provide them with an inheritance.
Another mode of relatedness among the K’iche’ functions according to the ammount and kind of communication had between family members. If parents and children communicate well, their family will remain intact. If, however, children ignore their parents and parents do not direct and help their children, the family is likely to disintegrate, and children may look for other forms of relatedness, for example, among street gangs. The communicative mode of relatedness allows people who are not related biogenetically to become otherwise related as a family; if communication is very good between two friends, they may come to regard and treat each other as fully related family members.
Closely associated with the communicative mode of relatedness is what I will call the household mode of relatedness. According to this mode, those who live together and cooperate in common, goal-oriented tasks will come to regard each other as family. The K’iche’ often perceive a different kind of relatedness between, for example, siblings who live and work together and siblings who live apart from each other and have few if any common activities. One K’iche’ youth listed his family members for me. I knew he had brothers that he did not list so I asked him if his other brothers were part of his family. He told me, “They live apart from us; they don’t count.” As the K’iche’ of Nahuala work together toward common goals they come to perceive filial relatedness among themselves.
The K’iche’ combine these various modes of relatedness in complex ways in order to define for themselves who counts as family members. If two people related biogenetically do not communicate with each other nor work together, they may come to perceive a more distant biological connection between them. In this way the K’iche’ blend biological and social notions of relatedness; the line between biology and culture becomes blurred according to the various modes of K’iche’ relatedness.
The K’iche’ Maya use a particular conception of respect to negotiate and order the various modes of relatedness. For the K’iche’, respect means to accept and honor the decisions of others so long as those decisions are legally and socially acceptable. In the case of filial relatedness, each person must accept the degree to which others would like to be related to him or her. For example, biological cousins may come to consider each other as brothers or sisters if they both adopt the communication and participation appropriate to that role. However, if one of the cousins chooses to maintain a relationship of distance with his or her cousin then the other party must respect that decision and treat the other cousin with the appropriate distance.
Each K’iche’ family combines modes of relatedness in idiosyncratic ways according to specific experiences and interpretations of common cultural ideas. One family may foreground one mode of relatedness while another family may conceptualize their relationships in a slightly or dramatically different way. As distinct families have specific experiences they come to interpret and implement modes of relatedness in ways that make sense to them, always with respect for the life decisions of others.