Kinship—Importance

Importance of Kinship System

Kinship is a universal system organised around the universal processes of mating and reproduction. In most societies, kinship plays a significant role in individuals’ socialisation and the maintenance of group solidarity. In pre-industrial, simple societies, kinship relations may be so extensive and significant that they constitute the social system. In more complex societies, kinship normally forms a fairly small part of the totality of social relations which make up the social system.

Simple societies do not have, like modern complex societies, highly organised and relatively autonomous institutions such as the state, industrial enterprises, the army, schools and religious organisations like churches, sporting and recreational associations, trade unions, and political parties. Consequently, many activities that we in a complex society would call political, economic, educational or religious are in those societies subsumed under and carried out in the performance of kinship roles. In other words, kinship in such societies constitutes the framework within which the individual is assigned economic and political functions, acquires rights and obligations, receives community aid, etc. In his study of The Nuer of the Southern Sudan, Evans-Pritchard describes how the lineage system performs the function of maintenance of law and order. This is not to imply that people’s behaviour is determined or narrowly prescribed by their kinship roles. Most individuals occupy more than one kinship role, so that there may be dilemmas and choices in the performance of a role in a particular situation, and there are often conflicts between roles; clans and lineage may fight over land. Faced with choice and conflicts, people may use their kinship roles; in small-scale societies, it is their kinship that they use to gain their ends, since in the absence of other well-articulated institutions, it is all they have.

The kinship of today is being influenced very much by the occupational system. A villager running his business in a city will try to establish himself in the city and likes to develop kins in the cities, which can help him promote his business. We may conclude by saying that “such an occupational system virtually requires the pattern of establishing or changing household according to the occupational opportunities of the husband.”