Kinship 101

When I was working on my doctorate at the University of Edinburgh, I was a teaching assistant for the introductory anthropology course for first year undergraduates. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of my students were Scottish.

One of the first lessons you learn in anthropology is about kinship. Family. What that means and why. My first lesson with my students, then, was to help them visually explore what kinship means in their own society, which boiled down to getting them to draw family trees. To demonstrate how to draw a family tree, one of my favorite games was to ask them if they could map out the British royal family. Most of the students would groan and roll their eyes, claiming they didn’t “pay attention to that kind of thing.” Still, I’d ask them to try, and grudgingly at first, they would do so.

A few intrepid students would begin, putting names onto slips of paper and arranging them near each other. Then another few would join in, as something would jog their memory about a little-known member of the royal family. And invariably, by the end of it, even the students who had mostly loudly assured me that they knew nothing about any of this were jumping in, yelling that so-and-so was married to such-and-such and that person was his daughter not his sister, and so on. Though no two were ever quite the same, we always wound up with a map of the royal family, with circles and squares, horizontal lines, vertical lines, dotted lines, broken lines, and a few small question marks here and there.

For British royalty where primogeniture (i.e. passing one’s whole estate to the firstborn child) is practiced, it’s pretty clear as to why understanding who is related to whom and how is important. But family, and the broader social dynamics of kinship, are important for everyone in a culture. The relationships within family often help shape us as individuals (for better and worse), but at a more macro level, understanding how kinship works in a society can tell you a bit about those people and how they see themselves.

Thicker than Water

So what is kinship? At its most basic level, it is the system of how individuals are related to each other, usually tied into the idea of family. For many people in the English-speaking world, family means “people who are related to you by biology or marriage or adoption.” But then again, we often refer to our close friends as “family” too, adding some complexity. I am “Aunt Kat” to a lot more kids than I am related to by blood.

Another challenge comes from the growing trend toward using genetic testing. Are the people who share a lot of DNA with you your “family” even if you have never met them and likely never will? Is “blood” then an adequate definition for family?

By the way, if you haven’t taken one of those tests, there are some fun caveats when you share your data that warn that companies cannot be held responsible for what you learn and that you can never unlearn it.

“Oh hello, unexpected siblings…”

But are they really, truly your siblings if you’ve never met? Are they your siblings if you meet them on a blind date and didn’t know you were related? Fun fact—in Iceland, where they have a very small population and extensive genealogical records, there is an app you can use to make sure you’re not too genetically close to your dinner date. (Indeed, one way to measure family may be by asking how close is too close when it comes to getting married or having kids together—most cultures have taboos around that at a certain degree of closeness, though not all. Looking at you, ancient Egyptian royalty.)

All in the Family

But who do you even consider family? First cousins? Second cousins? Third cousins twice removed? (Do you even really know what that last one means?) That can vary pretty widely by culture. I personally would be lucky if I recognized any of my second cousins, but there are parts of the world where those would still be considered close relations.

Why does degree of relatedness matter? In one interpretation (a somewhat Marxist one, if you’re into that sort of theoretical labeling), what’s really at the heart of family and kinship is responsibility and inheritance. Your close kin are the people you are responsible for, and vice versa. This is particularly true with parent-child relationships, but can extend beyond that. For instance, there is a system of kinship known as avuncular kinship. Cultures of the Marianas Islands, Tonga, Tsonga, and Apache, among others, have practiced forms of this kind of kinship, and its most defining feature is who is responsible for the well-being of children. A mother is, certainly, but it is not a child’s father who is their other main “parent figure,” but their mother’s brother. Biological fathers sometimes have loving relationships with their children, but they are not responsible for putting food on their plates and those children do not inherit from them.

Kinship, in this instance, is determined less by closest-degree-of-biology, and more by social responsibility.

Somewhere, my brother is crying, “but what if you’re like me and have two sisters and no other brothers to share the burden??” Indeed. Or what if three brothers have a single sister. You can see how certain families might wind up consolidating wealth that way.

So what’s the gaming angle here?

There’s a lot to unpack with kinship and it can have a lot of subtle impacts on your worldbuilding. I’ll explore some of those in future posts, but for now, it’s worth thinking about what “family” means in your world, and how that varies from one place to another. You may just borrow your ideas of kinship wholesale from your own experiences, and that’s absolutely fine, just know there are different options that might have impacts.

For instance, player characters are notorious for having tragic backstories. But what if a character came from a culture where “family” was the whole village in terms of emotions and responsibility. No child would strictly be affiliated with two specific parents, so they might have two parents die, but still have another twenty. Or, perhaps, if their “parents” were all dead, that might imply a backstory that’s even more horrific than it might otherwise be. Or, if a child from an avuncular-like system lost a parent, which one would it be? Would it be an emotional loss (their biological father), a loss of resources and family wealth (their uncle-father), or their mother, who is kind of all of those things. Those present alternatives for understanding traumatic backstories—does it leave a child heartbroken, impoverished, or both?

On a more light-hearted note, kinship can also be a fun way to mess with your players’ and PCs’ expectations. One PC introduces her sister. And then another sister. And then an eleventh sister. And on and on. The other PCs, who are used to rather more Western styles of kinship may suspect a lie or just be baffled.

Or PCs may find themselves in a land where wealth status is not measured in titles or currency but in “number of fathers.” One’s number of fathers (or mothers, or other/non-gendered parental figures—play around with it!) may eventually evolve to become titles. “Ah, she’s a Three-Fathers.” That’d be pretty confusing if you didn’t know what the heck it meant, and a party could land itself in all sorts of hot water by not understanding the lay of the land.

So, yeah, family. Don’t take it for granted!