◯, △, ▢, 卐?
Kinship charts!
Kinship charting is one of those skills I probably should have picked up as an undergrad, but they always seemed so quaint and antiquarian — the sort of thing that progressive anthropology stored away in a box with social evolution and words like ‘phratry’ and ‘fetish’. On the rare occasion that I needed to be able to read them, the charts were clear enough in context that I was fairly safe in my ignorance. However, a couple of things have conspired to awaken an interest in this stuff:
- the rumoured resurgence of kinship studies;
- my reading of older ethnographies to gain a firmer grasp of the discipline’s practical and theoretical history.
At this point, maybe a sample kinship chart would be helpful for all y’all who haven’t seen these doodads before (or who, like me, never paid attention).
1◯≠2△=4● | | 3◯ 5△
(1) Catherine of Aragon [woman — circle] married [=] (2) Henry VIII [man — triangle], and the two gave birth to (3) Mary I. Later, Henry, in his continuing search for a male heir, divorced [slash the marriage] Catherine, and (eventually) married (4)Jane Seymour (more popularly known as ‘Dr. Quinn’), who gave birth to (5)Edward VI. Sadly, Jane Seymour died [blacken the shape] in childbirth.
These things, of course, get enormously more complicated (as that would have been, had I decided to include Henry’s other wives and mistresses, or Catherine’s other progeny), but I think that this gets the main idea across. Of course, in various cultural contexts, ethnographers have used these symbols in varying manners, and the version I show above probably isn’t even the most common.
I got curious, today, about where all this came from. According to the AusAnthrop Website, this system was adopted by the Royal Anthropological Society (now Institute) of Great Britain from the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations.
Now, eugenics ≠ evil. Necessarily. Maybe it’s just married to misguided. But in this case…
In the decade leading up to WWII, IFEU scientists advised Il Duce’s fascist government on Italian eugenics programs.
In 1932 (the year of the RAI’s adoption of kinship chart standards), Swiss psychiatrist and geneticist Ernst Rüdin was elected president of the IFEU. Wikipedia tells us that Rüdin wrote official commentary for the racial policy of Nazi Germany, and was a member of the Expert Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy. Now, to be fair, Rüdin claimed to have been unaware of the millions of murders committed by the Third Reich: he just wanted Jews, schizophrenics, and the relatives of schizophrenics sterilised.
The moral of this story: Any aspect of anthropological theory or practise with which I am unfamiliar is probably part of a fiendish Nazi plot.
More seriously, it would be interesting to have access to better sources than what Google can provide. I’m curious as to the IFEU’s original intention in creating these ‘pedigree’ charts. And I’d like to know who, in the RAI, was reading IFEU memoranda and decided to pick the practise up.