Key concept: social relations practice questions.

A researcher records that every household in a farming settlement hands a fixed share of its harvest to the head of the settlement council, who stores the grain and gives it out again at the annual festival and to any household whose crop has failed. In the analysis of exchange, this flow of goods is best described as

• redistribution, because goods are pooled at a centre and allocated again by the holder of a recognised position
• balanced reciprocity, because each household receives goods of the same worth as those it handed over
• negative reciprocity, because the council head keeps back more than he returns to the households
• market exchange, because the worth of the grain is settled between the parties before it changes hands and no further claim remains

Answer: redistribution, because goods are pooled at a centre and allocated again by the holder of a recognised position

Redistribution runs through a centre: goods are pooled by the holder of an office and given out again according to claims recognised in that position, which is how a household that produced nothing can still receive a share. Reciprocity runs directly between two parties, and the return is owed to the giver rather than to the centre.

Lee described Ju/'hoansi camps in the Kalahari in the 1960s, where meat from a large kill was distributed through the camp without anyone recording who had received how much, and where a hunter who boasted of his kill was mocked rather than praised. In Sahlins's scheme, the sharing of the meat is an example of

• balanced reciprocity, because the shares were kept roughly equal between the households of the camp
• negative reciprocity, because the hunter gave away goods he could otherwise have kept
• market exchange, because each household received a portion in proportion to what it had contributed to the hunt
• generalised reciprocity, because no account was kept of what each household received and no return was timed

Answer: generalised reciprocity, because no account was kept of what each household received and no return was timed

Generalised reciprocity involves no accounting and no fixed time for a return; the obligation is diffuse and rests on the relationship rather than on the item. The mockery of the boastful hunter is the mechanism that stops the gift from becoming a claim to rank.

Evans-Pritchard described how, among the Nuer of the southern Sudan in the 1930s, cattle moved from the groom's kin to the bride's kin at marriage, and how those same cattle could later be recalled or disputed if the marriage broke down. Anthropologists analyse such a transfer as

• bridewealth, which establishes affinal relations and rights over any children of the union
• a purchase, since the payment transfers the woman herself into the ownership of her husband's household
• a dowry, since property accompanies the woman as she moves to a new household
• an act of charity towards the poorer of the two families involved

Answer: bridewealth, which establishes affinal relations and rights over any children of the union

Bridewealth is the classic case of exchange that creates a relationship between groups rather than transferring a person: because the cattle can be recalled, the two sets of kin stay bound to each other for as long as the marriage and its children matter. Reading it as buying a wife is the most common student error.

Mintz and Wolf analysed compadrazgo across Spanish America in 1950, drawing on their own fieldwork in Puerto Rico: the parents of a baptised child and the child's godparents address one another as compadre and comadre and afterwards owe each other help, hospitality and support in disputes. Anthropologically, this tie is best classified as

• affinity, because the link is created by a marriage between the two families
• descent, because the obligations pass down from one generation to the next
• a purely religious obligation, because the tie is made in church and has no bearing on everyday dealings
• fictive kinship, because the idiom of kinship binds people who are neither descendants nor affines

Answer: fictive kinship, because the idiom of kinship binds people who are neither descendants nor affines

Fictive or ritual kinship uses the idiom of kinship to create binding relations between people who are neither descendants of a common ancestor nor linked by marriage. It is the standard evidence that kinship is a cultural rather than a strictly biological system of relations.

Carsten carried out fieldwork on the Malaysian island of Langkawi in the 1980s. She found that villagers spoke of relatedness as something built up over time through sharing a hearth, eating rice cooked in the same kitchen and fostering children between households, so that people who had not been born into a house could come to be counted as kin of it. Her argument is that

• kinship in Langkawi is unusual in having no genealogical component whatsoever
• relatedness is produced through shared substance and daily living, not only through birth
• the villagers were using kinship terms loosely for people who were not in fact relatives at all
• fostering arrangements should be analysed under economics rather than under kinship, since they concern the distribution of labour

Answer: relatedness is produced through shared substance and daily living, not only through birth

The case is used to argue that kinship is a process rather than a genealogical chart: feeding and co-residence do work that a diagram cannot record. The tempting misreading is that villagers used kinship terms loosely; in fact they were applying criteria of relatedness the ethnographer had to learn.

Levine studied the Nyinba of north-western Nepal in the 1970s, among whom a set of brothers commonly married one woman together and lived in a single household. Nyinba explained the arrangement by reference to the household estate: terraced land at that altitude is scarce, and dividing it among sons at each generation would leave holdings too small to support anyone. An anthropologist would treat this as evidence that

• marriage rules can be analysed apart from property, since they concern who may live with whom
• the arrangement must be unstable, because no household organised in this way can persist over generations
• such an arrangement can only arise where a society places no value at all on the relationship between a husband and a wife
• marriage arrangements can organise the transmission of an estate and the labour available to a household

Answer: marriage arrangements can organise the transmission of an estate and the labour available to a household

Fraternal polyandry keeps land, herds and household labour undivided across generations, so the marriage rule and the property regime have to be read together. The account is the Nyinba's own, and the analytic task is to show the connection, not to rank the arrangement against any other.