Kinship organizations and their social structures

¶ … San and Kinship Groups

The San or "Bushmen" people of the Kalahari region in Africa share a kinship system based on lineage and family connections. These kinship systems provide a lifelong support network and allocate different responsibilities for daily living largely based on gender. Family units may be quite large because they may consist of three or even four generations. The San adhere to the same age/name rules as other kinship societies where many individuals of different generations necessarily share names because there may be fewer than forty names available by virtue of the fact that children are usually named after other family members. Traditionally, the San, (much like other nomadic hunter-gatherers), eschew the concept of private property ownership and this may both facilitate and establish a greater need for mutual support within kinship systems.

Generally, the genders are treated equally although the responsibility for hunting is almost always ceded to males while the females do the majority of gathering and foraging for nuts, roots, and for cultivating vegetables. Interestingly, while there is considerable excitement associated with successful hunts, meat actually constitutes slightly more than thirty percent of the San diet, the bulk of it coming from the foraging efforts of females. In theory, this suggests that the hunt is more important for other aspects of their culture besides as a necessary food source since the men could, with comparatively little effort, supplement the female foraging to provide the rest of their nutritional needs merely supplementing it occasionally with meat to avoid various diseases cause by lack of sufficient animal protein in the diet. It is thought, therefore, that much of the importance of hunting is that successful hunts necessitate communal cooperation in the preparation of the meat and that this social dynamic is actually more important than the nutritional value of the meat itself. Likewise, the ritualistic sharing of meat among families is also thought to serve important social functions that promote cohesion within the kinship group.

The San society in general and the kinship system in particular are very different from contemporary American society. In the U.S., it is highly unusual for adult children to continue living with their families, although this phenomenon has increased recently strictly as a function of the current economic recession and the comparative difficulty of finding employment after graduation. Americans do sometimes name children after relatives, but this is much less common and does not have the same connotations and rules that are associated with shared names in kinship societies. On the other hand, certain Western subcultures do have restrictions about naming children after living relatives.