Kinship and My Family

When the variety of ways to identify kin in class readings and discussions was first introduced, I was interested, but confused as to how other cultures would classify their kin, since I have only been exposed to the Eskimo way of describing familial relations, or so I thought. As I contemplated this further, I realized that I have also had contact with the Iroquois way of naming family members. Awhile ago, when my mother’s cousin (a very Euro-American way of describing him) came to visit my mother and her sisters, they all referred to him as brother, half-jokingly. He is their father’s brother’s son, and thus a parallel cousin. This makes him their brother, according to the culture they grew up in. However, when they called him “brother” in English, it sounded far stranger than when they called him that in Chinese, because of culture’s interconnectedness to language, which causes certain things to sound acceptable in some languages and yet out of the ordinary in other languages. It was surprising to me to discover my relationship with the Iroquois system, which ended up helping me better understand the different systems used to name kin.