All of us belong to a family. Let us take, for example, the Indian joint family. In this family there is one pair husband and wife. They are a final kin which means they are united by marital ties.
This relationship is also called consanguine kin. Their bond is that they are permitted to have sexual relations. Another set of relationships is between parents and siblings. The siblings are kin by blood.
They are the offspring’s of their parents. These relations are called agnate relations, that is, relations tied by blood. If there are grandparents in the family, they are also agnate kin. Similarly, if one of the sons in the family is married, his wife is affine. She is related to her husband and other members of the family through marital relations.
Thus, a family consists of agnates and affines. All the members are related to one another by marriage or blood. But this kind of explanation is limited only to family. Kinship extends beyond the family also.
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There are kin who belong to other families also. For instance, the sister of the family is married to a boy of another family. Relations with such a family are affine relations.
Standard Kinship Symbols and Abbreviations Used in Anthropology to understand kinship relationship better let us provide an explanation to some of the kinship symbols used by anthropologists in fieldwork. These symbols are standard and used universally by anthropologists all over the world.
The triangle is the symbol for a man. For our purpose this man is named Rama. The circle denotes a woman, Basanti. The equals sign shows marriage. It indicates that Basanti is married to Rama.
A horizontal line connects the siblings. In the following figure, Jaya and Yash are siblings in family 1, and Sushila, Shantu and Ramesh are in family 2. A diagonal line through a symbol indicates that the person in question (here, Rama) is dead. Rama’s and Basanti’s son Yash is married to Gora’s and Shanti’s daughter, Sushila.
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Quite like symbols, the anthropologists also use some standard abbreviations for kinship terms which are given below:
Thus, MBD is mother’s brother’s daughter. In these abbreviations ego is the reference point.