Browsing by Subject "Kinship"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Between Brothers: Brotherhood and Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages
    (2015-07) Bradley, Cameron
    Family relationships and responsibilities fundamentally shaped medieval life. This dissertation examines aristocratic brothers in order to understand how elite men negotiated the pressures of gender and kinship in the context of the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453). Brothers lived in the shadow of idealized brotherhood, which entailed loyalty, support, cooperation, and love. Yet a number of structural obstacles to harmony between brothers existed in the later Middle Ages, and perhaps most critically, brothers also were men—thus implicated within masculinity. The martial elites of this study were subject to what I call “chivalric masculinity,” a version that privileged prowess, honor, courage, reputation, and the pursuit of dominance through competition. Noble and royal brothers therefore stood at the intersection of essentially incompatible paradigms: peaceful and cooperative ideal brotherhood, and violent and competitive chivalric masculinity. Using both narrative and documentary sources, including the chronicles of Jean Froissart and Enguerrand de Monstrelet, wills, decrees, letters, legal proceedings, and accounting records, the dissertation explores case studies of brothers’ rivalries and alliances in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The primary geographical focus is France and England, but it also includes cases situated across Europe, with an in-depth analysis of the fifteenth-century Breton brothers François, Pierre, Gilles, and Tanguy. The dissertation argues that chivalric masculinity was a significant factor in relations between elite brothers. Masculinity shaped, steered, and constrained men’s behaviors, establishing the menu for the sorts of actions brothers—as men—could or should undertake. Brothers’ quarrels thus stemmed from the competitiveness of masculinity along with obvious catalysts such as vulnerable thrones, contestable inheritances, and the lure of prestige and influence. Secondly, it argues that some of the elements that drove brothers apart also could facilitate their cooperation. Rather than signal a failure of masculinity, fraternal cooperation indicates the presence of sufficiently compelling reasons to restrain the impetus to competition. The dissertation shows, thirdly, that despite many examples of fraternal strife, ideal brotherhood remained an important and influential paradigm in later medieval society. Even brothers who fought used its rhetoric in their quarrels, reinforcing its cultural weight even as they manipulated it to their own ends.
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    Relieved of These Little Chores: Agricultural Neighbor Labor, Family Labor, and Kinship in the United States 1790-1940
    (2018-08) Nelson, Matt
    Agriculture represents an aspect of United States identity with its emphasis on independence, hard-work, and strong family networks. This Jeffersonian narrative specifically focuses on the patriarchal authority of the white male farmer taming nature and the frontier, ignoring the importance and roles of women, children, and social networks on the farm. My dissertation uses farm diaries and the Census to address these invisible forms of labor largely ignored in the traditional narrative. Andrew Peterson’s diaries described family labor and neighbor labor exchanged with nearby families. While living in a frontier area, exchanged neighbor labor worked with the Peterson household through the 1860s until Andrew’s children were old enough to work in the fields. Neighborhood exchange of labor complemented a low worker to consumer ratio within the Peterson household, and was not simply a frontier or pre-capitalist form of bartering. Farm diaries better describe the work of these invisible groups than the Census, but Andrew still underreported women’s work due to traditional narrative biases. Gendered ideologies and census procedures emphasized norms of separate work spheres and reinforced the traditional agricultural narrative at the expense of these invisible groups. While most of the bias for women occurred in planning by Census officials, enumerator practices and biases resulted in inconsistent reporting for children. Biases such as month of enumeration and sex of the respondent were small but statistically significant for women and children. Other important socio-demographic variables for occupational responses included age, school attendance, marital status, and parental occupation. The availability of new complete count census data allows for measuring kin networks beyond the household. Kin propinquity declined in the United States from 30% in 1790 to 6% by 1940, which closely mirrored long-term declines in agriculture and intergenerational coresidence due to urbanization and industrialization. Kin propinquity was especially clustered in Appalachia, Utah, and New Mexico. The convergence in kin propinquity rates for younger and elderly people between 1850 and 1940 were caused by declining fertility, declining mortality, and younger generations leaving the farm with better economic opportunities elsewhere.
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    “This dog means Life”: making interspecies relations at an assistance dog agency.
    (2011-05) Edminster, Avigdor
    My ethnographic informants at an assistance dog agency say that dogs and humans can read each others' minds, have saved each others' lives, hear for one another, and are family and business partners. These clients, assistance dogs, staff, and volunteers have uniquely intimate, interdependent interspecies relationships despite the power of absolutist distinctions between humans and other animals. I explore how my informants understand and create shared and unshared dimensions between them as they also navigate and change ideas about the family, workplace, and larger society. Explored in tandem these relationships and cultural domains illuminate the anxieties, ambiguities, and securities experienced in both. Central to this project are the ways that shared embodied relational meaning emerges as my informants make meaningful lives together.