Poverty, Family, and Kinship in a Heartland Community by David L. Harvey

Author:David L. Harvey [Harvey, David L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Urban
ISBN: 9781351497558
Google: NR0uDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-12T04:34:31+00:00

CHAPTER

9

The Dialectics of Lower-Class Kinship

Potter Addition’s way of life is notorious on several counts. One source of disrepute is Potter Addition’s kinship system. During the best of times, the people of Grand Prairie regard it somewhat curiously and humorously as a social fossil from another era. In darker moments, Potter Addition’s “hillbilly clans” are looked upon as but one more sign of the backwardness of the “southern low-life” who live on the edge of Grand Prairie. To have so many kin so nearby, to be so tightly bound to one another and so xenophobic, to nurse decade-long grudges against kin without apparent provocation or reason seems unnatural to these staid bourgeois.

These impressions, once shorn of their mystification and virulent class prejudice, however, reveal something important about Potter Addition and its people. Indeed, its kinship structure is often Byzantine. A complex layering of kinship relations has been generated over the years by multiple marriages, adoptions of orphaned kin, and divorces followed by remarriages. Thus, it is not uncommon for two persons to be related to each other in two or more ways. Even the residents of Potter Addition sometimes become confused about the structural intricacies of its kinship system. On more than one occasion I saw someone become exasperated at his or her inability to get straight how a thrice-removed or more distant collateral was related to them.

Indeed, Potter Addition’s kinship system seems more typical of the inbred hollow cultures of Appalachia than a product of America’s stolid prairie interior. True to the stereotype, relations between kin often show an astonishing volatility. Warmth and total emotional involvement can suddenly and inexplicably be transformed into bitter antagonism. Such intense, almost feudlike shifts generate a perpetual array of bewildering kin group realignments.

To dismiss these shifting relations merely as “Southern,” is to miss the crucial role that class and poverty play in shaping Potter Addition’s kinship system. This chapter examines the material infrastructure of that kinship system and the role it plays in the actual maintenance of lower-class households. We will see how cycles of commitment and estrangement, as well as the shifting composition of kin groups themselves, are often reflections of the economic mapping of kinship roles. Finally, we will see how this type of kinship is itself a source of social uncertainty in Potter Addition. To use Meyer Fortes’s (1958, 1969) terminology, in this chapter I will analyze the domestic domain of kinship or, as it is sometimes called, the external system of kinship. In this context the term external system denotes the material foundations of kinship, i.e., the ways in which households in a single kin group cooperatively secure their economic, ecological, and social adaptations to the world about them.1

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