Family Relationships

The Family Tree

           Hatfields and McCoys

Once again I have fallen behind in my attempt to write a daily mini-essay and I can’t say it is because I spent the time trying to figure out the coding required to produce proper paragraphs while blogging. Nor can I say that my attempts at mental exercising were supplanted by the physical kind. While I work on those things I have the opportunity to provide you with the more interesting musings of others.

It is best that I leave this subject in their hands. I can’t say that I am particularly good at family relationships (the emotional kind) and I find the genealogical ones hard to understand. I am mystified by a phrase like “second cousin twice removed” and have no idea if I have one or who he/she might be. It is the latter kind that will concern us here.

I will present first, the thoughts of Levi-Strauss -- the anthropologist not the guy who made your dungarees. Since the thought of confronting academic prose  is likely to frighten you, I will then provide some redneck poetry concerning the same subject. Unfortunately, if you are as thick as I, you will find them equally baffling.

First, the Frenchman: (the third paragraph is the tough one)

“The first imperative of a human society is to reproduce itself, to maintain itself over time. Every society therefore possesses a rule of filiation defining how each new member belongs to the group; a kinship system determining the way that relations will be classified, as kin by blood or by marriage; and rules stipulating whom a person can and cannot marry. Every society must also possess mechanisms to handle sterility.
The problem of sterility has become a pressing issue in Western societies, ever since the invention of artificial methods to assist in reproduction. It is now possible — or, for certain procedures, it will be possible in the near future — for a couple, one or both of whose members are infertile, to have children through the use of various methods: artificial insemination, egg donation, the use of surrogate mothers for hire or free of cost, the freezing of embryos, in vitro fertilization with sperm from the husband or from another man and with an egg from the wife or another woman.

[I was doing okay up to this point. Now comes the difficult part.]
The child born of such procedures may have one father and one mother as usual, or one mother and two fathers, two mothers and one father, two mothers and two fathers, three mothers and one father, or even three mothers and two fathers, when the sperm donor is not the father and when three women participate: the one donating an egg, the one providing her uterus, and the one who will be the child’s legal mother. We are also faced with situations where a woman asks to be inseminated with the frozen sperm of her deceased husband, or where two lesbians have a child together by taking the egg of one, artificially fertilized by an anonymous donor, and implanting it in the other woman’s uterus. There is also no reason, it seems, why the frozen sperm of a great-grandfather could not be used a century later to fertilize a great-granddaughter. The child would then be his mother’s granduncle and his own great-grandfather’s half brother.”

Now for the Redneck Genealogy.

Many many years ago when I was twenty three,

I got married to a widow who was pretty as could be.

This widow had a grown-up daughter Who had hair of red.

My father fell in love with her, And soon the two were wed.

This made my dad my son-in-law And changed my very life.

My daughter was my mother, For she was my father's wife.

To complicate the matters worse, Although it brought me joy.

I soon became the father of a bouncing baby boy.

My little baby then became A brother-in-law to dad.

And so became my uncle, Though it made me very sad.

For if he was my uncle, Then that also made him brother

to the widow's grown-up daughter who, of course, was my step-mother.

Father's wife then had a son, Who kept them on the run.

And he became my grandson, for he was my daughter's son.

My wife is now my mother's mother And it makes me blue.

Because, although she is my wife,She's my grandma too.

If my wife is my grandmother, Then I am her grandchild.

And every time I think of it,It simply drives me wild.

For now I have become the strangest case you ever saw.

As the husband of my grandmother,I am my own grandpa!!

It seems that even when people procreate in the old-fashioned way, it ain’t simple, especially when family relationships are involved.

The portion of the essay by Levi-Strauss is found in “Parenthood Revisited”, Harper’s, April, 2013. It is taken from a lecture he gave in Japan in 1986.  It is also reprinted in Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World (Harvard University Press). Links to these sources are easily found, but are not provided here to avoid the dreaded link rot.

The poem was located on the Web, but I could not identify the author.