Kinship
What is your residence pattern (after marriage)?
What is your kinship terminology system? Why?
How does all this fit with the rest of your culture?

• Cultures emphasizing the nuclear family will have words for nuclear family members that are different from other family members (as in the Eskimo system).
• Cultures emphasizing extended families will often use the same words for parent’s siblings and their children are as used for the nuclear family (as in the Hawaiian system).
• Iroquois system often associated with strong descent groups. Cultures encouraging cross-cousin marriage often use systems such as the Iroquois system which names your parallel cousins “brother” and “sister” but may use the words for “eligible bachelor(ette)” for cross-cousins. Note: Crow is like Iroquois but for matrilineal descent groups.

Descent
Do you have descent groups? What kind?
What do they do? (land, help, war allies, inheritance, etc.?)


Associations
Are there any special associations or common-interest groups in your culture? Would it be useful to have one or some of the members of your group act on behalf of this association or common-interest group in the world simulation? (Note: Remember that these should be realistic as of 500+ years ago. New associations and political movements will hopefully occur naturally through the actual simulation. (I suppose you could plan to “simulate” these ahead of time if you want.) Smaller scale cultures might consider age sets as important to social organization (see text))

Age and Gender (This is universal, so it should be addressed this week or in the next two weeks)

Stratification
* Is your culture stratified or egalitarian? Describe and Explain.
* If your culture is stratified, is there social mobility? How does it work?
* How are your answers above integrated with the rest of your culture?

IMPORTANT: To what extent do your answers above represent your culture’s “ideology” and what is the true reality of your culture. You should distinguish these in the ethnography.

REMEMBER: In general, stratification increases with increased production & division of labor ... Foragers tend to be egalitarian while industrialists are highly stratified.

One last note:

As part of this general discussion of social organization, you might also discuss different roles for people in the culture. You can work this out over the next week as well when we discuss political organization and the week after that as we begin our discussion of religion. Ultimately, different people in the culture should have different roles, such as:

• Political specialist (chief, president, etc.)
• Religious specialist
• Business Owner / CEO
• Warrior (this could be part of an age grade – see above)
• Etc.

Remember that industrialists will have more role specialization than foragers, as there is almost no division of labor or specialization among foragers.