Kinship, marriage and family

In short

Kinship is the culturally recognised web of relationships created by birth (consanguinity), by marriage (affinity) and by social fiction (adoption, ritual friendship), together with the rules that tell a person whom to call what, whom to marry, where to live and from whom to inherit. Marriage is the socially approved union that creates affinal ties and legitimate descent; the family is the co-residing, co-operating group built on these. The topic matters because in most non-industrial societies kinship does the work that the state, firm and market do elsewhere — it allocates land, labour, authority and identity — and in India it still shapes caste endogamy, inheritance disputes, migration chains and business ownership. It is examined in UGC-CBCS BA/B.Sc Anthropology core papers on social-cultural anthropology, in UGC-NET Anthropology Paper II, UPSC Anthropology optional Paper I (Section 3) and in all university theory papers. It is used professionally in social-development and gender programmes, demographic and NFHS-type survey design, genetic-counselling pedigree work, medical and forensic anthropology, legal-aid and family-law practice, and the applied research roles of NGOs, UNICEF/UNFPA projects, market-research firms and the Anthropological Survey of India.

Explained

Basic concepts and types of kinship

• Kinship is the social recognition of biological or assumed biological relations; it is a cultural, not a genetic, system — anthropology studies the *recognised* link, which may contradict biology.
• Consanguineal kin: related by descent or shared blood — parent, sibling, cousin, grandparent. Affinal kin: related through marriage — spouse, parent-in-law, brother-in-law.
• Fictive / ritual kinship: kin-like bonds without birth or marriage — adoption, godparenthood (*compadrazgo* in Latin America), *dharam bhai/behen*, *rakhi* brotherhood, blood-brotherhood, milk kinship among Muslim communities.
• Degrees of kinship: primary (Ego's own 7: father, mother, brother, sister, husband/wife, son, daughter), secondary (primary kin of primary kin, 33), tertiary (primary kin of secondary kin, ~151) — the count expands geometrically, so every society restricts the range it recognises.
• Kinship usages (A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, and Indian work by Karve): behavioural rules attached to a relation — avoidance (daughter-in-law and father-in-law in north India, *purdah*), joking relationship (*devar–bhabhi*, brother-in-law and elder brother's wife), teknonymy (addressing a person as "X's mother/father" instead of by name), avunculate (special authority or indulgence of the mother's brother, strong in matrilineal Khasi and Nayar settings), amitate (special status of the father's sister), couvade (the husband observing restrictions and ritual seclusion at childbirth — recorded among the Khasi and some Oraon groups).
• Kinship functions: biological reproduction within approved limits, socialisation, inheritance and succession, economic co-operation, political alliance, ritual obligation, old-age and crisis security.

Descent, groups and kinship terminology

• Descent is the socially recognised link to ancestors that assigns a person to a group and channels inheritance, succession and ritual membership.
• Unilineal descent: patrilineal (through males — most of India, Nuer, Tallensi), matrilineal (through females — Khasi, Garo, Nayar, Trobrianders, Ashanti, Hopi). Double descent: both lines used for different purposes (Yakö of Nigeria). Bilateral / cognatic: both sides equally (Bhil and many Indian urban middle-class families today).
• Note the separation: matriliny is *descent through women*; matriarchy is *rule by women* and is not ethnographically established anywhere. Khasi society is matrilineal and matrilocal, yet political office is held mostly by men (typically the mother's brother).
• Descent groups, smallest to largest: lineage (genealogically demonstrable common ancestor — Indian *vansh*/*kul*), clan (*gotra*, *got*, *kur* among the Khasi — a stipulated, non-demonstrable ancestor, usually exogamous and totemic), phratry (two or more related clans), moiety (society divided into two halves, each marrying the other), kindred (ego-centred bilateral set, not a corporate group).
• Segmentary lineage system: E. E. Evans-Pritchard's *The Nuer* (1940) — lineages split and merge at matched levels, producing order without a state; feuds are contained by "complementary opposition".
• Kinship terminology — the systems examined: (i) classificatory — one term covers several distinct relatives (*chacha/mama* distinctions aside, English "uncle" is classificatory); (ii) descriptive / denotative — a separate term for each relation (Hindi *chacha, tau, mama, phupha, mausa* are five distinct terms where English has one).
• G. P. Murdock's six types: Hawaiian (generational — all same-sex kin of a generation share a term), Eskimo (lineal — nuclear family distinguished, all cousins alike; English/urban Indian), Iroquois (parallel cousins = siblings, cross-cousins separate and marriageable), Omaha (patrilineal skewing — mother's-side terms merged across generations), Crow (mirror image, matrilineal skewing), Sudanese (fully descriptive — closest to north Indian Hindi terminology).
• Terms of address vs terms of reference: what you call a person to their face (*bhaiya*) versus how you describe the relation to a third party (elder brother) — a standard exam distinction.
• Irawati Karve's four Indian kinship zones (*Kinship Organization in India*, 1953): Northern (patrilineal, village exogamy, cross-cousin marriage prohibited, hypergamy), Southern (Dravidian — cross-cousin and maternal-uncle/niece marriage preferred, kin and caste overlap), Central (mixed/transitional, Maratha and Gujarati belt), Eastern (largely tribal, Austroasiatic- and Tibeto-Burman-speaking groups, including matrilineal Khasi and Garo).

Marriage: definitions, rules, types and payments

• Definition problem: Notes and Queries on Anthropology (RAI) defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman such that children born are recognised as legitimate offspring of both — a definition that fails for the Nayar *tali*-rite and *sambandham*, for Nuer woman-to-woman marriage (a barren woman marries a wife and becomes "father" to her children by a genitor), and for ghost marriage; E. Kathleen Gough therefore redefined it around the *legitimacy-conferring role*, not co-residence or sexual access.
• Pater vs genitor: the socially recognised father versus the biological begetter — the distinction that makes the Nuer and Nayar cases intelligible. (Parallel: mater vs genetrix.)
• Rules of mate selection: endogamy (marry within — caste, *jati*, religion, *sub-tribe*), exogamy (marry outside — *gotra*, village, *sapinda* prohibition — three generations in the line of ascent through the mother and five through the father under the Hindu Marriage Act), incest taboo (universal prohibition on sex within the nuclear family, variously extended; explanations include Westermarck's childhood-familiarity effect, Freud's psychoanalytic account, Tylor/Lévi-Strauss's "marry out or die out" alliance argument, and inbreeding-depression arguments).
• Preferential marriage: cross-cousin (mother's brother's or father's sister's child — preferred in south India, prohibited in the north), parallel cousin (father's brother's daughter — preferred among some Muslim groups), levirate (widow marries the deceased husband's brother — *karewa*/*chadar andazi* in Punjab and Haryana), sororate (widower marries the deceased wife's sister), sororal polygyny (co-wives are sisters), exchange marriage (*badla*, reciprocal sibling exchange), avuncular (mother's brother–sister's daughter, among some south Indian groups).
• Forms by number of spouses: monogamy (and serial monogamy after divorce or death); polygyny — sororal and non-sororal, common in Africa, found among some Indian tribes; polyandry — fraternal/adelphic (Toda of the Nilgiris, Khasa/Jaunsari of Jaunsar-Bawar in Uttarakhand, Tibetan-speaking groups of Ladakh and Kinnaur, land-fragmentation being the usual explanation) and non-fraternal (Nayar *sambandham*); group marriage (Marquesans — reported but ethnographically doubtful); hypergamy (*anuloma* — woman marries up, Kulin Brahmin of Bengal) and hypogamy (*pratiloma* — woman marries down, traditionally disapproved).
• Ways of acquiring a mate, in the standard Indian tribal classification: marriage by negotiation, by service (*gharjamai*; Gond), by exchange, by capture (*paisa mur*, Ho and Gond), by intrusion (*nir bolok*, the girl forces entry into the man's house, Ho and Birhor), by elopement, by trial (Bhil *gol-gadhedo*), by probationary cohabitation (Kuki).
• Marriage payments: bride price / bride wealth (compensation paid by the groom's kin to the bride's kin, common in tribal India and Africa); dowry (*dahej*, goods moving with the bride, north Indian upper-caste pattern, now spread widely); dower (*mehr*, the Muslim husband's obligation to the wife herself); progeny price; groom price. Bride price tends to fall where women's labour value falls and dowry pressure rises — documented in Indian tribal belts undergoing Sanskritisation.
• Dissolution and remarriage: grounds for divorce, *talaq* and *khula* in Muslim practice, widow remarriage permitted or not, levirate as the structural alternative to widow remarriage.
• Functions of marriage: regulation of sexual access, legitimation of children, division of labour, alliance between groups, property transmission.

Family: types, functions and change

• Definition (G. P. Murdock, 1949): a social group characterised by common residence, economic co-operation and reproduction, including adults of both sexes at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship. Murdock's claim that the nuclear family is universal is contested by the Nayar *taravad*, the Israeli kibbutz and some Caribbean matrifocal households.
• Classifications: by size/structure — nuclear, supplemented nuclear, joint/extended (lineally extended, collaterally extended), sub-nuclear, single-person; by authority — patriarchal, matriarchal, egalitarian; by descent — patrilineal, matrilineal, bilateral; by residence — see below; by marriage — monogamous, polygynous, polyandrous; matrifocal / female-headed households.
• Residence rules: patrilocal/virilocal (with husband's kin — dominant in India), matrilocal/uxorilocal (Khasi, Garo), avunculocal (with the mother's brother — Trobriand), neolocal (new home — urban norm), bilocal/ambilocal, duolocal/natolocal (spouses stay in their own natal homes — Nayar, and the Ashanti case).
• Family of orientation (the one Ego is born into) versus family of procreation (the one Ego creates by marriage).
• Indian joint family (*kutumba*): common residence, common kitchen (*chulha*), common property, common worship, authority with the eldest male (*karta*); the Hindu Undivided Family (HUF) remains a recognised taxable entity under the Income-tax Act, 2025 (which replaced the 1961 Act from 1 April 2026), which is why the form persists for property and tax reasons even where co-residence has ended. I. P. Desai's Mahuva study distinguished *residential* from *functional* jointness — households split the kitchen while keeping ritual and economic obligations.
• Why the joint family changes: urbanisation and wage employment, migration, education, women's workforce participation, land fragmentation, housing cost, legal individualisation of property. The common exam error is to read co-residential nuclearisation as the end of jointness; Indian evidence shows "nuclear households in joint networks".
• Terms often confused: household (co-residence and commensality — the census unit) versus family (kinship unit) versus domestic group (the household over its developmental cycle — Meyer Fortes's developmental cycle of domestic groups: expansion, dispersion/fission, replacement, which explains why a census snapshot overstates nuclear families).

Theoretical approaches to kinship

• Descent theory (African model): Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes — unilineal descent groups are the corporate backbone of stateless societies; marriage is secondary, serving recruitment to the group.
• Alliance theory: Claude Lévi-Strauss, *The Elementary Structures of Kinship* (1949) — the incest taboo forces exchange; marriage is the exchange of women between groups, generating solidarity. Elementary structures prescribe the spouse's category, complex structures only prohibit. Restricted (symmetric) exchange = direct, two-group reciprocity, typical of bilateral cross-cousin marriage; generalised (asymmetric) exchange = A gives to B, B to C, C to A, typical of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage (MBD), which builds longer chains but requires trust in return over generations.
• Edmund Leach on Kachin *mayu–dama* ties showed that asymmetric alliance correlates with political rank and bride-wealth flows, not just solidarity.
• Extensionist/behavioural: Malinowski — kinship terms extend outwards from learned primary-family relations; Radcliffe-Brown's structural principles (sibling unity, unity of the lineage group, generational equivalence).
• Componential analysis / formal semantics: Floyd Lounsbury, Ward Goodenough — kin terms analysed into contrasting features (sex, generation, lineality, affinity) in the manner of linguistic phonemics.
• Critiques: David Schneider, *A Critique of the Study of Kinship* (1984) — "kinship" as a domain is a Euro-American folk theory of blood projected onto others. Feminist and gender critiques (Gayle Rubin, Sylvia Yanagisako, Jane Collier) — alliance theory treats women as objects exchanged, naturalises the sexual division of labour. New kinship studies / "new reproductive technologies": Marilyn Strathern, Janet Carsten's relatedness — kinship as practised and fed, including surrogacy, IVF, adoption, same-sex families, where the pater/genitor split returns in modern form.
• Indian contributions: Irawati Karve (regional zones, 1953), Louis Dumont (south Indian marriage alliance as a persistent structure, *Hierarchy and Marriage Alliance in South Indian Kinship*, 1957), T. N. Madan (*Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir*), M. N. Srinivas (Sanskritisation and its effect on marriage payments), Iravati Karve and K. M. Kapadia on the Indian family's continuity.

Indian law and current practice

• Hindu Marriage Act, 1955: applies to Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs; conditions include monogamy, prohibition of *sapinda* relations and degrees of prohibited relationship unless custom permits (which is how south Indian cross-cousin marriage remains valid), and minimum ages. Section 13B provides divorce by mutual consent. Special Marriage Act, 1954 allows civil, inter-faith and inter-caste marriage with notice.
• Minimum age of marriage: 18 for women and 21 for men under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006. A Bill to raise women's age to 21 was introduced in 2021 but has not been enacted — the statutory age for women remains 18.
• Hindu Succession Act, 1956, as amended in 2005: daughters became coparceners in joint-family property by birth; *Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma* (Supreme Court, 2020) held the right applies whether or not the father was alive on 9 September 2005.
• Muslim personal law: marriage is a contract (*nikah*) with *mehr*; the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019 made instant triple *talaq* void and punishable. Indian Christian Marriage Act, 1872 and Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act, 1936 govern those communities. A Uniform Civil Code is a Directive Principle (Article 44); Uttarakhand enacted a state UCC in 2024 (notified in 2025) — other states' positions differ, so cite the state before asserting.
• Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961 bars giving or taking dowry; cruelty and dowry death are offences under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (which replaced the Indian Penal Code from 1 July 2024) — quote the provision by name rather than by a shifted section number, because BNS numbering does not map onto the IPC by a fixed offset.
• Other current law: Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (includes shared-household relationships "in the nature of marriage"); Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 for adoption with CARA as regulator; Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021 and Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Act, 2021 — altruistic surrogacy only, which is directly relevant to the pater/genitor and "new kinship" discussion; *Navtej Singh Johar* (2018) decriminalised same-sex relations, while *Supriyo* (2023) declined to recognise same-sex marriage and left it to Parliament. Scheduled Tribes in Schedule V/VI areas are often governed by customary law, and the Hindu Marriage Act does not automatically apply to them.
• Data sources a student should name: Census of India household schedules (the 2021 Census was deferred; enumeration is scheduled for 2027), NFHS-5 (2019–21), Sample Registration System, and the Anthropological Survey of India's *People of India* project.

Key points

• Kinship - culturally recognised relations of blood, marriage and fiction, not biology itself.
• Consanguine vs affine - descent-based kin vs marriage-based kin; fictive kin are neither but behave as kin.
• Descent - rule assigning a person to an ancestral group; patrilineal, matrilineal, double or bilateral.
• Matriliny ≠ matriarchy - Khasi and Nayar are matrilineal, with authority usually held by the mother's brother.
• Lineage vs clan - lineage's ancestor is demonstrable, clan's is stipulated; clans (*gotra*) are exogamous.
• Segmentary lineage - Evans-Pritchard's Nuer; order without centralised government through complementary opposition.
• Endogamy/exogamy/incest taboo - the three rules that jointly fix the pool of permissible spouses.
• Cross vs parallel cousin - cross-cousins are children of opposite-sex siblings and marriageable in south India; parallel cousins are classed as siblings there.
• Levirate and sororate - widow marries husband's brother; widower marries wife's sister — both preserve the alliance.
• Polyandry - fraternal among the Toda and Jaunsari, linked to land fragmentation and sex-ratio; non-fraternal among the Nayar.
• Bride price vs dowry vs mehr - payment to bride's kin, goods with the bride, obligation to the wife herself.
• Pater vs genitor - social father vs biological father; the key to Nuer ghost/woman-marriage and to surrogacy.
• Murdock's six terminologies - Hawaiian, Eskimo, Iroquois, Omaha, Crow, Sudanese; north Indian terms are near-Sudanese.
• Karve's four zones - Northern, Southern, Central, Eastern kinship regions of India.
• Alliance vs descent theory - Lévi-Strauss's exchange of women vs the African model's corporate lineages.
• Restricted vs generalised exchange - symmetric two-group reciprocity vs asymmetric cycles (MBD marriage).
• Fortes's developmental cycle - households expand, split and are replaced, so census "nuclear" counts overstate nuclearisation.
• Residential vs functional jointness - a split kitchen does not end the joint family's economic and ritual obligations.
• 2005 amendment to the Hindu Succession Act - daughters are coparceners by birth; confirmed in *Vineeta Sharma* (2020).

Formulas and examples

Example 1 — Is it a cross-cousin or a parallel cousin? Ego is a Tamil man. His mother's brother's daughter is proposed as a bride.

1. The link runs Ego → M → B → D, i.e. MBD.
2. The two connecting siblings are Mother and her Brother — opposite sex → therefore a cross-cousin.
3. In the Dravidian/Iroquois pattern a cross-cousin falls in the marriageable category (she is addressed by a term distinct from "sister").
4. Answer: a preferred marriage in the southern zone. Had the proposal been his father's brother's daughter (FBD), the connecting siblings would be two brothers — same sex — making her a parallel cousin, classed as a sister and prohibited.

Example 2 — Degrees of relatedness in a first-cousin marriage. A couple are MBD-type first cousins and have a child.

1. Paths between the cousins: each goes cousin → parent → grandparent → parent → cousin = 4 links; there are two such paths (through the shared grandfather and grandmother).
2. r = (1/2)⁴ + (1/2)⁴ = 0.0625 + 0.0625 = 0.125.
3. Inbreeding coefficient of their child F = r/2 = 0.0625, i.e. 6.25% of loci expected homozygous by descent.
4. Compare: uncle–niece marriage, r = 0.25 → F = 0.125 (12.5%). This is why genetic counsellors in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and among Indian Muslim consanguineous-marriage populations treat these two as different risk classes, even though both are culturally preferred.

Example 3 — Reading a household as joint or nuclear. A Varanasi household: an elderly couple, their two married sons with wives and four children, one unmarried daughter — 11 persons, one kitchen, undivided land, one *karta*.

1. Two or more related married couples of different generations in one residence with common property → lineally and collaterally extended joint family.
2. Five years later the younger son moves to Bengaluru for work, cooks separately, but remits money and returns for *shraddha*; land is still undivided and the HUF is intact.
3. Residentially: two households (a nuclear household of 4 and a household of 7). Functionally: still joint — common property and ritual obligation persist.
4. Answer: the census would record nuclearisation; the anthropological reading is residential fission without functional fission — Fortes's dispersion phase, I. P. Desai's distinction.

Example 4 — Why fraternal polyandry concentrates land. A Jaunsari holding of 3.0 hectares; the household has three brothers.

1. Under partition among three sons: 3.0 ÷ 3 = 1.0 ha each — three holdings, three houses, three sets of oxen.
2. Under fraternal polyandry: one wife, one household, one undivided 3.0 ha, and children attributed to the eldest brother as *pater*.
3. The labour force is retained for high-altitude agro-pastoralism, where one brother can migrate with flocks while another works the fields.
4. Answer: polyandry here is an economic adaptation to scarce, fragmentable land and a dispersed labour demand — not merely a "custom", though sex-ratio and status explanations are also advanced.

Example 5 — Classifying three marriage payments.

Comparison table — descent theory vs alliance theory

Comparison table — matrilineal Khasi vs patrilineal north Indian household

Where it is used

• Public health and demography: NFHS and SRS survey design, consanguinity and genetic-disorder mapping (thalassaemia and sickle-cell screening in Gujarat, Maharashtra and tribal belts), ICMR studies of inbreeding in southern populations — pedigree charts are the working tool.
• Genetic counselling and medical genetics in hospitals and ART/surrogacy clinics: constructing three-generation pedigrees, computing F, explaining risk to consanguineous couples under the ART and Surrogacy Acts, 2021.
• Development and gender programmes: NGOs, UNICEF/UNFPA and state missions designing interventions on child marriage, dowry, widow remarriage and women's land rights — kinship rules decide whether a benefit reaches the woman or her in-laws.
• Law and legal aid: family courts, succession and *sapinda* disputes, tribal customary-law cases in Schedule VI areas, Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act proceedings about "shared household"; anthropologists appear as expert witnesses on custom.
• Government and research roles: Anthropological Survey of India, Census of India household schedules, Tribal Research Institutes, Registrar General's office; KVIC and tribal-welfare departments studying household labour units.
• Business and markets: family-firm succession in Indian business houses (Marwari, Chettiar, Gujarati networks), migration and remittance chains, market research treating the household rather than the individual as the consumption unit.

Interview questions

• Q: How is kinship different from biological relatedness? A: Kinship is the *social recognition* of relationship; societies may ignore a biological tie (unacknowledged genitor) or create kinship without one (adoption, ritual brotherhood), so the unit of study is the cultural rule, not the genealogy.
• Q: Why is matriliny not matriarchy? A: Matriliny traces descent and property through women; authority in matrilineal societies such as the Khasi or Nayar typically rests with men, usually the mother's brother. No society of established matriarchy has been documented.
• Q: Distinguish lineage from clan. A: In a lineage the common ancestor can be traced genealogically; in a clan descent from the ancestor is merely asserted, often with a totem, and the clan is usually larger and exogamous.
• Q: Why is cross-cousin marriage preferred in the south and forbidden in the north? A: The southern Dravidian system treats affinal kin as a recurring marriageable category, keeping alliances and property within a known set; the northern system applies *gotra* and village exogamy and classes all cousins as siblings, so marriage must go outside the kin group.
• Q: What does the Nuer case add to the definition of marriage? A: Woman-to-woman and ghost marriage show that marriage assigns the status of *pater* — the socially recognised father — independently of biological paternity or of a male spouse, which is why definitions based on the sexual union of a man and a woman fail.
• Q: How does Lévi-Strauss explain the incest taboo? A: As the positive rule to exchange: by forbidding marriage inside the group it forces groups to give women to one another, converting biological kin into social allies and creating the first durable social structure.
• Q: Difference between restricted and generalised exchange? A: Restricted exchange is symmetric and immediate between two groups (bilateral cross-cousin marriage); generalised exchange is asymmetric and cyclical — A to B, B to C, C to A — typically matrilateral cross-cousin marriage, which links more groups but demands long-term trust.
• Q: Is the nuclear family universal? A: Murdock claimed it is; the Nayar *taravad*, the Israeli kibbutz and matrifocal Caribbean households are the standard counter-examples, so the defensible position is that its *functions* are universal while its form is not.
• Q: Has the Indian joint family disappeared? A: No — co-residence has declined with migration and urban housing, but common property, HUF status, ritual obligation and financial support continue; the distinction is between residential and functional jointness.
• Q: What is the difference between dowry and bride price, and which is legally barred in India? A: Dowry moves from the bride's side to the groom's and is prohibited by the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961; bride price moves from groom to bride's kin and is a customary payment in many tribal communities, not a dowry offence.
• Q: What is the current legal minimum age of marriage in India? A: 18 for women and 21 for men under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006; a 2021 Bill to raise the age for women to 21 has not been enacted.
• Q: How do assisted reproduction and surrogacy affect kinship theory? A: They split genetic, gestational and social parenthood, reviving the pater/genitor distinction and supporting Carsten's and Strathern's argument that kinship is better studied as *relatedness* that is made and maintained than as a fixed biological grid.
• Q: How would you use kinship knowledge in a field survey? A: Collect a genealogy with kin-type notation and local terms, map residence and property, identify the actual decision-making unit — which is often the lineage or the *karta*, not the individual respondent — and sample households accordingly.

Common mistakes

• Treating matrilineal as matriarchal, and claiming women rule Khasi or Nayar society.
• Confusing cross-cousins with parallel cousins: the test is whether the connecting siblings are of opposite sex (cross) or the same sex (parallel).
• Writing dowry where bride price is meant, or calling *mehr* a dowry — the direction of payment and the recipient differ in all three.
• Describing polyandry as a general Indian practice instead of naming the specific groups (Toda, Jaunsari, Ladakhi, Nayar) and the economic context.
• Saying the joint family has vanished because households are smaller; residential fission is not functional fission, and census snapshots catch households mid-cycle.
• Mixing up levirate and sororate, or listing them as types of polygamy rather than as rules of secondary marriage.
• Quoting IPC section numbers for dowry cruelty — the Indian Penal Code was replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 from 1 July 2024, and the numbering changed; name the offence instead.
• Attributing alliance theory to Radcliffe-Brown or descent theory to Lévi-Strauss, and dating *Elementary Structures* (1949) or *The Nuer* (1940) wrongly.
• Giving English kin terms in an Indian answer where the Hindi or Tamil distinctions are the whole point of the question.

Related topics

Caste, class and family in India · Anthropological theories: evolutionism to structuralism · Economic and political anthropology · Religion and society · Tribal India and customary law · Demographic and medical anthropology