Kin structures refers to how families are organized. Do people or beings in your world live in nuclear families, extended families or no family at all. How kin relationships are designed will fundamentally impact the following truths of your world.
- Resource distribution. Families at base are economic units.
- Who’s inside or outside society? If you have to part of a family or a particular type of family to belong, what happens if you are not?
- The psychology of people – are they communal because they were brought up in communal structures, or focused solely on themselves, suggesting a more isolated upbringing. It determines where their loyalties lie (family, friends, state, themselves)
- Future prospects of offspring, which is an off shoot of the above three issues, but mobility or stagnation in society is influenced here. And perhaps how people self-identify in society.
- Gender roles are often defined through family structure and family roles.
- Evolution – is it random if folks get to choose their own mates and they get the children they get, or more engineered either scientifically (gene manipulation) or arranged marriages within narrowly defined social classes (e.g. royal lines).
- What a family looks like – how many partners live together (e.g. monogamy, polygamy), how children are raised, how reproduction functions, and how sex occurs.
Let’s look at some quick examples of how this works.
Harry Potter and the Wizarding World by J.K. Rowling: The evil wizards (Grindelwald and Valdemort) created alliances among pure blood families believing only pure blood wizards were worthy of ruling society. Hermione and Lilly Potter, Harry’s mother, were considered mudbloods, born of non-magic families and were considered inferior, which was evident on how they were treated – no matter how powerful they really were.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: Families have been eliminated in mainstream society. People are genetically engineered in hatcheries to have the right characteristics to be happy, succeed in their jobs and be loyal only to the state since families are now defunct. Personalities in this world are limited, because they are bred within a narrow band, defined by worker and positional category.
Xenogenesis Trilogy (renamed as Lilith’s Brood) by Octavia Butler: Post-apocalypse humans are rescued and captured by the Oankali, which engineered their genes to optimize environmental fitness. The cost to this genetic structure is the tendency to reach an evolutionary death by eliminating unnecessary diversity in the gene pool, forcing them to interbreed with new species to build a wider set of genetic options (especially so called bad genes which seem negative until an evolutionary change elevates their capabiltieis). Oankali, however, require three beings to participate in reproduction—the male, the female, and the ooloi, who takes male form with the female and female form with the male. Family structures include all three. The initial human-Oankali hybrids struggle with their identity, as they are the first to evolve in this new kin structure.
Any thoughts on the role of family and kin structures shape our own world?
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