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This chapter proposes a context for interpreting the phrase “in Christ” that would have resonated with Paul's audience: the ideology of patrilineal descent. The same logic which underlies the notion of “coming out of” (ek) your ancestors also shapes the concept of being “in” your ancestors. Indeed, these are two ways of expressing the same relationship: ancestors contain descendants. To understand how “in Christ” fits in with this descent logic, it is instructive to consider the other contexts in which Paul applies a similar concept of being “in” someone: the gentiles are blessed “in” Abraham (Gal 3:8), and true descendants of Abraham are said to be “in” Isaac (Rom 9:7). This chapter discusses a range of texts — Greek, Roman, and Jewish — that maintain similar notions about ancestors and descendants, and then focuses on the Septuagint (Paul's source for this “in” language) and Paul's letters to show how Paul turns this phrase into his own discourse of kinship for gentiles.

This introductory chapter lays the groundwork for the rest of the study by articulating the thesis of the book and then addressing several key issues. The book argues for a new way to read kinship and ethnic language in Paul that dismantles the contrast between a universal, “non-ethnic” Christianity and an ethnic, particular Judaism. Paul uses the discourses of kinship and ethnicity to construct a myth of origins for gentile Christ-followers and relies on the logic of patrilineal descent to create a new lineage for the gentiles, a lineage which links gentiles through Christ to the founding ancestor, Abraham. The chapter reviews scholarship on Paul, distinguishing between traditional readings and various strands of the “new perspective”. It addresses the issue of the audience of the letters, discusses the translation of Ioudaioi as “Jews“ or “Judeans”, and outlines a specific theoretical position which treats kinship and ethnicity as social constructs that nevertheless carry authority in defining collective identity.

This chapter examines the ‘external order’ of the household, that is, the interrelations between households constituting a wider grouping. A Pandit household does not commonly live in isolation in a village. In most cases its natal members have patrilineal kin living with them in the same village, albeit in another or other households. All such agnatically related households taken together constitute a kotamb (derived from the Sanskrit kutumba, meaning ‘family’ or ‘household’). The chapter discusses the compound and the neighbourhood; dispersed ‘kotamb’; inter-household relations within the ‘kotamb’; hostility between cousins; and the patrilineage.

This chapter summarizes the preceding discussions. In a study of Pandit kinship in rural Kashmir, the relations of the Pandits with the Muslims are not of any direct relevance. Not only are there differences of religion between them, but also of social organization and culture. The Pandits and the Muslims retain their separate identities by following their own customs and practices. The only significant groups found among the Pandits of Utrassu-Umanagri are based on kinship. The bonds of kinship divide the Pandits of a village into agnatic and non-agnatic kin. The smallest and most discrete kin group in Pandit society is the chulah, or the household. It is also functionally the most important group. In the structure and functioning of the chulah the importance of the bond of agnation, and the ‘patrilineal ideology’, is clearly indicated.

This chapter focuses on the poem “Damba Digoli”, which is believed to be the first one that Afa Ajura composed around 1952. It reveals that Afa Ajura recited the poem during a celebration for the occasion of Prophet Muhammad's birth, which coincided with the visit to Tamale of Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse, the most famous Tijaniyyah Khalifa in West Africa. It also considers Damba Digoli as a departure from the usual tradition where speakers would take the opportunity to shower praises and countless invocations on the Prophet Muhammad. The chapter begins with the Prophet's birth information, followed by the details of his patrilineal genealogy going back to Ishmael and Abraham. It covers verses on the praising of Prophet Mohammed and the significance of learning about his ancestry and praying for them.

This chapter puts the Nuosu cvyi firmly in the orbit of comparative studies of social structure, showing the differences between patrilineal organization at the local level in Nuosu and in Han society. Nuosu lineage organization, it shows, is linked more to territorial organization, less to specific landownership. The Nuosu lineage does not cut across caste, of course, whereas in Han society, which has no castes, lineage organization cuts across class. And Nuosu lineages are more concerned at the collective level with marriage alliances than are the Han, for whom marriage is a matter of concern to the immediate and extended family, but not to wider kin groups: exactly the kind of difference people expect to find between a tribal and a state society.

This chapter discusses the education of the bimo, the importance of patrilineal transmission of knowledge, and the ideas of education embodied in the long training and apprenticeship before a bimo can perform rituals on his own. For the national Chinese discourse, and to some extent for the local discourse of Yi identity, Nuosu society in Liangshan represents a kind of paradigm for the Yi in general—a society where outside influences were minimal and where one could see in the present what other Yi must have been like in the past, before their cultures were heavily intermixed with acculturative elements from the Han. The cosmopolitan discourse, in recent decades at least, has rejected such rigidly typological and general evolutionary schemes, and tends to view Nuosu society as something sui historically related to the other Yi.

As in other parts of rural China, the idea of kinship, largely coming from the traditional source of historical influence, plays an important role in structuring a vision of social relationships by defining both individual and collective identities, and by shaping individuals' attitudes and sentiments toward one another. This chapter discusses the traditional concept of kinship in the context of a marriage crisis that has followed the economic reforms in this community. Patrilineal descent and virilocal marriage had survived the encounter with the Maoist revolution, but were forced to give way in the 1980s. Endogamy, which in earlier times would have been taken as incestuous, had become a social norm in the 1990s. The discussion argues that this is one of the changes which reflects a shift in how these people conceptualize the relationship between the self and the other.

This chapter discusses shamanism. It argues that shamanism among the Yukaghirs is to be understood as a broadly based activity practiced to various degrees by ordinary hunters, instead of being seen as “mysticism” under the control of a certain religious elite. Finally, the chapter compares the shaman with the hunter and shamans in bilateral and patrilineal societies, and then examines the decline of the “professional shamans.”

This chapter demonstrates that the patrilineal family and the body of ritual that sustained it—the cult of ancestors—depended for their continued existence not only on the uninterrupted generation of male descendants and on their performance of sacrifices but also on the continued death of ancestors. On that note, large numbers of successful transcendents would undermine this trend in the society, by removing individuals from the lineage system, disrupting its generational continuity, and leaving the elderly uncared for. The chapter presents several stories of adepts who had left their family to search for transcendence. Fei Changfang deceived his family into thinking that he was dead, so as not to face his family’s vehement objection to his leaving home.

This chapter examines the critique of the patrilineal model within current anthropological literature in order to reconsider the claim that ancient Israel was a pure patrilineal society. While biblical writers valued patrilineality and preserved that value explicitly within the paternal begettings, known in Hebrew as the tôlēdôt, they consistently followed the exclusively paternal genealogies with narratives that introduced households. The biblical house, as opposed to the patriline, contained fathers, mothers, wives, concubines, slave wives, firstborn sons, second-born sons, daughters, foreigners, and slaves. The introduction of women and maternally defined subgroups of kin disrupts the neatness of a patrilineal genealogy, marking divisions within a paternal line. When the biblical patriline becomes a noisy, fully peopled house, we find not only a father and his firstborn son, but a series of maternally aligned kin groups with specific kinship labels that delineate maternal sub-houses within the larger house of the father.

Ancient Israel was a house society that organized itself into concentrically larger social groupings and geographic areas under the rubric of the single Hebrew word for house: bayit. The Bible and the origin stories contained within it is the heirloom valuable of ancient Israel’s foundational houses. In the patrilineal genealogies of foundational men, we find an idealized memory of the direct and unmediated transference of material and immaterial inheritance from father to designated son within the fixed geography of a named house. At the same time, the house of the father subdivides into maternally named units that have significant social ramifications for the sons nested within them. Sons who trace their genealogical pathway to the house-founding father through a primary wife become heirs to their father’s house. Sons who trace their pathway to the father through low-status wives find themselves nameless and socially and geographically peripheral. The division of a man’s house into hierarchically arranged maternal subunits is seen in the story of Abraham’s death and burial (Gen 25) and Joseph’s ascent to heir within the house of Jacob (Gen 37-48).

In January 1779, María Francisca and her mother, both from Cochiti Pueblo, New Mexico, were executed for murdering María’s husband, Augustín, originally from the pueblo of Tesuque. This chapter explores the reasons for this unusual act, arguing that the main cause was María’s inability to successfully negotiate the three conflicting kinship systems (each with its own expectations and obligations) in which she felt herself trapped: Cochiti (matrilineal), Tesuque (bilateral), and Spanish-Catholic (bilateral with a “patrilineal twist”). Many Pueblo unions were intercultural before the Spanish imposition. But the introduction of the last made for a still more complicated terrain upon which to construct harmonious marriages.

This chapter is a sophisticated ethnoarchaeological study of ancestor shrines and domestic space among the Kusasi of northern Ghana. The composition and location of ancestor shrines within Kusasi residential compounds reflect and reinforce social organization and the often ambivalent nature of patrilineal and matrilineal relationships. The chapter demonstrates that ancestors remain a central concern of Kusasi life and fulfil a multitude of functions within the family and community.

There are other ways besides men’s societies for symbols to be reproduced, and for them to represent reproduction in imagery drawn from sexual reproduction. Various examples are examined, including Catholic rituals of baptism and godparenthood; the ideology of patrilineal descent as practiced in rural Turkey; Sherpa monasticism and reincarnation lamas; death configured as a form of birth, as among the Kwaio and the Bara; the ideology of male parturition among the Hua of PNG and elsewhere; the ritual birth of a baby enacted by men in the Hain ceremony of the Selk’nam; and reproduction by child purchase among the Egyptian Mamluks.

Kinkajous have evolved a suite of unique adaptations not seen in other Carnivores, helping them thrive in the canopies of neotropical forests. They have a prehensile tail and reversible hind feet to help them climb trees, and large eyes and scent glands to help them navigate complex tropical canopies at night. By sticking to the treetops at night kinkajous have very few potential predators, and this frees them from the need move in large groups for protection, as seen in most diurnal primates. Instead, kinkajous live in small social groups that forage for fruits and flowers mostly as singletons, but reunite at large feeding or sleeping trees. Females defend exclusive territories against each other while males form small coalitions to defend larger areas that overlap with multiple females. Fruit comprises 90-99% of their diet, making kinkajous one of the most frugivorous mammals on earth, and an important seed disperser.