The birth and adoption of kinship: Folklore and fakelore in the context of nation-states and world religions
Abstract
[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] This dissertation centers upon the premise that human kinship, cooperation, and sociopolitical organization are not fully comprehensible without reference to the influence of stories in shaping them and that stories are not fully comprehensible without reference to the context of their origin, persistence, and subsequent modification. It is through transmitting traditional stories that human ancestors built a model of kinship around which their descendants would organize into clans and tribes, with ancestors as a unifying theme and moral center. It was these ancestors that tribes would compare upon meeting, oftentimes to disastrous results, but would in time serve as the model for their regular interaction within the emerging context of complex political structures. As the context of later storytelling began to diverge that of its evolution, the influence of traditional stories on descendant behavior would undergo a fundamental change, retaining much of an ancestral function in influencing behavior, but modified for an audience shifting in composition and circumstance. With the support of cross-cultural ethnographic evidence, I argue that traditional storytelling was a means through which ancestors were able to influence descendants to recognize a widening web of co-descendants and to teach them the rules for their cooperative interaction, in such a way that left the storytelling descendants that anthropologists would come to document. I then turn to the adoption of this effect in the context of nation-states and world religions, wherein the modification of traditional stories/storytelling extends the trope of kinship to include citizens and co-religionists, resulting, I found, in their identification, cooperation, and sociopolitical organization as a homogenous "people" (a nation).
Degree
Ph. D.
Thesis Department
Rights
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