Alfred Radcliffe-Brown provided a classic example of “joking relationships” with an article studying this social role, noting that it was permissible for subjects to steal and eat a sacrifice prepared by this type of person. For 10 points each:
[10m] Name this social role. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “alliance theory” improves on earlier theories of kinship by incorporating these people into the fundamental “atom of kinship” along with the nuclear family.
ANSWER: uncles [accept avunculate; or mother’s brother or maternal uncle; reject “father’s brother”]
[10e] By studying cultures where the uncle, rather than the father, was in charge of disciplining children, this anthropologist’s Sex and Repression in Savage Society demonstrated that the Oedipus complex was not universal.
ANSWER: Bronisław Malinowski [or Bronisław Kasper Malinowski]
[10h] A maternal uncle rubs his buttocks on the leg of a nephew who has carved his first canoe in this practice among the Iatmul people, which Gregory Bateson interpreted as a ritual to counteract schismogenesis.
ANSWER: naven ritual [accept Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe]
<Matt Bollinger, Social Science>