Folie 1

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Kinship And Social Security
An interdisciplinary project with an
anthropological agenda funded by the European
Union's Sixth Framework Programme Patrick
Heady Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology (Germany)
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Statistical evidence of different kinship patterns
Proportion of young women (20-24) living with the
parental generation (source Eurostat)
Nordic Countries
Central Western Countries
Mediterranean Countries
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Comment
Similar geographic patterns exist for residential
status of old people and for fertility.
Broad questions

• Are differing residential patterns related to
• Kinship solidarity in general?
• Level of state social security?
• Fertility levels?
• Are there implications for EU social policy?
• Can anthropology throw light on statistical and
  policy issues?

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Scientific aims

• A. To understand why, and when, relatives help
  each other
• Kinship altruism?
• Reciprocity?
• Rational self-interest?
• Cultures of kinship?
• To acquire social capital?
• Or some combination of these.
• B. To understand why people acquire more
  relatives
• Relatives can be acquired through procreation,
  though marriage or through spiritual kinship.
• 1. Do the theories that explain interaction
  between relatives also explain attempts to
  acquire more relatives?
• 2. Can this perspective help us to understand
  changing birth rates?

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Research strategy

• 1. Gather background information on social
  security and family systems from
• official sources
• official statistics
• sociological surveys
• 2. Look at historical data on interaction between
  family patterns and state social security systems
  since the foundation of modern state social
  security 100-150 years ago.
• 3. Fieldwork studies in both urban and rural
  areas. Key focuses extensive data on
  kinship-networks background data on other
  sources of help, property etc open interviews
  about understanding of kinship and about helping
  relationships participant observation. Fieldwork
  data to be analyzed both as ethnographic studies
  and via mathematical modeling of network
  relationships.

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Kinship Network Questionnaire
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Fieldsites and Contractors
1 Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology
Halle 2 Max-Planck-Institute for Demographic
Research Rostock 3 Max-Planck-Institute for
Research into Economic Systems Jena 4
Karl-Franzens-University Graz 5 Austrian
Institute for Family Studies Vienna
University of Vienna 6 Institute for Ethnology
and Folklore Research Zagreb 7 Université Paris
X-Nanterre 8 Université de Franche-Comté
Besancon 9 University of Cologne 10 Universitá
Degli Studi di Siena 11 Catholic University
Nijmegen 12 Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan 13
Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences 14
Södertörns högskola Huddinge 15 Nicolaus
Copernikus University Torun 16 Georg-August-Univer
sity Göttingen
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Thank you for your attention.