Revision summary
Kinship organises descent, marriage, and care; it is stretching, not dying. Alliance and caste endogamy persist beside delayed marriage and chosen intimacy. Migration, IVF, and law split biological and social parenthood. Census and NFHS show mixed households. COVID made kin the shock-absorber of care and shelter.
Model answer
Introduction
- Kinship is the social organisation of relatedness: descent, marriage, and care. Claude Levi-Strauss treated alliance and the exchange of spouses as elementary. The contemporary world has not abolished kinship. It has stretched, delayed, and partly chosen it, under law, migration, and new technology.
Body
From elementary structures to mixed forms
- Levi-Strauss’s alliance still organises much marriage, including caste endogamy in India.
- William J. Goode expected industrialism to spread a conjugal family. Census households show nuclear, joint, and female-headed mixes, not a single path.
- David Schneider taught that kinship is also a cultural code of blood and law, which same-sex and adoptive families now contest.
What is changing
- Later marriage, lower fertility in many classes, and longer education rearrange the generation clock.
- Giddens’s pure relationship and chosen intimacy describe a limited urban script: exit is thinkable.
- Migration and NRI households produce kinship at a distance: remittance, video ritual, and marriage markets across borders.
- New reproductive technology and legal adoption separate biogenetic and social parenthood.
What persists
- Care of the old and the child still leans on women, as Oakley and NFHS decision-making files show.
- Honour, dowry bargaining, and violence show that “choice” is stratified.
- Work from home put paid labour back into kin space, thickening household control for some women.
Shocks and public kinship
- COVID-19 made the household the hospital and the school. Kin absorbed risk that the state did not.
- Lockdown reverse migration was a kinship event: the village house as the only remaining right to shelter.
Discussion
- Contemporary kinship is more diverse in form and more loaded as a welfare system.
- It is not a simple shift from joint to nuclear, nor from structure to pure individual contract.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD KIN[Kinship] --> ALL[Alliance descent] KIN --> CH[Chosen delayed migrant] TECH[Law IVF adoption] --> CH CARE[Gendered care] --> PERS[Persistence] LOCK[Lockdown village house] --> KIN
Conclusion
Kinship is changing through delayed marriage, migration, law, and technology, while alliance, caste, and gendered care persist. Levi-Strauss, Goode, Giddens, and Schneider frame the debate. Census, NFHS, WFH, and 2020 returns show India as mixed, not post-kin.
Quick related
Students also ask
-
Describe the role of Science and Technology in enabling us to face the challenges triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Next question in the 2021 paper (Q8). View answer →
-
Has the joint family disappeared?
It has changed and often nucleated in cities. Joint obligations and property still bind many Census households.
-
Do live-in ties end kinship?
They rearrange conjugality. Children, care, and inheritance still pull people back into kin law.
PYQ trend
When UPSC asked this
Related PYQs from other years, newest first. Open a question to read it.
-
2025 · Q4(a) · Sociology GS 1 · 20 marks
Give an account of the recent trends of marriage in the Indian context. How are these different from traditional practices? -
2021 · Q7(a) · Sociology GS 1 · 20 marks
Explain how the pattern of patriarchy is being altered in a family and at the workplace in the present context. -
2019 · Q8(a) · Sociology GS 1 · 20 marks
In the light of judicial intervention on 'Live-in relationships', discuss the future of marriage and family in India -
2018 · Q1(e) · Sociology GS 1 · 10 marks
What are the new forms of family in developed societies? Discuss -
2018 · Q6(b) · Sociology GS 1 · 15 marks
Distinguish between family and household with reference to the concept of development of the household. -
2017 · Q5(d) · Sociology GS 1 · 10 marks
Examine 'patriarchal bargain ' as gendered division of work in contemporary India -
2017 · Q7(a) · Sociology GS 1 · 10 marks
Examine the relationship between the contemporary trends in marriage and changing from family -
2016 · Q8(c) · Sociology GS 1 · 15 marks
Distinguish between family and household as sociological concepts.
More from this paper
Q1(a) · UPSC Mains 2021 · Sociology GS 1 · 10 marks
Europe was the first and the only place where modernity emerged. Comment
Sociology
Modernity is a cluster of capitalism, state, science, and clock time. Europe was an early combination, as Weber, Marx, and Giddens show. “Only” ignores colonial modernity, Japan, and multiple modernities. Wallerstein places Europe inside a world-system. Comment: first is historical; only is false.
Q1(b) · UPSC Mains 2021 · Sociology GS 1 · 10 marks
Do you think ethnomethodology helps us in getting reliable and valid data ? Justify your answer
Sociology
Garfinkel studies members’ methods, indexicality, and accountability. That can validate how categories are produced, including official ones. Reliability of national rates needs stable instruments such as Census and NFHS. Cicourel links ethnomethodology to the making of statistics. Justify: yes for interactional validity; no as a sole reliability design.
Q1(c) · UPSC Mains 2021 · Sociology GS 1 · 10 marks
Discuss the challenges involved in collecting data through census method
Sociology
A census seeks complete enumeration; coverage of migrants and the homeless is weak. Definitions of work and household threaten comparability. Trust, NPR-type list fears, and enumerator quality shape answers. Census 2011 stands; Census 2021 slipped in the pandemic. Official completeness is organised, not natural.
Toppers' copies
Toppers' copies for this question will be uploaded soon.