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In anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the
lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are
often debated. Anthropologist Robin Fox states that "the study of kinship is the study of what
man does with these basic facts of life – mating, gestation, parenthood, socialization,
siblingship etc." Human society is unique, he argues, in that we are "working with the same
raw material as exists in the animal world, but [we] can conceptualize and categorize it to
serve social ends."[1] These social ends include the socialization of children and the formation
of basic economic, political and religious groups.
Kinship can refer both to the patterns of social relationships themselves, or it can refer to the
study of the patterns of social relationships in one or more human cultures (i.e. kinship
studies). Over its history, anthropology has developed a number of related concepts and terms
in the study of kinship, such as descent, descent
group, lineage, affinity/affine, consanguinity/cognateand fictive kinship. Further, even within
these two broad usages of the term, there are different theoretical approaches.
Broadly, kinship patterns may be considered to include people related by both descent – i.e.
social relations during development – and by marriage. Human kinship relations
through marriage are commonly called "affinity" in contrast to the relationships that arise in
one's group of origin, which may be called one's descent group. In some cultures, kinship
relationships may be considered to extend out to people an individual has economic or
political relationships with, or other forms of social connections. Within a culture, some
descent groups may be considered to lead back to gods[2] or animal ancestors (totems). This
may be conceived of on a more or less literal basis.
Kinship can also refer to a principle by which individuals or groups of individuals are
organized into social groups, roles, categories and genealogy by means of kinship
terminologies. Family relations can be represented concretely (mother, brother, grandfather)
or abstractly by degrees of relationship (kinship distance). A relationship may be relative (e.g.
a father in relation to a child) or reflect an absolute (e.g. the difference between a mother and
a childless woman). Degrees of relationship are not identical to heirship or legal succession.
Many codes of ethics consider the bond of kinship as creating obligations between the related
persons stronger than those between strangers, as in Confucian filial piety.
In a more general sense, kinship may refer to a similarity or affinity between entities on the
basis of some or all of their characteristics that are under focus. This may be due to a
shared ontological origin, a shared historical or cultural connection, or some other perceived
shared features that connect the two entities. For example, a person studying the ontological
roots of human languages (etymology) might ask whether there is kinship between the
English word seven and the German word sieben. It can be used in a more diffuse sense as in,
for example, the news headline "Madonna feels kinship with vilified Wallis Simpson", to
imply a felt similarity or empathy between two or more entities.
In biology, "kinship" typically refers to the degree of genetic relatedness or coefficient of
relationship between individual members of a species (e.g. as in kin selection theory). It may
also be used in this specific sense when applied to human relationships, in which case its
meaning is closer to consanguinity or genealogy.
Contents
1Basic concepts
o 1.1Family types
o 1.2Terminology
1.2.1Tri-relational Kin-terms
o 1.3Descent
1.3.1Descent rules
1.3.2Descent groups
1.3.3.1House societies
o 1.4Marriage (affinity)
2History
o 2.7Post-Schneider
o 3.2Evolutionary psychology
o 4.1Fictive kinship
o 4.3Composition of relations
5Appendix
o 5.1Degrees
6See also
7References
8Bibliography
9External links
Basic concepts[edit]
Family types[edit]
Main article: Family
Family is a group of people affiliated by consanguinity (by recognized birth), affinity (by
marriage), or co-residence/shared consumption (see Nurture kinship). In most societies it is
the principal institution for the socialization of children. As the basic unit for raising children,
Anthropologists most generally classify family organization as matrifocal (a mother and her
children); conjugal (a husband, his wife, and children; also called nuclear
family); avuncular(a brother, his sister, and her children); or extended family in which
parents and children co-reside with other members of one parent's family.
However, producing children is not the only function of the family; in societies with a sexual
division of labor, marriage, and the resulting relationship between two people, it is necessary
for the formation of an economically productive household.[3][4][5]
Terminology[edit]
Main article: Kinship terminology
Different societies classify kinship relations differently and therefore use different systems of
kinship terminology – for example some languages distinguish
between affinal and consanguine uncles, whereas others have only one word to refer to both a
father and his brothers. Kinship terminologies include the terms of address used in different
languages or communities for different relatives and the terms of reference used to identify
the relationship of these relatives to ego or to each other.
Kin terminologies can be either descriptive or classificatory. When a descriptive terminology
is used, a term refers to only one specific type of relationship, while a classificatory
terminology groups many different types of relationships under one term. For example, the
word brother in English-speaking societies indicates a son of one's same parent; thus,
English-speaking societies use the word brother as a descriptive term referring to this
relationship only. In many other classificatory kinship terminologies, in contrast, a person's
male first cousin ( whether mother's brother's son, mother's sister's son, father's brother's son,
father's sister's son) may also be referred to as brothers.
The major patterns of kinship systems that are known which Lewis Henry Morgan identified
through kinship terminology in his 1871 work Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the
Human Family are:
While normal kin-terms discussed above denote a relationship between two entities (e.g. the
word 'sister' denotes the relationship between the speaker or some other entity and another
feminine entity who shares the parents of the former), trirelational kin-terms—also known as
triangular, triadic, ternary, and shared kin-terms—denote a relationship between three distinct
entities. These occur commonly in Australian Aboriginal languages with the context
of Australian Aboriginal kinship.
In Bininj Gun-Wok,[6] for example, the bi-relational kin-term nakurrng is differentiated from
its tri-relational counterpart by the position of the possessive pronoun ke. When nakurrng is
anchored to the addressee with ke in second position, it simply means 'brother' (which
includes a broader set of relations than in English). When the ke is fronted, however, the
term nakurrng now incorporates the male speaker as a propositus (Pi.e. point of reference for
a kin-relation) and encapsulates the entire relationship as follows:
The person (Referent) who is your (PAddressee) maternal uncle and who is my
(PSpeaker) nephew by virtue of you being my grandchild.
Kin-based Group Terms and Pronouns[edit]
Many Australian languages also have elaborate systems of referential terms for denoting
groups of people based on their relationship to one another (not just their relationship to the
speaker or an external propositus like 'grandparents'). For example, in Kuuk Thaayorre, a
maternal grandfather and his sister are referred to as paanth ngan-ngethe and addressed with
the vocative ngethin.[7] In Bardi, a father and his sister are irrmoorrgooloo; a man's wife and
his children are aalamalarr.
In Murrinh-patha, nonsingular pronouns are differentiated not only by the gender makeup of
the group, but also by the members' interrelation. If the members are in a sibling-like relation,
a third pronoun (SIB) will be chosen distinct from the Masculine (MASC) and
Feminine/Neuter (FEM).[8]
Descent[edit]
Descent rules[edit]
In many societies where kinship connections are important, there are rules, though they may
be expressed or be taken for granted. There are four main headings that anthropologists use to
categorize rules of descent. They are bilateral, unilineal, ambilineal and double descent.[9]
History[edit]
One of the foundational works in the anthropological study of kinship was Morgan'sSystems
of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871). As is the case with other social
sciences, Anthropology and kinship studies emerged at a time when the understanding of the
Human species' comparative place in the world was somewhat different from today's.
Evidence that life in stable social groups is not just a feature of humans, but also of many
other primates, was yet to emerge and society was considered to be a uniquely human affair.
As a result, early kinship theorists saw an apparent need to explain not only the details
of how human social groups are constructed, their patterns, meanings and obligations, but
also why they are constructed at all. The why explanations thus typically presented the fact of
life in social groups (which appeared to be unique to humans) as being largely a result of
human ideas and values.
Morgan's early influence[edit]
A more flexible view of kinship was formulated in British social anthropology. Among the
attempts to break out of universalizing assumptions and theories about kinship, Radcliffe-
Brown (1922, The Andaman Islands; 1930, The social organization of Australian tribes) was
the first to assert that kinship relations are best thought of as concrete networks of
relationships among individuals. He then described these relationships, however, as typified
by interlocking interpersonal roles. Malinowski (1922, Argonauts of the Western Pacific)
described patterns of events with concrete individuals as participants stressing the relative
stability of institutions and communities, but without insisting on abstract systems or models
of kinship. Gluckman (1955, The judicial process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia)
balanced the emphasis on stability of institutions against processes of change and conflict,
inferred through detailed analysis of instances of social interaction to infer rules and
assumptions. John Barnes, Victor Turner, and others, affiliated with Gluckman's Manchester
school of anthropology, described patterns of actual network relations in communities and
fluid situations in urban or migratory context, as with the work of J. Clyde Mitchell (1965,
Social Networks in Urban Situations). Yet, all these approaches clung to a view of
stable functionalism, with kinship as one of the central stable institutions.
"Kinship system" as systemic pattern[edit]
The concept of “system of kinship” tended to dominate anthropological studies of kinship in
the early 20th century. Kinship systems as defined in anthropological texts and ethnographies
were seen as constituted by patterns of behavior and attitudes in relation to the differences in
terminology, listed above, for referring to relationships as well as for addressing others. Many
anthropologists went so far as to see, in these patterns of kinship, strong relations
between kinship categories and patterns of marriage, including forms of marriage, restrictions
on marriage, and cultural concepts of the boundaries of incest. A great deal of inference was
necessarily involved in such constructions as to “systems” of kinship, and attempts to
construct systemic patterns and reconstruct kinship evolutionary histories on these bases were
largely invalidated in later work. However, anthropologist Dwight Read later argued that the
way in which kinship categories are defined by individual researchers are substantially
inconsistent.[35] This occurs when working within a systemic cultural model that can be
elicited in fieldwork, but also allowing considerable individual variability in details, such as
when they are recorded through relative products.[36]
Conflicting theories of the mid 20th century [edit] [37]
Appendix[edit]
Degrees[edit]
Degree of Genetic
Kinship
relationship overlap
See also[edit]
Ancestry
Kin selection
Kinism
Kinship analysis
Kinship terminology
Australian Aboriginal kinship
Bride price
Bride service
Chinese kinship
Cinderella effect
Clan
Consanguinity
Darwinian anthropology
Dynasty
Ethnicity
Family
Family history
Fictive kinship
Genealogy
Genetic genealogy
Godparent
Heredity
Inheritance
Interpersonal relationships
Irish Kinship
Lineage (anthropology)
Nurture kinship
Serbo-Croatian kinship
Tribe
House society
References[edit]
1. ^ Fox, Robin (1967). Kinship and Marriage. Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican Books. p. 30.
2. ^ On Kinship and Gods in Ancient Egypt: An Interview with Marcelo Campagno Damqatum 2
(2007)
3. ^ Wolf, Eric. 1982 Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
92
4. ^ Harner, Michael 1975 "Scarcity, the Factors of Production, and Social Evolution," in Population.
Ecology, and Social Evolution, Steven Polgar, ed. Mouton Publishers: the Hague.
5. ^ Rivière, Peter 1987 "Of Women, Men, and Manioc", Etnologiska Studien (38).
6. ^ Skin, kin and clan : the dynamics of social categories in Indigenous Australia. McConvell,
Patrick,, Kelly, Piers,, Lacrampe, Sébastien,, Australian National University Press. Acton, A.C.T.
April 2018. ISBN 978-1-76046-164-5. OCLC 1031832109.
7. ^ Gaby, Alice Rose. 2006. A Grammar of Kuuk Thaayorre. The University of Melbourne Ph.D.
8. ^ Walsh, Michael James. 1976. The Muɹinypata Language of Northern Australia. The Australian
National University.
9. ^ Oke Wale, An Introduction to Social Anthropology Second Edition, Part 2, Kinship.
10. ^ Jump up to: Monaghan, John; Just, Peter (2000). Social & Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short
a b
Introduction. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 86–88. ISBN 978-0-19-285346-2.
11. ^ Endicott, Kirk M.; Endicott, Karen L. (2008). The Headman Was a Woman: The Gender
Egalitarian Batek of Malaysia. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc. pp. 26–27. ISBN 978-1-
57766-526-7.
12. ^ Houseman and White 1998b
13. ^ Jump up to: Houseman & White 1998a
a b
Michigan Press.
42. ^ Schneider, D. 1968. American kinship: a cultural account, Anthropology of modern societies
series. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
43. ^ Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1870. Systems of consanguity and affinity of the human family. Vol. 17,
Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
44. ^ Collier, Jane Fishburne; Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko (1987). Gender and kinship: Essays toward a
unified analysis. Stanford University Press.
45. ^ Carsten, Janet (2000). Cultures of relatedness: New approaches to the study of kinship.
Cambridge University Press.
46. ^ Strathern, Marilyn. After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century. Cambridge
University Press.
47. ^ Carsten, Janet (1995). "The substance of kinship and the heart of the hearth". American
Ethnologist. 22 (2): 223–241. doi:10.1525/ae.1995.22.2.02a00010. S2CID 145716250.
48. ^ Thomas, Philip. (1999) No substance, no kinship? Procreation, Performativity and
Temanambondro parent/child relations. In Conceiving persons: ethnographies of procreation,
fertility, and growth edited by P. Loizos and P. Heady. New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press.
49. ^ Malinowski 1929, pp. 179–186
50. ^ Malinowski 1929, p. 195
51. ^ Malinowski 1929, p. 202
52. ^ Sahlins, Marshal (1976). The Use and Abuse of Biology.
53. ^ Holland, Maximilian. (2012) Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship: Compatibility between Cultural
and Biological Approaches. North Charleston: Createspace Press.
54. ^ Hamilton, W.D. 1987. Discriminating nepotism: expectable, common and overlooked. In Kin
recognition in animals, edited by D. J. C. Fletcher and C. D. Michener. New York: Wiley.
55. ^ Holland, Maximilian (26 October 2012). Robin Fox comment (book cover). ISBN 978-
1480182004.
56. ^ Daly, Martin; Salmon, Catherine; Wilson, Margo (1997). Kinship: the conceptual hole in
psychological studies of social cognition and close relationships. Erlbaum.
57. ^ Lieberman, D.; Tooby, J.; Cosmides, L. (2007). "The architecture of human kin
detection". Nature. 445 (7129): 727–
731. Bibcode:2007Natur.445..727L. doi:10.1038/nature05510. PMC 3581061. PMID 17301784.
58. ^ Jump up to: The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, Edited by Robin Dunbar and Louise
a b
Barret, Oxford University Press, 2007, Chapter 31 Kinship and descent by Lee Conk and Drew
Gerkey
59. ^ Fox 1977, p. 34
60. ^ Evans-Pritchard 1951, p. 116
61. ^ Simpson 1994, pp. 831–851
62. ^ Barnes 1961, pp. 296–299
63. ^ By replacement in the definition of the notion of "generation" by meiosis". Since identical twins
are not separated by meiosis, there are no "generations" between them, hence n=0 and r=1.
See genetic-genealogy.co.uk.
64. ^ "Kin Selection". Benjamin/Cummings. Retrieved 2007-11-25.
65. ^ This degree of relationship is usually indistinguishable from the relationship to a random
individual within the same population (tribe, country, ethnic group).
Bibliography[edit]
Barnes, J. A. (1961). "Physical and Social Kinship". Philosophy of Science. 28 (3):
296–299. doi:10.1086/287811. S2CID 122178099.
Boon, James A.; Schneider, David M. (October 1974). "Kinship vis-a-vis Myth
Contrasts in Levi-Strauss' Approaches to Cross-Cultural Comparison". American
Anthropologist. 76 (4): 799–817. doi:10.1525/aa.1974.76.4.02a00050. Archived
from the original on 2013-01-05.
Bowlby, John (1982). Attachment. 1 (2nd ed.). London: Hogarth.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1951). Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Fox, Robin (1977). Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Holland, Maximilian (2012). Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship: Compatibility
Between Cultural and Biological Approaches. Createspace Press.
Houseman, Michael; White, Douglas R. (1998). "Network mediation of exchange
structures: Ambilateral sidedness and property flows in Pul Eliya" (PDF). In
Schweizer, Thomas; White, Douglas R. (eds.). Kinship, Networks and Exchange.
Cambridge University Press. pp. 59–89. Archived from the original (PDF) on 10
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Houseman, Michael; White, Douglas R. (1998). "Taking Sides: Marriage
Networks and Dravidian Kinship in Lowland South America" (PDF). In Godelier,
Maurice; Trautmann, Thomas; F.Tjon Sie Fat. (eds.). Transformations of Kinship.
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Malinowski, Bronislaw (1929). The Sexual Life of Savages in North Western
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Trautmann, Thomas R. (2008). Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship,
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Wallace, Anthony F.; Atkins, John (1960). "The Meaning of Kinship
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