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Man is a social animal. His social nature compels him to tie with others in some form of relationships. He always live with his fellow beings and is surrounded by different kinds of people. The people with which he lives in society are his friends, relatives, neighbors and strangers. Out of all these people man is bound up with some either through blood ties or marriage ties. This bond of blood or marriage which binds people together in a group is called kinship.

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This kinship system based on a biological fact of sexual intercourse between men and women. The desire for reproduction gives rise to a kind of binding relationship. Thus kinship is an interlocking system of families of orientation and procreation. But in a kinship system social recognition overrides biological facts.

That is why kinship system includes socially recognized relationships. These relationships are the product of social interaction. A kinship group may be a broad- range or narrow range.

Kinship refers solely to relationship based upon descent and marriage. An individual plays many roles in his social life such as – son, father, brother etc. Kinship is the idiom by which many people particularly in traditional societies comprehend these roles. Kinship is a construct, a cultural artifact created by almost all kinds of human society. As an artifact it primarily shapes people. Kinship relations are the most basic attachments a man has. Kinship is a social relationship based on real consanguinity.

(1) According to the Dictionary of Anthropology, “Kinship system includes socially recognized relationships based on supposed as well as actual genealogical ties.” Kinship is a cultural system. It varies from culture to culture, from society to society.

(2) According to Theodorson and Theodorson, “Kinship system is the customary system of statuses and roles that governs the behavior of people who are related to each other through marriage or descent from a common ancestor.”

(3) According to Murdock, “Kinship is a structured system of relationship in which kins are bound to one another by complex inter­locking ties.”

(4) According to Smelser, “Kinship is a cluster of social relations based on such factors as biological ties, marriage and legal rules regarding adoption, guardianship and the like.”

Thus, from the above it is concluded that the relationships created through marriage or blood ties are called kinship. When two or more persons are related to each other through descent or united through marriage kinship comes into existence. Murdock opines that each and every adult individual belongs to two nuclear families.

The family of orientation i.e. the family in which one is born and brought up and the family of procreation i.e. the family established through marriage. The relationships formed by both these types of family, ancestors, posterity and successors are called Kinship. Hence every kinship system has blood relations and close relatives based on intimacy.

Study of Kinship: Sociologists and anthropologists like Lowte, Murdock and Levistrauss have made a detailed study on Kinship. Famous anthropologist Radcliffe Brown and Robin Fox have also examined the kinship system. Mrs. Iravati Karve and K.M. Kapadia have analyzed the kinship relationships in Indian society. H.M. Johnson also studied kinship system.

The Important Types of Kinship:

Kinship mainly divided into two types such as:

(1) Consanguineous Kinship:

Those kins who are related to each other by blood is known as consanguineous kins. The relationship is based on blood ties. Son, daughter, sister etc. are example of consanguineous kinship.

(2) Affinal Kinship:

The kinship relationship established by marriage is known as affinal kinship. And the relatives so related are called affinal kins. Son-in-law, Father-in-law, Mother-in-law, Sister- in-law etc. are example of affinal kins.

Types of Kins or Degree of Kinship:

On the basis of nearness or distance kins may be classified into primary secondary and tertiary kins. These are:

(1) Primary Kins:

Those kins who are closely and directly related to one another are called primary kins. Normally there are eight types of primary kins which includes husband-wife, father-son, mother-son, father-daughter, mother-daughter, sister-brother, younger brother-elder brother, younger sister-elder sister. One’s father is one’s primary consanguineous kins whereas one’s wife is one’s primary affinal kins.

(2) Secondary Kins:

Secondary Kins are defined in relation to our primary kins. Primary kins of our primary kins are called secondary kins. Father’s brother, sister’s husband, brother’s wife are our secondary kins. An anthropologist opines that there are 33 types of secondary kins.

(3) Tertiary Kins:

The secondary kins of our primary kins is known as tertiary kins. Brother of sister’s husband, wife of brother- in-law are example of tertiary kins. An anthropologists opines that there are at about 151 types of tertiary kins. Besides the above types of kin there may be some other type of kins such as:

(1) Consanguineal Kin:

A consanguineal kin is a person who is related through blood ties such as father, brother, mother, son, daughter etc.

(2) Affinal Kin:

An affinal kin is a person who is related through marriage such as husband, wife, spouse’s parents etc.

(3) Lineal Kin:

A lineal kin is a person who is related by a direct line of descent such as father, father’s father, son and son’s son etc.

(4) Collateral Kin:

A collateral kin is a person who is related indirectly through the mediation of another relative such as father’s brother, mother’s sister etc.

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Kinship of Family Essay

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Kinship refers to the link that exists among people who are related to each other either by marriage or blood. This link is important because it defines somebody’s history. Kinship is used in most communities to dictate how properties are distributed among one’s descendants. The volume of properties received is dependent on the beneficiary’s number in the family order.

Among communities that speak the same vernacular language, the language is used as the unifying factor because it is used to distinguish that community from other communities. Residing in a common geographical location was responsible for fostering strong bonds due to frequent interaction.

There are two ways through which kinship can be acquired and they include marriage and through blood. The strength of these links does not rely on their source. A link based on marriage can disintegrate after the marriage has collapsed. In contrary affiliation by blood is thought to have the strongest foundation and is said to end when death walks in.

In my typical family setup the affiliation that exists among family members is used to hold it together. For instance, if my father was to divorce my mother, my link with the two of them would remain intact unless I take sides. This is because the link between me and both of them is based on blood while theirs is based on love.

In the above mentioned scenario it is certain that links that are based on blood are stronger and cannot be compared to links based on the marriage because the partners in marriage are united by their strong feelings towards each other and when these feelings fade away the link between them is then broken.

In our culture, the first born male is accorded the same respect as his father and is responsible for the continuation of family name. Female children are not able to participate in family name continuation because traditions dictate that when a woman is married she becomes more attached to her new family.

The male first born is usually consulted before a decision is made because if the father of the family does not exist the first born male assumes his role. Mothers tend to favor the child who is more financially stable than the rest. Studies in the recent past have proved that this favor is natural among females.

In ancient days our community supported marriage strongly because they knew the family was the basic unit that determined the survival of a community. In today’s world these cultures have been eliminated by modernization. Descendants of a given family name were avoided by many because it was perceived that by marrying such people will bring bad blood into a family name.

Children who are not financially stable enjoy limited authority in decision making process in their families because they are only allowed to implement decisions that have been made by those considered to be more intelligent. Money commands power in our family regardless of whether the wealthy child is the last born in the family.

Experience cannot be bought over the counter and thus one would expect the first born of the family whether male or female to be given the first priority in giving counsel to his siblings. Favoring one child over the other fosters jealousy in the family against the child who is seen as the apple of parent’s eye.

Property inheritance should be done with evenness because all the children enjoy the same rights in their family. In most families within our community, property inheritance has led to many wrangles that are extended to their offsprings. Children who are more successful than their siblings tend to take advantage of their siblings.

Parents also are also known to dislike children who are named after the parents of their partner. This is most likely to happen if the bond between the in-laws and their brother’s wife is soar. It is worth noting that the character traits exhibited by one’s children reflect those of his/her parents. Favoritism makes those who are more preferred than others feel like they are superior to their siblings, and hence decisions in that family must safe guard their interests.

Sometimes parent ignite family wrangles by allocating more property to one child. Parents should distribute their property equally among their children unless their children recommend so. This evenness will promote unity in a family. Thus children in our society are encouraged to exercise respect to each other.

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Kinship in Sociology: Definition in the Study of Sociology

The Basic Underpinning of All Human Relationships

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Kinship is the most universal and basic of all human relationships and is based on ties of blood, marriage, or adoption.

There are two basic kinds of kinship ties in sociology:

• Those based on blood that trace descent
• Those based on marriage, adoption, or other connections

Some sociologists and anthropologists have argued that kinship goes beyond familial ties, and even involves social bonds.

Defininition of Kinship in Sociology

Kinship is a "system of social organization based on real or putative family ties," according to Encyclopaedia Britannica. But in sociology , kinship involves more than family ties, according to the Sociology Group :

"Kinship is one of the most important organizing components of society. ... This social institution ties individuals and groups together and establishes a relationship among them."

Kinship can involve a relationship between two people unrelated by lineage or marriage, according to David Murray Schneider, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago who was well known in academic circles for his studies of kinship.

In an article titled "What Is Kinship All About?" published posthumously in 2004 in " Kinship and Family: An Anthropological Reader ," Schneider said kinship refers to:

"the degree of sharing likelihood among individuals from different communities. For instance, if two people have many similarities between them then both of them do have a bond of kinship."

At its most basic, kinship refers to "the bond (of) marriage and reproduction," says the Sociology Group. But kinship can also involve any number of groups or individuals based on their social relationships.

Types of Kinship in Sociology

Sociologists and anthropologists debate what types of kinship exist. Most social scientists agree that kinship in sociology is based on two broad areas: birth and marriage; others say a third category of kinship involves social ties. These three types of kinship are:

• Consanguineal : This kinship is based on blood—or birth: the relationship between parents and children as well as siblings, says the Sociology Group. This is the most basic and universal type of kinship. Also known as a primary kinship, it involves people who are directly related.
• Affinal : This kinship is based on marriage. The relationship between husband and wife is also considered a basic form of kinship in sociology.
• Social : Schneider argued that not all kinship derives from blood (consanguineal) or marriage (affinal). There are social kinships where individuals not connected by birth or marriage have a kinship bond, he said. By this definition, two people who live in different communities may share a bond of kinship through a religious affiliation or a social group, such as the Kiwanis or Rotary service club, or within a rural or tribal society marked by close ties among its members. A major difference between consanguineal or affinal and social kinship is that the latter involves "the ability to terminate absolutely the relationship" without any legal recourse, Schneider stated in his 1984 book, " A Critique of the Study of Kinship ."

Importance of Kinship in Sociology

Kinship is important to a person's and a community's well-being. Because different societies define kinship differently, they also set the rules governing kinship, which are sometimes legally defined and sometimes implied. At its most basic levels, according to the Sociology Group, kinship in sociology refers to:

Descent : the socially existing recognized biological relationships between people in the society. Every society considers that all offspring and children descend from their parents and that biological relationships exist between parents and children. Descent is used to trace an individual’s ancestry.

Lineage : the line from which descent is traced. This is also called ancestry.

Based on descent and lineage, kinship determines family-line relationships—and even sets rules on who can marry and with whom, says Puja Mondal in " Kinship: Brief Essay on Kinship ." Mondal adds that kinship sets guidelines for interactions between people and defines the proper, acceptable relationship between father and daughter, brother and sister, or husband and wife, for example.

But since kinship also covers social connections, it has a wider role in society, says the Sociology Group, noting that kinship:

• Maintains unity, harmony, and cooperation in relationships
• Sets guidelines for communication and interactions among people
• Defines the rights and obligations of the family and marriage as well as the system of political power in rural areas or tribal societies, including among members who are not related by blood or marriage
• Helps people better understand their relationships with each other
• Helps people better relate to each other in society

Kinship, then, involves the social fabric that ties families—and even societies—together. According to the anthropologist George Peter Murdock:

“Kinship is a structured system of relationships in which kins are bound to one another by complex inter­locking ties.”

The breadth of those "interlocking ties" depends on how you define kin and kinship.

If kinship involves only blood and marriage ties, then kinship defines how family relationships form and how family members interact with one another. But if, as Schneider argued, kinship involves any number of social ties, then kinship—and its rules and norms—regulates how people from specific groups or even entire communities relate to each other in every aspect of their lives.

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Understanding Key Concepts in Kinship Studies: At a Glance

If one is to trace the history of the development of social science disciplines such as sociology and anthropology, one can see how family and kinship were perhaps the first social phenomena that were studied systematically. For over a period of nearly 200 years, kinship studies have undergone a dramatic transition, following much-needed incorporation of the study of non-traditional forms and patterns of kinship, moving beyond the usual Eurocentric approach that dominated the related fields of study.

Kinship Key Concepts

Family is usually the first key kinship concept that one is to study, especially from a sociological point of view, because it is the first site of human socialization that one is exposed from a very young age. John Macionis (2017) defines family as ‘a social institution found in all societies that united people in cooperative groups to care for one another, including any children’. Simply put, a family is the group of individuals that one lives with for elongated periods. Broadly, families can be of the following two types.

Typically, a  consanguine family consists of parents, their children, and other extended members related by blood. A consanguine family may include grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins as well. For a very long time, most communities around the world followed this type of kinship wherein large families lived together in the same household.

However, in present times, people especially those who live in urban communities recognize that this kind of lifestyle is not only economically draining, but also known to tear apart families due to conflicts and disagreements.

While consanguine families try to establish traditional familial and kinship patterns, it is in the nuclear family that one can hope to freely accommodate non-normative familial styles like single-parent families, live-in partners and other non-blood-related families as well.

Monogamy, as the name itself suggests, involves the union of two individuals, meaning that each party has only one partner. Globally, this is the most common type of marriage as in most cultures, not only is monogamy a time-honored system of kinship but it is also viewed as more desirable than its counterpart.

Usually, in a heteronormative society, in a monogamous marriage, it is expected that the couple is heterosexual and that union results in progeny. In most instances, couples who tend to not meet these societal expectations are often ostracised from their communities.

Although there are strict rules about monogamy, not every monogamous couple is known to remain partners for the end of their lives. Instances of extra-marital relations are well known among people.

Based on the prefix  ‘poly’  meaning ‘many’, one can tell that polygamy refers to the marriage of one person to two or more individuals. Polygamy has been prevalent in societies for centuries and depending on the country that one lives in, there are several rules and restrictions when it comes to polygamy.

For example, in Islamic law, a man is permitted to marry up to four women at one time. Accordingly, in countries where Muslim personal laws exist, polygamy is legally and socially sanctioned. Based on the gender of the persons entering a polygamous marriage, there are two broad types;  polygyny  and  polyandry.

Furthermore, both polygyny and polyandry can be classified into two sub-types each, i.e sororal polygyny (wherein all the wives of the man are sisters) and non-sororal polygyny, along with fraternal polyandry (wherein one woman is married to more than one man, all of whom are brothers.) and non-fraternal polyandry, respectively.

Generally, a kinship based on marriage is commonly known as ‘affinal kinship’. Apart from the above-mentioned classifications, some other crucial phenomena are also explored under the institution of marriage such as dowry ,  divorce  and rules of  endogamy  and  exogamy  in marriage.

While it is usually expected that marriages are long-term, several marriages are known to result in an annulment due to a plethora of reasons. Although limited these days, there is certain anxiety when it comes to divorce in most communities, especially in the case of heterosexual couples. Divorce may have certain negative connotations especially for women, but in many instances, it also means freedom from marital life or redemption from an abusive relationship.

Dowry has been a very common practice across cultures, both in the West as well as in the East. According to one anthropologist (Hendry, 1999), the nature of ‘wife-giver’ and ‘wife-taker’ determines the power-dynamics that entails dowry giving. For example, if the husband’s family is viewed as having a higher socioeconomic status, then the ‘wife-taker’ in this case is deemed as more important and therefore, meeting their demands for dowry is seen as important by the bride’s family.

However, it is essential to remember that dowry has some real gender-specific implications and in many communities in India, dowry related violence has done a great deal of damage to women’s lives. It is also a crime to give or accept dowry in India under the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961 of the Indian Penal Code.

Broadly, there are three ways in which people trace their ancestry: patrilineal descent, matrilineal descent and bilateral descent.

In a matrilineal type of descent, the lineage and ancestry are traced through the female line. Several communities across South Asia and Southeast Asia are known to have matrilineal patterns of descent and it is seen in Leela Dube’ s ground-breaking work. Some examples of matrilineal descent are found in the Khasi and Garo tribes of northeast India.

Even traditional Nair families traced descent from the female line, although it is not a practice continued to this day. However, this isn’t to say those matriarchal families had a better chance at gender equality. Although women were in a better social position with entitlement to property and wealth to a large extent, it was the maternal uncles in these households that wielded a considerable amount of power.

In this type of descent, lineage is traced through both male and female lines. For example, according to Nur Yalman (Yalman, 1967 as cited in Uberoi, 1994), bilateral descent is found in certain south Indian communities as well as in communities in Sri Lanka. Since here the descent is traced through both parents’ lineages, an account is made of all consanguine kin of both parents.

Residential Patterns

Patrilocal residence means ‘residence near or with the husband’s family’. As mentioned before, since patriarchal society dominates the world diaspora, it is the most dominant pattern of residence. It is quite evident that in patrilocal residence, women tend to have very little say in matters concerning the household, distribution of socio-economic duties and other similar work.

This type of residence was popular not only amongst the Nairs of Kerala, but also the Muslim community in the Lakshadweep islands. Matrilocality is still a common practice in certain cultures of Southeast Asia.

Kinship beyond traditional institutions of marriage and consanguinity

Accordingly, people are known to seek out companionship that may not enter the purview of heterosexual and cis-gendered relationships. In many countries around the world where same-sex marriages are legal, couples chose to get married and ‘start a family’ by adopting children or even keeping pets at home.

• Jan 22, 2023

Anthropology and Kinship: Past, Present, and Future

Traditionally one of the key topics in Anthropology, the study of kinship encompasses how individuals are related to one another through biological, legal, and symbolic means (Peletz, 1995). Across all societies, kinship is marked by a set of relationship terms that define the universe of kin and that may be extended metaphorically to non-kin, and even to various aspects of the world of nature (Nuttall, 2000; Souza, 2006). Appreciating how kinship has been studied across the anthropological discipline and the direction it is taking today is crucial to understand whether postmodern cultures of consumerism, alongside technological advancements, are impacting the ways in which people connect and form meaningful relationships with each other across a range of mediums.

The study of kinship is widely regarded to have its origins in the mid-19th century United States with anthropologist L.H. Morgan (Schneider, 2003). Exploring the kinship classifications of Native American communities, Morgan conceptualized kinship with explicit reference to a genealogical grid defined in biological terms, arguing relationships to be founded upon a “community of blood” (Morgan, 1871; in Sousa, 2003). Morgan embarked on several ethnographic trips around America and Asia, gathering information on kinship terminology to culminate in his publication of Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871). Within this, Morgan would argue for kinship systems across the New and Old Worlds to be differentiated as ‘descriptive’ versus ‘classificatory’ systems; however, being a proponent of Social Evolutionism theory, Morgan used these findings to support imaginations of non-Western ‘primitive’ civilisations as contrasted against ‘advanced’ Western societies, later penning Ancient Society in 1877 to propel this view of the linear evolution of social institutions (Sousa, 2003).

Although Morgan’s social evolutionist views would not face critique until almost a century later, his research into consanguinity ignited an interest across British anthropology in the study of kinship, as imperatives for understanding the mechanisms for maintaining political order in stateless societies grew alongside the colonial enterprise. Influenced by Morgan’s initial comparative models, the formulation of descent theory was propelled by Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard in the early-to-mid twentieth century. This theory posited that biological descent was the basis for group stability in non-Western societies, informing how rights, duties, status, and property were transmitted within these decentralised communities from one generation to the next. Building on the sociological orientation of Durkheim (1892, 1898) who viewed kinship as ‘nothing if not social’ (Sousa, 2003), Evans-Pritchard (1940) and Radcliffe-Brown (1950) pushed for a structuralist-functionalist approach in their studies of African kinship systems, highlighting kinship organisation as informed by the social relationships between parents and children and resulting in arrangements that enabled persons to cooperate with one another in an orderly social life. Despite this social focus however, the assumption of a biological crux within kinship was something that would engender serious criticism in decades to come (Schneider, 1984).

While British social anthropologists in the mid-twentieth century were focused on social rules and the ways in which members of different societies acted within given frameworks, French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss (1949) turned to systems of affinity within kinship to explore the transition from notions of the animal world of nature to the human one of culture through the medium of reciprocity and exchange. Influenced by Marcel Mauss’ (1925) work on gift giving in ‘primitive’ societies, Levi-Strauss held that the act of giving away and receiving fertile women in the reproduction of one’s group constituted categories of communities of the Self against the Other, ultimately setting up a distinction between those who give wives (“wife givers”) and those who receive them (“wife takers”) to form the first kinship categories as an act of incest prohibition.

Terming this as the alliance theor, Lévi-Strauss’s theories placed him in opposition to anthropologists who saw kinship as based on descent rather than marriage. Yet a biological core remained implicit within Levi-Strauss’ theorisation as he saw the exchange of women as critical to the procreation and biological reproduction of societies (Schneider, 1965). Moreover, the perspective that women’s role was simply that of being exchanged would come under fire alongside the emergence of feminist and Marxist anthropology in the 1980s.

Before this, however, by the 1960s and 1970s the salience that was being placed on kinship itself within anthropology began to be challenged. Questioning its theoretical validity, American anthropologist Schneider (1968) and British anthropologist Needham (1971) unpacked how attempts to construct kinship through theories of descent and alliance in a universal manner had not only subsumed the heterogeneity of relationships into concepts and typologies, but that such concepts were rooted in ethnocentric notions of biological procreation that miss non-Western understandings of kinship.

Conducting a home analysis in the United States, Schneider (1972) undertook a culturalist approach, examining kinship as a cultural system based in shared symbols, norms, and values. Revealing how American views rested on the symbolic notions of blood and shared genes as equating to social relationships, Schneider highlighted how kin ties of “diffuse, enduring solidarity” were ultimately a genealogical conception entertained only in the anthropologists’ subculture (Sousa, 2003). Comparing his ethnographic research to his analysis of the Micronesian Yapse, who did not link sexual procreation with kin ties, Schneider (1984) maintained that the anthropological study of kinship was based on biological assumptions of sexual procreation that were not valid cross-culturally, and that instead kinship was culturally specific, unfixed, and fluid, changing between societies.

Similarly, Needham criticised how anthropologists had succumbed to a craving for universality across kinship studies, bypassing the particular complexities of social life. Looking to the institution of marriage, Needham argued that none of the rights that are part of this concept of matrimony exist in all empirical instances, that it is instead an idea of a “contractual union of sexual statuses” (Needham 1971). Both Schneider and Needham challenged existing theories of alliance and descent as well as the biological focus at the crux of the field, citing the lack of analytical consistency in the comparison of social relations across cultures as invalidating kinship as an analytical category (Sousa, 2003). As such, anthropology’s ‘love affair’ with kinship began to cool, with Needham (1971) declaration of “the death of kinship” seemingly condemning the subfield.

With this damning critique, studies of kinship across anthropology suffered a twenty-year decline, kept alive only by the interest of feminist anthropologists in the intersection between kinship, gender and personhood. The work of Nature, Culture, and Gender by Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern (1980) further enforced the position that past theories of kinship were particularities of Western thought, as the authors examined the dichotomy between nature and culture and how this became mapped onto Cartesian constructions of women and men as a universal phenomenon for the purpose of female subordination. The later publication of Jane Collier and Sylvia Yanagisako's edited collection Gender and Kinship: Essays Towards a Unified Analysis (1987) reinforced the importance of gender relations and asymmetries in understanding kinship systems cross-culturally, contending how women’s positions within patrilineal societies had long been usurped by attention on the male ego and thus how the work of social reproduction in domestic, private spaces had not been given due consideration.

Nevertheless, the death knell for kinship within anthropology did not ring true, as with the 1990s came the revitalisation of the subfield into a paradigm of new kinship studies (Read, 2007). The work of feminist anthropologists surrounding gender and personhood, queer studies into gay and lesbian kinship, and the rise of new reproductive technologies (NRTs) alongside perceived changes in the institution of the family in Western societies suggested new practices and experiences of Western kinship emerging outside of the biological and domestic spheres that had been core assumptions of old kinship studies (Strathern, 1992).

Ethnographic research into the kinship practices amongst gay and lesbian communities was crucial in critiquing the Schneiderian analysis of kinship in the United States as rooted in understandings of blood and biology, forcing a rethinking of what constitutes kinship in Western societies. Studies in the United States by Kath Weston (1991, 1995) and Ellen Lewin (1993) revealed how informants conceptualised biological kinship as temporary, as such kin had been known to sever ties upon learning of a relative’s homosexuality. On the other hand, the friendships of informants were described in terms of certainty and permanence, presented as replacing the kin ties that had been lost across biological family members. The distinction between biogenetic and social worlds was therefore disrupted through the analysis of non-heterosexual kinship practices, highlighted the performative qualities of kinship (re)production (Butler, 2002), and the puncturing of the conjugal and nuclear family allowed for recognition towards new and complex, recombinant families and partnerships (Edwards, 2014).

Furthermore, the influence from cultural and feminists theorists to consider gender and personhood within conceptualisations of kinship led to the expansion of old understandings fixed in biological procreation towards a new paradigm that situates kinship as established through daily interactions (Read, 2007). Built on by Janet Carsten with her publication of Cultures of Relatedness (2000), kinship was presented as embedded in the everyday experience of ‘becoming’. In her eighteen-month ethnographic study exploring food, residence, and friendship within a Malay family in Pulau Langkawi, Carsten experienced how kin relations were built and reproduced through commensality (the act of sharing food) and living with one another. Such acts of caring and sharing supported the construction of kin relations regardless of biogenetics, highlighting kinship as a process that is embodied and practiced rather than essentialised within our biological being (Butler, 2002).

Marilyn Strathern was also a key figure within the study of kinship at this time: her research into Melanesian society led to her formulating the concept of the dividual person, a contrast to the Western concept that imagines persons in a “permanently subjective state” (1988, 338) towards instead a singular body that manifests itself as partible and permeable representing a social microcosm of multiple relationships (Strathern, 1988; in Linkenbach and Muslow, 2019). Maintaining that to act, the singular dividual must be individuated shedding “half the dual form” (1988, 275), such as Strathern saw a person within society as moving from one state to the other. While Strathern’s work was praised as a milestone, critiques have formed through concerns of essentialism and cultural relativism, with Melanesian and Western personhood appearing as incommensurable and the dividual as the ‘other’ of individuality (Gell, 1999; LiPuma, 1998). Nevertheless, in/dividuality is an important concept in the study of kinship as it explores how persons can be constituted through their relations, becoming inherently relational beings.

In the last three decades, Anthropology has taken a turn towards New Kinship studies, propelled by the rise of genetic science and Artificial Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) (Laibman, 2013). Challenging how English kinship used to be grounded in natural facts, Strathern (1992) proposed an anthropological shift towards a post-natural world where artificial reproduction combined with neoliberal ideals of choice were transforming established understandings of kin relations from primordial to technological, social, and political. The 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act was key in generating such interest, as constructing the legal frameworks governing infertility treatment, medical services ancillary to infertility treatment such as embryo storage, and all human embryological research performed in the UK (La Tourelle, 2014) quickly led to discussions surrounding how surrogacy (Thompson, 2001), gamete-freezing (Carsten, 2004), abortions and designer babies (Gilding, 2002) enabled by new reproductive sciences were reshaping practices and experiences of relatedness and parenthood.

Across studies involving ARTs, a flexible choreography between the biological and the social has emerged where kinship could be forged just as much through care, desire, and attention as it could through biology and genetics (Edwards, 2014). Poignant examples include research across fertility clinics within discussions of those providing the egg and sperm, those who gestate, and those who raise the child. Charis Thompson’s (2001) study of Californian infertility clinics explored the ‘de-kinning’ of Vanessa, a gestational surrogate, who after being paid an agreed-upon $12,000, became unlinked from the kin network after giving birth to the baby who she was carrying for another couple. Labelling Vanessa’s experience as part of the process of ‘strategic naturalising’, Thompson highlights how certain biological facts become recognised only through social activation, suggesting the biological as inherently deeply social. Kinship thus becomes reinforced as “an artefact of the organisation of knowledges from different sources, with different ways of verifying connections between persons” (Strathern 2005: 46; cited in Edwards, 2014: 57), ultimately reflecting postmodern tenets of subjective ontologies and epistemologies (Haraway, 1989) where overarching metanarratives regarding how kin relations form are rejected.

ARTs and new kinship studies have highlighted the centrality of choice and circumstance in how relatedness is conceptualised, emphasising how today a family may consist of any grouping regardless of biogenetic ties. Regarding the development and commercialisation of genomic testing for personal health and ancestry information however, research into the medicalisation of kinship through the biological nuclear family (Finkler et al ., 2003) alongside bio-essentialist narratives of relatedness through constructions of ethnicity and race (Panofsky and Donovan, 2019) are complicating the extent to which past ideas of consanguinity and shared genes have been laid to rest. Notions of finding one’s true identity through their biological connections are increasingly being employed as a marketing strategy by DTC companies, impacting who is considered kin, and through what means.

Bibliographical References

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Carsten, J. (2000). Cultures of relatedness: New approaches to the study of kinship. Cambridge University Press.

Carsten, J. (2004). After kinship: New departures in anthropology. Cambridge University Press.

Collier, J.F. and Yanagisako, S.J. (1987). Gender and kinship: Essays toward a unified analysis. Stanford University Press.

Durkheim, E. 1982 [1895] The rules of the sociological method. Review of Kohler. L’Annee Sociologique , 1, 306-319.

Edwards, J. (2014). Undoing kinship. Relatedness in assisted reproduction. 44-60.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1940). The Nuer: a description of the modes of livelihood and political institutions of a Nilotic People . Oxford University Press.

Finkler, K., Skrzynia, C. and Evans, J.P. (2003). The new genetics and its consequences for family, kinship, medicine and medical genetics. Social science & medicine , 57(3), 403-412.

Franklin, S. (2001). Biologization Revisited: Kinship Theory in the Context of the New Biologies. In S. Franklin and S. McKinnon (Eds.), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies , 302–325. Duke University Press.

Gilding, M. (2002). Families of the new millennium: designer babies, cyber sex and virtual communities. Family Matters , 62, 4-10.

Laibman, D. (2013). Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Chapter Seven: Assisted Reproduction.

LaTourelle, J. (2014). Human fertilisation and embryology act (1990) . Embryo project encyclopedia.

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Lewin, E. (1993). Lesbian mothers: Accounts of gender in American culture . Cornell University Press.

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MacCormack, C. and Strathern, M. (Eds.). (1980). Nature, culture and gender . Cambridge University Press.

Mauss, M. (1967). The Gift (I. Cunnison, Trans.). New York: Norton.

Morgan, H.L. (1871) Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human family. Smithsonian Institution.

Nuttall, M. (2000). Choosing kin. Dividends of kinship: Meanings and uses of social relatedness , 33-60.

Panofsky, A. and Donovan, J. (2019). Genetic ancestry testing among white nationalists: From identity repair to citizen science. Social studies of science , 49(5), 653-681.

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Strathern, M. (2005). Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise. Cambridge University Press.

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Weston, K. (1991). Families we choose: Lesbians, gays, kinship . Columbia University Press.

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4 Kinship and Family

Sheena Nahm McKinlay

In the docuseries Babies (2020), the first episode “Love” features several interviews with families and scientists who discuss how bonds are forged between caregivers and children. One of the families includes Josh and Isaac and their son Eric who was born via surrogacy. Isaac shares how “AJ gave us the ultimate gift of being able to form a family. Now she’s part of our family.” Isaac goes on to describe how unique this gift was given the fact that commercial (i.e., paid) surrogacy is illegal where AJ resides. The process involved submitting a case and waiting for a surrogate to choose the family. AJ explains, “In Canada, it is illegal to get paid for surrogacy. But I think that, because of how intimate surrogacy is, money cannot be the reason to do this. And I wanted to help. I mean, I can’t do much, but this is something that I can do.” In this brief snapshot of how family is made through relationships and policies, love is described not only as the love between parent and child but also between the adults that helped to make the conditions of parenthood possible. This is just one example of how we see modern day policies and practices shaping kinship.

Across the history of the discipline, anthropologists have recorded a vast array of kinship types and related practices. For example, Anindita Majumdar writes about kinship and surrogacy in in her book, Transnational Commercial Surrogacy and the (Un)Making of Kin in India (2017) . In her interview on the accompanying podcast to this textbook, Majumdar describes how commercial surrogacy can be a way for women to stay empowered in the process of negotiating their role in kinship, declaring their own agency in the process of choosing to become a surrogate, and discovering the limitations of potential policy changes that move away from commercial surrogacy to altruistic surrogacy.

Surrogacy is just one of many ways in which the nuances of kinship can be explored in contemporary anthropology. Surrogacy itself is not a new phenomenon; however, in more recent decades, the convergence of new policies, transnational flows, and assisted reproductive technologies bring to the forefront examples that build upon classic models of kinship and destabilize oversimplified theories of kinship. Additionally, parent-child relationships are just one means of understanding how ‘kin’ is defined and constructed within broader social contexts.

The relationships that matter to our social lives and individual identities are a rich topic for exploration. Families of origin might refer to the families into which we are born, adopted, or raised. Meanwhile, chosen families refer to the kin we find and make as young adults to complement and/or compensate for any challenges or limitations we may have experienced with families of origin. This chapter provides an overview of the history of kinship studies in anthropology, including its original definitions and some of the ways in which those models have been critiqued and revised over time. We then turn to more recent studies to better understand how anthropological perspectives illuminate our understanding of kinship.

Defining and Describing Kinship

Marshall Sahlins once described kinship as the “mutuality of being” and added, “kinsmen are persons who belong to one another, who are members of one another, who are co-present in each other, whose lives are joined and interdependent” (Sahlins 2011, 11). This definition may seem straightforward at first glance, but in actuality, it opens us up to imagine an infinite number of ways that someone might become kin. Among other critiques of Sahlins’ theory and methods (Gillison 2013), one critique has been that this definition of the mutuality of being is “too vague to be meaningful” (Kronenfeld 2012, 678). Still, many anthropologists continue to ask what it means to have mutual relationships with other human beings.

In this chapter, we will examine the concepts and practices that come with kinship or kin relations. We will review how understandings of kinship have evolved within the discipline as well as define some basic models and ways of illustrating those models using diagrams. We will then explore beliefs and practices that come with kinship , ranging from adoption and marriage to traditions and taboos. Along the way, we will review a variety of examples that have pushed anthropologists to think about how kinship is continuously in flux depending on ever-changing local and global contexts.

Kinship is a specific way of describing the relationships between people, initially conceptualized to include blood kin as well as kin relations created through marriage or similar bonds. To begin understanding how family relationships are defined, we can begin with some common terms. Family can include ties that are consanguineal ( blood) as well as affinal (partnerships sometimes referred to as marriage ties). Over time, anthropologists have acknowledged the limitations of these terms and definitions in describing meaningful relationships such as friend communities, other kin communities, and the dynamics of developing and maintaining ties in a world where people are on the move and not always residing in close proximity to each other for their entire lives. Popular culture as well as scholarship have drawn attention to this broader notion of kinship. Books like Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close and television shows like Pose highlight the meaningful relationships that create bonds between kinfolk who “live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths.” In understanding kinship in fuller terms, we can better understand the diverse, vital supports needed for human wellbeing and social connectedness.

Relationships matter for a variety of reasons, including their representation as a “system of meaning and power that cultures create to determine who is related to whom and to define their mutual expectations, rights, and responsibilities” (Guest 2016, 236). How relationships are configured and understood among individuals has implications in daily activities as well as in milestone responsibilities. This can include everything from expectations about who has primary and secondary childrearing responsibilities to who attends rites of passage such as communion, bar mitzvah, or weddings. We begin by reviewing some basic concepts around kinship including a variety of systems or models and how they might be drawn using diagrams. And perhaps more importantly, we dive into the meaning behind the relationships depicted in those diagrams as we look at the social expectations and acknowledgement that comes with different ways of belonging to a group. While models and diagrams can help us understand some of the basic components of kinship systems, it is important to remember that “most of our talk about families is clouded by unexplored notions of what families ‘really’ are like” (Collier, Rosaldo, and Yanagisako 1997).

Kin relations and a sense of belonging to a group are built on collective understanding. For example, a person might reflect, “”Who do I see as my mother and is that the same or different from who others see as my mother?” Such understandings go beyond naturalized, inherent notions that one is born simply knowing who to call what and who will provide a great sense of belonging and connectedness.

• How the Nuclear Family Broke Down (The Atlantic)
• Janet Carsten on the Kinship of Anthropology
• Babies in limbo: Surrogacy in the time of COVID
• My Six Wives And 29 Children
• All My Relations podcast: Episodes “ Beyond Blood Quantum ” and “ Love in the Time of Blood Quantum ” focus on issues of kinship

Recall our earlier discussions of Bronislaw Malinowski in earlier chapters. Malinowski also explored notions of family and kin relations during his time on the Trobriand Islands. Malinowski’s argument was that “family” was a universal human institution. His work was then challenged by other theorists who took the opposite stance.

Much of what we know about kinship in the history of American anthropology comes from the 19 th century. Lewis Henry Morgan drew his insights from conducting research among the Haudenosaunee (whom he refers to as the Iroquois in his writings). Morgan noticed that relationships between individuals looked different from those he had grown up with and defined as family. He then recorded these observations in League of the Iroquois (1851). Decades later, Morgan who was a lawyer by trade recounted the words that Haudenosaunee used to describe family members and explained how they relate to right and responsibilities, both legally and socially. Morgan went on to record kinship systems among Indigenous groups in other parts of the world.

While we will spend some time reviewing some classic definitions and models of kinship systems from around the world as they were described initially by anthropologists, readers should keep in mind that definitions of family and how people are related to one another are neither simple nor static. As societies, nation-states, and biocultural flows are always in transition, so too are ideologies and practices around family ties. In examining the evolution of kinship charts, it is also possible to revisit the history of anthropology, noting what was recorded and what was not. This allows us to look at archived knowledge while also noticing and critiquing its limitations as artifacts produced and curated within systems of power rather than as neutral facts that simply exist for learners to memorize.

Before we dive into kinship diagrams, a way of depicting different models of understanding family ties, let us take a few moments to describe some basic terms and definitions. Adding to consanguineal and affinal, we introduce two other terms: matrilineal and patrilineal. Matrilineal means that descent follows the mother’s line whereas patrilineal descent follows the father’s line.

In “Don’t Even Talk to Me if You’re Kinya’áanii [Towering House]”: Adopted Clans, Kinship and “Blood” in Navajo Country,” Kristina Jacobsen and Shirley Ann Bowman examine ideologies around k’é or the Diné kinship system which connects people through “an elaborate matrilineal descent network of systems of obligation and reciprocity, otherwise known as the clan system (dóone’é). As elsewhere, kinship in Diné contexts is culturally specific, cultivated through daily use, and not a given, natural fact” (2019, 43).

Jacobsen and Bowman attend to the ways in which clan systems have incorporated non-Navajos into Navajo Nation and how varying practices have been impacted by settler colonialism. They also reflect on the nuances of historical and contemporary kinship and how they are related to the politics of citizenship (44). There are over 80 active clans, organized into nine groups: this organization influences taboos around marriage and dating. “If a Diné person has four Navajo grandparents, then they will have four Diné clans—maternal, paternal, mother’s father, and father’s father, and typically presented in this order. The first or maternal clan is considered to be the most important in being identified (and identifying oneself) as Diné…Sharing kinship means that everywhere one travels where there are other Navajos, one gains not only a relative but also a sense of belonging” (47). In understanding kinship systems where there may be some common organizing beliefs and practices, it should be noted that variation exists as do multiple understandings and practices that resist homogenizing assumptions about the entirety of any group. For example, Diné is sometimes considered preferable to “Navajo” which is not a word that exists within the language. In 1993, Navajo Nation President Peterson Zah was quoted in the Los Angeles Timesas stating, “We were called Diné by the Great Spirit…By changing our name, we are simply exercising self-determination and tribal sovereignty” (Sahagun 1993). Despite this advocacy, Legislation No. 0395-16 did not receive enough support from the Navajo Nation Council to change the group’s name from Navajo Nation to Diné Nation. This is one example among many that shows how perspectives and preferences can vary within a group of people who share aspects of identity.

Members of a society may choose to adopt different beliefs such that they no longer follow or know about their clans over time. Additionally, as Jacobsen and Bowman emphasize, there is much more fluidity when adoptive practices exist than are depicted in rigid kinship charts. They write, “Outside groups merged with Diné society, retained their own clans, merged clans, left for long periods of time, and returned, and adoption was not an overnight process. So the boundaries of Diné society, while cohesive and coherent, were also porous” (50).

In matrilineal systems, a man who marries typically becomes a member of his wife’s clan and goes to live with his wife’s (his new) clan. This is an illustration of being both matrilineal and matrilocal. Where people live depending on family ties is defined as patrilocal (living with the father’s side of the family) or matrilocal (living with the mother’s side of the family). Though locality has historically followed lineal systems, residential conventions have morphed over time to be less rigidly followed.

Patrilineage or matrilineage does not mean that relatives are limited to that line but rather, that linkages across generations (e.g., through surnames) might follow one line over another as will certain responsibilities such as caring for elders or inheriting land. Depending on the context (e.g., locality and how far family villages or residences are from one another), one might grow up with deeper relationships with one’s lineal descent and hardly any with the other side. It is also possible that one might be equally familiar with both lines of descent in terms of daily or weekly interactions. In a patrilineal context, children may bear the name of the father’s line as well as distinguish names for describing relatives on the father’s side and the mother’s side. Aunts, uncles, and in-laws will denote whether they are relatives via the father or the mother. There are also descriptors that indicate age and birth order. For example, someone might call an older brother and younger brother by two different names that denote birth order rather than using a singular term like “brother.”

It is important to note that matrilineal or patrilineal is about descent and not necessarily about gendered power. For example, one can live in a patriarchal society where landownership and leadership (e.g., kings) are male but determined through the mother’s line. That is to say, one can find themselves in a patriarchal and matrilineal society. Both matrilineal and patrilineal descent are examples of unilineal (one line or one side) descent. By contrast, when kinship follows both sides of the family, it is defined as bilateral descent.

Kinship charts or genograms can account for spousal death as well as divorce using a slashed line on symbols, for example over the shape symbolizing the individual who passed or over the double bars between previously married individuals. Even while examining the diverse range of ways kinship can be depicted in the history of anthropology, we can also see limitations in how charts are written including practices such as divorce or adoption. The assumptions that are both evident in what is visible and invisible can help to stimulate further examination of what sociocultural norms are present and how people may be treated if they live outside of those norms.

To get acquainted with reading these diagrams, we begin with “ego” who is the lens or starting point from which a chart will define and depict relations. In early kinship diagrams, triangles were typically used to indicate males and circles for females. Two parallel bars or lines denotes marriage, single vertical lines birth or parent/child relationships and single horizontal lines marked sibling relationships. While these kinship systems are named by societies that are examples of each, there are other societies that follow similar conventions. Additionally, images include labels used in the original charts but are accompanied with critiques and relevant updates to names. (Note: images for kinship system diagrams have been made available under the Creative Commons, where authors have waived rights so that the work might be available in the public domain. These depictions of different systems are associated with particular groups but as with most examples, are not meant to assume homogeneity across diverse and nuanced practices of any group of people.) In contemporary kinship charts, we see a range of symbols on kinship charts including triangles for males, circles for females, and squares for gender nonbinary individuals.

In the Haudenosaunee (previously referred to as Iroquois in historical documents) kinship systems, your parents’ same-sex siblings would also be considered your father or mother. Originally, the Iroquois Confederacy was a term used to describe six related tribes (initially five tribes: the Kanienkehaka or Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca) who called themselves the Haudenosaunee or “the people of the longhouse.” Iroquois appears to have been generated from French adaptations of a variety of indigenous words. In this type of kinship system, your father’s brother would also be considered your “father” and your mother’s sister would also be considered your “mother.” Meanwhile, your parent’s opposite-sex siblings (e.g., your father’s sister and mother’s brother) would not be considered similar to your father or mother; they would, instead, be considered to be more like “aunts” and “uncles.”

In general, in kinship diagrams, cross-cousins are considered to be the children of your parents’ opposite sex siblings (e.g., father’s sister’s children and mother’s brother’s children) while parallel cousins are the children of your parents’ same sex siblings (e.g., father’s brother’s children and mother’s sister’s children). In this type of kinship system, cross-cousins would be called “cousins” while parallel cousins would be considered “brothers” and “sisters.”

In the Hawaiian kinship system, all members of the same generation are considered similar. This system is now sometimes referred to as a generational system. In this generational system, in addition to ego’s mother and father, all siblings of both parents who are female are “mother” and all siblings of both parents who are male are “father.” Cousins are not called cousins at all but rather, brothers for males and sisters for females.  The terms Kanaka Maoli and Kanaka ‘Ōiwi are the original terms that were later popularized into the term Native Hawaiian. Kanaka maoli is the “appropriate indigenous term for Native Hawaiian by advocates of Native Hawaiian sovereignty and independence” and the term ‘Ōiwi refers to the literal translation “of the ancestral bone” according to Davianna Pōmaika‘i McGregor and Melody Kapilialoha MacKenzie (2014).

The Haudenosaunee kinship system was originally labeled as the Iroquois system to describe a kinship system that distinguishes between same or cross-sex siblings of parents. In this chart, ego’s father’s brother is considered father and his children are considered brothers and sisters. Meanwhile, ego’s father’s sister is an aunt, and her children are considered cousins. Following this same naming convention, ego’s mother’s sister is considered mother and her children are brothers and sisters whereas ego’s mother’s brother is an uncle, and his children are cousins.

While some generational systems utilize fewer categories of distinguishing relations and their names, the kinship system historically referred to as the Sudanese system differs in that words for relations range based on distance from ego as well as gender and relationship. In this system, nearly every relationship has a different name.

In what was referred to as the Crow system, distinguishing differences exist depending on the same or cross-sex sibling relationship. For example, ego’s father’s brother is father, and his children are therefore brother and sister; ego’s mother’s sister is mother, and her children are brother and sister to ego. However, ego’s father’s sister is an aunt equivalent, and her children are cousins. Ego’s mother’s brother is mother’s brother or uncle equivalent, and his children are cousins.

Like the Haudenosaunee and Crow, the kinship system initially described as the Omaha system also distinguishes between same and cross sex sibling lines.

While each of these charts may be antiquated, they are summarized here as part of the record of disciplinary history. Limitations exist because of methods used at the time as well as in reflecting knowledge today. People and populations are constantly changing and as a result relationships and structures of relation also evolve. No person or people are stuck in time, nor can the be captured for all time in a static diagram. However outdated they may be today, they are presented here as an illustration of a method (how to quickly diagram how someone describes themselves in relation to others) and a visual depiction of anthropologists presenting multiple ways in which family and belonging might look beyond a singular worldview.

Kinship in Social Context

Practices sometimes play out in the affirmative—things you are expected to do or might have the responsibility of doing, such as making decisions about childrearing, naming, or providing for in economic terms. But practices can also play out in the negative—things you should avoid doing. These beliefs and behaviors are sometimes encompassed by recognizing taboos. One illustration of the importance of understanding who is related and in what ways is in Juǀʼhoansi kinship (referred to as the !Kung in some ethnographies). Anthropologists described the Juǀʼhoansi as having very strict rules regarding incest and marriage taboos such that it was important to note who was a first cousin or second cousin on either side of the family to avoid marriage taboos.

Kinship was described in three different ways: 1) bilateral ; 2) names (people who have the same name as a kin relation will also be treated as family); and 3) wi (where an older person may “wi” a younger person, somewhat similar to the concept of adoption). Marrying someone further away from their family as defined by internal/external to one’s band not only avoids taboos but also increases knowledge of resources.

Another way to think about “marrying further away” is exogamy, the practice of marrying outside of one’s group. Conversely, another culture may practice endogamy which would be the practice of marrying inside the group. While exogamy and endogamy refer to marriage practices external and internal to groups, poly- and mono- refer to the number of partners. In classic kinship terms, monogamy indicates the practice of having one partner at a time. Differentiations can be made between lifetime monogamy and monogamy in a given moment of time or season of life (e.g., serial monogamy ). Polygamy indicates the practice of having more than one partner at a time. This can indicate multiple variations from one husband with many wives ( polygyny ), one wife with many husbands ( polyandry ), or multiple wives and husbands. In today’s terms, more common or nuanced terms such as polyamory or ethical non-monogamy might be used to describe non-exclusive relationships without necessarily aligning with the context of marriage or long-term partnerships.

Families and cultures might practice arranged marriage for a wide variety of reasons, ranging from economic or financial reasons to social ties and religious norms that indicate where families have similar things in common. The degree of formality in the arrangement also varies. Two people might meet as the result of an arrangement through a mutual friend, family member or relative or through someone who is a matchmaker.

Whether through arrangement or not, additional practices may help to forge ties between two families. A dowry refers to a bride’s family giving gifts to either the bride or the groom’s family at the time of marriage. Bride service is different from a dowry in that the first few months of marriage include living with the bride’s family and the groom (now husband) provides for his wife’s family for a period of time.

As with all cultures and societies, adaptations and shifts occur over time sometimes as a result of internal dynamics and at other times, a result of external pressures that can range from environment and climate to government policies and global flows. Kinship and ownership practices related to kinship structures have long been an area of study in anthropology, with many case studies focusing on the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania or the Nuer of Sudan. More recent anthropological contributions have shown, though, that it is important to be aware of how groups have changed their systems to meet the evolving needs of their group. Additionally, changes may come about because of popular and academic narratives that then impact how local and international interventions are constructed with regard to land allocation. In Once Intrepid Warriors: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Cultural Politics of Maasai Development , Dorothy Hodgson (2001) emphasizes the impact of transnational factors ranging from colonialism to international development interventions. The limitations and failures of various development interventions, argues Hodgson, can often be rooted in inaccurate and static understandings of Maasai culture as pastoralist and patriarchal when, in fact, the Maasai have changed a great deal over the course of the last 80 years. Hodgson opens her text with a critique of letters published in the New York Times during the late 1980s, reflecting on images floating in popular discourse linking Maasai ethnic identity to either a romanticized “once free and beautiful” narrative or to a highly gendered narrative of pastoralism being inherently a male activity and means of organizing society. Images and narratives of the Maasai have limited perspectives circulating in the world in such a way that nongovernmental organizations as well as other administrative agencies have developed interventions based on outdated information that are inaccurate or inadequate in informing how present-day issues are addressed.

Other research such as the work of Winnie Wairimu and Paul Hebinck (2017) emphasize that the Maasai should not viewed as passive receivers of land tenure policies passed by the Kenyan state. Instead, they are agents in devising a varied number or responses to how land is divided among groups and to individual families. One of the actions that emerged in response to land subdivision is the cultivation of crops by women while men chose to aggregate smaller pieces of land to continue pastoral lifestyles. Among the Maasai, both traditional practices such as pastoralism might continue while also creating space for other practices such as horticulture (both of which we will delve into in more detail in an upcoming chapter on economics but named here for the ways in which they intersect with practices that weave together kinship, gender, and economic strategies).

Kinship also continues to morph and challenge notions of fixed definitions of family. For example, Caroline Archambault’s ethnographic work with families that have gone through the process of adoption shows how parents and children create ties. In particular, she stresses the perspective that children are active participants in how kinship is made and unmade (2010). Archambault writes, “In the Kenyan primary school syllabus the biological, nuclear and monogamous family model is by far the most popular textbook representation of family life. For most Maasai children, such a family model does not correspond to their lived reality. Throughout the school, dozens of children will make their way back to non-natal homes” (230). Moving across families as adopted children/“children given” or fostered children/ “children borrowed” supports the idea that family itself is a dynamic form of organizing relationships and that children do not belong to single set of parents in contrast to more rigid nuclear models. Dynamic practices also underscore the idea that adoption is not limited to a singular event but part of a process wherein acceptance and attachment are created and recreated over a span of years.

In one example, survey results from residents of a community organized by units called an enkang or a patrilocal residential unit reported that 28.4% of wives were living with at least one non-natal child (232). In this context, children often   circulate within and across homesteads for a variety of reasons including the convenience of being closer to schools as well as through adoption or fostering. This is rooted in the belief that children are gifts “not made and ‘owned,’ but given into human care” (Lienhardt 1961, 22 as cited in Archambault 2010, 232). Archambault traces how this belief and practice of communal support for children is changing and leaning toward the increased nuclearization of families because of factors like land privatization policies introduced in the 1990s. These policies allocated parcels of land to individual male family heads (rather than via communal group allocations), influencing the emphasis on nuclear units. Additionally, exposure to Euro-American ideals of nuclear families and biological parenthood (which itself are not representative of European and American societies but often circulate through institutional discourse) also impacted the increased emphasis on nuclear units.

A classic example of kinship and social context comes from the work of E.E. Evans-Pritchard who wrote The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (1940) and Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer (1951). At the time, Evans-Pritchard’s contributions helped challenge the notion that parent-child relations as well as marriage followed definitions that assigned a single person to a single role (e.g., a romantic partner also being a legally and socially recognized partner). In his ethnography, Evans-Pritchard described how various roles might play out in Nuer society, including differentiated definitions such as the following:

• The genitor as the biological father
• The pater as the socially recognized father
• The legal marital partner as the person responsible for caring for a woman and her children
• Ghost marriages, described as a situation wherein a man dies without marrying so that one of his male relatives steps in to fulfill the duties of the ghost. This might be a brother or cousin of the deceased. The male relative or pro-husband then has a child with the widow and helps to raise the children. In this context, a woman states that her husband is the ghost (deceased person) and the children take the name of the ghost who is recognized as their father. Thus, the relative might be a genitor and legal marital partner but not the pater. The ghost of the deceased is considered to be the pater. The pro-husband and relative might have another wife with whom their children and kinship relations are socially recognized as pater among other roles such as genitor.
• A leviratic marriage is when a widow goes to live with a kinsman or close relative of her deceased husband. The kinsman becomes her pro-husband. If the widow is still young, the pro-husband will reproduce with her, but the children are considered to be the children of the dead husband. Because the widow establishes a relationship with her deceased husband who exchanged bridewealth, any of her children would always be his children and he would be the socially recognized father or pater. The biological father or genitor in this context is less important because the social relationship had already been recognized through the exchange of bridewealth.

In these examples, various marriage practices and beliefs around parent-child relationships ensured that lineages continued even in the event of death.

Decades later, Evans-Pritchard’s work was both upheld as classic contributions to kinship theory and deeply critiqued for its limitations. Aidan Southall (1986) writes about the “real paradox of Evans-Pritchard’s Nath [i.e., Nuer] analysis was that he stimulated some of the most productive work in social anthropology by formulating a brilliant theory that applied well to many other societies but not to the one in which it was conceived” (Southall 1986, 17 as cited in McKinnon 2000, 36). One way this played out was in his noting of differences that occurred depending on class status but its exclusion in his theoretical framework of societal structure (which was depicted as egalitarian). In this way, Evans-Pritchard serves as an example of many figures in the history of anthropology who simultaneously observed different ways of being outside of Western contexts and raised awareness of diverse configurations of social belonging while also falling into their own limited perspectives and constructs such as the separation (i.e., non-integration) between domestic and political domains (Collier and Yanagisako 1987).

As we look at different kinship systems and how gender roles play out in different societies, we quickly see that there are no universally standardized norms about who counts as family and how being related to each other influences beliefs and practices. Recall Malinowski’s focus on the Trobriand Islands in his ethnographic research. Malinowski described Trobrianders as a matrilineal society, tracing descent through mother’s side. However, most of Malinowski’s work focused on men. During the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, anthropologist Annette Weiner conducted research specifically on women’s roles in the Trobriand Islands. Weiner noted how women had a tremendous amount of political and social influence and were not limited to domestic roles such as childrearing. One practice that illustrated women’s power in political and socioeconomic spheres was the sagali. Sagali occurred about one year after a person dies. It was an important period of feasting and gift exchange, led and organized by women. In preparation for this event, goods were made by women and exchanged by women. Goods included banana leaf bundles and grass skirts. Both items required many hours of work and were indicators of social prestige. The person who gave away the most goods (rather than the person who accumulated the most) was therefore seen as more socially powerful. While men were involved, it was women who had the power to establish social status and power during sagali.

Weiner’s work shined a light on the labor provided by women in Trobriand society. The intersections of gendered roles, specifically labor, and the social contexts of kinship can be seen in societies around the world.  Women’s work has been recorded in both public and private spheres.   Micaela di Leonardo provides an overview of kin work across a variety of cultural contexts (1987). One area where women labor outside of the marketplace includes housework and caregiving for family members within the home. In her fieldwork among Italian-Americans, di Leonardo defines kin work as “the conception, maintenance, and ritual celebration of cross-household kin ties, including visits, letters, telephone calls, presents, and cards to kin; the organization of holiday gatherings; the creation and maintenance of quasi-kin relations; decision to neglect or to intensify particular ties; the mental work of reflection about all these activities, and the creation and communication of altering images of family and kin vis-à-vis the images of others, both folk and mass media” (442-443). While the specific details of duties like writing holiday cards takes place in a specific place and time, the concept that there is work associated with maintaining kinship ties and how that work is designated or assumed in gendered ways is applicable to diverse contexts. One thing to note here is that there is an assumption of who kin are, based on socio-cultural constructs (e.g., who even gets or expects a holiday card — is it who is recognized as a relative through birth or law? Is it kin based on friendship and other relational ties that are meaningful?). On top of understanding who your kin are, there is work done to maintain those ties. Some of that work might be expected and can upheld or transgressed and others are further strengthened and cemented through regular work and practice.

Kinship, Transnationalism and Technology

We have discussed some examples of kinship systems both in the US and in other countries and become familiar with some of the terms and how concepts like lineage are woven into the texture of everyday life and milestones like marriage and having children. We have discussed scenarios that include widowhood and connections between life and death, gender and family, and political and economic power. The late 20 th century and early 21 st century in particular have surfaced additional questions and insights about kinship as it intersects with transnational flows, immigration, and technology. These add additional factors to ever-changing landscapes that, to large degree, have long contended with transnational flows via colonialism and imperialism as well as the circulation of norms related to “family” and the ways in which it plays out both in domestic and political domains.

Kin relations converge with a wide range of other topics of interest such as economic and political power. One example of contemporary complexities in kinship is in Christine Ward Gailey’s Blue Ribbon Babies: Labors of Love : Race, Class, and Gender in US Adoption Practice . In her research on adoption, she notes how white couples pursuing adoption via independent or private agencies seek out “healthy white babies” or “blue ribbon” babies. They often seek out international adoption and avoid open adoption, denoting perceptions of the quality of the babies themselves as well as the severing of ties from biological parents and biological links to lineage. Meanwhile, single Black and white women as well as middle class Black couples and working class white married couples choose a different route, often pursuing foster adoption. What is highlighted in this book is both the differing preferences for types of adoption (e.g., international vs domestic and closed vs open) as well as how those preferences are inextricably tied to parents’ perception of children, their backgrounds and needs, and how that impacts integration into the life and lineage of the adoptive family.

PODCAST: Kathryn Mariner

Listen here to this podcast episode where we interview Kathryn and hear about her work. Read and explore additional publications from Kathryn which include:

• American Elegy: A Triptych
• White Parents, Black Care: Entanglements of Race and Kinship in American Transracial Adoption
• “Who you are in these pieces of paper”: Imagining Future Kinship through Auto/Biographical Adoption Documents in the United States

Transnational flows or international contexts introduce additional factors to how kinship is defined and how that plays out in terms of economic and social expectations. For example, a family that immigrates from one country to another may create and expand their kin relations to include “relatives” in their new country of residence, making and cementing ties where they might not have been included in the context of the country of origin. One simple way this plays out is when “aunties” and “uncles” are included as family, with the bonds of social support as well as the concrete supports that can come from roles such as assistance in childrearing or connections to employment opportunities, even without the requisite lineal ties that might have been part of the criteria for defining aunt and uncle relationships in a non-immigrant community contexts. Immigrant and migrant communities and the context of economic and political challenges reframe kinship ties, roles and responsibilities in new ways often adding additional pressures to provide economic support to family from one direction to the other. Sacrifice is defined on both sides of the lines crossed and blurred through the migration process.

Zooming in on the practice of transnational or international adoption, we see how kinship can become complex in the context of global flows and the sometimes productive, sometimes tenuous relationship between national identity and globalization. Eleana Kim is an anthropologist who has studied transnational adoption of babies from South Korea to the US and the implications of those babies returning to visit Korea as adults. In “Our Adoptee, Our Alien: Transnational Adoptees as Specters of Foreignness and Family in South Korea,” Kim recounts how adopted Koreans are welcomed back to their birth country under the legal designation of “overseas Koreans” under a state-sponsored globalization project (2007). She writes:

Designed to build economic and social networks between Korea and its seven million compatriots abroad, this policy projects an ethnonationalist and deterritorialized vision of Korea that depends upon a conflation of “blood” with “kinship” and “nation.” Adoptees present a particularly problematic subset of overseas Koreans: they have biological links to Korea, but their adoptions have complicated the sentimental and symbolic ties of “blood” upon which this familiarist and nationalist state policy depend. Because international adoption replaces biological with social parenthood and involves the transfer of citizenship, to incorporate adoptees as “overseas Koreans,” the state must honor the authority and role of adoptive parents who raised them, even as they invite adoptees to (re)claim their Koreanness (2007, 497).

In this example of transnational adoption, we see the complex relationship between birth and adoptive ties in the making of kin as it intersects with macro-level projects in nationhood and in global flows. Legal and social bonds converge and diverge with the complexities of racial identity. For example, Korean American adults who return to Korea to reunite with their birth families discovered that their rights to sponsor Korean relatives’ entry into the U.S. are nullified or forfeited. This is an example of how the severing of kin relationship from birth to and through adoption changes the definition of “relative” and the legal rights that can be attached to the sponsorship of relatives joining family through immigration.

In this scenario, adoptive parents are the only legally recognized genitors as well as socially recognized parents in the U.S. context. The reason for the shift in genitor (or birth parent) designation is because, historically, babies were designated as “orphans” before going through the adoption process. This plays out in the context of the major rise in adoption out of Korea in a post-war context. Decades after the war in a time when Korea’s economic and global status as a “developed” nation places new and emerging challenges on family definitions, choices, and population demographics. Kim documents how more and more adults are choosing to have fewer children or no children at all. In 2006, Korea had a birthrate of 1.08 which was the lowest among developed nations at that time, adding context to a history of overseas adoption that takes on new shape, building on post-war landscapes to a present-day population health discourse among national policymakers concerned with not having enough babies to sustain the nation.

The geopolitical context of adoption, immigration, and kin relations is indeed complex. Technology also introduces pathways for kin relations to be defined and redefined. For example, building on the writings of Marilyn Strathern (1992), Charis Thompson’s “Strategic Naturalizing: Kinship in an Infertility Clinic” (2001) reflects on her fieldwork in infertility clinics in California in the 1990s. Thompson reveals insights into contemporary notions of kinship. She points to the clinic as a site where notions of kin relationships are made and remade, and how that plays out in the context of reproductive technology clinics where biological definitions of being related and social definitions of parenthood sometimes collide, converge, and conflict. She writes, “In the process, the meaning of biological motherhood is somewhat transformed; in particular, biological motherhood is becoming something that can be partial. This work is thus about ‘doing’ kinship, as opposed to simply ‘being’ a particular and fixed kind of kin” (175). In particular, Thompson raises questions about the need to understand kinship in the context of donors and surrogates who are close friends or family members (vs. contracted individuals). Kinship is not just about who is defined and designated as a parent but also includes all of the implications that come from parental roles as well as the need to be explicit about relationships in order to avoid possibilities of incest. Through a range of case studies, Thompson suggests several ways of understanding kinship in the context of reproductive assistance. Stages in the establishment of pregnancy are determined to be “relational” when they implicate kin relations whereas the stage is called “custodial” if it enables relatedness but does not itself become part of kinship understandings. For example, in a custodial stage, a woman might be instrumental in the conception or bearing of the child (i.e., biologically involved) but not a part of the kinship network (i.e., not implicated as mother).

Technologies (both biomedical and legal) have influenced the making of kin. Examples range from birth control and in vitro fertilization to surrogacy and artificial insemination. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp have explored the impact of assisted reproductive technologies on kinship and society. For example, medical technologies have helped children with disabilities to survive in ways that they may not have in the past (Ginsburg and Rapp 2011). Ginsburg and Rapp argue that such “disruptions of reproduction” are inextricably tied to rises in learning disabilities and that the politics of reproduction therefore have an indelible mark on the contemporary context of developed nations. Learning disabilities doubled each decade after the 1970s, resulting in a 15% rate among US students. In addition to the development of new technologies, policy changes and disability rights legislation and portrayals of more nuanced or positive representations of children and adults with disabilities in the media have also increased in recent decades. They converge to transform the American context of children and parenthood to be more inclusive of people with disabilities and to bring together family relationships, technology, and social justice. Ginsburg and Rapp emphasize, “With nearly every interview, we heard stories about how families have had to reimagine everything from household budgets to school careers, to sibling relations, to models of humanity that take into account life with a difference. We argue that the stories our respondents told us about living with disability—from the moment of birth onward—collectively constitute a ‘new kinship imaginary’ with temporal and social implications” (2011, 3).

PROFILE: Tam Perry, Associate Professor, School of Social Work, Wayne State University

What prompted you to study social work and anthropology? How did one area of study start to lead to the other and then to thinking about them in conjunction with one another? Anthropology was a discipline that I was not directly exposed to until later in my academic career when I was entering my joint PhD program in social work and anthropology. I was interested in investigating the ways that anthropology and social work could merge. As social work is a helping profession, it is often utilized by its skilled professionals who “talk” in roles as advocates and brokers of services. My choice to specialize in linguistic anthropology allowed me to develop a framework for understanding how language acts both as a response to behaviors and also influences other behaviors. Recognizing linguistic patterns that are present within families and understanding linguistic practices could contribute to finding better ways for social workers to work with older persons and their families.

Alongside others committed to the intersection of social work and anthropology, I have become active in a group called Scholars Across Social Work and Anthropology (SASW). SASW aims to integrate social work and anthropology by (1) developing knowledge at the intersection of these fields; (2) fostering greater dialogue among social workers and anthropologists; (3) promoting collaboration on teaching and research; and (4) facilitating outreach and mentorship between scholars at all stages of their careers. SASW was founded in 2016 in a basement hallway at the annual conference of the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR). Since that first “underground” meeting, membership has grown to approximately 50 active members. Thus far, members are primarily faculty and doctoral students in either social work or anthropology departments, though we welcome all who have an interest in the intersection of these two fields. The founding executive committee includes John Mathias (Florida State University), Matthew Chin (University of Virginia) and Lauren Gulbas (University of Texas at Austin). Please see our paper, “Interrogating Culture: Anthropology, Social Work, and the Concept Trade” (Mathias et al., 2020). As articulated by Dr. Gulbas, SASW is committed to the idea that systematic and rigorous qualitative research can be used to improve well-being and help meet human needs. Gulbas notes, “My engagement with social work has helped me to envision how to build on the vital intersections between medical anthropology and social work to confront important social problems and effect change. I have found there has been no better way to explore these synergies than through my collaborations with Scholars in Social Work and Anthropology.”

Much of your research has taken place in Detroit. Can you share a little bit about how you develop both short term and long-term relationships in field research and how anthropology as well as social work training informs how you approach connecting with people and places?  I have been active in Detroit since joining the faculty of Wayne State in 2012. Cultivating strong, trusting relationships with stakeholders in the Detroit community is a critical part of my work and personal ethos. I develop these relationships by consistently following through and following up with the people I meet. I regularly attend a variety of community events and am very committed to a local coalition, Senior Housing Preservation Detroit. In this coalition, I serve as research chair and help with the Strategic Planning process. Many of the projects we do in this coalition which aims to raise awareness about the concerns of those living in senior housing in the City’s core are possible because of long-standing relationships. I have always co-published and co-presented with members of this coalition (see Perry et al. 2015, 2017, 2020, in press).

Anthropology informs this work through the discipline’s emphasis on prolonged engagement and the level of detail needed to understand the lived experience from multiple angles (older adult, service providers) as well as the need to connect these details to macro policies and advocacy. Our multi-agency coalition often shares accounts of older adults facing displacement and other challenges recently as a result of COVID. My macro social work training on advocacy and the importance of understanding the individual and social determinants contributing to inequity are also always incorporated into my research and service approaches.

Your work focuses on housing transitions among older adults. Can you talk about the research and how it illustrates the importance of thinking about kin relations as changing over time? Kin relations have been part of most of my research projects with older adults in Detroit.  My dissertation work explored the processes of voluntary relocation, and my later projects involved older adults and their relationships to their homes and communities in times of involuntary displacement or environmental challenges. It is very clear that many of these decisions or the repercussions of challenges involve a host of kin. These kin structures constantly change as we examine resources, caregiving obligations and gentrification. I have written a paper with a section “kinship and lightbulbs” (Perry, 2014) illuminating (pun intended!) the intersection of kin relations with material possessions, in this case, collections of light bulbs. These lightbulb collections ensured that the patriarch of the household facilitated safe lighting and by inference, a safe physical environment. When he moved to senior living, this social role, as indexed by the selling of the lightbulb collection, was also transformed. My latest research project, Navigating Time and Space: Experiences of Aging with Hemophilia, also investigates aspects of kin relationships in this rare, genetically transmitted, bleeding disorder. The intersection of age with hemophilia in this population that has been gravely stricken by the HIV/AIDS pandemic highlights the “lack of a roadmap” in terms of older real and fictive kin in a population that never expected to age.

Your new project specifically examines how issues of housing and aging play out for urban Black American populations. Can you share a little about this project? More generally, how do you develop ideas for new projects and build on previous work while continuing to explore new ideas?  Working in Detroit, a predominantly Black American city, housing opportunities include reflections on historical homeownership opportunities, employment opportunities and system navigation. In general, projects tend to build upon themselves as insights are gained and research networks expand. For example, my interest in understanding housing challenges has expanded to working with urban planning researchers to understand how older adults are depicted in “development” materials, or in many cases, not featured, so depictions of “family” focuses on couples with small children (see Berglund et al. 2020). I’ve also been involved with larger work on building trust when it comes to engaging in research with communities of older adults in Detroit and Flint through the Michigan Center for Urban African American Aging Research. This includes examining best practices with Community Advisory Boards as a way to highlight historically marginalized voices (Mitchell et al. 2020). During initial waves of COVID-19, MCUAAAR engaged in a telephone outreach project to engage older adults to understand immediate concerns (Rorai & Perry, 2020).

Another example of kin-making in a contemporary context is the defining of hope and loss in both surrogacy and adoption. Christa Craven writes about kinship and “de-kinning” in LGBTQ communities in the context of reproductive loss. Reproductive loss can include failed adoption or miscarriage. After conducting interviews with LGBTQ parents in the US, Canada, Belgium, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, New Zealand and Scotland, Craven finds how reproductive loss can be de-kinning by marking the lack of family formation while new kinships can also be formed through practices such as creating physical memorials, having religious or spiritual services, or remembering kin-making experiences through tattoos and art.

Adoption, surrogacy, and assisted reproductive technologies underscore what many have called new kinship studies or the second coming of kinship studies. Motherhood disaggregates into categories such as genetic, birth, adoptive and surrogate, distinguishing between social and biological parenting (Strathern 1992, 27). For example, Janet Carsten discusses the evolution of anthropological thought on kinship from Levi-Strauss to today (Warburton and Edmonds 2016). Thinking about the topics of global flow alongside surrogacy and technology in the context of more recent events, we see how quickly kin relations are made, interrupted, and remade. News stories marked with headlines such as “Israeli Dads Welcome Surrogate Born Baby in Nepal on Earthquake Day” (Harris 2015) illustrate how policy, sexual orientation, circulation of people and things across borders, and natural disasters come together. In this particular story, two dads who are barred from adoption in their home country of Israel due to their sexual orientation fly to Nepal to meet their child, trying to find their surrogate in the middle of earthquake recovery. In this journey to make kin, the story begins with sperm in Israel that is frozen and flown to Thailand where a South African donor supplied her egg for fertilization. The embryo was then flow to Nepal where it was implanted in an Indian woman who had agreed to be the surrogate. W hether the egg donor and surrogate were paid and to what degree they were able to negotiate the terms of their labor are not details explicitly included in the news report.

Surrogate labor and its relationship to social power structures have led to discussions about women, particularly poor women, are relegated to “womb renting” for wealthy foreigners. Added reflection also comes from researchers who provide important critiques of commercial surrogacy based on these power differentials as well as calls to analyze limitations in these debates such as essentializing narratives of surrogates as agency-less individuals. Bronwyn Parry acknowledges that commercial surrogacy can indeed be exploitative but also cautions against fetishized, exceptionalist narratives that define it as inherently so when other forms of bodily labor are also spaces of potential and real exploitation. Parry writes:

One of the powerful implications of perpetuating racialized and gendered accounts of surrogacy that characterize the practitioners (the surrogates) as an oppressed and exploited minority is that they actively prohibit such women from occupying the role of benefactor of reproductive labour to the more privileged Indian or white Western women and men who avail themselves of their services. Keeping them in this role, whilst simultaneously denying the significance of their labour, works to strip them further of both power and self-respect (2018, 228).

Better regulation that encourages or mandates more information sharing and the building of structures for more equitable negotiation are distinguished from exceptionalist narratives that might require the entire act of commercial surrogacy to be banned because the entire practice is seen as inherently exploitative. Parry cautions against falling into narratives of agency-less women that might address some inequities while further perpetuating others.

In examples like these, we see how marginalization and power might play out in one locale (gay men in Israel who want to be fathers) but also position them to interact in other locales (such as in Thailand and Nepal) in ways that leverage the power and privilege that accompanies the financial means to pursue assisted reproductive technologies and international travel. In this way, the complexities of kinship are mediated, facilitated, and disrupted by law, social and economic power, as well as unforeseen events that connect many countries and people of different cultural backgrounds to one another in the making of this family.

Recall our opening chapter where the context of COVID-19 brings anthropological issues to the forefront. Within this context, we also see how surrogacy and transnational flows take shape in the midst of a global pandemic (Maynes 2020). BioTexCom operates a center in Ukraine and released footage of surrogate babies born and awaiting their meeting with their parents but facing delays due to travel restrictions put in place as result of COVID-19 response. The center has been criticized for some of its practices in the past, and as an example of the complications of the transnational reproductive “market” for surrogacy and for lack of regulations. For example, parents who are one of the more frequently represented customers of BioTexCom may rely on its presence in Ukraine because surrogacy is not legal in their country of residence. This is further complicated by socioeconomic and class divisions that allow only certain would-be parents to travel to far away locales where surrogacy is permitted. For example, not all people in Spain (where surrogacy is illegal) who want to be parents through surrogacy have the option or means to travel internationally to Ukraine. Local and state-specific laws thus collide with financial resources and class status when it comes to this modern-day configuration of parenthood.

These are just some of the ways in which technology, policy and transnational contexts impact the shifting definitions of kinship and family. Over the years, anthropologists have grappled with the ways in which human beings make meaning out of our mutual relations. From a world where simplified concepts of kinship helped to broaden narrow definitions of family to a more critical and reflexive discussion about how those early endeavors also had negative repercussions in the way they upheld static and homogenizing notions of kinship in non-Western societies, anthropology as a discipline continues to evolve in its study of kin relations. Lessons from the discipline now integrate key themes such as the role of technology and state policy and stratifications that exists due to persistent race, gender, and class-based barriers in access to resources (Inhorn 2020).

FOR FURTHER READING

• Digital Elder Care
• The Ends of Kinship: Connecting Himalayan Lives Between Nepal and New York
• The Circulation of Children: Kinship, Adoption, and Morality in Andean Peru

Kinship sits as a foundational principle in cultural anthropology, but it is a foundation that has shaped and shifted over time. How anthropologists think and write about kinship itself as universal or particular or as static versus in flux has itself evolved over time. Some historically understood notions of kin relations may remain cogent today but none remain “stuck” in the past or limited to definitions provided in a singular diagram. In a world where people, things, and ideas flow across group, clan, and nation-state borders, relationships between people have and will continue to shift.

By introducing some concepts and how they play out in different cultural contexts, we hope to underscore the fact that there is a wide range of diversity—and that there are no obvious givens when it comes to who relates to whom. Migration, transnational adoption, assisted reproductive technologies, and the converging spheres of legal, political, economic, and social contexts all challenge us to continuously interrogate how we think of our mutual relationships. Any changing roles, rights, and responsibilities must then be examined in all the ever-changing ways they impact kin relations in ways that underscore the diversity of ways human beings find belonging and community with one another.

CURRENT EVENTS & CRITICAL THINKING

• People Staff. “51-Year-Old Mother Serves as Her Daughter’s Surrogate After She Is Unable to Get Pregnant.” People , June 25, 2020. https://people.com/human-interest/mother-carries-daughters-baby/ .

The article features a story of a 51-year-old mother Julie Loving and a 29-year-old daughter Breanna Lockwood. The daughter had several miscarriages and was told that her uterus was unable to successfully carry a child. The Lockwoods looked for several surrogacy agencies, but the costs were very expensive. However, Lockwood’s fertility specialist Brian Kaplan suggested Lockwood to consider surrogacy, “specifically from a family member or friend instead of an agency to save the dental hygienist more than $100,000.” After series of careful medical examination and consultation, Loving volunteered to become a surrogate for her grandchild. This article provides an interesting example of kinship and pushes the boundaries of definition of motherhood. Although the baby was born through the 51-year-old mother’s uterus, genetically, the baby is 100% biologically related to the 29-year-old of daughter and her husband. The article is an example of modern medical technology re-defining the definition of traditional kinship.

• Strabuk, Alexa. “There Is No Way to Capture the Full Complexity of Transracial Adoption.” International Examiner , January 2, 2020. https://iexaminer.org/there-is-no-way-to-capture-the-full-complexity-of-transracial-adoption/ .

This opinion post covers complex layers of transracial adoption discourse and shares stories of adopted children growing up in a family of different race. Being Asian-American and a transracial adoptee herself, Strabuk shares brief history of transracial adoption in the US and modern international political background behind Asian kids’ adoption to the West. Questioning mass media’s generalized “happy endings” of adoptees and Strabuk writes, “A happy ending in the media erases the very real structural realities of the adoption industrial complex, one that orchestrates the exchange of babies for money. By watering down adoption, by overlooking the problems with white savior and colorblind parenting, the mainstream media uses transracial adoption to support its latest diversity campaign.”

Critical Thinking & Discussion Questions:

• Draw a kinship diagram of your family, however you define it. What are some places where it was easy to depict in a diagram? What are some places where it was challenging? What does relative ease or challenge say about the social and cultural norms you were raised in? Alternatively, you could do this exercise with a famous person, whether a celebrity in popular culture or a historic/political figure and ask the same questions.
• Define some key ways in which legal, biological, and socio-cultural definitions of kinship converge and diverge. How might this play out in the case of adoption or surrogacy?
• How have kinship concepts evolved over the course of the history of anthropology?

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What Kinship Is-And Is Not

Marshall Sahlins

120 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2013

Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology

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“Sahlins catalogs brilliantly the varied ways in which people construct family ties completely apart from their genetic relationships. . . . This is cultural anthropology at its best.”

Culture & Cosmos, NPR

“Exhilarating. Sahlins’s essay has (re)captured a significant truth—freshly, memorably. He does so without pre-empting the diversity of conceptual interests that anthropologists find their category ‘kinship’ generates, or indeed the manifold truths to be spoken of people’s interrelations. Conversely, this bold articulation of co-presence, of people’s intersubjective participation in one another’s lives, does not need to be confined to discussions of kinship as usually understood. It is important, however, that Sahlins’s argument implies not just a communicative mutuality (reciprocity, anticipation of others’ intentions, etc.), but also mutuality of bodily and personal (in the sense of ‘transpersonal’) being. The book leaves a provocation with this reader: maybe we should think twice when this kind of mutuality flourishes in otherwise non-kinship contexts before taking it simply as an extension of kinship thinking from some pre-metaphorical base.”

Marilyn Strathern | Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“ What Kinship Is—And Is Not is a gem of a book; a joy to read and a reminder of why I was enchanted by anthropology when I first encountered it. Ethnographic example tumbles after ethnographic example; many familiar, others less so, all attesting to the richness of the ethnographic record on that contested, albeit perennial, topic of kinship.”

Jeanette Edwards | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

“Marshall Sahlins is one of the great names of modern anthropology, but thus far he has not counted as one of the key figures in the study of kinship. . . . but [ The Use and Abuse of Biology ] and the present text both show that Sahlins is knowledgeable about kinship and entirely capable of contributing something new to debates concerning it. . . . He has clearly ransacked the most recent literature in the search for relevant ethnography, though he also finds support for his argument in some of the older literature, going back to Tylor in 1865, and even to Plato. The basic theme, therefore, is not new, though his treatment of it is. Sahlins has given this phenomenon a name—“mutuality of being”—and that in itself will compel us to take notice of it.”

Robert Parkin | Anthropological Quarterly

“ What Kinship Is—And Is Not exhibits its authors’ signature brilliance, erudition, and originality (not faulting wit), and it is impossible to address its many virtues. . . . Sahlins’s Janus-faced universalizing-particularizing orientation provides an encompassing context whose value for the exploration of both earlier and contemporary kinship concerns would be difficult to exaggerate.”

Robert Brightman | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

“ What Kinship Is is clearly destined to become something of a classic in kinship studies in anthropology. This is partly because of the huge breadth of Marshall Sahlins’s scholarship, which takes in everything from Aristotle to the most up to date references in the study of kinship, including a wonderful range of standard and lesser-known works along the way. But this of course is not just a work of synthesis; it is also an original, brilliant, and, above all, creative contribution to current debates in the discipline.”

Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh

“ What Kinship Is—And Is Not is a complex book, subtle and important. Since its publication in 2013, it has continued to challenge the experts. . . . It can be read as a response—late but brilliant—to the radical questioning initiated by Schneider more than forty years ago and the progressive marginalization of the field that followed the corrosive analytical critique that was last made in 1984. . . . The main merit of the book is that Sahlins has produced a remarkable critical synthesis of new kinship studies, which have remained somewhat underground for the last twenty years, despite their importance and their vitality. It is thanks to the diversity and quality of this rich ethnographic corpus that Sahlins was able to carry out his undertaking. Thus, this undisputed master of anthropology. . . . has managed to put these studies at the center of contemporary anthropological debate.”

European Journal of Social Sciences

“The work of Marshall Sahlins has continuously inspired whole academic generations of anthropologists. As with many of his previous interventions, this bold and incisive essay will be hailed as a beacon of lucidity in the somewhat foggy conceptual landscape of current anthropology. The all too neglected structuralist insight of the radical identity between sociality and semiosis is rescued and developed by Sahlins in a wonderfully refreshing way, with the help and the benefit of an easy, capacious scholarship that embraces everything from philosophy to linguistics to contemporary ethnography (from the Nichomachean Ethics to Benveniste on pronouns, from Amazonian couvade to Maori gift-exchange). This book musters deep and convincing arguments in favor of a thoroughly relational human ontology, bodying forth a renewed notion of internal or intrinsic relationality, which runs counter to the current infatuation with substances and impenetrable essences. It shows that what is natural in human culture is what is cultural in human nature: kinship, precisely.”

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

“ What Kinship Is—And Is Not is a tour de force, even by Sahlinsian standards. Kinship is one of the oldest topics in anthropology, but by the 1970s it began to lose its centrality, partly under the weight of critiques which denied the cross-cultural validity of ‘kinship’ as an analytical category. Sahlins develops an incisive counter-critique of that position while at the same time radically reframing kinship as ‘mutuality of being,’ which he takes to be a pan-human phenomenon. A superb piece of anthropological writing, this book does a wonderful job of ethnographically substantiating that concept, along the way making several other major contributions to anthropological theory.”

Alan Rumsey, Australian National University

“In What Kinship Is—And Is Not , Marshall Sahlins argues that kinship is culture, not biology, and he does so in the pure, uncompromising, vivid way of which he is the master. We now have the case for the cultural interpretation in the strongest imaginable form, which is at the same time a case for not splitting the difference in the quandary at the heart of kinship studies. It is a service of inestimable value, and all who study kinship will benefit.”

Thomas Trautmann, University of Michigan

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The Sociology of Kinship: A Case for Looking Back to the Future

• First Online: 02 November 2021

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• Alexandra Maryanski 4  

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Kinship fired the imagination of scholars in sociology and anthropology for generations, although kinship per se is no longer regarded as a particularly useful concept for the study of family life in modern societies. Kinship theory rests on a global literature stockpiled over the last 150 years with clashing theories over whether kinship is a biological, sociological, or psychological phenomenon, how and why exogamy and the incest taboo originated, the role kinship plays in social integration, and even whether kinship and the nuclear family are a facet of human nature or an invented social construct. This essay reviews the compelling ideas of the leading kinship theorists in sociology and anthropology during the Axial Age of kinship. And, surprisingly, as this chapter will document, some early speculations on kinship and its related elements have now been corroborated in the light of primate data and the fossil, molecular, sociological, and archeological records, with findings that have the potential to revitalize sociological theory and practice. The near discarding of kinship theory in sociology is thus a rather foolish line of reasoning.

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The kinship literature is so enormous that only a representative sample of the leading kinship theorists and their contributions are possible in this essay.

Polygyny is the marriage of several women to one man at the same time; polyandry is the marriage of several men to one woman; bilateral descent lines are through both the mother’s and father’s relatives; unilineal descent lines are limited to either the mother’s or father’s relatives; patrilocal is a postmarital residence where the married couple live in or near the groom’s home; matrilocal is a postmarital residence where the couple live in or near the brides’ home; neolocal is a postmarital independent household; and avunculocal is a residence shift where a male leaves his patrilocal residence as an adult to reside with his mother’s brother before and after marriage. Two excellent (and easy to read) books on kinship for the interested are Fox ( 2003 ) and Schusky ( 1983 ).

The nuclear family is the starting point for creating larger kinship networks. The polygynous family is a compounded extension of the nuclear unit because each wife has her own offspring, usually her own residence, and they share a single husband. Exceptions are very rare. For example, the traditional Nayar, a group of castes living on the coast of India, once practiced a form of polyandry. The Nayar castes, however, comprised only a small slice of Indian society, and their very specialized occupations are said to account for their mating arrangement. About 1890, Nayar kinship patterns shifted to monogamy and a gradually emerging nuclear family (Gough 1961 ; Murdock 1949 , pp. 1–40)

J.D. Freeman ( 1961 ) noted that corporate kindred groups are rare but possible with bilateral descent, but they are never organized on the basis of a common ancestor (like a clan) and they are very small in size.

Six basic types of kinship terminology have been identified worldwide, although every society adds some variations. By tradition, they are called, Iroquois, Eskimo, Omaha, Hawaiian, Sudanese, and Crow. Sudanese is the most complex system because it assigns a distinctive kin term to each near relative, and it has eight different cousin terms. Interestingly, Old English and Latin kin terms conform to a Sudanese pattern. Crow (named after a native American tribe) is a mirror image of Omaha and is associated with a matrilineal kinship system.

Morgan’s division of kinship terminologies into descriptive and classificatory is a misnomer given that both classificatory and descriptive terminologies merge some relatives. Morgan knew this, but his intent was to distinguish between kinship terminologies that isolate out the nuclear family with special kin terms from those that lump them in nomenclature with other relatives. Critics have attacked Morgan over what they thought was a blunder on his part, but they were apparently ignorant of his reasoning when he made this distinction. The terms are still used in the kinship literature despite this obvious problem.

Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology or Groups of Sociological Facts (1873–1934) is a huge compilation of cross-cultural materials drawn from archeological, ethnological, historical, and other sources, classified and arranged by Spencer. Originally commissioned in the 1860s in preparation for writing Principles of Sociology , he later published them for future students, along with a trust fund to complete the series. In all, there are 15 fat volumes that include a series of tables and columns using the same categories for each type of society. For example, some columns have a heading that relates to some social, cultural, or institutional structure of society (e.g., religious, ceremonial, linguistic, artistic, and domestic relations). Other columns have headings for the sociological, organic, and inorganic environment (e.g., past history, contact with neighbors, climate, geography, and animal life).

Durkheim taught a lecture course at the Lycée de Sens in 1883–1884 where he refers to the family as “the primary and most natural grouping of individuals” and “the seed from which society as a whole is born” (see Gross and Jones 2004 , pp. 255–257).

As senior editor, Durkheim reviewed whatever caught his fancy, especially books and articles on social organization and religion. His articles on incest, totemism, and primitive classification were all published in L’Année sociologique as Mémoires originaux

Durkheim’s publications on kinship and the family (outside of his Journal reviews and in Suicide ) include the published introductory family lecture (discussed above), a fragment of the seventeenth lecture that he delivered in 1892 on the “Conjugal Family” (published posthumously in 1921) and in 1906 “Divorce by Mutual Consent.”

Durkheim essentially adopted Robertson Smith’s view on kinship in blood. As Smith put it: “The idea that kinship is not purely an affair of birth …has quite fallen out of our circle of ideas; but so, for that matter, has the primitive conception of kindred itself…To know that a man’s life was sacred to me …it was not necessary for me to count cousinship with him by reckoning up to our common ancestor; it was enough that we belonged to the same clan and bore the same clan-name” ( 1889 , p. 255).

Rivers did not entirely reject the notion of survivals, but he confined these so-called leftovers from the past to a few systematic features (Davis ([ 1936 ] 1980, p. 47).

Murdock was very critical of the way the Boasian school had “exorcised the bogey of evolutionism.” He considered Boas “extravagantly overrated by his disciples… [and]… the most unsystematic of theorists, his numerous kernels of genuine insight being scattered amongst much pedantic chaff” ( 1949 , p. xiv).

A.R. Radcliffe-Brown taught social anthropology in Chicago, Oxford, Alexandria, Sydney, London, Manchester, Johannesburg, and pretty much around the globe (Evans-Pritchard and Eggan 1952 ).

Following Davis, social distance has three manifestations: an individual’s private feelings toward certain individuals, open, overt behavior, or contact, and social norms that distinguish different classes of individuals ([1980] 1936 , p. 164).

Parsons notes that this characterization is for urban middle-class American society. For the upper-class elite, kinship solidarity usually persists as it is associated with status of ancestry, transfer of estates, etc. And this main kinship pattern also differs among the lower classes, although this has not been studied, he said, using a structural perspective.

A kinship system can be examined from two distinctive vantage points: An Ego-centered focus (the anchor for a kindred) or an ancestral focus (the anchor for a clan). A clan can exist in perpetuity, whereas a kindred comes in and out of existence with the birth and death of an Ego.

The great apes (our closest relatives) are all forest living. Orangutans are arboreal and nearly solitary, and the only stable group is a mother with dependent offspring. Gorillas are mostly terrestrial and live in regenerating and high-altitude forests and ravines. They are organized into loosely woven heterosexual groups or “bands” which average about 15 gorillas. While a gorilla band is made up of a shifting collection of individuals, it is organized around a leader male and includes a number of adult females with dependents and up to four adult males. Chimpanzees are tree-living and also hang out on the forest floor. The only stable group is a mother and her dependent young. Chimpanzees share nearly 99% of our DNA and as King and Wilson ( 1978 , p. 90) highlighted “the chimpanzee-human difference is far smaller than that between species within a genus of mice, frogs, or flies.” So, given that species usually build on the social structure that they inherit, it is a good bet that early hominins started out with an organizational arrangement much like the promiscuous and community living chimpanzees (see Maryanski 2018 and Turner and Maryanski 2008 )

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Maryanski, A. (2021). The Sociology of Kinship: A Case for Looking Back to the Future. In: Abrutyn, S., Lizardo, O. (eds) Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78205-4_12

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11.3 Reckoning Kinship across Cultures

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe the importance of kinship in social structure.
• Distinguish between different kinship systems.
• Illustrate three forms of kinship.

By defining relationships between individuals, cultural understandings of kinship create kinship systems or structures within society. This is the institutional aspect of kinship, and it is bigger than the family itself. In smaller societies with lower populations, kinship plays a major role in all social institutions. In larger societies with higher populations, kinship places the local and familiar in opposition to a wider, more amorphous society, where relationships have less and less significance. In effect, kinship frames the way the individual and family are viewed in relation to the larger society and embodies social values.

Types of Kinship Systems

In his early research, Lewis Henry Morgan distinguished three basic forms of kinship structure commonly found across cultures. Today, we refer to these kinship forms as lineal, bifurcate merging, and generational kinship. Each one defines family and relatives a bit differently and so highlights different roles, rights, and responsibilities for these individuals. This means that depending on the kinship structure used by a society, EGO will refer to a different set of individuals as kindred and will have a different relationship with those individuals.

Lineal kinship: Lineal kinship (initially referred to as Eskimo kinship ) is a form of kinship reckoning (a way of mapping EGO to other individuals) that highlights the nuclear family. While kindred in a lineal system is traced through both EGO’s mother and father (a practice called bilateral descent), the kinship terminology clearly shows that the rights and responsibilities of the nuclear family far exceed those of other kindred. In effect, lineal kinship, associated frequently with North American and European societies, suggests a very small and nominal family with little power and influence across other social institutions.

On the lineal diagram ( Figure 11.8 ), note the following: each of the members of the nuclear family have specific kinship terms, but bilateral kin (through both EGO’s mother and father) and collateral kin (EGO’s siblings and their offspring) are lumped together with similar terms. These relationships are not highlighted by individualized terms because there are minimal rights and responsibilities between EGO and kin outside of the nuclear family of orientation and procreation.

Bifurcate merging kinship: Bifurcate merging kinship (initially referred to as Iroquois kinship ) highlights a larger family of orientation for EGO by merging EGO’s parents’ same-sex siblings and their offspring into the immediate family (creating parallel cousins) and bifurcating, or cutting off, EGO’s parents’ opposite-sex siblings and their offspring (creating cross cousins). Figure 11.9 depicts bifurcate merging kinship with unilineal descent (either patrilineal or matrilineal). This means that once descent is introduced into the diagram, EGO’s relationships, with associated rights and responsibilities, will shift toward either the mother’s or father’s side. This form of kinship reckoning, quite common to tribal societies, is found extensively, and it creates a distinction between the family of orientation, which is merged together from various lines, and other relatives, who are bifurcated, or cut away.

On the bifurcate merging diagram ( Figure 11.9 ), note that the members of the family of orientation share kinship terms that indicate a close intimacy with EGO. As an example, while EGO knows who his biological mother is (the woman who gave birth to him), his relationship with his biological mother has the same rights and responsibilities as his relationship with his mother’s sister(s), etc. Notice also that the category of individuals lumped together as “cousins” under the lineal diagram are here distinguished depending on EGO’s relationship with their parent. EGO’s mother’s sisters are called “mother” and his father’s brothers are called “father,” which means that any of their offspring would be EGO’s brothers or sisters. Notice, though, that the mothers and fathers highlighted outside of EGO’s biological parents are married to non-kin members; EGO does not refer to his mother’s sister’s husband as father—he is referred to as “mother’s husband.” Mother’s brothers and father’s sisters produce offspring who are bifurcated and lumped as “cousin.” Anthropologists distinguish between parallel cousins (EGO’s brothers and sisters through his parents’ same-sex siblings) and cross cousins (EGO’s cousins through his parents’ opposite-sex siblings). In many tribal societies, EGO would choose his (or her) marriage partner from among his (or her) cross cousins, thereby merging their children back into a primary kinship line. In this way, the family unit (the kindred) maintains a stable and significant presence across generations.

Generational kinship: Generational kinship (initially referred to as Hawaiian kinship ) presents a very different case. Widespread in Polynesia, especially during the times of chiefdom societies, generational kinship provides a distinction in kinship terms only along gender and generational lines. Generational kinship has the least complicated kinship terminology of all kinship systems, but the impact of creating a family of orientation this large and powerful is immediately apparent. In reading this chart, it is obvious that the intimate family was as large as could be configured and it would have significant sociopolitical impact within the society.

Kinship structure is highly diverse, and there are many different ways to think about it. Descent is the way that families trace their kinship connections and social obligations to each other between generations of ancestors and generations to come. It is a primary factor in the delineation of kinship structures. Through descent, the individual highlights certain particular relationships with kindred and drops or leaves off other possible relationships. Descent ultimately determines such things as inheritance, alliance, and marriage rules. There are two common ways that a cultural group can trace descent across generations:

Unilineal descent: Unilineal descent traces an individual’s kinship through a single gendered line, either male or female, as a collective social rule for all families within a society. The patrilineal or matrilineal relatives that connect to and from EGO form EGO’s lineage . This lineage is believed to be a continuous line of descent from an original ancestor. Lineages believed to be close in relationship are gathered into clans , a tribal social division denoting a group of lineages that have a presumed and symbolic kinship, and eventually into moieties (the social division of a tribe into two halves).

In matrilineal (or uterine) descent , the descent of both males and females is traced solely through female ancestors. Males hold the matrilineal descent of their mothers, and females pass on the descent through their children.

Cognatic descent: Cognatic descent is a kinship structure that follows descent through both men and women, although it may vary by family.

• In ambilineal descent , an individual’s kinship is traced through a single gendered line, with each family choosing either the mother’s or the father’s descent line; in societies practicing this type of cognatic descent, some families will trace descent through the mother and others through the father. Usually families will choose their descent type at marriage based on the different opportunities presented by either the mother’s or father’s family, and they will use this for each of their children. While societies practicing ambilineal descent might initially look like those of unilineal descent, they are different. Within these societies, families are diverse and do not follow a single type of descent reckoning.

In bilateral descent (also referred to as bilineal descent), an individual’s kinship is traced through both mother’s and father’s lines. This is the most common form of descent practiced in the United States today.

Why does descent matter? It structures the way the family will be formed (who counts most in decision-making). It determines the choices individuals have in forming their own families. And it directs how material and symbolic resources (such as power and influence) will be dispersed across a group of people. As the example in the next section shows, descent affects the whole structure of society.

A Matrilineal Society in the United States

The Navajo are among the most populous of the Indigenous peoples in the United States, exceeding 325,000 members. Roughly half live in the Navajo Nation. Covering some 27,000 square miles, the Navajo Nation is an autonomous jurisdiction that crosses New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. Traditionally a matrilineal society, the Navajo trace descent and inheritance through their mothers and grandmothers. Such a descent pattern would normally lead to the establishment of matrilocal households, with daughters bringing their husbands to live with or near their matrilineal kin following marriage.

In his study of the contemporary Shonto Navajo, however, William Yewdale Adams (1983), an anthropologist who spent part of his childhood living on the Navajo reservation, found that this wasn’t always the case. While matrilocal residence remained the ideal for Navajo families, it was not followed any more frequently than patrilocal residence (living with or near the groom’s father). Neolocal residence (a separate, independent household) was also practiced across the Navajo Nation. While the ideal Navajo family type endured as part of their identity, the actual everyday practices of families depended on their particular circumstances and might change over the course of their lives. When job opportunities and economic choices necessitated that families live in different areas, they adapted. When families became large and less manageable as a socioeconomic unit, they might splinter into smaller units, some into nuclear families living alone. However, during major life events, such as marriage and childbirth, it is the matrilineal family that will most support the couple by providing resources and any needed labor and help. Matrilineal descent also elevates the role of women in society, not by excluding men, but by recognizing the vital roles that women play in the establishment of both family and society.

Traditionally, the Navajo constructed houses (called hogans) of timber or stone frames covered with earth (Haile 1942). There are multiple types of hogans, including a male hogan, which is conically shaped and used for more private rituals, and a female hogan , which is circular and large enough to accommodate the whole family. Although today most Navajo live in Western-style homes with electricity and running water, many families still construct one or more hogans for ritual and ceremony. For families that continue traditional Navajo ceremonies, the most common hogan form today is the female hogan. As Adams aptly argues, the Navajo are very much like other societies in regard to kinship—while it defines an ideal within Navajo society, its primary function is to provide “possibilities and boundaries” around which individuals will construct kinship (1983, 412). It adapts to the changing environment and the needs of family.

Profiles in Anthropology

Louise lamphere 1940-.

Personal History : Louise Lamphere is a professor emerita of the University of New Mexico, where she held the honorary post of Distinguished Professor of Anthropology. Her scholarly career in anthropology began with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford University and a PhD in anthropology from Harvard University.

Area of Anthropology : Lamphere’s research in cultural anthropology extends over many areas of the discipline, including gender and feminist anthropology, kinship, social inequality, and medical practices and reform in the United States and across cultures. She has worked extensively with indigenous peoples, including the Navajo, and in urban contexts. She seeks to understand the intersections between sociocultural institutions and individuals. A recent focus is social and economic changes emerging from the deindustrialization of nation-states. Her work has had wide-ranging impact on generations of anthropology students and scholars.

Accomplishments in the Field : Lamphere’s research contributions are extensive (and continue). She served as the president of the American Anthropological Association from 1999 to 2001, leading the organization toward public support of policies focused on current themes such as poverty and welfare reform in the United States (see this letter from Lamphere ). She has received numerous awards and commendations for her research and service. In 2013 she was awarded the Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association. This award, which is presented annually, recognizes extraordinary achievements that have served the anthropological profession and the greater community by applying anthropological knowledge to improve lives. In 2017 Lamphere was awarded the Bronislaw Malinowski Award by the Society for Applied Anthropology in recognition of her use of social science to solve the problems of human communities today.

Lamphere’s research interests have been important in addressing current needs of human societies, including gender inequalities, socioeconomic challenges, and issues of migration and adaptation. She has also worked to address inequalities and discrimination in her own life. In 1968 she was hired as an assistant professor at Brown University, where she was the only woman on the anthropology faculty. She was denied tenure in 1974, with the university claiming that her scholarship was “weak.” Together with other two other female faculty, Lamphere put forth a case accusing the university of widespread sexual discrimination. In September 1977, then Brown University president Howard Swearer entered into a historic consent decree to ensure that women were more fully represented at the institution and agreed to an affirmative action monitoring committee. This was a landmark settlement for female anthropologists everywhere. For more on the case, see “ Louise Lamphere v. Brown University .” On May 24, 2015, Brown University awarded Dr. Louise Lamphere an honorary doctorate for her courage in standing up for equity and fairness for all.

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Kinship Reconsidered: Research on a Neglected Topic

Across the Western world and in other nations with advanced economies, a remarkable transformation in family systems took place during the final third of the 20 th century. The institution of marriage, once nearly hegemonic, lost its nearly universal appeal. Marriage now takes place later in life in virtually all nations with advanced economies, and, not uncommonly, it is delayed indefinitely. New family forms have proliferated gaining legitimacy in the 21 st century as alternatives to heterosexual marriage. Specifically, a sharp rise occurred in the prevalence of cohabitation both as a prelude and alternative to matrimony; divorce and remarriage rates have increased in most nations, creating growing family complexity; the legitimation of same-sex unions has changed the form of the family; and, there is a growing level of voluntary childlessness. In 1960, 88% of all children in the United States lived with both their biological parents; this proportion has dropped to 65% in 2015 ( Child Trends, 2015 ). The growth of non-nuclear families has been less dramatic in other Western nations than in the United States, but still widespread ( Mortelmans, Matthijs, Alofs & Segaert, 2016 ; Heuveline, Timberlake & Furstenberg, 2003 ).

By now, these developments are old news to family scholars, but social scientists are just beginning to sort out the varied sources and consequences of these changing family practices in the Western nations. One of the less examined features of global change in family systems is how this transformation has altered kinship conceptions and practices, the topic of this review. This paper examines what we know and don’t know about how kinship operates in contemporary Western nations, as an exchange and support system, a ceremonial group, and source of identity. When I initially undertook this review, I had hoped to include in a single essay, a discussion of how kinship works both in the standard form (wrongly described as “traditional”) of the family and in various alternative structures that have sprouted up and become more prevalent over the past half century. However, I quickly discovered that there was too much material to cover in a single paper, so I was forced to divide my overview into two essays.

The first of these examines the history of kinship and contemporary patterns of kinship reported in recent literature, both in the United States and other Western nations in the standard, nuclear form ( Stone, 1977 ). I conclude with a research agenda of largely unexamined questions about how kinship works in contemporary families throughout the Western world, the arrangement that William J. Goode (1965) referred to as the conjugal family form.

A second paper, currently in preparation, will explore how kinship notions have been expanded to a wide variety of alternative forms such as: families who divorce and remarry; cohabitating couples with children; couples and single-parents living in extended households; families formed by assisted reproductive technology; adopted families and kinship care; and, of course, same-sex unions and marriages. Most of these so-called “alternative family forms” have only been examined one at a time rather than compared to one another as varied contexts of kinship. The question I examine in the second essay is how kinship is construed and performed across these different family structures and, particularly, when compared to the conjugal unit, the historically favored family arrangement of the West ( Stone, 1977 ; Goody, 1996 ).

Family systems organize human reproduction, economic support of family members, childcare, socialization, and social placement by defining rights and obligations for parents and extended kin ( Murdock, 1949 ; Davis, 1949 ). A second important function of family systems receives far less attention in the literature than it merits: the family is also a social arrangement responsible for giving its members a sense of identity and shared belonging through kinship connections including not only those inside the natal family household, but also among relations living elsewhere as well. From the perspective of evolutionary biology, kin recognition, protection, and support are mechanisms for selection and survival. This helps to explain why kinship conveys a powerful sense of belonging and diffuse emotional connection that enhances social solidarity among relatives ( Sapolsky, 2017 ).

In recent years, some attention has been devoted to the ceremonial role of kin in studies of family life by cultural sociologists, but we have not yet fully appreciated the importance of kinship in everyday life. A recent and important exception discussed later in the paper is Jallinoja & Widmer, 2011 . In contrast, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of papers, devoted to the exchange of money and time within and across households ( Swartz, 2009 ). While undoubtedly exchanges of resources are a critical feature of kinship systems, the importance of kin connections have been fully valued by an exclusive focus on time and money exchanges. I believe that family research has downplayed the role of collateral and extended kin (other than grandparents) that frequently constitute the ceremonial family, often providing members, not only tangible benefits but a profound sense of connection, social support, and identity.

When I first entered sociology in the 1960s, kinship was a vibrant area of research within the field of family sociology in the United States as well as in social anthropology in England and Continental Europe. This is far less true today. Even the most cursory examination of the current literature on kinship in the United States (and to a lesser extent in Europe) reveals just how is underdeveloped the topic area is in the recent literature in family sociology and demography. Over the past several decades only a scant body of research has been produced on how kinship is practiced in contemporary Western societies. In my search of the literature, I discovered only a few general reviews of kinship research describing studies undertaken in the past thirty years ( Peletz, 1995 ; Stone, 2001 ; Carsten, 2004 ; Déchaux, 2014); only one appears in a sociological journal (Johnson, 2001). Empirical, or for that matter, theoretical studies on kinship in advanced societies remain relatively rare; comparative and cross-national studies, until quite recently, even rarer ( Grandits, 2010 ; Heady & Kohli, 2010 ).

Within the discipline of anthropology, there have been some recent attempts to restore the study of kinship that fell out of favor after David Schneider’s seminal writings in the 1970s (1966, rev. 1980) (Déchaux, 2014). Based on his study of American kinship, Schneider forcefully argued that much of the theory and research in classical anthropology had been misdirected because they were based on a biogenetic conception of kinship. He drew this conclusion from his fieldwork study on American kinship, though his empirical findings were only sketchily presented in his publications.

Kinship, contended Schneider, is a cultural construction, that cannot be derived from the “natural” world. In anthropology, a great deal of theory and research has been devoted to qualifying or elaborating Schneider’s argument that overturned a century of previous research ( Carsten, 2004 ; Déchaux, 2014). During the 21 st century, only a small number of studies have appeared on the standard form of the family in Western nations. (See, for example, Newman, 2012 ; Murphy, 2011 ). Recently, however, there are some indications within anthropology of a growing interest in newer forms of the family, stimulated by the path-breaking research on gay families conducted several decades ago by Kath Weston (1991) . This burgeoning body of research will be addressed in the second paper that is currently in the works.

A Brief History of Kinship Studies in the 20th Century

In the middle of the 20th century, the study of kinship in post-industrial societies was a “hot” topic in the sociology of the family, judging by the attention given to it in theoretical discussions and empirical research ( Zeldich, 1964 ; Farber, 1966 ). Kinship research on contemporary, post-industrial societies has its roots in the writings of 19 th and early 20 th century social theorists such as Durkheim, Engels, LePlay, among others, who first speculated about how kinship systems changed as societies became more complex and a variety of institutions were devised to manage activities that had formerly been regulated by family practices in simpler, agrarian societies. Broad agreement existed that kinship systems gradually became simpler, less essential as support systems as societies moved from an agricultural to an industrial base. A rural past was largely assumed when the patriarchal family was the dominant institution that provided education, more education, and employment. A burgeoning historical literature demonstrated that early American practices gave enormous authority to elders and fathers to make decisions for women, children and youth, particularly in New England ( Demos, 1970 ; Gordon, 1978 ).

Industrialization disrupted family control with the emergence of a job economy, undermining the power of elders to exert their influence over the young. This change, family theorists believed, resulted in a simpler family form--- a “nuclear” arrangement of two biological parents and their offspring, largely outside of the influence and support of extended kin (Goode, 1965; Laslett, 1972 ). This proposition became the subject of considerable debate both in the new field of social history as well as by sociologists who studied family systems (Sussman & Burchinal, 1959; Farber, 1966 ).

The earliest empirical examinations of the family as a social system in the United States emerged from the community and family studies of the Chicago School of Sociology in the first half of the 20 th century ( Burgess & Locke, 1945 ). W. E. B. Du Bois (1899) can be credited with the first community study in the United States. The Chicago School writers paid close attention to how immigrants assimilated into American society and the significance of kinship ties in making this transition. This idea appeared in the early and now classic study by W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (1918, 1920 ) of Polish migrants to the United States. The evidence that they assembled from letters and testimony from immigrant families showed how immigrants established strong ties to extended kin and neighbors in ethnic communities, who helped to guide the process of assimilation for newcomers to America.

Other researchers connected to the Chicago School of Sociology focused on how kinship operated to facilitate the migration of African Americans leaving the South in the decades leading up to and following the Second World War ( Johnson, 1934 ; Frazier, 1939 ). Emerging from many of the ethnographic studies conducted in low-income communities in the middle of the last century of whites and blacks alike, researchers reported that the family boundaries were not nearly as tightly maintained as appeared to be the case among more privileged families in the middle-class ( Clayton & Drake, 1945 ).

By the middle of the 20 th century, a slew of studies, again primarily ethnographic, in both the United States and Britain continued the theme of how ethnic and kinship ties were intertwined in urban working-class communities. Research on social class, kinship, and community can also be traced to the appearance of Talcott Parsons’ (1954) influential essays on the American family. Drawing on the kinship theory in anthropology, Parsons described American kinship relations as a product of our bilateral system (stressing neither the matrilineal or patrilineal lines) that produced what Parsons described as an “isolated nuclear family system.”

Parsons contended that the American family’s relatively shallow ties to either family line, produces a kinship system that structurally emphasizes loyalties to both husbands’ and wives’ sides of the family in equal measure. Accordingly, distinctions are not drawn in the terms used to describe collateral relations (aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws) on one side of the family or the other as is done in kinship systems in which the maternal or paternal lines determine kinship obligations. Without strong loyalties to lineage, Parsons, and his followers such as Kingsley Davis (1949) and William J. Goode (1965), contended that the nuclear family as a distinct unit becomes more powerful and prominent in regulating social reproduction and family life.

Isolated from the influence of kin, the “conjugal family system,” as William J. Goode described the Western family form, produced a potent domestic unit harnessing strong sentiments within the nuclear family ( Lasch, 1977 ). Historians have observed that this family form became especially prevalent in the United States because of its immigrant origins and high level of geographical mobility ( Nimkoff, 1947 ). The predominance of the nuclear family and its isolation from the influence of extended kin was, according to Parsons, a distinctive feature of the American family system. Though, as Goode (1965) observed, the dominance of the nuclear family system is, in fact, a distinguishing feature of Western family systems ( Laslett, 1972 ).

Not long after the publication of Parsons’ seminal essays, a stream of empirical studies began to appear in sociological journals that explored the presumed absence of strong kinship bonds in the United States and England. During the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, a number of researchers showed that kinship bonds both survived and thrived in the post-industrial economy ( Sussman & Burchinal, 1962 ; Farber, 1966 ; Gans, 1962 ). British research on kinship, largely conducted by social anthropologists, echoed the same theme. Among others, Michael Young and Peter Willmot (1962 ), Raymond Firth (ed. 1956 ) conducted studies of working-class neighborhoods in East London showing that families were deeply embedded in extended kin networks supporting the nuclear family. Elizabeth Bott (1957) developed a theory reconciling the Parsonian claim by showing that strong conjugal bonds appeared to crowd out more active kinship relations in middle-class families whereas in working-class settings, the opposite was true. Weaker marital bonds and gender-segregated social networks promoted more intense relations with extended kin (For an extensive summary of this early research, see Bott’s 1971 essay in the revised edition of her book).

Urban contexts among the working class were not the only setting in which kinship thrived in post-industrial America. Throughout rural communities, and especially in geographically isolated pockets of the United States, there was a large body of evidence to show how much families continued to be an enduring feature of the American family system ( Adams, 1970 ; Lee, 1980 ). Although the U.S. family, according to historian Edward Shorter (1975) , was “born modern,” relations with extended kin, it appears in empirical research mentioned above, continued to be an important feature of family systems within the U.S. and among Western nations throughout the latter half of the 20 th century.

Kinship in post-industrial societies remained “functionally important,” researchers concluded, especially within the working-class and in less urbanized parts of the country. Eugene Litwak and colleagues (1975, 1959 ) in a series of qualitative studies demonstrated how kin continued to play an important role in mediating the family and the growing bureaucratic institutions such as schools, welfare agencies, and the health system. Kin in working-class and immigrant communities often acted on behalf of the family, helping to bridge relations to more formal organizations as well as the labor market. Granovetter (1973) extends this idea two decades later. While not explicitly employing the term, “social capital,” Litwak, among others, discovered the potential power of social bonds as a “resource” for families with a limited ability to connect outside the confounds of the household and neighborhood. Although the exploration of how families use extended relations has not disappeared, it has not continued to be a topic of much research interest inside the field of family sociology apart from the considerable attention given to intergenerational exchanges, a theme that I return to later on in this essay.

As I noted in the introduction, this body of early research largely neglects the symbolic and ceremonial function that kinship plays in the Western family system. Beyond the early work of Bossard and Boll (1950) in the United States, the neglect of this topic in family sociology remains noteworthy. I will return to this topic in the concluding section.

Early Research on Kinship Among Disadvantaged Populations

In the final decades of the 20 th century, following the publication of the Moynihan Report, there was a widespread belief, that the Black family was distinctively different in structure and family practices from other ethnic groups because of its African origins, history of slavery, and urban migration ( Furstenberg, 2007 , 2009 ). There was growing interest in the role kin played in survival of poor families, especially among African Americans living in single-parent households often with extended kin.

Much of that work was influenced by Carol Stack’s important ethnographic study of poor black families in 1974 ( Stack, 1974 ). Her study resonated with the findings of a number of fieldwork examinations conducted in roughly the same period. (See also Jeffers, 1967 ; Rainwater, 1970 ; Jarrett, 1995 ). Stack, among others, showed the benefits and burdens of close family ties, emphasizing the demands placed on poor families to share limited resources when crises occurred and the consequences when assistance went unreciprocated. Stack’s research initiated an empirical quest to determine if kinship bonds were, in fact, stronger in black than white families, an inquiry that has continued to the present ( Sarkisian & Gerstel, 2013 ). It also influenced my work on the kinship practices of teenage mothers and their families. I discovered that unplanned parenthood, especially when it does not lead to paternal involvement and ultimately marriage, establishes a strong matrilineal tilt in the kinship system ( Furstenberg, 2007 ).

While there has been considerable attention to the role of kinship in poor families, far less is known about how kinship works among the highly privileged (See, for example, Warner, 1942 ; Hollingshead, 1949 ). Apart from intriguing observations about kinship bonds among the upper class by E. Digby Baltzell (1966) sixty years ago, remarkably little attention has been given to the way that families in the top decile, much less the top one percent, deploy resources through schooling and inheritance to maintain privilege from one generation to the next. We do know that educational homogamy and union stability have been rising among the well- educated, likely leading to a growing of family resources at the top ( Smits, Ultee & Lammers, 1998 ; Mare, 2016 ). While it is widely acknowledged that privilege is maintained through the transmission of material resources over generations, only recently have social scientists begun to look at how this practice of resource provision works over the life course to advantage children born into well-off families. Moreover, in recent decades as the concept of social capital became increasingly popular in social science, researchers, myself included, began to consider kinship as a social resource that is unevenly distributed ( Furstenberg & Kaplan, 2007 ; Parcel & Dupur, 2001 )

Family Systems in Comparative Perspective: Persistence and Change

Change in the Western model of the family has continued to occur apace in the first decades of the 21 st century in the United States and Canada, other Anglo speaking nations, and Europe, as well as in many parts of the developed world ( Oláh, 2015 ; Child Trends, 2015 ). Scholars have accordingly begun to conduct comparative studies of family patterns cross-nationally, picking up on the early efforts of Goode (1965) and a few of his contemporaries to address specific economic, technological, demographic, and ideological drivers of new ideals and practices in family systems. The motivation for comparative research emerges from the competing explanations of why change occurs in family systems and how it is diffused; this perspective has been applied more recently to the developing world ( Pesando et al., 2018 ).

This line of comparative studies has provided an assessment of how family systems in economically advanced nations are responding and adapting to exogenous conditions depending on history, culture, and existing institutions such as educational systems, the polity, and religious values ( Breen & Buchman, 2002 ; Meyer, 1977 ; Cook & Furstenberg, 2002 ; Mayer, 2009 ). Among wealthy nations in the West, there is clear evidence of convergence in family formation practices such as postponed home leaving, later and less marriage, lower childbearing, and greater movement toward gender equality. At the same time, considerable divergence remains and could be increasing in the first two decades of the 21 st century both between and within countries ( Billari & Liefbroer, 2010 ).

A slender but growing strand of this research has investigated changing kinship practices in comparative perspective. As I reported earlier, kinship relations have been examined almost exclusively through the lens of how intergenerational ties and levels of support and exchange have been changing in advanced economies ( Dykstra et al., 2006 ). Specifically, it has been largely assumed that intergenerational exchanges between mid-life parents and their adult children and offspring constitute the important arena of action in Western kinship systems.

Cross-national studies on change in family systems reveal longstanding cultural and historical patterns that differentiate parts of Europe and the Anglo-speaking world that can be traced back over centuries and even millennia (see Goody, 1996 ). Goody, like Goode, argues that it is necessary to understand that countries change from different starting points depending on their history, culture, and demography. He views existing kinship systems as a mediator of change but kinship obligations are, at the same time, a potential site in which change occurs.

Demographic scholars have previously identified important regional variations in kinship practices across geographical regions, between, and within nations ( Iacovou, 2002 ; Kertzer, 1989 ). In a path breaking demographic research, Hajnal (1983) identified a demographic divide that has separated Eastern and Western Europe for centuries; across this divide, family systems have displayed sharp variations in family formation patterns and household structures (Wall et al., 1987). Early marriage and a greater prevalence of intergenerational households have been far more common in Eastern Europe than Western Europe (Wall et al., 1987). Similarly, research comparing Northern and Southern Europe has persistently revealed differences in the age of home leaving, marriage, and childbearing ( Iacovou, 2002 ; Lesthaeghe, 1983 ). Mediterranean countries display higher levels of what has been labeled as “familism” than generally occurs in Northern Europe, especially Scandinavia ( Reher, 2004 ; Leitner, 2010 ).

Esping-Andersen (1990 , 2016 ) in a series of influential writings hypothesized that these regional differences are linked to a typology of distinctive “welfare regimes” that emerged over time in different nations establishing alternative arrangement in state/family relationships. These varying political cultures take the form of a welfare system that allocates responsibilities to government, families, and individuals. Thus, individuals and family systems express expectations and enact practices that are informed by exposure to these different cultural and institutional frameworks ( Heady & Kohli, 2010 :397). This assumption recalls C. Wright Mills’ (1957) observation that individual biographies and life scripts are embedded in institutions in flux in modern societies ( Buchman, 1989 ; Mayer, 2009 ).

Although a large body of research has explored the alignment between welfare regimes and family patterns, the empirical evidence supporting Esping-Anderson’s general theory is mixed at best: it remains unclear whether Esping-Anderson’s categorization of welfare regimes is, in fact, related to family systems or discrete patterns of change within family systems. Only a few comparative studies have examined the data to ascertain whether kinship practices differ across the typology of welfare regimes he constructed.

In one of the earliest of these studies, Hollinger and Haller (1990) used data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) to compare kinship contact in seven nations that were selected because they represented varied welfare regimes. They discovered, consistent with Esping-Anderson’s theory, that the Anglo-speaking countries that are grouped in the Liberal Regime--- Australia, the United States, and Great Britain--- have sharply lower levels of co-residence and contact with relatives (living outside the home) than do West Germany and Hungary, and especially Italy.

The incidence of contact conforms to the principle of genealogical order, a dominant feature of Western kinship: after spouse/partners, interaction is highest with parents (outside the home); and, conversely older parents spend the most time with children, next with adult siblings, followed by other relatives (See Rita Jallinoja & Widmer, 2011 ). In part, this correspondence is maintained by differing patterns of geographical proximity among family members. Co-residence and levels of geographical mobility explain an important share of the country-level differences according to Hollinger and Haller (1990) . Residence patterns among family members are both an indicator of the importance of kin ties and close proximity facilitates the high levels of interaction, especially in the Mediterranean region.

Hollinger and Haller (1990) present similar findings for patterns of exchange and support in times of need with the spouse (assuming one is present) being listed as the person/s from whom help is most expected, then parents and/or children living outside the home, siblings, and other kin. In the entire ISSP sample, a relatively low figure, about five percent, report that they look to other relatives (beyond parents) for support, in addition to children and grandchildren. These findings are based on data collected 30 years ago. It is difficult to know whether national-level differences would still look the same today, following similar patterns across the nations represented in the study. The best recent data on exchanges of time and money among kin come from SHARE, a multi-country study that collected information on kin identification and contact as part of its overall mission to study the health and security of older adults in Europe and other nations with advanced economies ( Aassve, Meroni & Pronzato, 2012 ; Kohli, Hank & Künemund, 2009 ; Litwin, 2009 ).

A recent paper by Ganjour and Widmer (2016) , paralleling the work of Hollinger and Haller reaches similar conclusions revealing significant variations by region in reliance on kin. Their analysis that relied on configurations of kinship also failed to find that kinship practices reflected differences in welfare regime though it should be noted that about a quarter of their sample had a profile of high involvement with extended relations with siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and other extended kin.

In a policy brief reporting on eight nations in SHARE, both qualitative and quantitative data were collected and compared from rural and urban sample sites. Both within and across countries, large differences emerged both in the level of how many kin were recognized and how contact occurred across rural and urban sites in all countries. The findings strongly point again to large within-country differences. Urban Italy looks more like urban Sweden than it does rural Italy. Overall, the frequency of kin contacts shows general regional differences, especially a Northwest and Southeastern divide, but the within-country differences remain prominent, as large as the between-country, differences ( European Policy Brief, European Commission, Brussels, 2010 ).

The SHARE dataset has been used extensively to chart country-level differences in intergenerational support among adult children and their parents. Based on a series anthropological and historical case studies, Heady and Kohli (2010) have provided the most extensive discussion of intergenerational and gender ties across Europe and of how they are linked to public policy regimes. They provide extensive empirical support showing that reliance on public vs. private support for the family varies across regions, between Northern and Western Europe on one side and Southern and Eastern Europe on the other. Public support systems do not “crowd out” private support in the family, but they do appear to relate to the intensity of support both for children and the elderly ( Brandt, Haberkern & Szydlik, 2009 ; Brandt & Deindl, 2013 ). Thus, comparing the Nordic countries with the South, notable regional differences exist in the level and intensity of intergenerational co-residence, exchange, and in the prevalence of childcare provided by grandparents.

In his work with Heady and elsewhere, Kohli and collaborators report that the flow of resources in all countries represented in the SHARE study is downward from older parents to their adult children and grandchildren rather than upward. High levels of resources and time provided to seniors (from their children or grandchildren), only occur later in life when parents become infirmed. This is not to say that children and grandchildren do not provide assistance, but the level appears to be very modest, until the death of a spouse or a serious illness occurs to a parent. Even then, if a spouse or partner is present, children’s involvement is limited. Typically, children do not assume a great deal of oversight or care when an able spouse is present in the home.

Kohli’s observation that flows (financial especially) go downward in Western family systems may be somewhat biased because reports from SHARE come exclusively from the older parent generation: reporters (whether they be children or adults) almost always say that they give more resources (time and money) than they receive. This bias, notwithstanding, both Kohli and Albertini (2007 ) find that support from kin, especially from parents to children and grandchildren, remains a very prominent feature of all Western societies. Only in rural areas where families live in close proximity do we see much evidence of broader networks of kinship support involving a greater share of contact with and assistance from extended kin. Evidence of such involvement is generally more common in Southern and Eastern Europe where levels of co-residence and geographical proximity remain much higher than in the Northwestern nations.

Albertini (2016) provides an excellent, recent review of the growing body of comparative research on intergenerational exchange across nations, based on the first three waves of data from SHARE. His findings reveal a picture of country-level variations based on reports from 17 nations, grouped by regions that also represent different balances of public and private support. Regional differences in the level and intensity of intergenerational exchange appear to reflect longstanding cultural and demographic differences mentioned earlier, but there is little evidence of a close correspondence of kinship patterns to particular welfare regimes.

Within families for all the nations examined, high levels of intergenerational flows occur. Consistent with earlier reports (also largely based on SHARE data), financial assistance by parents to their adult children is relatively common even in countries with strong systems of public support, as occurs in Scandinavia. Assistance (time spent) between parents and their adult children flows in both directions. There is strong evidence that childcare assistance by grandparents is also widespread: in virtually every nation, a majority of grandparents report that they provide assistance though in the Mediterranean region, grandparenthood is more institutionalized, especially among less affluent and educated parents. In the Nordic countries, grandparent care is also common. Where there are supplemented state sponsored institutions to provide childcare, there are higher levels of participation by women in the labor force. There is little evidence that the assistance supplied by family members comes from extended kin (aunts, uncles, cousins, and the like).

In recent study by Nauck, Groepler, and Yi (2017) , levels of kinship contact were contrasted between two Western nations, the United States and Germany, and two Asian countries, Taiwan and China, to examine how Western and Eastern cultural systems influence patterns of home leaving and co-residence. As might be expected, large differences were observed in the timing of leaving home among young adults, but again, the authors found that the results did not fit a simple typology of individualistic vs. collectivistic. Just as Jack Goody (1990) speculated, patterns of kinship across regions are only loosely aligned to broad cultural ideologies. To be sure, cultural and political systems are indeed correlated with kinship arrangements, but there appear to be many more conditions operating to affect the level, intensity, and patterning of kinship bonds.

There appears to be a good deal of commonality in the findings from comparative research on family patterns in the West and, to a much lesser degree, in wealthy nations in Asia ( Furstenberg, 2013 ). First, most of the “action” within families is confined to the conjugal family where a clear and widespread genealogical order exists in the provision of assistance by relatives: spouses and partners give and receive very high levels of time and emotional support to their adult children in conjugal families; financial contributions from parents to their offspring are also very prevalent, but only in rare circumstances do children help their parents out by giving money or significant, material assistance. Time commitments in the form of errands, household help, and social support flow in both directions, although it appears that more support comes from parents than vice versa until late in life.

Assistance in the form of childcare by grandparents is frequent, regardless of region or nation, although it is more intense in Southern than Northwestern Europe ( Aassve, Meroni & Pronzato, 2012 ; Settles et al., 2009 ). Co-residence is more common in Southern and Eastern Europe in large measure because of lower levels of economic development and urbanization. Beyond the conjugal family, there is little evidence to suggest that extended kin play an important role in assistance or care of family members. This last conclusion should perhaps be tempered on methodological grounds. For the most part, researchers have not directly delved into how extended kin participate in providing assistance to their relatives, although results from SHARE suggest that kinship obligations may be circumscribed when it comes to extended kin outside of natal family members. A further qualification is that little if any extent comparative data, address the ceremonial role of kin.

Recent Research on Kinship Relations in the United States: The Conjugal Family System Reconsidered

Comparative research done over the past several decades seems to suggest that the United States resembles the other Anglo-speaking countries and parts of Continental Europe in the range and intensity of kinship bonds. We begin by examining some evidence from the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), the counterpart to SHARE in Europe. Like the results from SHARE, the preponderance of interest related to kinship has focused on intergenerational exchange and, the lessons learned, not surprisingly, resemble findings from the comparative research summarized above.

A recent analysis of HRS data by Margolis and Wright (2017) looking at the flow of intergenerational resources across generational units finds that the vast majority of Americans who are above the age of 50 provide support to children and grandchildren. The burden of obligations is highest among mid-life adults, the so-called sandwich generation, in their 40s and 50s, who often face demands both upward and downward from elderly parents and adult children (and grandchildren). About two out of three older American are part of two or three generational families, and, the great majority of individuals report providing assistance to their children. Conversely, only about five percent say that they have no kin on whom they rely; the proportion rises with the age of the respondent. Predictably, the level of flows are highest when there are three generations, but the vast majority of the elderly both provide (money and time) for their children and/or grandchildren. The ratio of giving to receiving is about two to one, up until age 70 when the intergenerational flows become more even; that is, almost as much help is received from descendants as provided to them by parents. (The reports come from parents or children who are older than 50). This finding echoes the results of intergenerational flows from SHARE reported by Kohli, Albertini, and others.

A huge literature exists in both the United States and other nations with advanced economies on the determinants of patterns of family support across the generations--- when, why, and how parents and adult children (and their children) help each other out through the provision of money, help, and emotional support ( Keene & Batson, 2010 ; Swartz, 2009 ; Silverstein & Giarrusso, 2010 ; Luecher & Pillemer, 1998 ). In recent years, this literature has been advanced both by the growth of nationally representative, longitudinal studies that span across the generations as well as high quality three-generation samples ( Bengtson, 2001 ). It is beyond the scope of this paper to review in any detail this rich and copious literature, the determinants and consequences of intergenerational exchange. Reviews of the findings from two and three generational studies abound, discussing the results of this long tradition of inquiries going back to Rossi and Rossi (1990) (See also, Jackson, Jayokody, & Antonuci, 1996 ; Pilkauskas & Martinson, 2014 ; Birditt et al., 2012 ). I will, however, offer a few observations about this line of research that closely echo the findings from comparative studies discussed in the previous section.

First, the impact of geographical proximity is huge: children who remain near their parents both receive and give more than those who live farther away. When adult children live close to their parents (or parents move to be near their offspring), both may reflect emotional closeness that could affect residential choices as well as need for assistance within the parent-child dyad ( Compton & Pollak, 2009 ).

Second, while gender differences frequently appear in the intergenerational exchange--- women are more active kin keepers---there is some evidence that the significance of gender may be diminishing over time. Still, women are continuing to do the lion’s share of the domestic and care work, but the gendered nature of kinship exchange may be lessening (Oláh, Richter, and Kotowska, 2014; Kahn, McGill, Bianchi, 2011 ; Agree, & Glaser, 2009 ). Third, there appears to be differing patterns of assistance related to social class and ethnic affiliation, but many of these differences are not consistent across studies, suggesting that researchers may have more work to do in unraveling the circumstances that lead to more or less reliance on the family across race/ethnicity and social. But there is general agreement, that patterns of co-residence, material assistance, and social support may be markedly higher within ethnic, and especially recent immigrant communities, and may reveal different patterns by social class ( Kane, 2000 ).

There are reasons to suspect that intergenerational exchanges could become even more intense in the coming decades. As the population ages, it is likely that the situation of the sandwiched, the middle generation, will be more burdened by care duties for elderly parents while they continue to provide assistance to their children. Grandchildren, themselves, might too play a more active role in caring for elder grandparents because they are more likely to be living with their parents.

The age of home leaving in the United States and in most other Western nations has steadily risen with the growth of higher education accompanying a delay of entrance into the labor market. The period of economic dependence on parents has increased markedly in recent decades; the longer period of semi-autonomy among young adults creates a special challenge for future cohorts in balancing cross-generational demands in the conjugal family and its immediate extensions. Moreover, geographical mobility has declined significantly in the past two decades in the United States. An increase in geographical proximity to family could contribute to greater reliance on kin if young people remain closer to their natal households. Finally, a decrease in the generosity of public support after retirement could also alter the patterns currently in place. These changing trends could intensify the flow of time and money across the generations in the near future.

Relations With Kin Outside of the Conjugal Family

I have noted throughout this review that very little attention has been given to patterns of contact and support provided by family members outside the conjugal household and its extension to adult children and their offspring who have moved from the natal household: almost everything we know about kinship relations is confined to the assistance that flows within and across households between parents, children, and grandchildren.

This body of research strongly indicates that the principle of generational order remains a powerful feature of Western family systems that recognizes that family responsibilities flow from marriage and parenthood, concentrating resource flows within the conjugal family system rather than disbursing them across a wider network of kin. It is, therefore, not so surprising that we know relatively little about patterns of contact and exchange among collateral kin such as adult siblings and their children (aunts/uncles, cousins and their descendants). And few studies provide details on the family dealings with in-laws and their extended families though, as we shall see, relations with in-laws appears to be one prominent arena in which kinship interactions take place ( Santos & Levitt, 2007 ; Fingerman, Gilligan, VanderDrift & Pitzer, 2012 ).

There are many sources of data that contain questions on exchanges in the natal family between parents, their adult children, and their grandchildren, such as the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Adults, the Panel Study on Income Dynamics, and ADDHealth. To my knowledge, the only nationally representative study in the United States that has collected data directly on a wide range of kinship contacts, closeness, and assistance in a nationally representative sample is the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), conducted in two waves (1987–88 and 1992–94) at the University of Wisconsin.

The NSFH contains some of the only and most systematic information that we possess on interactions and exchanges from a wider network of kin even though the data is now 30 years old. Most analysis of the NSFH provides information on the exchange of time/services and money across the generations between parents and their children and grandchildren; this information has been widely examined by the research community (See list of publications of NSFH, https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/nsfh/bib.htm#kincontact ). The NSFH also collected information on exchanges with some categories of extended kin, notably siblings, in-laws, and a catchall category of “other kin” that has been examined far less frequently. Only a small amount of the data collected has been examined in published papers.

It is important to keep in mind certain limitations that inevitably restrict the value of demographic and social surveys that provide reports of contact and aid received from kin categories outside the natal family. Concerns have been raised about the quality of the data in social network studies that relied heavily both on the skills and persistence of interviews and the commitment of the respondent to deal with a long series of repetitive questions ( Paik and Sanchagrin, 2013 ).

The NSFH includes several sets of questions about exchanges and communication among potential kin, although the categories of kin of non-residential kin are restricted to: parents, children, siblings, and “other relatives.” Grouped in this latter category are aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, in-laws and more distant relations. Almost certainly, had the interview contained questions that asked explicitly about each category of relationship on each side of the family (tedious though it might be), it might have revealed more contact, exchange, and support from extended kin than is reported in the amorphous grouping of “other relatives.” Only a single set of questions in the first wave of the NSFH provides information among young adults residing with a partner about in-laws and quasi-in-laws (among unmarried partners).

These limitations notwithstanding, the data from the NSFH reveals much greater contact with kin than has generally been assumed from studies that have not explicitly inquired about relations with relatives outside of the nuclear or parental household. Most notably, NSFH data reveals that siblings have frequent contact and close relationships into adulthood although, as might be expected, some variation exists in contact and quality across sibling relationships. Still, more than three quarters counted one or more of their siblings among their closest friends; only one in ten report that they do not get along with one or more of their siblings. Perhaps, this information is censored or idealized, but it still indicates a surprisingly strong bond exists among siblings even in adulthood. By ignoring the interpersonal and ceremonial importance of family bonds that are collateral or outside of the parent/adult child dyad, the importance of kinship ties has not been adequately acknowledged. This conclusion echoes the findings reported earlier from analyses using the International Social Survey showing considerable contact and involvement with relatives outside the household ( Ganjour & Widmer, 2016 ).

In an intriguing analysis, Lynn White (2001) used the NSFH data to examine contact between adult siblings over the entire age span. The proportion of those who have contact with living siblings when they are adults is high; upwards of 50% have reported being in touch on at least a weekly basis or more, in their twenties, and this level remains almost constant over time. Just over half the sample who are 70 or older reports seeing or talking to at least one sibling once a week or more. Exchange of assistance is common among siblings when they are under the age of 30--- especially if they live nearby. Assistance between siblings dips in mid-life, and then rises notably after age 70 especially for those who are in close proximity. While the analysis is based on cross-sectional information in the two waves of the NSFH, it indicates that most adult siblings remain involved and perhaps even become more interdependent in later life. These results are not so surprising, but they reveal that collateral kin ties have been seriously neglected, in part because of the absence of good data (See, Cicirelli, 2013 ).

Given findings revealing high levels of contact, communication, and assistance among adult siblings, it raises a host of questions about whether we have adequately appreciated what the role of kin outside of the immediate family plays in the Western family system. Siblings are close in the “genealogical order;” and, it is hard to imagine that when strong sibling bonds exist--- which appears to be common--- there is not spillover to relations in the next generation. We have paid too little attention to collateral relations that are created through sibling ties, among aunts, uncles and their respective nieces and nephews, and, of course, relations among cousins.

When I conducted a Google search for research on kinship relations among cousins, I discovered that little if anything had been done on this topic: virtually all the references for research about cousins were devoted to variations among “cousin marriages” across the states. In some states this practice is permitted and in others not. Apart from an interest in the legality of marriage between cousins, there has been no attention to how frequently siblings form lasting bonds after childhood (or even during childhood). Yet, there is good reason to suspect that many Americans retain strong ties to one or more cousins in their adult years if we extrapolate from the data on adult sibling bonds in later life. The durability of these ties constitutes a structural feature of Western kinship that deserves some attention, at least in how families are organized as ceremonial and social units.

As I mentioned earlier, a small literature exists on relations among in-laws. In the NSFH, a module of questions asked about the quality of relationships with in-laws though few of the results of this module have appeared in published research findings. The reports from NSFH suggest that relations between in-laws are generally positive and can be emotionally intense--- that is, for marriages and partnerships that are intact. The vast majority reports in the NSFH that they have regular and frequent contact with both parents-in-law and siblings-in-law. Not surprising, the data suggests that in-law contacts are important features of kinship relations in the United States (and probably in other Western nations) that remain unexamined in the literature on the family. White’s (2001) analysis of interactions among siblings over time suggest the possibility that strong bonds might develop among siblings-in-laws; and, indeed the NSFH data point to that result: close to 90% of respondents with in-laws report that they get along well. As was the case among siblings, over half counted one or more of the siblings-in-law as among their closest friends. This finding might surprise some observers of the family, but it is completely consistent with White’s findings on the endurance of sibling ties.

Consistent with these results, the NSFH provided parallel information on the level of closeness with parents-in-law. The vast majority of respondents in the NSFH report positive relationships--- rating them five or more on a scale from 0 to 7--- with their spouse or partner’s parents. Over 70% say that they have good or excellent relations with the parents of the partner. The small literature on the determinants of the quality of relations indicates again that geographical proximity with in-laws is an important predictor of close relations. This finding calls to mind the observation made by George Homans (1951) many years ago: high interaction between two individuals increases “liking” except when it doesn’t!

To summarize from the only source that provides reliable data on kinship ties beyond the nuclear family, the NSFH results indicate that kinship networks are typically wider and more emotionally intense than has previously been acknowledged in the general sociological literature on the American family system. In all likelihood, the sheer difficulty of collecting detailed data on relations with extended kin has led to an under-estimation of their significance in the everyday life of families in the United States and probably more widely in the West.

Collateral kin such as siblings, their partners and children, establish lines of family solidarity and support that are based on horizontal rather than vertical lineage. In a bilateral kinship system such as those existing in the West, where ties are reckoned on both sides of the family, potential kin expand exponentially with each new generation. Still, it remains an open question how family members preserve ties that extend collaterally and incorporate horizontal relations in ceremonial events. Most Americans may not know a “third cousin,” the respective great grandchildren of siblings, but the data from NSFH indicates that many more retain relationships with distal family members including second or third cousins than we might have imagined.

Why should we care about these relationships if they are not the direct source of intimate support and material assistance? In the first place, we do not really know how much exchange actually takes place with extended kin because this information has not been adequately measured. The flow of contact and exchange is thought to be infrequent; however, data from the NSFH suggests that we may have underestimated the level of contact and exchange from more distant kin extrapolating from the findings on siblings and their partners.

The broader kinship system may also provide a range of “weak ties” that are enacted when assistance is needed by family members. At this point, we can say very little about the workings of kinship networks because we don’t really possess data on the scope of interactions and the way that they are used. Kinship connections beyond the natal family may be an important source of information, emotional support, and perhaps even material assistance when families need help.

In an ongoing study of middle income families, participating families mention getting or giving help from aunts, uncles, cousins, and other relatives. Using a cousin’s vacation, accompanying an aunt to the doctor, or giving tutoring to a nephew are the kinds of assistance that appear to be relatively common. A recent study of social networks in Europe reveals that family members constitute about half of personal network members in Switzerland. In Portugal, their share is close to 95% ( Wall, Widmer, Gauthier, Česnuitytė, & Gouveia, 2018 ).

But even if this speculation about the flow of information and assistance turns out to be overstated, there are other good reasons for understanding how kinship operates as a protective and supportive context to family members as they perform certain ceremonial or ritual tasks such as celebrations, weddings, funerals, reunions, and the like. Cultural sociologists have considered family events as important ways of “performing” or “doing” family, but the under-attention to this area of family life is notable. While there is a tradition of research in this area going back to Bossard and Boll (1950) , the significance of family rituals and ceremonial events have not been given its due in scholarly studies of family life.

A recent European collection of writings on this topic edited by Jallinoja and Widmer (2011) makes an effort to correct the impression that extended kin don’t count for very much. This collection of papers picks up on an understudied area in family and kinship, the occasions, rituals, and events that bring families together as a larger social unit. In one of the papers in this volume, Jallinoja examines obituaries showing that listing in death announcements follow the principle of genealogical order, emphasizing the conjugal family, with the spouse/partner accorder priority, followed by children, living parents, and siblings (sometimes including their partners). Related research suggests that this rule operates in accounting for who is present for important celebrations such as Christmas and other holidays though the studies to date are too few to confirm Jallinoja’s observations with any confidence.

A second principle of equity, identified by Jallinoja, operating within the family system, deems that both sides of the family of married individuals are to be represented equally at such occasions as marriages, religious ceremonies for children, and other important family events. Of course, it remains an open question whether and how this principle is in fact enacted in practice. The research on the ceremonial family, as I have noted throughout, is underdeveloped. The principle of equity will figure importantly in the second essay that I am preparing on kinship relations in variant family forms where marriage may not occur.

This is one of many promising areas for future research on the conjugal family system relating to how kinship is practiced in the conjugal family system. There has been far too little attention to important linkages that take place across households of former members such as siblings and their families. As fertility has declined, it is likely that relations among siblings and their families may also be diminishing. However, it is also possible that they may take on added significance in an era when communication and contact has become easier, especially with the advent of social media. In the future, data from these contacts and exchanges may become available.

Research using the Internet may also provide opportunities to develop demographic profiles of kinship networks that have hitherto been beyond the reach of conventional survey research. By sampling individuals who could be asked to provide a complete listing of kin with whom they are in contact, we might be able to construct kinship networks for representative samples that are built from reports collected over time and space. Such data would permit social demographers to inquire about important compositional features of kinship networks that can be examined over time and space. For example, we might want to know how much kinship networks vary by ethnicity, social class, gender preference and the like. It would be no less important to know whether networks themselves are becoming more or less heterogeneous. How are kinship networks changing over historical time and how are they modified throughout the life course. Such questions are currently beyond our grasp; we do not possess the data to answer them. It should also be obvious that it would be extremely useful to be able to compare kinship networks across family forms, a topic that I will return to in the next paper.

The literature that I have reviewed in this essay was mostly limited to the conjugal system, nuclear families formed by marriage. Much of this work flows directly from Parsons’ observations on the functioning of the “isolated nuclear family,” the term he borrowed from anthropology to describe our bilateral system that places emphasis on the conjugal bond and the ties formed by marriage that extend equally to both sides of the family. Intense bonds formed by marriage, parenthood, and grandparenthood continues to serve as the central axis of our kinship system at least so long as marriage occurs, children are born, the parental marriage survives, and the next generation repeats the process. But, as I noted in the beginning of the paper, this set of conditions no longer prevails in many, if not most, American families. Marriage has been the lynchpin of our kinship system, creating a network of ties between families joined together in matrimony. How is kinship created when individuals no longer follow the traditional model of marriage and parenthood?

Leaving aside the important issue of how variant forms of the family construct and enact kinship and how much the form of the family affects both the reckoning of bonds and the flow of resources, I have argued throughout that we require new sources of data that contain more specific information on how Americans, living in all types of families, construct their kin and interact with them both in ceremonial and everyday circumstances. In short, we would make large advances in our understanding of how kinship operates if we developed methods to examine the demography and sociology of kinship in American society. Our exclusive focus on intergenerational ties leaves unexamined a host of important questions on the workings of our family system beyond the confines of the natal unit.

Taking a page from recent work in Europe on the ceremonial significance of kinship, we also need cultural and family sociologists to examine more closely how families is “enacted” both in formal events such as births, union formation, funerals, birthdays, reunions, and occasions when families get together. The decisions that create these events need more careful scrutiny if we are to peer further into the operation of kinship in the United States. The happy news for researchers is that there is a lot of important work to be done.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Martin Kohli, Rachael Margolis, and Eric Widmer for providing thoughtful reviews of an earlier draft of this paper. Appreciation also goes to Shannon Crane for her excellent editorial assistance.

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• Introduction
• The evolution of family forms
• Personhood, cohesion, and the “matrilineal puzzle”
• Critiques of descent theory

Reciprocity, incest, and the transition from “nature” to “culture”

Elementary structures, critiques of alliance theory.

• Kinship terminology
• Historical materialism and instrumentality
• Households, residence rules, and house societies
• Culturalist accounts
• Feminist and gendered approaches to kinship
• Challenging the conceptual basis of kinship
• Reproductive technologies, social innovation, and the future of kinship studies

Alliance theory

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While British social anthropologists were focused on the existence of social rules and the ways in which members of different societies acted within a given framework of ideas and categories, French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss had a very different starting point. His work was motivated by the question of how arbitrary social categories (such as those within kinship, race , or class ) had originated. He was also concerned with explaining their apparent compulsory quality, or presence within the “natural order,” in societies. In The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Lévi-Strauss turned to kinship to try to answer these questions. His model became known as the alliance theory of kinship.

Profoundly influenced by the work of Marcel Mauss on the central role of reciprocal gift giving in “primitive” societies, Lévi-Strauss held that the transition from the animal world of “nature” to the human one of “culture” was accomplished through the medium of exchange: it was in the act of giving that the category of the self in opposition to another, or of one’s own group to another group, was actually constituted . Thus, the first social categories originated not in the realm of ideas but through the exchange of gifts .

Lévi-Strauss suggested that, because women ’s fertility is necessary to the reproduction of the group, women are the “supreme gift.” With no fair return for a woman except another woman, they must have been reciprocally exchanged rather than simply given away. The simplest form of exchange in this schema involved men exchanging their sisters. According to Lévi-Strauss, this set up a distinction between those who give wives (“wife givers”) and those who receive them (“wife takers”), thus creating the first kinship categories. Later, more-complex forms of exchange marriage were developed.

But what had encouraged this notional exchange of women in the first place? According to Lévi-Strauss, two factors obtained: the principle of reciprocity and the incest taboo. He suggested that the principle of reciprocity , essentially the recognition that gifts set up a series of mutual obligations between those who give and receive them, lies at the heart of human culture . Because women were unique in value, reciprocity ensured that men who gave their sisters away in marriage would in turn receive the sister (or sisters) of one or more other men.

Lévi-Strauss invoked the incest taboo as the second condition upon which the exchange of women was based, noting that it had the peculiar status of being well-documented as both a universal human phenomenon and one in which specific forms were culturally variable. That is, every culture proscribed sexual relations between some kin categories, but the particular categories of kin with whom sexual relations were prohibited varied from one culture to the next. He posited that, in being not only universal but also culturally variable, incest taboos marked humanity’s transition from “nature” to “culture.”

Most anthropologists viewed incest taboos as negative prohibitions that had a biological basis (to prevent the inheritance of negative genetic traits) or reflected a particular nexus of cultural rules about marriage. In contrast, Lévi-Strauss saw incest taboos as positive injunctions to marry outside the group. These “positive marriage rules,” which state that a spouse must be from a certain social category, were the titular “elementary structures” in The Elementary Structures of Kinship .

Within sets of elementary structures (or positive rules), Lévi-Strauss made a further distinction between systems of “restricted exchange” and those of “generalized exchange.” Restricted exchange involved just two groups of men exchanging women (for example, their sisters). Here the reciprocity was direct and immediate. Generalized exchange involved three or more groups exchanging women in one direction (from group A to group B to group C and back to A). Here exchange was delayed and indirect but held out greater possibilities in terms of the scale and number of groups involved.

For Lévi-Strauss, positive marriage rules combined with the rules of reciprocity as the basis for a general theory of kinship that emphasized exchange as the central principle of kinship and indeed of “man’s” break from nature. He subsumed relations of consanguinity (blood ties) to those of affinity (marriage): whereas British structural functionalists saw descent ties—based on filial relations within the group—as paramount in kinship, the relations between groups had priority in Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist analysis. He also held that affinal relations framed the most basic and irreducible unit of kinship—what he called the “atom of kinship.” Where descent theorists defined a set of parents and children as the core of kinship relations, Lévi-Strauss defined it as a husband and wife, their son, and the wife’s brother. The presence of the wife’s brother signified the importance of marriage as a relation of exchange between men rather than a mechanism concerned only with ensuring reproduction.

Lévi-Strauss’s work demonstrated that human kinship was fundamentally cultural. Originally he had intended to proceed to an analysis of “complex structures” (those without positive marriage rules). There, he argued, the same principles of exchange and reciprocity were present but were implicit and hidden rather than explicit. In fact, he never completed this work but instead went on to a monumental study of myth . Anthropologists in France, however, have pursued Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of complex and “semi-complex” systems.

As already indicated, Lévi-Strauss’s theories placed him in opposition to anthropologists who saw kinship as based on descent rather than marriage. This was not just a matter of whether consanguineal or affinal relations had logical priority. There was a fundamental difference between the analytical projects in which each of these groups of anthropologists were engaged. While structural functionalists in Britain and elsewhere aimed to describe the rules of kinship operating in particular societies, Lévi-Strauss was seeking to understand the origin of categories and thereby of human culture.

A common criticism of both descent theory and alliance theory was that they had a strong tendency to view kinship in normative terms, ignoring the variations of gender and of different social actors and omitting the experiential and emotional sides of kinship. Feminist anthropologists and others inveighed against Lévi-Strauss and other alliance theorists for their objectification of women. Other critiques addressed both theories’ androcentrism, their exclusive concern with “primitive” cultures , and their deficiencies in the analysis of residence and other aspects of kinship.

Despite these problems, Lévi-Strauss left a clear and enduring mark on kinship studies. The fundamental importance of treating marriage as an exchange between groups eventually became a more or less uncontroversial tenet within anthropology . Particularly in New Guinea , Indonesia, and South America—regions where it was difficult to discern descent groups operating in the manner described by the classic models—exchange seemed to be the principle that unlocked a new way of understanding social life.

Kinship and Foster Caregivers' Perspectives on the Need to Tailor Parenting Programs: A Qualitative Study

• Elizabeth Hamik Cincinnati Children's Hospital
• Anne Berset General and Community Pediatrics, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0715-3387
• Katie Nause Behavioral Medicine and Clinical Psychology, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7027-9017
• Mary Greiner General and Community Pediatrics, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center & Department of Pediatrics, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine
• Sarah Beal Behavioral Medicine and Clinical Psychology & General and Community Pediatrics, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center; Department of Pediatrics, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7223-0070

Children in foster care are more likely to express behavior problems that disrupt their relationships with caregivers and impact their ability to successfully engage in social interactions. Simultaneously, services designed to address behavior problems are often not delivered until problems emerge, contributing to increased risk for placement disruptions and more behavior challenges. Prevention programs designed to reduce behavior problems through enhanced parent-child relationships have robust evidence to support effectiveness, but many are not tailored for foster and kinship care. The purpose of this study was to describe the perspectives of foster and kinship caregivers about their experience receiving a prevention program designed for traditional parent-child dyads, The Chicago Parent Program. Five caregivers (3 females, 2 males), including 3 kinship and 2 licensed foster caregivers, completed 11 sessions prior to an interview to discuss their perspectives and how the intervention influenced their perceptions, skills, stress, and observations of disruptive and problematic behaviors with the children in their care. Caregivers reported perspectives that aligned with three general themes: Aspects of content generalizable to foster and kinship care, Implementation and structure improvements, and Content that required tailoring for foster and kinship care contexts. These findings point to the important need to tailor parenting programs for specific sub-groups of caregivers to ensure services are inclusive, available, and accessible to families of children who are most likely to benefit from these programs and services.

Copyright (c) 2024 Elizabeth Hamik, Anne Berset, Katie Nause, Mary Greiner, Sarah Beal

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

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