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Genes shared through common ancestry are among the oldest social bonds. Despite these ancient roots, humans often co-opt the psychology of genetic relatedness and extend it to genetically unrelated others through culturally-acquired kinship systems. We investigate how genealogical relatedness and kinship norms might mutually support or oppose each other within a known kin network in Yasawa, Fiji. Yasawans' reliance on intensive, kin-based cooperation for daily life makes Yasawan kinship an interesting test case to compare the effects of genealogy and kinship norms. Confirming qualitative ethnographic claims, we find that Yasawan kin terms can be described in two dimensions of respect/closeness and joking/authority. Individual players use different strategies for genealogical relatives and non-relatives by making economic game choices that are increasingly beneficial to partners who share a higher percentage of genes through common ancestry. However, pairs of players are most successful in coordinating their game choices despite conflicting self-interests based upon kinship norms relevant to hierarchy. Thus, while genealogical relatedness may boost generosity, the extra behavioral structuring from kinship norms facilitates more productive but difficult coordinated action even when communication is not possible.

This article examines female protagonists in Rabindranath Tagore’s stories and novellas – specifically Charu (A Broken Nest, 1901), Mrinal (The Wife’s Letter, 1914), Kamala (Musalmani, 1941), Anila (House Number 1, 1917), Chandara (Punishment, 1893) and Boshtomi (Devotee, 1916) – from a social anthropological viewpoint, focusing on gender and time-based kinship relations. Here, kinship is defined as an extension of familial relationships to the community (common ethnic-social life, locality and religion) in such a way as to achieve progressively higher levels of social integration and extensive social networks through marriage alliances and lines of descent. Studying how the characters placed the universality of family and kinship structures into question, I argue that parameters of kinship organisation need to be redefined, with plurality and difference as the basis of inquiry rather than universality.

As Indian women's rights organizations address violence against women, they rely heavily on mediation practices such as family counseling. At one counseling center in Jaipur, Rajasthan, family counselors operated in an environment saturated with transnational discourse about human rights and gendered violence. Yet counselors addressed household harm through arguments about kin-based care and interdependence, referred to as seva. Through their discussions of seva, counselors challenge scholarly assumptions about an insurmountable opposition between the demands of kinship and women's rights as autonomous subjects. Instead of presenting independence as a solution to disordered homes, they reordered household dependencies, subtly reworking ideologies of patriarchal kinship. Via ethnographic attention to the complex connections between kinship, care, and interdependence in counseling, I demonstrate the central role of kinship in localizing transnational arguments about rights. [kinship, care, dependence, gender, domestic violence, India]

Kinship systems cannot be analysed as straightforward translations of the ‘facts of nature’ when those facts are limited to the production of a child by a heterosexual couple. Based upon analyses of three New Guinea societies (Gimi, Daribi, and Iatmul), I suggest that kinship systems take account – often by denying – certain ‘facts’ of human reproduction when those facts are extended beyond coitus and parturition to include both the very long period of infantile dependence upon one significant caregiver (always the mother in the societies in question and nearly universally) and the subsequent requirement for the child to be extracted from a dyadic maternal universe. Separation from mother is as critical to the survival and development of the individual as is the original prolonged and intense attachment to her. The question, then, is not whether indigenous peoples accurately understand coitus and conception – they do – but rather the ways in which they manipulate that knowledge in rules and rites of kinship in order to manage the growth and development of a child long after parturition. Rules of kinship and social relations neither ignore nor exist apart from theories of procreation as many anthropologists now claim. Rather, it is precisely because theories of procreation indicate and idealise the flow of bodily substance during coitus and pregnancy that they serve as organisational premises for social relations. The fact that kinship is a symbolic construction does not mean that it is wholly ideological nor, like a language, free to vary in ways that are arbitrary and unconnected to the ‘facts of life’ as Westerners understand them. Even when interlocutors openly deny such understanding and knowledge, especially of the male role in coitus and conception, evidence to the contrary is abundantly provided in myth, ritual, and indigenous theories of procreation. What kinship systems often do show, however, is a strategic denial of the role of the mother who, upon deeper understanding of indigenous concepts of procreation, turns out to be a ‘sterile vessel’ or without substantial contribution to her child. I illustrate this premise by extending earlier analyses of Gimi kinship and reexamining certain materials on neighbouring Daribi provided by Roy Wagner and on Iatmul peoples of the Sepik River as originally described in Naven by Gregory Bateson eighty years ago.

This article complicates the idea that lesbian and gay kinship is based primarily on friendship, voluntarism and being free from duty and obligation. It also offers a more nuanced understanding of wills as a rich source of evidence for making claims about kinship, family and relationships. It analyses conversations about will-writing with fifteen older lesbians and gay men, taken from interviews which formed part of a wider socio-legal study on the intersection of ageing, gender and sexuality (Westwood in Ageing, Gender and Sexuality: equality in later life. PhD thesis, School of Law, University of Keele, UK, 2015). The analysis identifies a wide range of kinship formations and composition going beyond “family of choice” narratives, and also both connections and disconnections between ties of love and affection and disposal of assets in wills. Participants’ will-writing reflected four types of prioritisation: prioritising children; prioritising friends; prioritising siblings; mixed priorities. In contrast with accounts of “families of choice” as being duty-free, a sense of duty, especially towards biological family members, was evident in a number of interviews. I suggest that wills can sometimes be a rich source of evidence about kinship, but only when analysis takes into account the complexities and contingencies which can be involved.

This article deals with the notion of equality in Louis Dumont’s work, specifically relative to ideology and sex distinction in kinship terminology. It provides a new reading of his writings on kinship, analyzing his discussion of South Indian terminology and marriage, the contrasting value of affinity and consanguinity in caste society, and equality of the sexes. Dumont’s works on kinship are used to open a comparative examination of sex distinction in kinship terminology. This article seeks to extend this analysis of equality and hierarchy in kinship to other societies and ideologies, in order to explore the applicability of this approach to understanding of contemporary transformations in kinship relationships.

Kinship has been an “essentially contested concept” in social and cultural anthropology. Nevertheless, linguistic and anthropological linguistic studies of kinship terminologies, grammar, and pragmatics have developed in parallel with anthropological ones. Lacking, however, is a broad overview of the range of linguistic variation across languages that would build a bridge between the linguistics and anthropology of kinship. Toward that end, this article explores the role of language in the constitution of kinship. It asks, on what linguistic resources do people of different cultures and languages draw in order to constitute kinship as an institution?

This article uses the analytical tool of divine kinship to explore political charisma across Indian and Venezuelan democratic social revolutions. In both contexts, charismatic elected political leaders build their image of strength and action on a wide repertoire of cultural and religious resources that are legitimated by divine kinship. The juxtaposition of the Indian and Venezuelan political ethnographies shows how charismatic kinship inflects lived understandings of popular sovereignty and opens up spaces for holding personality politics accountable. © Stichting Focaal and Berghahn Books.

This article argues that kinship terminologies are best studied in their full linguistic context; the data should be collected from naturally occurring conversation rather than elicited with frames, and recognition must be given to the fact that people choose which expressions to use. Other means are available for talking to or about kin: in any language there are many ways of referring to people. These include the use of kin terms, names, nicknames, titles and pronouns. These 'social deictic' terms are used in different social contexts. Analysis of the context shows the inadequacy of the address/reference distinction. However, the connexions between the choice of linguistic means and the social context are central to social anthropology, so new approaches must be sought. A Mambila transcript is examined, and some suggestions are made as to how a large body of conversational data could be approached in order to analyse the social deictic terms employed. The central problem for the student is to see his kinship terminology as a definite part of the dynamism of kinship relations, to determine how far the separation and combination of relatives under linguistic labels can be correlated with other sociological phenomena (Firth 1936: 226).

Traditional human societies are organised around kinship, and use kinship networks to generate large scale community projects. This is made possible by a combination of linguistic kin recognition, a uniquely human trait, which is mediated by the reliability of kin as collaborators. When effective fertility falls, this results in two simultaneous effects on social networks: there are fewer kin that can be relied on, and the limiting effect of the local kin-clustering becomes stronger. To capture this phenomenon, we used a model of kinship lineages to build populations with a range of fertility levels combined with a behavioural synchrony model to measure the efficiency of collective action generated on kin networks within populations. Our findings suggest that, whenever effective cooperation depends on kinship, falling fertility creates a crisis when it results in too few kin to join the community project. We conclude that, when societies transition to small effective kin networks, due to falling fertility, increased relative distance to kin due to urbanisation or high mortality due to war or epidemics, they will be able to remain socially cohesive only if they replace disappearing kin networks with quasi-kin alternatives based on membership of guilds or clubs.

Ethnographic research amongst Sinhala Buddhists in community and clinical settings in the Madampe Division, northwest Sri Lanka, suggests that local understandings and practices of suicidal behaviour reflect the kinship structure. In particular, acts of self-harm and self-inflicted death arise in response to the breaking of core kinship rights, duties and obligations, or as a challenge to inflexibility or contradictions within the system. In either case, the morality of kinship is closely associated with the causes of suicidal behaviour, as the ‘inevitability’ or ‘evitability’ of kin relationships is negotiated and lived in practice. This article analyses how local political economies give rise to particular kinship and moral conditions, with special attention paid to those between household (gē) members and brothers-in-law (massinā).

This article discusses kinship practices in connection with death and mourning. It argues that kinship is an ambiguous and contingent concept, and that rituals done in connection with death and mourning have consequences for how people are acknowledged as bereaved. The discussion is based on data from a Swedish study of bereavement. Besides evincing the salience in death practices of a notion of kinship based on conjugal relations and blood ties, the results of analyses of participant observations in a grief group and in-depth interviews with gay widowers reveal that the dominant kinship norm both constrains and enables differing positions as primary mourners. Drawing on Judith Butler and discourse theory, the study shows that claiming a position as bereaved can entail struggles concerning acknowledgment of kinship, and that examples of denunciation simultaneously stand out as resistance and subversion. To avoid marginalizing prospective mourners, it is important to be aware of how these practices of kins...

In many traditional mythologies, kinship constitutes the privileged idiom of both unity and diversity in the cosmos. In "post-mythological" thought, categories logically conceived attempt to take over the cosmic role of kinship. I compare two accounts of the nature and genesis of categories—those by Durkheim and Mauss on one hand, and by Lakoff and Johnson on the other. Neither account severs ties with mythology or kinship; moreover, the structure of the category, like kinship, offers a mode of projecting the human as the cosmic. To the long-standing anthropological concern with the ways in which humans impose their diverse categories on the world, we should add a concern with the ways category-theorists impose their diverse worlds on the category.

The study examines popular politics in Damascus during the 1830s with a focus on kinship and other social categories that served as bases for political action. It is based on a close reading of one text, an anonymous Arabic chronicle known as ‘Historical Memoirs’ (Mudhakkirāt tārīkhiyya), which is analysed as a repertoire of contemporary social and political concepts. This analysis reveals an ideology of ‘localist’ resistance against the centralising state and its ‘loyalist’ allies in Damascus. Kinship played an important role in this struggle on the social plane (e.g. by using family networks for political ends) as well as on the cultural plane (e.g. through the use of kinship metaphors or through criticism of kinship ties in politics). It is concluded that the function of kinship in Damascene politics can only be understood in the context of other social categories such as factionalism, religious affiliation, class and ethnicity. ☆ An earlier version of this paper was presented in the Ottoman Urban Stud...

Kinship relations in Upernavik and Nuuk are created through genealogy, consanguinity, affinity, adoption, naming, friendship, and between colleagues. Functions, organization, structure and roles of kinship in towns can be utilized in many different ways. The basic ideology for kinsmen is the expectation that you agree on moral and mutual obligations such as (1) sharing, (2) naming, (3) adoption and (4) friendship. For decades there have been predictions of the disappearance of the traditional family in Greenland. Modern civilization, industrialization and urbanization have been seen as factors destructive of kinship and family network. However, family and kinship is still an important factor for many people in Greenland, and it remains a key unit and institution in Greenland.

Concept of a ‘kin-based society’ relies on the assumption that, in stateless societies, kinship served as a fundamental and sufficient principle of social and political organization. Developed within the evolutionary paradigm, this concept has acquired different forms during the discipline’s history, depending on the theoretical orientation of various anthropologists and their understanding of the notion of ‘kinship’. Speaking from significantly different theoretical positions, anthropologists ranging from Rivers to Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, to Evans-Pritchard, Fortes and Levi-Strauss, all maintained that kinship formed a basis of social organization, although they did not always agree on the definition of the concept and the type of kinship relations that had this special quality of integrating and organizing the whole of society. The debates were primarily about whether it was consanguinity or affinity that served as a fundamental factor of forming and reproducing social relations. As modern anthropology rejects the idea that kinship relations can form the basis for social, economic and political integration in any type of society, including those without the state, class or caste system, this article considers the assumptions underpinning the construction of the concept witch for long played such an important role in the discipline’s knowledge but later came to be seriously challenged.

This article observes the ways in which the law mediated kinship relations in early modern England in three contexts: inheritance, marital property law, and provisions for the financially distressed. An enquiry into statutory law adopted during the period indicates that Parliament was not active in legislating in the area of family law. The courts, however, were actively involved in determining the validity of property settlements, thereby setting their temporal bounds. Both the jurisprudence and the settlements themselves illustrate that families became more interested in providing maintenance within the nuclear family (for children and widows) than they were in fostering patrilineal continuity. Likewise, an obligation to support financially needy kin was required from only a relatively small universe of family members.

Kath Weston's highly-acclaimed analysis of gay kinship is examined in the light of the old kinship studies, especially the notion of focality. The verdict is quite contrary to Weston's, viz. that gay kinship and the idea of gay families are structural derivatives of heterosexual kinship and heterosexual families. Weston's work is shown to be part of a larger collectivist project in kinship theory in which key concerns in semantic theory are ignored.

This review considers four recent works on in vitro fertilization; human egg donation; the relation among family, kinship and nature; genetic databases, and medical research. Assisted reproductive technology has increasingly become a tool for the artificial production of body parts. Anthropology is reformulating kinship and family theories, taking into account their relationship with biology (in the strict sense of body) and technology as primary ‘‘agents’’ of reproduction and the socio-cultural constitution of selves.

This article builds on sociological accounts of the negotiated, creative character of kinship and on previous studies of children's involvement in family life to ask how children actively create and define kinship and relatedness. Drawing on data from a qualitative study with children aged 7—12 in the north of England, the authors identify five interconnected ways in which children made sense of kinship. They explore how children understood genealogical kinship conventions, creatively deployed or interpreted kin terms, and defined some unrelated others as `like family'. The interplay between children's creative agency and adults' involvement in children's kinship is considered.

Kinship is a fundamental component of human sociality influencing a range of behaviors including altruism, aggression, and mating. Though a central focus in psychology’s neighboring disciplines, kinship has been largely neglected within psychology. An illustrative example ‐ and the focus here ‐ is research on social categorization. Researchers investigating the categories into which our mind carves the social world have focused primarily on sex, age, and race. Here we present evidence that kinship belongs in the family of fundamental social categories. In a series of experiments using a memory confusion paradigm, we show that participants implicitly encode the kinship relations of social targets and do so to the same extent as sex and age, two previously established robust dimensions of social categorization. The functional framework applied here provides useful guide-rails for investigating how the human mind naturally parses the social world, and, more broadly, helps unite psychology with its neighboring disciplines in which kinship is treated as an important conceptual tool. Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

From a cultural-historical perspective, nature and nurture (and thus education) are contested concepts. The paper focuses on the nature/nurture debate in the work of William Shakespeare (influenced by Montaigne) and in the Romantic tradition (evidenced by Rousseau and Wordsworth), and argues that while our Romantic inheritance (still highly influential in education) problematises nurture, it tends to mystify nature. Given that conceptions of nature are culturally driven, there is an urgent educational challenge to problematise nature as well as nurture.

This article uses the examples of the `kinship consequences'of assisted conception, the contemporary enthusiasm for tracing family histories, and a more general interest in family resemblances to argue that there is a contemporary fascination with kinship which existing sociological and anthropological theory do not entirely explain. It proposes a conceptual framework for understanding what is both distinctive and fascinating about kinship, based on four dimensions of affinity: fixed affinities, negotiated and creative affinities, ethereal affinities and sensory affinities. These are dimensions where kinship is engaged with, defined, known and expressed. Collectively, these are referred to as`tangible'affinities, not because they are all literally tangible but because of their resonance in lived experience and their vivid and palpable (or almost palpable) character.

Reciprocity is central to Cubans’ negotiation of their kin and gender relations. Cubans enact and expect reciprocity in the course of everyday practices of care that create and reproduce family and love relations. Care also plays a central role in the state ideology through the socialist idea of lifetime nurture. However, both individuals’ caring practices and the state care vary considerably from one moment to another. This chapter introduces the notion of dialectics of care as a way to understand the shifting interaction between individuals’ caring practices and state nurture over the life cycle. Over time, when engaged in mutual care, various social actors become conceptualized through kinship idioms by both individuals and the state discourse. Kinship thereby provides Cubans a general idiom for social relations.

In Islamic law, breastfeeding institutes a type of kinship relation (ridā‘, ‘milk kinship’), historically a medium for complex social and political networks in the Middle East, although of diminished frequency in modern times. My research focuses on Islamic Middle Eastern reactions to new reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation: for Muslim religious specialists, milk kinship provides a way of thinking through and resolving the ethical dilemmas of the use of donor eggs and surrogacy arrangements. Rather than disappearing under modernity, then, milk kinship endures as a resource for the mediation of social relations and intellectual challenges.

Kinship has cast such a long shadow over anthropological analysis that students who have never confronted its more technical aspects still profess boredom with the topic and relief that they do not have to deal with it. But deal with it, surprisingly, they do-in a technically less demanding guise, to be sure-through the more fashionable medium of other topics that have become considerably more central to the discipline: nationalism, gender, warfare, bio-ethics, the ethnography of science, transnational mobility, memory and the uses of history. The technical virtuosity of kinship analysis has largely passed from the scene; what remains is a cluster of basic principles-the importance of the nuclear family, the use of nuclear family terms in nationalistic rhetoric, correlations of inheritance rules with kinship structure, and the expectation that kinship should ideally be a major source of affect and cooperation-that barely seem to need analysis and that seem, to a very large extent, immediately comprehensible even to those who are only familiar with West European models of the relationships thus grouped together. But are these principles really so transparent? Kinship-rather than kinship systems-has become a global phenomenon, in which surface homogeneity and an apparent reduction in complexity may nonetheless mask considerable differences in use and interpretation. We can see the implications of this expansion especially well in the subtly contrasted but mutually complementary models of world diplomacy that Eleana Kim and Monica Konrad offer here in their respective essays on international adoption and the negotiation of biomedical knowledge; Konrad offers an especially subtle linkage between ideologies of shared (and exclusive) substance that characterize local kin groups on the one hand and the ethical and "diplomatic" aspects of transporting biomedical knowledge across the borders of nation-states on the other. The papers grouped together in this issue of Anthropological Quarterly indeed collectively illustrate both the persistence of kinship as a strong organizing principle of ramified relationships extending far beyond the face-to-face communities of anthropological yore and beyond the strongly Eurocentric bias, the latter being especially evident in the almost exclusive emphasis on the nuclear family and a rhetoric of parity between matrilateral and patrilateral kin that masks a continuing agnatic emphasis. This Eurocentrism now informs the extended (some would say metaphorical or at least metonymie) elaborations of local "moral communities" (Evans-Pritchard 1940; Campbell 1964) or, more conceptually, "moral worlds" (Kleinman 2006: 219) that we encounter in the rhetoric of most nation-states today. Imperceptibly, it seems, kinship, routed from the scenes of its computational glories, has insidiously slipped back everywhere, and its channels are numerous: from transnational migrations (Ho 2006; Watson 2005) to artificial insemination and the nationstate (Kahn 2000), kinship-in-general has clearly morphed into something still vital and important. Truth to tell, the capacity for such metaphorization (or metonymie extension) was always present; its lack of visibility is a direct consequence of a very unfortunate loss of vision, in which the relevance of older ethnographies to current concerns appears to have largely vanished. Yet we do not have to look far in order to recuperate the loss. The patrilineal idiom of the Bosnian and Kosovo wars builds on earlier models of patrilineal clan identity (see Herzfeld 1997; cf. Hammel 1968), anthropologically foreshadowed in Evans-Pritchard's (1940: 237-238) insistence that patriliny among the Nuer was as much a political idiom as a literal statement of genealogy; he subsequently extended this insight directly to the historical emergence of statehood in Libya, showing how it shaped the response to external pressure and particularly the impact of colonialism (Evans-Pritchard 1949). …

James D. Faubion (ed.) The Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. 277 pp. This is a book about the ethics of affect as manifested in kinship relations. James Faubion asked a number of one-time doctoral students of anthropology at Rice University (Texas) and two like-minded colleagues to write essays about their own personal experiences of kinship. The resulting collection is very welcome as it not only constitutes an interesting read in its own right but is also a contribution for the present renewal of debates in the anthropology of kinship. Each of the contributors chose to focus on some aspect of their own kinship history which they somehow problematized. The result is a number of fascinating essays dealing with what one might call the margins of kinship:1 forgotten' relatives, manipulations of the law of kinship, clandestine "adoptions," love and hate, class and kinship, sibling cooperation and rivalry, sexual preference and legal family, etc., all accumulate to bring out a marvellously varied picture of middle-class kinship in the United States. Indeed, although a number of contributors expound interestingly on their family histories in diverse places of origin around the world (Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Trinidad), what they tell us are stories of kinship as "lived in America." As a matter of fact, whilst writing their accounts, most of the contributors not born in the United States were undertaking a move to permanent residence there-to use Nityanand Deckha's words, they were becoming "new citizens of the West" (153). The book resonates with this sense of America as the land of success and liberation which merges with the authors' own pride in their individual success within academia as doctoral students. Karim, for example, tells us of her "diasporic urge to remake myself into a subject who transcended kinship ties and was not bound by local and national habits and prejudices-a cosmopolitan subject." (118) Reddy, Deckha and Youngblood all make similar statements. Nevertheless, their location is decidedly in North America, which belies their "cosmopolitanism." Indeed, not all venues and not all classes can grant the aura of cosmopolitan subjecthood. Cosmopolitanism is a paradoxically local privilege that only some can exercise when they are accepted by certain countries and belong to certain classes. As Susan Ossman puts it elsewhere, "The abstract, far-sighted nature of this cosmopolitan vision can easily lead us to ignore the actual movements of people" (2006: 561). In the essays, the logic of marginality2 is put to work wonderfully to reveal both the relation between kinship and other aspects of social life and the relation between people's discursive practices and those aspects of their lives which they "know and share" but which they "normally" have no means to speak of. Clearly, judging from the emotional depth of the accounts, for every single one of the contributors, the exercise came to have a self-revelatory, exutorial function. Thus, the book is both a good read and a comment on how anthropological examination can breakthrough convention. Denise Youngblood (presently editor at CountryWatch, Houston) writes an essay about her family background in Trinidad, dealing mostly with the issue of marriage across race and its relation to ethnicity, nation, and color. She shows us how "the ideology of cosmopolitanism in Trinidad relates to the production of both the family and the nation" (48). She turns interestingly to Bourdieu's notion of "symbolic capital" to show how marital and extra-marital sexual relations were used to produce family in a context where, due to the "dramatic boom and bust cycles" which characterize Trinidad's economic history, wealth was seen as rather transient. According to her account, "intermarriage"3 is actually encouraged in Trinidad, as it produces a "hybrid" identity which furthers the nation's sense of itself as "cosmopolitan. …

This paper reports the results of a study of the Kazakh kinship structure, classification and the socio-cultural functions of the Kazakh kinship terms. The Kazakhs have developed at first glance very complex and many branched kinship bonds with the moral codes, family relationship etiquette, the patterns of rights , duties and responsibilities thus being one of the strongest binding forces. The first and foremost principle of the Kazakh kinship system is the principle of “the seven ancestors”-a particular kind of chain of parent-child links between ancestors and descendants. The principle of 7 ancestors defines marriage rules, sex regulation, and incest taboo. For Kazakhs kinship was one of the strongest survival strategies thanks to which they could save integrity of their country. Every terminologically identified kinship category is associated with a culturally distinctive pattern of behavior which should be followed in relation to EGO.

In the past few decades there has been a re-thinking about kinship and family relations across several disciplines. Kinship relations are now regarded more as active participation than static categories, always part of the cultural context of period and place. The Western emphasis on vertical relationships of parent and child has neglected the wider web of kinship, especially relations among siblings. Historians are increasingly aware of the greater saliency of wider kin in the 18th and 19th century shift to capitalist economic development, especially in an era of large families. These general issues are examined in the case of the upper middle class, Evangelical Gladstone family, particularly William Ewart's relationships with his older sister, Anne, and younger sister, Helen. Here the development of gender identity and the effect of age and birth order are highlighted within the intensely religious and moral culture of 19th century England.

This introduction is a critical response to claims made about the demise and revival of the sub-discipline of kinship studies. Contemporary calls to a reclaimed and revitalised area rest, ironically, on a misplaced concentration on the preoccupations of dominant cultures, one of the grounds used to discard kinship in the past. It is argued that many of the issues debated up to the 1970s in the domain of kinship involve more general problems such as arguments about structure and process, gender and biology and the way in which indigenous categories are to be apprehended and accommodated in a genuinely comparative discipline. The case is also made that kinship's demise is largely an Anglocentric phenomenon and that the continuing importance of many of the issues debated in the past, such as the relationship between people and land and its local ideological representations and global consequences, make knowledge of kinship's more exotic manifestations vital to contemporary graduates. The final section introduces the papers in the volume, each of which addresses, in a contemporary and critical way, an area that was important to previous kinship debates and remains of interest in the present.

The issue of whether formal kinship structures and sentiments reflect the reality of social relations was of particular concern to specialists at the height of the kinship debates in the 1960s and 1970s, as it continues to be in some contemporary studies. So too, the classifications ‘patrilineal’ or ‘matrilineal’ have clearly been shown to be problematic given that there are multiple levels of discourse and relational and ideational realities in any given society. For many contemporary kinship specialists in fact no simple correlation can be made between type of descent system and actual social relations, especially relations between men and women. However, some anthropologists continue to argue that patrilineal kinship systems are somehow indicative of control or domination by men or, put inversely, of women's lack of power and authority. It is argued in this paper that even where the formal kinship structures and ideological discourses are dominated by agnation as appears to be the case in south Slav societies generally, and Macedonian in particular, this is not automatically mirrored in gender relations between men and women. In short, there is a long leap from patriliny to patriarchy.

This article introduces chimerism and mosaicism as two recent scientific ‘discoveries’ that present challenges to western heteronormative notions of kinship. Chimerism, in the form of xenotransplantation, already demands a rethinking of traditional boundaries between what is considered ‘kin’ and ‘non-kin’. Recent biological studies describing chimerism as two genetically distinct cell lines in one organism not caused by transplantation, invites further questions regarding the stability of kinship ideology. The aim of the article is to argue, with anthropologists and feminist science studies scholars, that the western understanding of kinship relies upon a problematic use of ‘nature’, and that this dependence necessarily produces shifting and contradictory definitions of kinship.

This paper focuses upon changes that have occurred in the use of metaphors and ideologies of kinship in post socialist Mongolia. Three major kinship metaphors and symbols (bone, blood and flesh), which were used historically and are now in the process of being transformed, are examined. It also looks at various types of non-kin relations that imitate kinship. Then I outline the ways in which the new metaphors of ‘blood’ are involved in the discourse of ethnicity among the Halh Mongols.

Kinship used to be described as what anthropologists do. Today, many might well say that it is what anthropologists do not do. One possible explanation is that the notion of kinship fell off anthropology's radar due to the criticisms raised by Needham and Schneider among others, which supposedly demonstrated that kinship is not a sound theoretical concept. Drawing inspiration from epidemiological approaches to cultural phenomena, this article aims to enrich this explanation. Kinship became an unattractive theoretical concept in the subculture of anthropology not simply because of problems with kinship theory per se, but also on account of fundamental changes in the very conception of anthropological knowledge and the impact of these changes on the personal identity of anthropologists.

This paper explores the role and importance of kinship within the lives of 14 working class women as they seek to make sense of motherhood and their own self-identity as a young mother. Within late modernity, numerous discourses suggest that kin networks and the role and importance of kinship are in decline as ‘the family’ changes and adapts. Indeed, the idea of extended family support and networking is frequently viewed as a historically cozy image rather than an everyday reality as we enter the twenty-first century. However, this paper demonstrates that the situation is far from straightforward. The young mothers' discourses and everyday experiences remain firmly grounded in relations of class, gender and the locality within which they live. Hence, although many of the young women are increasingly individualised, self-reflexive actors seeking to make sense of intimate relations and kinship in an ontologically insecure world, kin networks, especially female kinship continue to play a pivotal role in their lives – practically, socially and emotionally. Indeed, female kinship is closely interwoven with their self-identity as a caring and capable mother.

In the past several decades there has been an explosion of research in genetics and on genetic inheritance. This new genetics is part of contemporary biomedicine and forecasts great advances in alleviating disease and prolonging human life. It also encompasses notions about biological family and kinship relations. I propose that with the advent of the new genetics, family and kinship are being medicalized. I explore the ways in which explanations of the inheritance of genetic disease influence people’s understandings of family and kin and both reflect and conflict with broader current sociocultural processes. The discussion includes a brief overview of the anthropological study of kinship, the meaning of family and kinship in contemporary society, and the concept of medicalization and its implications for people’s lives as seen through narratives and concludes with an analysis of the significance of the medicalization of family and kinship in present-day society.

This paper reviews the current status of kinship research in the United States and identifies factors that might account for the declining interest in the subject among family researchers. The analysis uses both structural and cultural factors to illustrate how they can determine the diversity in kinship functioning that ranges from those family systems where kinship relationships flourish and those where they play a small part in family life. The structural and demographic variables determine the numbers and availability of kin, whereas the cultural variables determine the norms that establish the motivation to sustain kinship bonds. To illustrate how these factors operate among subgroups in the United States, I analyze three types of kinship systems: the lineal emphasis in White families of the very old; the collateral emphasis in the families of their Black counterparts; and the egocentric emphasis of White suburban families that are undergoing marital change.

Based on fieldwork and archival study in a small north Puglian town, this article explores the complex interrelationship between kinship and politics. In the context of a recent local election, it seeks to show how ties of kinship and affinity provide a moral framework and idiom for civic cooperation, and how shared political ideologies and a common political heritage define and reinforce a sense of lineage identity. It argues that a failure to engage with the implications of 'kinship beyond the household' has both detracted from the analysis of Italian local politics and impeded our understanding of the long-term resilience of wider kinship forms,especially in periods of acute system change.

Peasant political order is functionally related to the ties of kinship. Kinship ties are of crucial importance to its effective functioning. Peasant communities in Bangladesh deserve mention. Most peasant communities here are by and large undeveloped hinterland. We may convey the status of ‘virgin village’ to those peasant communities yet visited by any survey team or any voluntary organisations involved in the process of rural modernisation. Here socio‐economic and political activities are organised around kinship nexus. Institutional foundation of kinship is a pervasive phenomenon. Viewed in this perspective kinship is an institution encompassing all aspects of life. The peasants have most intimate relationship with this institution marked by affection, reciprocity, solidarity and co‐operation.

The anthropologist has a professional license to study such interstitial, supplementary, and parallel structures in complex society and to expose their relation to the major strategic, overarching institutions. This chapter focuses on three sets of such parallel structures in complex societies: kinship, friendship, and patron-client relations. Membership in a kinship coalition would be advantageous in situations where the state delegated the taxing power and the execution of other demands to entities on the local level. The kinship coalition or the village coalition is made to override any coalitions which the individual may wish to form, by playing off affinal and consanguineal ties against each other. The tie of kinship merges with the tie of friendship. In contrast to the kin tie, the primary bond in the friendship dyad is not forged in an ascribed situation; friendship is achieved. Like kinship and friendship, the patron-client tie involves multiple facets of the actors involved, not merely the segmental needs of the moment.

There is an influential strand in the history of the Englishfamily, casting its shadow over interpretations of the nineteenth century and rapidly becoming sociological orthodoxy, which stresses the centrality of what has been termed the autonomous nuclear family. In this interpretation, the nuclear family dominates household structures, kinship is weak, and the community rather than family or kin is the main source of support for the needy sections of society. This article, which employs the technique of total reconstitution, examines the role of kinship in three adjoining rural communities in nineteenth-century Kent to question some of these orthodoxies. It shows that as many households in the area went through an extended phase as experienced only the simple family structure, and that kinship links in the immediate area were strong. Any separation between kin and commu nity would have been meaningless in these rural parishes where kinship was part of neighborhood.

Author(s): Leaf, Murray | Abstract: We now know what kinship terminologies are and what their function is in kinship systems, even though this knowledge is not yet widespread. Every social system consists of a set of organizations built up interactively by the use of specific idea systems: governmental systems are systems of organizations built up by the use of governmental ideas, military systems by the use of military ideas, economic systems by the use of economic ideas, and so on, including kinship systems by the use of kinship ideas. These social idea systems are not preeminently nomenclatures per se, but are associated with distinctive nomenclatures, just in the way that geometry is not a nomenclature but is associated with a nomenclature. For kinship, the core of the nomenclature has mainly been encountered and studied under the heading of “kinship terminologies.” The ideas associated with them are the ideas that make up their definitions. These are highly systematic and form powerfully generative conceptual calculi. This paper describes how this recognition has emerged from earlier, quite different, formulations.

In John's Gospel, the Jesus movement is represented as developing in an environment in which kinship was the primary social matrix. Combining exegetical research and anthropological analysis, the article highlights the relation between two Jewish-Palestinian social forms, coexisting within the Jesus movement: discipleship and kinship (1:35-51). In the social imagination of John, the group of disciples allows for the participation of the mother and the brothers (2:12). Kinship, however, undergoes some modifications. First, the kinship system is no longer a unique instrument for the attribution of roles. Jesus, his mother and the brothers interact dialectically, moving between acceptance and rejection (at Cana and Sukkot). Second, the kinship system is characterized by the absence of the fathers. This anomaly introduces flexibility and indefiniteness into the roles. The disappearance of wide lineages and of male relatives of women modifies contexts and re-situates all the characters. Male functions are taken on by women in substitutive ways. On the other hand, discipleship is influenced in turn by kinship, which offers unquestionable social support to Jesus and his disciples, as is shown by the mediating function of the mother at Cana and the "adivising" function of the brothers. Kinship also takes on an integrative role in the movement, as in the case of the unnamed disciple and the mother at the cross (19:25-27). In Jesus' last words, discipleship is remodelled on the basis of kinship criteria and logic. To be "in possession of" Mary, the mother, alters the balance of power within the movement.

The social domain of kinship covers a broad range of institutions: genealogy and descent, marriage and divorce, and dowry-systems and inheritance. Because kinship in the ancient Mediterranean impacted virtually every part of life and every other social domain, it is fundamental for readers of the Bible to have a solid grasp of how kinship functioned in these cultures. While one might assume that "family" is a straightforward concept determined by biology, it is, in fact, a social construction. Kinship studies provide analytical frameworks within which to interpret the biblical texts that assume the reader's knowledge of kinship transactions. This "Reader's Guide" introduces the secondary literature most helpful in beginning kinship analysis of these biblical texts.

Like many African rural-to-urban migrants, Igbo-speaking migrants to cities in Nigeria maintain close ties to their places of origin. ‘Home people’ constitute a vital core of most migrants’ social networks. The institution of kinship enables migrants to negotiate Nigeria’s clientelistic political economy. In this context, dichotomous distinctions between rural and urban can be inappropriate analytical concepts because kinship obligations and community ties that extend across rural and urban space create a continuous social field. This paper presents ethnographic data to suggest that fertility behavior in contemporary Igbo-speaking Nigeria cannot be understood without taking into account the ways in which rural and urban social and demographic regimes are mutually implicated and dialectically constituted (anthropological demography; migration; kinship; reproductive behavior; Nigeria).

During recent years, the Danish public service television station (DR) has launched several documentary serials that focus on kinship and genealogy. Genealogy makes ‘good TV’ because it enables an immediate identification with the protagonist of the programme. Furthermore, the protagonist’s personal story can function as a vehicle for telling other stories. However, the way kinship is depicted in the serials presupposes that a person’s knowledge about her biological kin equals knowledge about her personal identity. The article analyses the serial Find my Family (Danish: Sporløs), discussing the naturalisation of biological kin and the possible consequences of the conceptualisation of kinship that is taken for granted in the serial.

Research in anthropology has shown that kin terminologies have a complex combinatorial structure and vary systematically across cultures. This article argues that universals and variation in kin terminology result from the interaction of (1) an innate conceptual structure of kinship, homologous with conceptual structure in other domains, and (2) principles of optimal, “grammatical” communication active in language in general. Kin terms from two languages, English and Seneca, show how terminologies that look very different on the surface may result from variation in the rankings of a universal set of constraints. Constraints on kin terms form a system: some are concerned with absolute features of kin (sex), others with the position (distance and direction) of kin in “kinship space,” others with groups and group boundaries (matrilines, patrilines, generations, etc.). Also, kin terms sometimes extend indefinitely via recursion, and recursion in kin terminology has parallels with recursion in other areas of language. Thus the study of kinship sheds light on two areas of cognition, and their phylogeny. The conceptual structure of kinship seems to borrow its organization from the conceptual structure of space, while being specialized for representing genealogy. And the grammar of kinship looks like the product of an evolved grammar faculty, opportunistically active across traditional domains of semantics, syntax, and phonology. Grammar is best understood as an offshoot of a uniquely human capacity for playing coordination games.

The target paper claims to contribute to the conceptualisation of kinship but is, in fact, only concerned with descriptive kinship terminologies. It uses Optimal Theory to analyse this vocabulary but it is not clear if this is to be understood as a psychological phenomenon. Jones does not make clear how this special vocabulary might relate to kinship in general.

Migration may offer Filipinos abroad new ways to practice religious faith and opportunities to extend social networks, but many must at the same time sustain and renegotiate kinship ties at home. The obligations of kinship can mean declarations of faith are not always what we may think. Rather than being the good converts or diligent congregation members of their self-descriptions, migrants may continue to be drawn into village ritual at home. The present paper aims to shows how an exchange-based approach to faith persists in the diaspora and enables migrants to renegotiate long-distance forms of kinship.