Kinship

• 1. Introduction

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  Kinship is one of the oldest questions humans have asked about themselves: who counts as family, and why? Anthropologist Robin Fox put it plainly: the study of kinship is the study of what humans do with the basic facts of life, mating, gestation, parenthood, socialization, and siblingship. What makes humans unusual, Fox argued, is that we work with the same raw biological material found in the animal world, yet we conceptualize and categorize it to serve social ends. Those social ends range from the everyday, raising children, to the sweeping, forming the economic, political, and religious foundations of entire societies.

  But here is where it gets complicated. What counts as a relative? Is family determined by blood, by living together, by who feeds you? Is the word 'brother' in English the same category as the word translated as brother in another language? Anthropologists have debated these questions for well over a century, and the answers have changed dramatically. This documentary traces that debate, from the first systematic classifications of kin relations in the 19th century to a radical challenge that shook the entire field in the 1980s, and into the present, where researchers are still working out how biology, culture, and nurture intertwine to create what we call family.

• 2. Naming the Relationships

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  Lewis Henry Morgan mapped kinship terminology in his 1871 work Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, and what he found surprised him. Different societies do not simply have different words for the same relationships. They categorize those relationships differently at a fundamental level. Morgan identified six major patterns of kinship systems: Iroquois, Crow, Omaha, Inuit, Hawaiian, and Sudanese. A seventh, Dravidian kinship, was identified later as a distinct system.

  The difference between descriptive and classificatory terminology captures the heart of the variation. In English-speaking societies, the word 'brother' is descriptive: it refers to one specific type of relationship, a son of one's same parents. In many other classificatory systems, a person's male first cousin, whether through the mother's brother, the mother's sister, the father's brother, or the father's sister, may also be called 'brother'. These are not linguistic accidents. They reflect genuinely different ways of organizing social categories and obligations.

  Some languages go further still. Australian Aboriginal languages, particularly those with elaborated kinship systems, deploy what linguists call tri-relational or triadic kin terms. In Bininj Kunwok, the term nakurrng can mean 'brother' in a bi-relational sense. But when a possessive pronoun is placed in a different position, the same term encapsulates a three-way relationship: the referent who is the addressee's maternal uncle, and who is simultaneously the speaker's nephew, by virtue of the addressee being the speaker's grandchild. A single word encodes a triangle of people and their relative positions simultaneously.

  Kuuk Thaayorre and Bardi illustrate how far this elaboration can extend. In Kuuk Thaayorre, a maternal grandfather and his sister are addressed together with the vocative ngethin. In Bardi, a father and his sister share one term, irrmoorrgooloo, while a man's wife and children together are aalamalarr. Murrinh-patha even differentiates its nonsingular pronouns not just by the gender of a group but by whether the members are in a sibling-like relation to one another, using a third pronoun distinct from both masculine and feminine forms.

• 3. Rules of Descent

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  Anthropologists use four main headings to categorize how societies trace descent: bilateral, unilineal, ambilineal, and double descent. Each has implications not just for identity but for inheritance, residence, and political belonging.

  Bilateral descent affiliates an individual more or less equally with both parents' sides. The Batek people of Malaysia recognize kinship ties through both parents' family lines, treating neither parent's family as more or less important than the other. Most Western societies also follow bilateral reckoning, as do the Inuit and Yupik.

  Unilineal rules trace descent through one sex only. Patrilineal descent, through males, is more common globally. Matrilineal societies, which trace descent through females, include the Nyakyusa of Tanzania and the Nair of India. Importantly, many matrilineal societies are also matrilocal in residence, yet men in these societies often still exercise significant authority. Kinship and power do not map neatly onto each other.

  Ambilineal societies, such as the Samoans of the South Pacific, allow individuals to choose which line they affiliate with. In Samoan society, the core members of a descent group can live together in the same compound, giving the descent group a physical presence in daily life.

  Double descent, also called double unilineal descent, operates in societies where both patrilineal and matrilineal groups are recognized simultaneously but for different purposes. The Afikpo of Imo state in Nigeria are among the most widely studied examples. There, patrilineage provides one form of organization, but the Afikpo consider matrilineal ties to be more important overall. Property, identity, and ceremony may each follow a different line.

  Above the level of lineages, societies organize into clans, phratries, and moieties. A clan claims descent from a common apical ancestor, and non-human ancestors, called totems, appear in the traditions of Chechen, Chinese, Irish, Japanese, Polish, Scottish, Tlingit, and Somali societies, among others. When a society divides into exactly two descent groups, each half is called a moiety, from the French word for half. If both halves are required to marry outward into the other, they are called matrimonial moieties.

• 4. Marriage as Alliance

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  Edmund Leach argued that no single definition of marriage applies to all cultures. He offered instead a list of ten rights frequently associated with marriage, including sexual monopoly and rights with respect to children, while acknowledging that specific rights differ across cultures. A broad definition treats marriage as a cultural universal, encompassing monogamous, polygamous, same-sex, and temporary forms.

  One estimate holds that 80% of all marriages in history have been between second cousins or closer. This figure reflects the degree to which marriage has functioned not simply as a romantic arrangement but as a mechanism for knitting social groups together. In societies with a classificatory kinship system, potential spouses are actively sought from a specific class of relatives defined by prescriptive marriage rules.

  Claude Lévi-Strauss developed his alliance theory precisely to account for this phenomenon. In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, published in 1949, Lévi-Strauss argued that the incest taboo, by forbidding marriage within certain categories, necessarily generated the exchange of women between kinship groups. The incest prohibition, on this reading, is the engine of social connection. Lévi-Strauss shifted the emphasis of kinship study away from descent groups and toward the stable structures or relations between groups that preferential and prescriptive marriage rules create. He saw three fundamental forms of exchange: symmetric and direct, reciprocal delay, and generalized exchange.

  In some societies, kinship and political relations are organized not around descent groups at all, but around membership in corporately organized dwellings. Lévi-Strauss himself proposed the concept of 'house societies,' which he named sociétés à maison. He introduced it originally as an alternative to the corporate kinship group model among cognatic kinship groups of the Pacific region. The concept has since been applied to societies from Mesoamerica and the Moluccas to North Africa and medieval Europe, including royal houses such as the House of Windsor.

• 5. Schneider's Challenge

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  In 1968, David M. Schneider published a study of the symbolic meanings surrounding kinship in American culture. He found that Americans attach a special significance to 'blood ties,' along with related symbols such as the naturalness of marriage and child-rearing within a biological family. This was already a finding worth sitting with. But Schneider drew a far more unsettling conclusion from it.

  In later work, in 1972 and most fully in his 1984 book A Critique of the Study of Kinship, Schneider argued that anthropology itself had been built on an ethnocentric foundation. American anthropologists, and their counterparts in western Europe, had assumed that the cultural value of 'blood is thicker than water,' common in their own societies, was a natural and universal fact of human life. This assumption, Schneider contended, had been embedded in the discipline since Morgan's earliest work. As a result, the entire enterprise of kinship studies might rest on faulty foundations.

  Schneider drew on his own earlier research into Yap society to make the point concrete. The citamangen/fak relationship, which he had previously described as a father/son relationship, turned out to be fundamentally different from what Western consanguinity implied. As Schneider wrote in 1984: 'the stress in the definition of the relationship is more on doing than on being.' The relationship could be terminated absolutely if the fak failed to perform his obligations. The terms could even reverse, so that an old, dependent man became fak to a younger man. No concept of blood could account for this.

  Schneider contrasted this with the European notion of consanguinity, which, he argued, 'rests more on the state of being, on the biogenetic relationship which is represented by one or another variant of the symbol of blood, or on birth, on qualities rather than on performance.' He preferred instead to focus on what he called 'performance, forms of doing, various codes for conduct, different roles' as the most important constituents of kinship.

• 6. Nurture and Relatedness

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  Janet Carsten's fieldwork with the Malays of Langkawi offered one of the most influential responses to Schneider's challenge. Carsten introduced the idea of 'relatedness' to move past the pre-constructed opposition between the biological and the social. As she wrote in 1995: 'In Langkawi relatedness is derived both from acts of procreation and from living and eating together. It makes little sense in indigenous terms to label some of these activities as social and others as biological.'

  Philip Thomas' work with the Temanambondro of Madagascar found that nurturing processes are considered the basis for kinship ties in that culture, alongside but not subordinate to genealogical connections. Thomas described 'nurture' there as a largely ungendered relation, constituted in everyday practical life, in the household, through feeding and farming. Relations of ancestry structure inheritance and define the boundaries of incest. But the giving and receiving of nurture constitutes a separate and equally real layer of relatedness.

  These ethnographic accounts echo an earlier observation made by Malinowski in his study of the Trobriand Islands. The Trobrianders did not believe pregnancy resulted from sexual intercourse, and they denied any physiological relationship between father and child. Yet for a woman to have a child without a husband was considered socially undesirable. Fatherhood was recognized as a social and nurturing role. As Malinowski recorded it, the woman's husband is 'the man whose role and duty it is to take the child in his arms and to help her in nursing and bringing it up.' The Trobrianders themselves put it plainly: 'though the natives are ignorant of any physiological need for a male in the constitution of the family, they regard him as indispensable socially.'

  In his 2012 book Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship, Holland drew on fieldwork from social mammals and primates to argue that social bonding and cooperation in these species is mediated through shared living context, familiarity, and attachments, not by genetic relatedness as such. Holland read this as support for the post-Schneider anthropological perspective, arguing that the biological theory of inclusive fitness, as its originator W. D. Hamilton conceived it, does not predict that genetic relatedness per se mediates social bonding. Robin Fox described Holland's argument as one that 'gets to the heart of the matter concerning the contentious relationship between kinship categories, genetic relatedness and the prediction of behavior.'

• 7. Kinship as Something Done

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  The shift Schneider initiated is sometimes described as moving from the 'being' to the 'doing' of kinship. A new generation of anthropologists began studying kinship as a practice: something maintained through acts rather than assigned at birth.

  Radcliffe-Brown had argued as early as 1922 in The Andaman Islands that kinship relations are best understood as concrete networks of relationships among individuals. Malinowski, in Argonauts of the Western Pacific from the same year, described patterns of events with concrete individuals stressing the relative stability of institutions and communities, without insisting on abstract systems. Gluckman, in his 1955 study The Judicial Process Among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia, balanced institutional stability against processes of change and conflict. John Barnes, Victor Turner, and others affiliated with Gluckman's Manchester school of anthropology described actual network relations in communities and fluid situations in urban and migratory contexts. J. Clyde Mitchell's 1965 work Social Networks in Urban Situations extended this approach to migrants in cities.

  From the 1950s onward, reports on kinship patterns in the New Guinea Highlands added momentum to the view that co-residence, living together, could itself create kinship. Barnes made the point in fieldwork notes from 1962: genealogical connection is one criterion for membership in social groups, but so are birth, residence, a parent's former residence, use of garden land, and participation in exchange and feasting. Langness, writing about the Bena Bena in 1964, went further: 'The sheer fact of residence in a Bena Bena group can and does determine kinship. People do not necessarily reside where they do because they are kinsmen: rather they become kinsmen because they reside there.'

  Marshall Sahlins, in his 1976 book The Use and Abuse of Biology, challenged sociobiological accounts of kinship on empirical grounds. He argued that for humans, the categories of 'near' and 'distant' kin vary independently of consanguinal distance, and that these categories organize actual social practice. Evolutionary psychologists Daly and Wilson directly disputed this in 1997, arguing those categories do not in fact vary independently of genetic relatedness in any society on earth. The debate between these positions remains one of the live fault lines in kinship studies, connecting questions about family structure to deep questions about what it means to be human.