kinship
Sign in to savethumb|upright=1.3|A multi-generational extended family in [[Chaghcharan, Ghor Province, Afghanistan]]
AI overview
Kinship refers to the relationships between people who are connected through family ties, whether by blood, marriage, or social bonds. It matters because these family connections shape how people organize their lives, share resources, care for one another, and pass down cultural traditions across generations.
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Article
31 sectionsContents
- Basic concepts
- Family types
- Terminology
- Tri-relational kin-terms
- Kin-based group terms and pronouns
- Descent
- Descent rules
- Descent groups
- Lineages, clans, phratries, moieties, and matrimonial sides
- House societies
- Marriage (affinity)
- Alliance (marital exchange systems)
- History
- Morgan's early influence
- Kinship networks and social process
- "Kinship system" as systemic pattern
- Conflicting theories of the mid 20th century
- Recognition of fluidity in kinship meanings and relations
- Schneider's critique of genealogical concepts
- Post-Schneider
- Biology, psychology and kinship
- Nonreductive biology and nurture kinship
- Evolutionary psychology
- Extensions of the kinship metaphor
- Fictive kinship
- Detailed terms for parentage
- Composition of relations
- See also
- References
- Bibliography
- External links
thumb|upright=1.3|A multi-generational extended family in [[Chaghcharan, Ghor Province, Afghanistan]]
In anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated. Anthropologist Robin Fox says that the study of kinship is the study of what humans do with these basic facts of lifemating, gestation, parenthood, socialization, siblingship, etc. Human society is unique, he argues, in that we are "working with the same raw material as exists in the animal world, but [we] can conceptualize and categorize it to serve social ends". These social ends include the socialization of children and the formation of basic economic, political and religious groups.