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Kinship is one of the most basic principles for organizing individuals into social groups, roles, and categories. It was originally thought to reflect biological descent, a view that was challenged by David M. Schneider in his work on symbolic kinship (1984, A Critique of The Study of Kinship). The crux of his argument was that anthropologists had founded the domain of “kinship” on the notions of human reproduction and the biologically defined relatedness of their own Euro-American culture. Human reproduction and notions of biological relatedness cannot necessarily be presumed to structure people’s social relationships in other cultural contexts.

Janet Carsten developed the idea of "relatedness" in response to David M. Schneider's 1984 work on Symbolic Kinship (A Critique of The Study of Kinship). Carsten developed her initial ideas from studies with the Malays in looking at what was socialized and biological. Here she uses the idea of relatedness to move away from a pre-constructed analytics opposition which exists in anthropological thought between the biological and the social (1995, The substance of kinship and the heat of the hearth; feeding, personhood and relatedness among the Malays in Pulau Langkawi, American Ethnologist). Carsten argued that relatedness should be described in terms of indigenous statements and practices, some of which fall outside what anthropologists have conventionally understood as kinship (Cultures of Relatedness, 2000).

The word kinship can refer more broadly to any emotional relationship. This can also refer to ideas which are mathematically related.

In its most general sense, kinship can be used in reference to similarity; for instance, a car is akin to a truck. In some cultures, the formal establishment of kinship involves various customs and obligations.

Anthropologists have studied different systems of kinship in a wide variety of cultures; see family.

Many codes of ethics consider the bond of kinship as creating obligations between the related persons stronger than those between strangers, as in Confucian filial piety.

• family
• Kinship terminology
• fictive kinship
• clan
• dynasty

• heredity
• kin selection
• kinship and descent
• Serbian kinship
• taxonomy
• consanguinity
• brideservice
• bride price
• interpersonal relationships

• Introduction into the study of kinship
• Kinship and Social Organization: An Interactive Tutorial by Brian Schwimmer
• James A. Boon, David M. Schneider Kinship vis-a-vis Myth Contrasts in Levi-Strauss' Approaches to Cross-Cultural Comparison American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 799-817
• Dwight W. Read Formal analysis of kinship terminologies and its relationship to what constitutes kinship. Anthropological Theory, Vol. 1, No. 2, 239-267 (2001) http://ant.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/2/239

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• Catholic Encyclopedia "Duties of Relatives"