Kinship

Kinship is a cultural construct built upon, but not necessarily identical with, the human experience of mating, reproduction, and family formation. That experience is universal, and anthropologists have considered its widely divergent forms to be expressions of a few basic structural principles. Descent and alliance theories summarized those principles and dominated thinking on this subject for much of the twentieth century. Fifty years ago, kinship was a central concept in comparing the world's societies, closely linked to the understanding of comparative legal systems. That centrality was eroded by a sharpened awareness of the errors created by assuming that kinship is easily understood as a part of nature. Today there is a cautious uncertainty about its meaning or meanings and its useful application as a comparative concept. Further complications arise in the modern world of complex and highly mobile societies as new phenomena such as genetic manipulation, in vitro fertilization, and gay marriage pose new problems for the understanding of kinship and its place in jurisprudence.

One of the earliest and most prolific writers on this subject was Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), an upstate New York lawyer whose Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family was published in 1870, and the title of which encapsulates many of the problems that have beset our understanding since then.

The first problem is consanguinity. Common sense and modern science seem to confirm that individual human beings are enmeshed in ever-increasing circles of relationship established through biological reproduction. That is, any individual is linked to a wide range of living and dead persons through ties of what is popularly termed “blood,” hence Morgan's use of the term consanguinity. Similarly,affinity refers to the relationship between individuals and groups created through marital alliance. Unfortunately, common sense is not a good guide to the actual behavior of human beings.

In studying variation among human societies, the first, and major, hurdle is to overcome assumptions rooted in the culture and social practices of the observer. Recognizing the tendency for even the most careful students to view the world through the lens of familiar concepts, it is but a short step to question the value of categories such as kinship. For example, it has often been a core assumption that something called “the nuclear family” is universal in human societies because of its supposedly necessary function of social reproduction. In its more extreme forms, this assumption insists that the legally established, cohabiting unit of husband and wife produce the legitimate offspring necessary for the reproduction of society itself and is, therefore, “natural.” Such thinking does not survive even casual scrutiny; careful observation shows great variation both among societies and within them. Therefore, an understanding of those things generally known as “kinship” requires attention to the structures that seem to grow out of consanguinity and affinity, but also to the beliefs and ideologies that underpin the perception of those regularities and variations.