Kinship

In anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of most humans in most societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated. Anthropologist Robin Fox states that "the study of kinship is the study of what man does with these basic facts of life  mating, 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.

Kinship can refer both to the patterns of social relationships themselves, or it can refer to the study of the patterns of social relationships in one or more human cultures (i.e. kinship studies). Over its history, anthropology has developed a number of related concepts and terms in the study of kinship, such as descent, descent group, lineage, affinity/affine, consanguinity/cognate and fictive kinship. Further, even within these two broad usages of the term, there are different theoretical approaches.

Latest News for: Kinship system

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Economic resilience: Tradition meets innovation

B & FT Online 26 Mar 2025
At the heart of Ghana’s informal support practices lies what scholar Goran Hyden termed the “economy of affection,” a system where identity, kinship, and mutual obligation drive economic behaviour ... Kenya’s M-Pesa mobile money system succeeded by digitising informal savings groups (chamas), while India’s SHGs formalised community lending....
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Bacteria’s Last Will and Testament to Feed Living Relatives

The Scientist 24 Mar 2025
Cann and his team next investigated whether the Lon system comes at a cost to the cell when it is still alive. They observed that wild type cells with the Lon system grew more slowly, indicating a fitness cost, while Lon-null cells grew to a higher density ... Kinship in the Swarm....
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It's time for the English speaking world to come together – but we can no longer rely on the US

The Daily Telegraph 15 Mar 2025
Within hours of Britain’s declaration of war on 3 September 1939, Michael Joseph Savage, New Zealand’s first Labour prime minister, made a statement from his hospital bed (he was to die seven months later) ... Where she goes, we go ... We are linked by language, culture and kinship. We share a legal system, drawing on one another’s precedents ... Show comments....
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Letter of the week: Missed connections

New Statesman 12 Mar 2025
connection ... Grant Feller, London, W4. Defend or attack? ... Climate conundrum ... Altered states ... Systems of meaning develop, generating belief systems and ideologies as a source of identity and social cohesion. Kinship, universalism, a divine power, the supremacy of nature, Marxism and other political philosophies are some of these organising principles....

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