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Kinship is the relationship between members of the same family or a feeling of being close or similar to others. Learn more about kinship terms, systems, and evolution with examples from the Cambridge English Corpus.
- English (US)
KINSHIP meaning: 1. the relationship between members of the...
- Znaczenie Kinship, Definicja W Cambridge English Dictionary
kinship definicja: 1. the relationship between members of...
- Kinsman
KINSMAN definition: 1. a man who belongs to the same family...
- Kinswoman
KINSWOMAN definition: 1. a woman who belongs to the same...
- Simplified
KINSHIP translate: 家属关系，亲属关系;亲密关系, 亲密感；亲切感. Learn more in...
- Pronunciation in English
KINSHIP pronunciation. How to say KINSHIP. Listen to the...
- Kinship Collocations
Words often used with kinship in an English sentence:...
- English (US)
Kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies. Learn about the basic concepts, patterns and systems of kinship, as well as the different ways of classifying and referring to relatives in different cultures and languages.
Kinship is the quality or state of being kin, or having a relationship with someone. Learn the synonyms, examples, word history, and etymology of kinship from Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
- Overview
- The evolution of family forms
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kinship, system of social organization based on real or putative family ties. The modern study of kinship can be traced back to mid-19th-century interests in comparative legal institutions and philology. In the late 19th century, however, the cross-cultural comparison of kinship institutions became the particular province of anthropology.
If the study of kinship was defined largely by anthropologists, it is equally true that anthropology as an academic discipline was itself defined by kinship. Until the last decades of the 20th century, for example, kinship was regarded as the core of British social anthropology, and no thorough ethnographic study could overlook the central importance of kinship in the functioning of so-called stateless, nonindustrial, or traditional societies.
Kinship is a universal human phenomenon that takes highly variable cultural forms. It has been explored and analyzed by many scholars, however, in ways quite removed from any popular understanding of what “being kin” might mean. As the theoretical core of the newly emerging discipline of anthropology, kinship was also the subject that made the reputations of the leading figures in the field, including scholars such as Bronisław Malinowski, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, A.L. Kroeber, George Peter Murdock, Meyer Fortes, Edward Evans-Pritchard, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
These and other anthropologists held that the importance of kinship in “primitive” societies largely resided in its role as an organizational framework for production and group decision making. They typically described these realms of traditional culture (generally glossed as economics and politics, respectively) as being embedded in kinship and dominated by men. Studies of industrialized societies, by contrast, reflected sociological theories that tended to assume kinship constituted a private, domestic domain rather than a central feature of social life. For those whose work featured such cultures, kinship was of minor interest because it was constituted by close family relations and was considered to be the female domain par excellence. During the mid-20th century, studies of kinship became increasingly abstract and removed from the practice of actual lived relations and the powerful emotions that they engendered. Indeed, anthropological and sociological studies of the era were typified by highly technical, or even mathematical, models of how societies worked.
The rise of feminist and Marxist scholarship in the 1960s and ’70s was among several developments that challenged the basis of earlier kinship scholarship. The American Marxist-feminist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock and others brought to the fore the extent to which supposedly holistic practices of ethnography were actually concerned with men only, often to the point of excluding most or all information on the lives of women. The relative foregrounding of men in anthropological studies became less acceptable, and women’s experiences became a legitimate topic of scholarship. Meanwhile, materialist studies of so-called traditional and industrial societies were increasingly able to show the political and economic inflections of the “private,” “domestic” domain of the family.
Feminist anthropologists gradually shifted from documenting the world of women to analyzing the symbolization of gender itself. These studies of the late 1970s and ’80s challenged the intellectual edifice on which the study of kinship had been built and gave rise to a lively debate over the mutual definition of kinship and gender. This debate was part of a much wider questioning of the central tenets of anthropological method and theory, including the division of the field into discrete domains such as politics, economics, kinship, religion, and theory. These developments seemed likely to result in the displacement of kinship studies. However, the advent of new reproductive technologies (including in vitro fertilization), family forms (such as same-sex marriage), and approaches blending the separate domains of anthropology instigated the revitalization of kinship studies in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
The earliest attempts at the comparative study of kinship institutions were undertaken by 19th-century theorists of cultural evolution. The most prominent of these scholars combined legal studies with ethnology and included Henry Maine, Johannes Bachofen, John Ferguson McLennan, and Lewis Henry Morgan. They attempted to trace the historical evolution of family forms from the most “primitive” to the most “modern” and “civilized.”
According to Maine’s theory, the earliest form of kin organization was a state of “patriarchal despotism” in which society consisted of an aggregation of families, each under the rule of the father. The evolution of society was characterized by Maine as a movement from “status” to “contract” forms of relationship—in other words, a change from relations ordered by ascribed positions in a familial system to one in which relations were based on contractual obligations freely entered into by individuals.
In contrast, Bachofen, McLennan, and Morgan posited that the earliest societies were ruled by women and that the forms of kinship used by these societies were rather less regulated than Maine had suggested. Between what Morgan labeled a state of “primitive promiscuity”—in which sex and marriage were quite unregulated—and the patriarchal monogamous family form of “civilization” (the evolutionary stage in which he placed 19th-century European and Euro-American society) came a sequence of intermediate stages. These varied depending on the theorist but typically included variations such as group marriage, exogamy (outmarriage), matriarchy, and polygamy.
Theories of cultural evolution were conservative in the sense that they demonstrated that the mid-19th century bourgeois family was the most “civilized” of kinship institutions. They were also speculative in that there was no direct evidence for the various early stages posited by Bachofen, McLennan, or Morgan; group marriage, matriarchy, primitive promiscuity, and so forth were merely colourful projections of the 19th-century imagination.
The evidence that these early theorists did use was partly derived from the comparison of the legal institutions and kin terms found in different societies. Collections and analyses of linguistic data by philologists, among others, demonstrated that while some cultures differentiated “lineal kin” (those in a direct parent-child relationship) from “collateral kin” (such as cousins, aunts, and uncles), others did not. In some cultures, for example, father and father’s brother, or mother and mother’s sister, were denoted by the same term. In such systems the terms for cousins would be the same as those for siblings—in other words, father’s brother’s son, father’s son, and brother are classed together, as are mother’s sister’s daughter, mother’s daughter, and sister.
Morgan called kinship terminology that differentiated lineal kin from others “descriptive,” while systems that grouped lineal and collateral kin became known as “classificatory.” He posited that classificatory terminology reflected a system in which a group of brothers shared their sisters in marriage and that it was a cultural survival from an earlier time in which either father and father’s brother had been indistinguishable or the distinction held no social significance.
Kinship is a system of social organization based on real or putative family ties. Learn about the history, evolution, and diversity of kinship systems from various perspectives, such as anthropology, sociology, and feminism.
- Janet Carsten
Kinship is the relationship between members of the same family or a feeling of being close or similar to others. Learn more about the meaning, usage and synonyms of kinship with examples and collocations from various sources.
Kinship is the state or fact of being of kin; family relationship. It can also refer to the relation between two or more persons that is based on common ancestry or marriage. See synonyms, origin, examples and word history of kinship.
Kinship is the connection by blood, marriage, or adoption, or the relationship by nature or character. Find synonyms, translations, and usage examples of kinship from various sources.
