Loading field map
Kinship and relatedness is the branch of anthropology that studies how people create, conceptualize, and act upon relationships of belonging—especially those modeled on, or claimed to derive from, shared substance, shared history, or shared care. Its subject matter includes the classic domains of descent, marriage, and family, but also extends to adoption, assisted reproduction, friendship, ritual kinship, and the ways people classify one another as "kin" or "not kin." The field asks not what kinship is in any universal sense, but how particular people make kinship real through their ideas and practices.
Modern kinship studies emerged in the late nineteenth century, when anthropologists first tried to explain why human family arrangements vary so dramatically across societies. Early evolutionists such as Lewis Henry Morgan treated kinship terminologies—the words people use for relatives—as fossils of earlier stages of social organization. Morgan argued that systems like the Iroquois practice of calling one's father and father's brother by the same term reflected a time when group marriage made biological paternity unknowable. This evolutionary framework was later abandoned, but it left a lasting question: why do kinship terminologies take the shapes they do?
The twentieth-century answer came from structural-functionalist anthropology, especially the work of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who treated kinship as a "social structure"—a network of roles and obligations that held small-scale societies together. For Radcliffe-Brown, the key was not biology but the jural dimension: kinship terms marked rights, duties, and expected behaviors between categories of people. A man's relationship to his mother's brother, for example, might be one of affectionate license in one society and formal respect in another, and the terminology encoded that difference.
A rival approach, associated with Claude Lévi-Strauss, shifted attention from descent groups to marriage. In The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Lévi-Strauss argued that the prohibition of incest—the rule that one must marry outside one's immediate family—was the fundamental human social fact. From this prohibition flowed systems of alliance: the exchange of women between groups, which created enduring bonds between families. Lévi-Strauss distinguished "elementary" systems, where a person is required to marry a specific category of cousin, from "complex" systems, where the choice is left open. His structuralist method treated kinship terminologies as logical systems whose rules could be mapped like a grammar.
A third classical tradition, associated with British social anthropology and especially the work of Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, focused on descent as the organizing principle of political life. In societies without centralized states, they argued, groups formed around lines of descent from a common ancestor—patrilineal or matrilineal—and these groups regulated land, marriage, and ritual. Descent theory distinguished sharply between "unilineal" systems (tracing through one parent only) and "cognatic" systems (tracing through both), and asked how each generated social cohesion.
These three approaches—terminological analysis, alliance theory, and descent theory—were not mutually exclusive in practice. Many anthropologists combined them. But they shared a common assumption: that kinship was a system with rules that could be discovered and compared. They also shared a common limitation: they treated kinship as a domain of formal structure, largely divorced from emotion, individual choice, or historical change.
By the 1970s, a new generation of anthropologists began to question the field's most basic assumption: that kinship was ultimately grounded in biological reproduction. David M. Schneider, in American Kinship: A Cultural Account (1968) and later A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984), argued that even the supposedly "natural" kinship of the United States was a cultural construction. Americans, he showed, defined kinship through two symbolic codes: "shared biogenetic substance" (blood) and "love" (the diffuse enduring solidarity of the family). Neither code was actually biological in any scientific sense—adoption, step-relations, and in-law relations all worked perfectly well as kinship—but the idea of biology gave kinship its cultural authority.
Schneider's critique had two consequences. First, it undermined the cross-cultural project of finding a universal definition of kinship. If even "biological" kinship was a cultural model, then anthropologists could not assume that other societies were doing the same thing with different labels. Second, it opened the door to studying kinship as a system of meaning rather than a system of rules. Kinship became, in Schneider's phrase, a "symbolic system" whose content varied from culture to culture.
This cultural turn coincided with the rise of feminist anthropology, which challenged the field's implicit male bias. Feminist scholars such as Jane Collier, Sylvia Yanagisako, and Marilyn Strathern argued that classical kinship theory had taken men as the default actors and women as objects of exchange. They also showed that the distinction between "domestic" and "political" spheres—which underlay descent theory—was itself a gendered cultural assumption. Yanagisako and Collier's edited volume Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis (1987) proposed that kinship and gender be studied together, as mutually constituting systems of meaning and practice.
The most radical consequence of the cultural turn was the claim that kinship might not be a universal domain at all. Some anthropologists argued that "kinship" was an artifact of Western assumptions about biology and genealogy, and that other societies organized relatedness through quite different principles—shared residence, shared food, shared ritual, or shared name. This position was associated with the "deconstruction" of kinship as an analytical category, and it led some scholars to propose replacing "kinship" with the broader term "relatedness."
The term "relatedness" gained prominence in the 1990s, especially through the work of Janet Carsten, who studied Malay fishing communities where kinship was made through feeding, living together, and everyday care. Carsten argued that in these communities, relatedness was not a matter of blood or descent but of process: people became kin by doing kin things. Her book After Kinship (2004) proposed that anthropologists abandon the search for a universal definition and instead ask how relatedness is produced, maintained, and transformed in specific contexts.
This "new kinship studies" was also driven by a practical development: the rise of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) such as in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and gamete donation. These technologies made visible the assumptions embedded in Western kinship. If a child is conceived with a donated egg, a surrogate's womb, and a social father's intention to raise the child, who is the "real" mother or father? Anthropologists such as Sarah Franklin, Charis Thompson, and Marcia Inhorn studied how people using ARTs negotiated these questions—often drawing on older cultural models of blood and love while also creating new ones. The result was not the collapse of kinship but its proliferation: more ways of making kin, not fewer.
The new kinship studies also incorporated insights from science and technology studies (STS), which treats scientific facts as social achievements. Rather than asking whether a genetic link is "really" kinship, anthropologists asked how genetic knowledge becomes meaningful in people's lives. Studies of genetic testing, ancestry DNA kits, and family reunification projects showed that biology could be mobilized as a resource for relatedness without being its sole ground.
Today, kinship and relatedness is a pluralistic field, with several overlapping research programmes rather than a single dominant paradigm.
Practice and performance approaches build on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and others to ask how kinship is done in everyday life. Rather than treating kinship as a structure or a set of rules, these scholars examine how people enact relatedness through care, feeding, residence, and ritual. This approach has been especially influential in studies of migration, where families are maintained across borders through remittances, phone calls, and periodic visits.
Critical and decolonial approaches examine how kinship has been used as a tool of colonial governance and how colonized peoples have resisted or reworked those impositions. Colonial administrations often tried to impose Western models of the nuclear family, patrilineal inheritance, and legal marriage on societies with different arrangements. Anthropologists have documented both the violence of these impositions and the creative ways people have maintained alternative forms of relatedness. This work connects kinship studies to broader questions of race, citizenship, and the state.
Queer kinship studies emerged from the recognition that LGBTQ+ people often create families that do not fit the heterosexual, reproductive model. Kath Weston's Families We Choose (1991) documented how gay and lesbian communities in the United States built kinship through friendship, care, and commitment rather than blood or legal ties. Subsequent work has examined same-sex marriage, transgender kinship, and the ways queer people navigate biological and legal definitions of family. This research has shown that kinship is not necessarily about reproduction or heterosexuality, and that chosen families can be as durable and meaningful as genealogical ones.
Comparative and historical approaches continue the classical project of mapping kinship variation, but with greater attention to context and change. Anthropologists now study how kinship systems respond to demographic shifts, economic transformation, and state policies. The rise of single-person households, declining marriage rates, and new forms of cohabitation in many societies have prompted questions about whether "the family" is in crisis or simply changing form. Historical anthropologists have shown that many supposedly "traditional" kinship arrangements are themselves recent inventions, shaped by colonialism, capitalism, and law.
A persistent debate concerns the relationship between biology and culture. Some scholars argue that human kinship is rooted in evolved dispositions—for example, a tendency to favor genetic relatives—and that cultural variation is a surface overlay on deeper biological patterns. Others insist that kinship is irreducibly cultural, and that even the perception of biological relatedness is shaped by social context. Most contemporary anthropologists take a middle position: biology provides raw materials and constraints, but what counts as kinship, who counts as kin, and what kinship means are always cultural achievements.
Another ongoing tension concerns the status of "kinship" itself as an analytical category. Some scholars, following Schneider, argue that the term carries too much Western baggage and should be replaced by "relatedness" or abandoned altogether. Others maintain that kinship remains a useful comparative concept, provided it is defined broadly enough to include the many ways people create durable bonds of belonging. This is not a dispute that can be settled by definition alone; it reflects different views about what anthropology should be trying to explain.
Despite these debates, the field is organized around a set of durable questions that have remained recognizable across its history:
The field's distinctive contribution to anthropology as a whole is its insistence that the most intimate and seemingly "natural" aspects of human life—who we call family, how we care for one another, what we owe our relatives—are also social and cultural achievements. Kinship is not a biological given that culture merely decorates; it is a domain of human creativity, constraint, and contestation. That insight, first established through the study of small-scale societies, has proven remarkably durable as anthropologists have turned their attention to hospitals, courts, borders, and digital platforms where relatedness is made and unmade today.