In the mid-1970s, David M. Schneider rocked the anthropological world with his announcement that kinship did not exist in any culture known to humankind. This v

American Kinship is the first attempt to deal systematically with kinship as a system of symbols and meanings, and not simply as a network of functionally inter

Our understanding of what makes a person a relative has been transformed by radical changes in marriage arrangements and gender relations, and by new reproducti

At one time Francis L.K. Hsu put forth a hypothesis on kinship that proposed a functional relationship between particular kinship systems and behavior patterns

In this pithy two-part essay, Marshall Sahlins reinvigorates the debates on what constitutes kinship, building on some of the best scholarship in the field to p