Kinship

Kinship is the complex web of social relationships found in every human society. It serves as a fundamental principle for organizing people into social groups, roles, and genealogies. Anthropologist Robin Fox suggests that humans take the raw material of life, such as mating and parenthood, and categorize it to serve social ends. These ends include the socialization of children and the formation of economic, political, or religious groups. Kinship can refer to the actual patterns of relationships or the scientific study of those patterns. It is a central way that humans create structure in their communities.

Relationships within kinship are often divided into two main categories: descent and affinity. Descent refers to social relations that arise during a person's development, often through birth. Affinity refers to relationships created through marriage. Within a culture, some descent groups might even believe they lead back to gods or animal ancestors, known as totems. Kinship also uses specific terminologies to define these connections. These terms can be concrete, like "mother," or abstract, using kinship distance to show degrees of relationship. These degrees are not the same as legal heirship or succession.

Societies organize families in several distinct ways based on who lives together and how they are related. Anthropologists classify family organization into several types. A conjugal or nuclear family consists of a husband, a wife, and their children. A matrifocal family focuses on a mother and her children. An avuncular family includes a brother, his sister, and her children. Finally, an extended family involves parents and children living with other members of a parent's family.

Beyond raising children, families also form economically productive households through marriage and the division of labor.

Kinship terminology refers to the specific words used to address or identify relatives. These systems are either descriptive or classificatory. A descriptive terminology, like the English word "brother," refers to only one specific type of relationship. A classificatory terminology groups many different types of relatives under a single term. For example, in some cultures, a person's male first cousin might also be called "brother." Lewis Henry Morgan identified several major patterns in his 1871 work, *Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family*. These included Iroquois, Crow, Omaha, Inuit, Hawaiian, and Sudanese systems.

Researchers have discovered even more complexity in how languages describe human connections. A seventh type, Dravidian kinship, was identified as a distinct classical classificatory type. Some languages, such as those used by Australian Aboriginal groups, use tri-relational kin-terms. While most terms describe a relationship between two people, tri-relational terms describe a relationship between three distinct entities. In the Bininj Kunwok language, the term *nakurrng* can change meaning based on how a pronoun is used. It can describe a simple relationship or a complex bond involving the speaker, the listener, and a third person.

Rules of descent determine how an individual is affiliated with their kin groups. There are four primary categories used by anthropologists to classify these rules. Bilateral descent affiliates a person equally with both the father's and mother's sides, as seen among the Yakurr of Nigeria. Unilineal descent follows only one sex. Patrilineal descent follows the male line, while matrilineal descent follows the female line, such as with the Nyakyusa of Tanzania. Ambilineal descent allows individuals to choose whether to affiliate with their father's or mother's line, a practice seen in Samoan society.

Finally, some societies utilize a system known as double descent. In these groups, both patrilineal and matrilineal descent groups are recognized simultaneously. An individual belongs to a patrilineal group for some purposes and a matrilineal group for others. The Afikpo of Nigeria are a well-known example of a society practicing double descent. While they use patrilineage for organization, they consider matrilineal ties to be more important. This shows how kinship can create multiple layers of identity and obligation within a single community.