Kinship Systems

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Kinship Systems
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Kinship Systems
DWIGHT W. READ
University of California, Los Angeles, United States
Kinship is a universal of human societies, built around systems of self-centric, recipro-

cal social relations. In all societies, societal members are conceptually organized, to one
degree or another, through structured, reciprocal systems of relations. Kinship systems
are broad in their scope and interdigitate with religious, economic, political and other
social systems. The kinship relations that are part of a kinship system include, in
their cultural meaning, the rights and obligations of kin, including expected (through
not always realized) mutually supportive behavior by kin. The system of kin-term
relations provides a kinship framework within which individuals formulate how they
interact with their kin and a basis for interpreting the meaning and implications of the
behavior of their kin to them. The kinship framework may also involve a culturally
formulated ideology regarding the role and nature of the respective contribution of a
male and of a female to the formation of an offspring and to its emotional and mental
make-up. Despite a biological mode of reproduction being a constant for all humans,
local ideologies and accounts of reproduction vary extensively across human societies;
hence these idea systems cannot simply be reduced to epiphenomena of biological
k
reproduction. A group’s ideas about procreation, along with its ideas about kinship k
relations in general, provide for the social identity of a newborn offspring through the
family social unit (ranging in form from single parent to extended family) into which
it is born and to its position in an already-existing network of kinship relations into
which it is entering through kinship relations recognized at birth. Kinship relations
also provide an idiom through which forms of social organization are expressed in
human societies—especially in pre-state societies—whether the society be a small,
hunter-gatherer group or a large, modern industrial state.
Life-cycle events and kinship relations
Birth
Birth, in all societies, is culturally marked as a social event during which the kinship
relations a newborn will have to other persons are activated and identified, usually as
part of a ritual or ceremony. The ceremony serves to announce publicly the birth of a
newborn child to the members of the social unit in which the newborn will be raised
and to identify and/or reaffirm the primary person(s) responsible for the care and nur-
turing of a newborn. Though kinship relations are formed through birth in accordance
with the kinship ideas and ideology of the society in question, they may also be estab-
lished by other, culturally recognized, means. This includes, in addition to affinal and
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
k
2 K I NSHI P S YST E MS
consanguineal (in the sense of filiation) relations, a form of kinship labeled as “sponsor-
ship” by anthropologist Fadwa El Guindi (2010). Sponsorship includes the widespread
practice of adopting a child, the godparenthood relationship recognized in Catholicism,
and the practice in some societies of forming a kin relation when a woman with milk
suckles a child other than her own. Other ways for establishing kin relations include
a formal name-giving–name-receiving relation created when the name of one person
is given as the name of a newborn of the same sex. In addition, kinship relations may
be established by acts of nurturance or co-residence. In some societies, kinship rela-
tions can be changed (outside of marriage) during one’s lifetime through actions and
behaviors engaged in by the relevant individuals.
Marriage
In all human societies, there is a system of kinship relations through which individuals
are given social, as opposed to biological, identity. This system of relations also provides
the underpinnings for the different forms of social organization occurring in human
societies. Social identity, though activated through birth, begins with marriage as a cul-
tural institution that publicly signifies, among other things, that the child of a woman,
through marriage, is entitled to recognition as a legitimate member of that society with
whatever rights accrue to a societal member (Gough 1959).
Marriage, as an institution, varies widely in form across societies, both with regard
k to the rights, privileges, and obligations that are established through marriage and with k
regard to the behavioral expectations each of the parties to the marriage has of the other
party. In common across human societies, the marriage act establishes a tie or connec-
tion between two persons who are usually, but not always, of opposite sex and serves to
publicly announce that a kinship relation (technically, an affinal, as opposed to a consan-
guineal, relation) has been established between these two persons, who may already be
consanguineally related, as occurs in societies with prescribed cross-cousin (genealog-
ical or classificatory) marriage, and with other persons who are kin to one or the other
of these two persons.
In some societies, marriages must be monogamous, meaning that a person may be
married to only one other person at the same time, whereas in other societies mar-
riages may be polygamous, meaning that a person may be married to more than one
other person at a time. Only a few societies allow for polyandrous marriages in which
a woman has more than one husband. The multiple husbands are usually brothers and
polyandrous marriages seem to occur with land scarcity as a way to prevent division of
land among brothers beyond what is economically viable. When polyandrous marriages
occur, they usually are but one of several forms of marriage within that society. No soci-
eties have group marriages in which several males are simultaneously married to several
females. Supposed examples of group marriage from Australia have been shown to be
without foundation. For the other extreme of a society without marriage, the matri-
lineal Mosuo of southwestern China come the closest since, traditionally, marriage was
restricted to the elite. Commoners did not marry, though there was a ritual for boys and
girls at time of puberty marking the change in their status from children to adults, after
which both girls and boys could initiate sexual relations with any resulting offspring
k
K I NSHI P S YST E MS 3
recognized as legitimate members of the girl’s matrilineage. The absence of marriage

for commoners appears to be the most extreme means for a matrilineal society to pre-
clude a potential conflict arising between matrilineal descent bonds, on the one hand,
and marriage bonds, on the other hand, with regard to a man’s claims to his progeny
and to authority over his wife. By excluding marriage, a man lacks a culturally recog-
nized basis for making such claims since both the status of being a culturally recognized
father and husband have been eliminated by the absence of marriage.
Death
Biologically, death signifies absolute termination of an organism’s existence as a coher-
ent entity and marks the beginning of the disintegration of that organism. Kinship, in
conjunction with religious ideas, conceptualizes death of a person in a different man-
ner in which one’s kinship identity may take on a different status, rather than death
marking the termination of being a kinsman, as is implied by the biological significa-
tion of death. Or, aspects of being a kinsman while alive may continue after death. One
of the central features of kinship, producing progeny and being recognized as a father,
can be continued beyond death through cultural ascription of what constitutes being
a father. In some societies, such as the Dinka and the Nuer of the southern Sudan, a
woman may marry a deceased man and his younger brother will stand in for him as
groom to the bride being married to the deceased older brother, with any subsequent
k male offspring arising from this union with the younger brother considered to be the k
son(s) of the dead brother. The rationale for the marriage to a deceased man appears to
be both in providing a way to assure, if a man dies before he has sons, the continuity of
a bloodline stemming from him and continuing through his sons, and also in enabling
a wealthy woman to maintain control of her wealth after marriage, since otherwise her
wealth is transferred to the man who becomes her husband upon her marriage. In a
similar way, though less extreme in its form and the extent to which it counteracts the
biological consequences of death, the levirate (a man replaces his married brother as
husband upon the brother’s death, generally associated with patriarchal societies) and
the sororate (a man marries the sister of his wife, usually after her death or if she is
infertile) enable (among other things) the continuity of a reproducing, conjugal couple
beyond the death of one couple member. In brief, death may serve to transform, rather
than terminate, kinship relations.
Forms of kinship relations
Genealogical relations
Through biological birth, a parent–child relation may be recognized by reference to cul-
tural criteria regarding who is considered to be a parent of whom. Female parentage is
generally built around (but is not reducible to) the biological fact of giving birth in coor-
dination with the social fact of marriage. Thus the mother–child relation is identified
for the relevant community through cultural recognition of her birth act; otherwise, the
k
newborn may be considered illegitimate according to local criteria determining when a

biological birth will be recognized as a culturally accepted event. For males, the cultural
criteria for being recognized as father are less certain and need not be coupled with a
man’s sexual role in reproduction. In addition, there may be uncertainty in knowing
what male, if any, should be culturally recognized as the father according to local ideas
about what constitutes fatherhood. Together, the mother–child and the father–child
relations provide the conceptual basis, in conjunction with the spouse relation estab-
lished through marriage, for tracing a genealogical connection of one person to another
through parent–child and marriage links.
Though the presence of a kinship relation between two persons can, in principle, be
indicated through tracing a genealogical connection between them, the needed infor-
mation for determining whether a genealogical connection exists may neither be known
to the parties involved nor culturally marked as being of importance, thus kinship, as
it is practiced, is not expressed solely through genealogical and marriage connections.
Instead, who is kin to whom is identified linguistically through a system of conceptually
interconnected kin terms referred to, technically, as a “kinship terminology.” Kinship
relations can be computed directly by culture bearers using the kin terms that identify
the kinship relations connecting the individuals in question without first referring to,
or establishing the presence of, a genealogical connection between them (Read 2007).
Kin-term relations: Address terms and reference terms

k k
Kin terms are analytically divided into terms of address, namely the terms used when
addressing one’s kin—as when a child says “Mommy, may I go outside and play?”—or
terms of reference used to identify the kinship relation of the reference person to
speaker—as in a statement like “He is my uncle”—for an English-speaker. Address
terms are more variable in their linguistic form than reference terms because they
express not only the kinship relation between speaker and listener but also emotional
and other characteristics involved in the relationship. For English-speakers, each of the
address terms “father,” “dad,” “daddy,” “pop,” and so on, has a different connotation
regarding the relationship between speaker and the reference person who is the subject
of the term of address. In contrast to address terms, a term of reference explicitly
indicates the kinship relation connecting speaker to another person. Collectively,
the reference terms constitute the kinship terminology for societal members and the
terms in the kinship terminology linguistically define and express the kinship-term
relations recognized in that society’s kinship system. For English-speakers, the refer-
ence terms include father, mother, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, cousin, wife, husband,
mother-in-law, father-in-law, and so on.
Computation of kinship-term relations

The kinship terminology is a logically structured system of interconnected terms (Leaf
and Read 2012) that make it possible to compute the kinship relation between two per-
sons by reference to a third person whose kinship relation to each of the two persons is
already known. For English-speakers, if speaker refers to a person as “uncle” and that
k
person refers to yet another person as “child,” then speaker knows to refer to the latter
person as “my cousin” even if the actual genealogical connection among the three indi-
viduals is unknown to them, as may be the case with adoption. Computations like this
are commonly made by two culture bearers to determine the kin-term relation between
them by referring to their respective kin-term relations to a third person and making
use of the (implicit) structural logic of their kinship terminology. Technically, the com-
putation being made is the kin-term product of (in this case) the reference kin terms
child and uncle, with (for English-speakers) the reference kin term cousin being the kin
term resulting from taking the kin-term product of child and uncle.
Alternative views of kinship: Kinship as a nonsubject

and the “new kinship”
From genealogy to kinship as a nonsubject

From the time of American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, kin relations have
been assumed to begin with procreation and are expanded through marriage, so
genealogical connections have been taken analytically as the primary way to express
the meaning and definition of kin terms for a particular society. However, precisely
what is meant by genealogical connections has been subject to different interpretations
in kinship studies, with these interpretations ranging from the purely biological to
k the purely cultural. The biological interpretation was extensively critiqued by David k
Schneider (1984), thereby leading to his assertion that kinship, at least as it has been
studied by anthropologists who make this biological interpretation (implicitly or
explicitly), does not exist, a claim that parallels the British anthropologist Rodney
Needham’s ([1971] 2004) similar assertion regarding kinship as a nonsubject.
The “new kinship”

Subsequently, a “new kinship” based on the idea of culturally constructed and recog-
nized forms of relationship, in place of kin relations presumed to be established biolog-
ically through procreation, has gained traction. While rejection of the idea that kinship
is essentially a biological phenomenon is supported by extensive ethnographic data on
what constitutes kinship relations from the perspective of culture bearers, not recog-
nized, though, in this proposed paradigm shift is the fact that including procreation
as central to kinship systems does not require assuming the primacy of biology for
recognizing kin relations. Instead, the process of tracing genealogical connections by
culture bearers only requires the idea that parent–child relations, however these may
be defined culturally, apply in principle to all persons, not that these relations can be
reduced to biological relations. Similarly, the kin terms making up a kinship terminol-
ogy are organized in a logically coherent manner without any need to first presume a
biological foundation (Read 2007). Further, there is no society that fails to have a kin-
ship terminology system expressing, for culture bearers, the conceptual organization of
their system of kinship relations recognized and linguistically expressed through kin
k
terms. Where substantial differences arise, though, is in the cultural meaning assigned
to procreation, including the local understanding of the respective roles of a male and a
female (and possibly others) in the formation of an offspring through procreation. This
includes how a kinship system, through its terminology viewed as a system of sym-
bols, expresses the kinship relations through which the social/kinship identity of the
offspring-to-be being created biologically and born socially is enacted.
Unwarranted rejection of previous kinship research

In effect, though not stated precisely in this manner, what Schneider was criticizing
is the presumption (in his reading of the literature on kinship systems) that procre-
ation, even from a cultural perspective, is essentially a biological act having sociological
prerequisites. However, rather than being subsumable under biological reductionism,
procreation, as viewed by culture bearers, is a social act with biological prerequisites
(Sahlins 2013). This leaves open, from an empirical perspective, the scope and kind of
relationships that can be included in local ideas about kinship and does not require the
unwarranted rejection of a century of rigorous and insightful scholarship on the nature
of kinship systems in human societies.
Instead of rejection, the domain of kinship can be divided usefully into three aspects:
(1) behavior—what people actually do, (2) rules—what people say are the rules or jural
restrictions on behavior, and (3) categories and relations among categories. These divi-
k k
sions have content varying from less to more abstract and the third has been the focus
of theorizing about the categories of kin making up kinship systems and it has been the
basis for the formal modeling of kinship terminology systems.
Kinship as a system: Kin categories and relations among

kin categories
Bridewealth and dowry

Regardless of the structural form that marriage takes on, marriage is not just a cul-
tural tie established between a male and a female but also incorporates, to one degree
or another, relations involving the social units in which the bride and groom were
members before marriage. In unilineal societies, marriage is normally exogamous with
respect to the lineage and may be enacted through a contract between the involved lin-
eages regarding transfer of service, goods, land, or other forms of wealth, thus making
marriage an economic as well as a social event. In its simplest form, within patrilineal
societies the wealth transfer, often referred to technically as “bridewealth,” is normally
from the groom’s lineage through his kin to the bride’s lineage in exchange for her
becoming (among other things) a provider of new members for the groom’s lineage
through her reproduction, since her children will be members of her husband’s lineage.
In effect, through marriage she is being alienated (to one degree or another, depending
on the society) from her lineage and the contract provides compensation to her lineage
k
for her alienation, especially the transfer of her services and reproduction to the groom’s
lineage.
In matrilineal societies, there is no alienation of a man from his lineage on marriage
and wealth transfer may, instead, take the form of a dowry provided by the bride’s father
for his daughter upon her marriage, with control of the dowry after marriage being
variable from one society to another regarding whether it remains under the control of
the bride or comes under the control of the groom after marriage. The inclusion of a
dowry as part of the marriage act is not limited to matrilineal societies as it provides,
more broadly speaking, a way for economic resources to be transferred from the bride’s
family to the bride, whether as a means to make a daughter more desirable as a potential
wife through the dowry she will bring to the marriage or as a means to help ensure her
economic wellbeing after marriage, with the latter typically exogamous at the level of
social units within the society of which she is a member.
Marriage exogamy
The theoretical reasons proffered for marriage exogamy range from inbreeding
avoidance through incest taboos to the formation of marriage alliances among groups,
thereby linking together otherwise distinct descent lineages into a single society.
It should be noted, though, that mating exogamy, which is a correlate of marriage
exogamy, is not uniquely a human characteristic as it also characterizes nonhuman
k primates through their common pattern of sex-biased philopatry. k
Descent theory and alliance theory

Whether seen from the perspective of marriage alliances or of unilineal descent groups
determined by tracing through parent links of a single sex (depending on the society)
to a reference ancestor or ancestress, marriage exogamy prevents a system of intercon-
nected lineages from devolving into isolated groups. As a consequence, one of the main
differences in the two perspectives referred to as descent theory and alliance theory
lies in the relative importance each orientation places on affinal versus consanguineal
kinship relations for the structural and functional cohesion of a society.
Descent theory Descent theory is generally associated with the ethnographic accounts
of African societies by British social anthropologists of the early and mid-twentieth cen-
tury. Their focus tended to be on the structural organization and functioning of societies
seen from the perspective of considering kinship as primarily referring to filiation, with
marriage considered to be a more secondary aspect of kinship systems. Many African
societies were found to be structurally organized through lineages connected by descent
from a common ancestor.
Descent groups may be nested hierarchically and more inclusively through using, as
reference points, increasingly remote ancestors. Tracing may either be actual, in which
case a lineage member may be able to recite the genealogical connection he or she has
to the reference ancestor, or putative, thus allowing for a nonhuman reference ances-
tor. By restricting tracing of genealogical links to parents of a single sex, lineages with
k
ancestors at the same genealogical level to one another will be non-overlapping, hence
the boundary of a lineage is well defined by the reference ancestor used for identifying
group membership.
Typically, marriage is exogamous with respect to the lineage. The structurally small-
est lineage (in the sense of tracing to the least remote ancestor recognized as a possible
reference point for a lineage) is often a corporate group that holds resources, land,
domesticated animals and/or various other wealth items in common, with individu-
als and families having access to lineage items through their status as lineage members.
The structure and function of societies in this perspective, then, seemed to be explicable
through the lens of descent groups and their social, political, economic, and religious
role in the functioning of a society. Problems with descent theory arose from ethnogra-
phies in other parts of the world, though, especially in the Pacific and Asian areas when
it became clear that unilineal forms of social organization were not universal and the cri-
terion for an individual being recognized as a kinsman could occur by means other than
filiation through procreation or by marriage. In addition, it increasingly became clear
that marriage played a much greater role in the organization and structure of kinship
systems in these societies than is assumed under descent theory.
Alliance theory Alliance theory, associated primarily with the French anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss, operates from a different premise, namely that the pattern of ties
between groups created through marriage is central to the structure and coherency of
k interconnected social groups. Descent may define the relevant social units but mar- k
riage, he argued, provided the means by which units are unified together into a coherent
and stable social system. Further, marriage was not simply an enterprise to be decided
on by the interests of individuals and their families; instead a major division could be
made between what he referred to as elementary structures and complex structures,
where the former, in response to the incest rule, had positive marriage rules specifying
marriages using kin categories, while the latter had negative rules specifying the kin cat-
egories that were prohibited under marriage. Marriages in elementary structures were
not so much marriages between individuals as forming, in accordance with the ideas
of Marcel Mauss regarding the social importance of reciprocal gift giving, an exchange
relationship involving two groups, namely those who give wives and those who take
wives, thereby creating two categories of kin: wife givers and wife receivers. According
to alliance theory, marriage had to be between groups due to the incest taboo.
Elementary structures
Lévi-Strauss divided elementary structures into those with restricted exchange, where
the males of each of two groups exchange “sisters” (genealogical or classificatory) as
wives with the other group, and generalized exchange, where at least three groups
are involved and each group is a wife giver to one of the groups and a wife taker
from a different group. The positive marriage rules are, he argued, expressed through
prescriptive cross-cousin marriage: restricted exchange results from cross-cousin
marriage (genealogical or classificatory) whether matrilateral or patrilateral and gen-
eralized exchange results from either matrilateral cross-cousin marriage or patrilateral
k
cross-cousin exchange alone. The last, theoretically speaking, should be rare (and, in
fact, empirically is rare) due to patrilateral cross-cousin marriage causing each group
to change its wife-giving or wife-receiving role with respect to another group in each
genealogical generation.
Complex structures
Complex structures, though not given the detailed analysis Lévi-Strauss provided for
elementary structures, lack any simple pattern of marriages due to only restricting the
conditions under which marriage may not take place. Whereas marriage alliances in
elementary structures, at least for Australia, link together sociocentrically defined mar-
riage classes, kinship groupings in complex structures are egocentric since they specify
what egocentric kinship relations are not permissible between a bride and a groom,
hence there is no alliance structure composed of intermarrying sociocentrically defined
groups.
House societies
Lévi-Strauss also recognized another form of society, with neither an elementary nor
a complex structure, that he called “sociétés à maison” (“house society”). A house
society is “a corporate body holding an estate made up of both material and immaterial
wealth, which perpetuates itself through the transmission of its name, its goods and
k k
its titles down a real or imaginary line considered legitimate as long as this continuity
can express itself in the language of kinship or of affinity and, most often, of both”
(Lévi-Strauss 1982, 194). As regards its organization as a society, it is between a
kinship-based and a class-based society, with the house (physical or conceptual, as
in the House of Windsor) metaphorically providing a focus that enables it to be
coherent as a society without the kinship restrictions of lineal systems and having,
instead, inherited titles of rank and position associated with a hierarchical system, with
emphasis on wealth accumulation (material and immaterial) by the house.
Atom of kinship
The importance of affinal relations in alliance theory for understanding kinship rela-
tions can also be seen in Lévi-Strauss’s idea of an atom of kinship based on filiation
(father–son, brother–sister) and affinity (husband–wife) and filiation combined with
affinity (wife’s brother–sister’s son). How the atom of kinship relates to a system of kin-
ship relations expressed through a kinship terminology is not considered, and in fact it
does not appear as a construct in accounts of the generative logic of kinship terminolo-
gies.
Comparison of descent theory with alliance theory

The very different premises and implications of descent theory versus alliance theory
regarding how we understand human societies from a kinship perspective were
k
extensively debated in the 1970s, both from the perspective of theory and of ethno-
graphic observation. This led to the realization that much of the seeming conflict
between alliance theory and descent theory resulted from whether one assumes
kinship systems are primarily structured around filiation (descent theory) or around
affinal relations (alliance theory). Structurally, though, insufficient attention has been
paid to the possibility that alliance theory relates to societies in which a lineage
structure cannot be divorced from a marriage rule, as is the case with marriage classes
in Australia, and descent theory to societies in which a lineage structure is defined
by tracing back to a reference ancestor. In this sense, both theories suffer from being
circular since alliance theory applies to societies in which affinal relations through
marriage determine a lineage structure and descent theory applies to societies in
which lineages are descent groups defined by descent from a recognized, common
ancestor.
Regardless of the possible circularity, one of the important outcomes of that debate
has been the realization that neither theory can claim universality, both for the rea-
sons just described and because their respective premises of a lineage structure either
determined by descent from a reference ancestor or by marriage rules forming a lineage
structure without a reference ancestor are not universal.
k Ethnographic exceptions to alliance theory k
The Arab and Berber societies are a notable exception to alliance theory with their
preference for patrilateral parallel cousin marriage even though they are patrilineal
societies. For this kind of marriage, both a man and his wife are members of the same
patrilineage; hence marriages are not exogamous with respect to the lineage. Inclusion
of nonexogamous marriages within marriage preferences is also found in other groups,
such as the Netsilik Inuit of Hudson Bay with their preference for (undifferentiated)
cousin marriage.
Preferential parallel cousin marriages

Preferential parallel cousin marriage poses a problem for alliance theory since mar-
riages like this decrease the occurrence of affinal kin ties among lineages, hence poten-
tially reducing the unifying effect of marriage alliances for the society as a whole. Parallel
cousin marriages appear to be activated in situations where, from the perspective of the
lineage members involved in the marriage, the consequences of keeping affinal rela-
tions created through marriage within the lineage outweigh the potential advantages
derived from marriages linking different lineages (Bourdieu 1990). Parallel cousin mar-
riage in a patrilineal system, for example, enables female inheritance of lineage wealth
from her father while simultaneously keeping that wealth within the lineage, an impor-
tant consequence that comes to the fore in Arabic and Berber societies with the Islamic
requirement of female inheritance.
k
Preferential cousin marriages

For the Netsilik, with residence groups based on father–son filiation, cousin marriage
enables both the residence group of the bride and of the groom to benefit from the
groom as a procurer of food resources. Expected postmarriage residence is with the
groom’s residence group, even though the scarcity of marriageable daughters due to
female infanticide would otherwise favor a bias toward matrilocal residence. The bias
toward the groom’s residence group is counterbalanced by cousin marriage. With patri-
lateral parallel cousin marriages, both the groom and the bride are from the same res-
idence group and so, by default, the groom remains in her residence group after mar-
riage with patrilocal residence. For cross-cousin marriages, the two residence groups
involved in the marriage are already linked through the brother–sister tie in the parental
generation. For the remaining possibility of matrilateral parallel cousin marriage, the
two residence groups involved in the marriage, though lacking a male sibling connec-
tion in the parental generation, are already closely linked through the husbands of the
two sisters having become, as brother-in-laws, angayungoq-nukangor to each other, a
relationship that emphasized their affinal bond and led to a close relationship between
them. For all four possibilities, then, cousin marriage enables the interest of both the
bride’s residence group and the groom’s residence group in benefiting from the groom
as a procurer of resources through hunting to be realized.
k k
Rethinking cross-cousin marriage rules
While preferential parallel cousin marriage acts against alliance theory, there is another,
and potentially more serious, problem relating to our theoretical understanding of kin-
ship systems. The problem stems from assuming that genealogically framing a marriage
rule as a behavior rule adequately expresses the implications of the structural relation-
ships that are involved. More precisely, absent in a marriage rule expressed genealog-
ically is the ontological relationship—and its implications—connecting the generative
logic of a kinship terminology with a marriage rule.
Ontology of the Kariera cross-cousin marriage rule

Consider the Kariera of Western Australia, whose kinship system has been taken as
canonical for alliance theory. The Kariera are said to have a prescriptive cross-cousin
marriage rule requiring reciprocal exchange of women as wives between marriage
classes; hence, in the language of alliance theory, they are said to have an elementary
kinship structure. The generative logic of their terminology, however, shows that the
marriage rule is only implicitly a prescription for behavior and instead is a structurally
required property for the logical completeness of their terminology as a structure
composed of four vertical “lines” of kin terms. Briefly, for the terminology structure
to consist of four lines of kin terms connected vertically in the upward direction by
kin-term products with the terms mama (father) and nganga (mother) and in the
downward direction by kin-term products with the terms maiñga (son) and kundal
k
(daughter), it is necessary that both the kin-term product of “spouse” and “male self”
and of “spouse” and “female self” be ñuba (cross-cousin); that is, for logical consistency
in the kinship terminology, speaker must refer to one’s spouse by the consanguineal
kin term ñuba (cross-cousin), hence there is no affinal kin term—such as the affinal
kin terms “wife” and “husband” for English-speakers—for spouse distinct from the
consanguineal term ñuba (cross-cousin). It follows from this that maiñga (son) of
ñuba (cross-cousin) [= “son” of {“spouse” of (male, female) self}] is maiñga (son),
since when the genealogical child of speaker is also the genealogical child of speaker’s
spouse, both speaker and speaker’s spouse refer to their common genealogical child by
the kin term that is used to refer to genealogical child in their kinship terminology. A
similar argument applies to kundal, making (daughter) of ñuba (cross-cousin) be the
kin term kundal (daughter).
These two results imply that the terminology will be structurally consistent with
respect to four vertical lines of kin terms when a man’s (or a woman’s) spouse is referred
to as ñuba. Hence the cross-cousin marriage rule is not a behavioral prescription about
who must marry whom, but a statement about what kind of marriage is consistent with
the logic of their kinship terminology. This suggests that rather than the marriage rule
being a means to create alliances, alliances emerge as the consequence of marriages
consistent with the logic of their kinship terminology.
k Ontology of the Dravidian cross-cousin marriage rule k

When we contrast the Kariera cross-cousin marriage rule with the cross-cousin mar-
riage rules among the Dravidian speakers of southern India, we find that what is struc-
turally entailed by the Dravidian marriage rule is substantively different (Read 2010).
Unlike the Kariera kinship system, the cross-cousin marriage rule associated with Dra-
vidian kinship systems is not necessary for the logical completeness of a group’s termi-
nology. Instead, the rule emerges from the way sibling and spouse links enter into the
generative logic of a Dravidian terminology. Consequently, their consanguineal terms
for cross-cousin (differentiated by sex and relative age) need not be, and are not, used
in reference to the spouse of a person.
Their marriage rule also derives from the generative logic of their terminology, with
the latter leading to a structural division of kin terms into two groups: marriageable kin
terms and nonmarriageable kin terms—that is, a person (of the opposite sex) referred
to by speaker with a kin term from the first group is marriageable (taking into account
generation restrictions on proper marriages) but not when referred to by a kin term
from the second group. In generation 0, only the cross-cousin kin terms are in the
marriageable group for speaker, hence a marriage between a male and a female in gener-
ation 0 must be between “cross-cousins.” Thus, whereas the cross-cousin marriage rule
expresses what kind of marriage (regardless of generation) is consistent with the struc-
ture of the terminology for the Kariera, the cross-cousin marriage rule in a Dravidian
terminology is an emergent, prescriptive rule specifying (to put it back into genealogical
language) that a cross-cousin is the only permissible marriage partner for two persons
of the opposite sex and of the same generation.
k
For Dravidian terminologies, the marriage rule does not lead to a system of mar-
riage reciprocity between distinct sociocentric groups as happens with the marriage
classes in the Australian kinship systems since the persons who are, or who are not,
marriageable in a Dravidian kinship system are not socio- but self-centric groups,
hence the marriage ties do not form an alliance structure based on marriage exchanges
between sociocentric kinship groupings (Good 1980). However, the marriages do
create an implicit division into two intermarrying groups, or sidedness, for the
middle three generations, as has been shown through a network analysis of marriage
links.
Altogether, these examples of structural differences and significant behavioral con-
sequences in what has been included under cross-cousin marriage rules suggest that
heterogeneity in cultural form and practice has been obscured through unwarranted
homogeneity in cross-cousin marriage rules being imposed when structural hetero-
geneity is removed through the use of a single, genealogically defined cross-cousin
marriage rule and treating other forms of cousin marriage, such as parallel cousin mar-
riage, as aberrations.
Formal modeling of kinship relations
Modeling of kinship categories and relations among these categories has generally relied
on one of two related analytical frameworks: (1) the genealogical meaning of the kin
k k
terms and organization of a kinship terminology through genealogy or (2) the impli-
cation of prescriptive marriage rules for the structural integration of social units such
as families, lineages, clans, or even whole societies through a system of alliances. For
the first framework, it has generally been assumed—though incorrectly as has been
shown (Read 2007)—that kin terms are primarily linguistic labeling for already deter-
mined categories of genealogical meaning. While kin terms do identify genealogical
categories—such as the kin term “uncle” being used by English-speakers for a person’s
parent’s brother or parent’s sister’s husband—these categories are derived from the logic
of the structure of a kinship terminology and not the reverse, as has generally been
assumed (Read 2007).
The organization and structure among the kin terms making up a kinship
terminology can be modeled formally by considering a few, primary kinship
concepts and their structural properties (Read 2007). The cultural knowledge
embedded in a kinship system therefore incorporates a cultural theory regard-
ing salient kinship properties derived from these primary kinship concepts, such
as the structural basis for Morgan’s (1871) distinction between descriptive and
classificatory terminologies. These concepts have roots both in culturally defined
marriage systems—with marriage rules that structure the kinship connections
among social groups positively through prescriptive marriage rules or negatively
through incest taboos—and in biological reproduction, including new reproductive
technologies.
k
Kinship and the new reproductive technologies
The new reproductive technologies have redefined the role of the agents in biological
reproduction, thereby raising questions about what it means, biologically, to be a parent
(Strathern 1992). In extreme form, a female can contract to use the egg of one female,
have it fertilized through artificial insemination, and then have it implanted in another
contracted female who provides the womb for the development and birth of the fetus.
The offspring can be legally recognized as the child of the contracting woman, yet she
neither has genetic connection to the child nor has she been physically involved in the
biological process of fetal growth leading to birth.
In addition to providing alternatives when one (or both) of the parties involved in
reproduction is infertile, reproductive technologies also make it possible for a same-sex
couple to have a child genetically connected to one of the two persons making up that
couple. With two females, one female can provide the egg and the other the womb;
hence both can be involved in the reproduction process.
Alternatives to the usual pattern of biological reproduction through sexual inter-
course involving just one male and one female are not new in human societies. People
have long been innovative in finding ways to accommodate both marriage and repro-
duction limitations arising from biological constraints, such as one parent being infer-
tile or no longer alive, in order that the outcome desired by the individuals involved
can be achieved through reproduction. In England, Henry VIII’s well-known actions
k (and consequences thereof) undertaken to ensure a male heir to the throne is but a k
prominent example where the outcomes of biological reproduction have been made
subservient to the desired, expected, or hoped-for reproductive outcomes by the indi-
viduals and/or groups involved. The new reproductive technologies simply underscore
the dynamism and inventiveness of humans in their behavioral implementation of soci-
etal and cultural ideas about kinship.
Conclusion
In sum, no society considers the biological reproduction process alone to be a sufficient

wbiea1333
wbiea1334 basis for an offspring to be recognized as a societal member and to have kinship status
wbiea1335
wbiea1346 vis-à-vis other members of that society. In all societies, kinship has to do with cultural
wbiea1348
wbiea1358 systems that include biological facts, not biological systems that include cultural facts.
wbiea1377
wbiea1423
SEE ALSO: <DRAFT: Family>; <DRAFT: Kinship, Overview of>; <BLIND: BE167>;
wbiea1369
wbiea1440
<BLIND: BE196>; <BLIND: BE204>; <BLIND: BE271>; Section Marriage Systems;

wbiea1442
wbiea1444
wbiea1449
wbiea1462 Elementary Structures of Kinship, The / Les structures élémentaires de la parenté;
wbiea1481
wbiea1461 Levirate; Consanguineous Marriage; Leach, Edmund (1910–89); Milk Kinship;
wbiea1498
wbiea1525 Bride-Price; Polygamy (Polygyny, Polyandry); Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1881–1955);
wbiea1531
wbiea1537
wbiea1539
Bride Service; Ritual and Fictive Kinship; Maine, Henry (1822–88); Tetradic Theory;
wbiea1573
Kroeber, Alfred L. (1876–1960); Reproduction; Fortes, Meyer (1906–83); Goody,
wbiea1566 Jack (1919–2015); Ghost Marriage; Couvade; Exogamy; Dravidian Systems of Kin-
ship; Kinship Terminology; Human Kinship, Evolutionary and Bioanthropological
k
wbiea1604
wbiea1616
wbiea1623
Approaches to; Exchange of Women, Lévi-Strauss and Critiques of; Structuralism
wbiea1667
(Linguistic Anthropology); Tribe; Partible Paternity; Marriage: Approaches from
wbiea1670
wbiea1704
Evolutionary Ecology; Totemism; Self and Selfhood; Fatherhood, Anthropological
wbiea1728
wbiea1793 Approaches to; Surrogacy; Fatherhood, Biosocial Perspectives on; Kinship, Sociocul-
wbiea1820 tural Approaches (the Nineteenth Century); Conception Beliefs; Sahlins, Marshall
wbiea1816
wbiea1865 (b. 1930); Kinship, Sociocultural Approaches (Recent Approaches); Firth, Raymond
wbiea1956 (1901–2002); Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908–2009); Incest, Theoretical Perspectives on;
wbiea1958
Morgan, Lewis Henry (1818–81); Joking and Avoidance Relationships; Matriarchy;
wbiea1972
wbiea1971 House Societies; Patriarchy and Male Dominance; Pair Bonds and the Evolution of
wbiea2007
wbiea2041 Monogamy; Malinowski, Bronisław (1884–1942); Virgin Birth; Evans-Pritchard, E. E.
wbiea2075
wbiea2105 (1902–73); Parallel Cousin Marriage; Gender and Kinship; Household; Human Kinship
wbiea2056
wbiea2112 (Early), The Archaeological Evidence for; Cross-Cousin Marriage; Consanguinity
wbiea2145
wbiea2148
wbiea2164
wbiea2226
wbiea2251
wbiea2266 REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
wbiea2312
wbiea2319
wbiea2343
wbiea2351
wbiea2352
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press.
El Guindi, Fadwa. 2010. “The Cognitive Path through Kinship.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences
33: 384–85.
Fortes, Meyer. 1969. Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan. Chicago:
Aldine.
k Godelier, Maurice. 2012. The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Translated by Nora Scott. London: k
Verso.
Good, Anthony. 1980. “Elder Sister’s Daughter Marriage in South Asia.” Journal of Anthropolog-
ical Research 36: 474–500.
Gough, Kathleen. 1959. “The Nayar and the Definition of Marriage.” Journal of the Royal Anthro-
pological Institute 89: 23–34.
Leaf, Murray J., and Dwight Read. 2012. Human Thought and Social Organization: Anthropology
on a New Plane. Lanham, MD: Lexington Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1969. Elementary Structures of Kinship. Translated by James Harle
Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. Edited by Rodney Needham. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1982. The Way of the Mask. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1871. Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity in the Human Family. Wash-
ington, DC: The Smithsonian Institute.
Murdock, George Peter. 1949. Social Structure. New York: Macmillan.
Needham, Rodney. (1971) 2004. “Introduction.” In Rethinking Kinship and Marriage, edited by
Rodney Needham, xiii–cvii. London: Routledge.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1941. “The Study of Kinship Systems.” The Journal of the Royal Anthro-
pological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 71: 1–18.
Read, Dwight. 2007. “Kinship Theory: A Paradigm Shift.” Ethnology 46: 329–64.
Read, Dwight. 2010. “The Generative Logic of Dravidian Language Terminologies.” Math-
ematical Anthropology and Cultural Theory 3 (7) 1–27. Accessed May 24, 2017, http://
mathematicalanthropology.org/Pdf/Read.0810.pdf.
Sahlins, Marshall. 2013. What Kinship Is … And Is Not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Scheffler, Harold W., and Floyd Lounsbury. 1971. A Study in Structural Semantics: The Siriono
Kinship System. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
k
Schneider, David M. 1984. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1992. Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the New
Reproductive Technologies. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
k k
k
Please note that the abstract and keywords will not be included in the printed book,
but are required for the online presentation of this book which will be published on
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If the abstract and keywords are not present below, please take this opportunity to
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The abstract should be a short paragraph of between 50 and 150 words in length and
there should be at least 3 keywords.
ABSTRACT
Kinship is a universal of human societies, built around systems of self-centric, reciprocal
social relations. In all societies, societal members are conceptually organized, to one
degree or another, through structured, reciprocal systems of relations. Kinship systems
are broad in their scope and interdigitate with religious, economic, political, and other
social systems. A group’s ideas about procreation, along with its ideas about kinship
relations in general, provide for the social identity of a newborn offspring through the
family social unit (ranging in form from single parent to extended family) into which
it is born and to its position in an already-existing network of kinship relations into
k which it is entering through kinship relations recognized at birth. Kinship relations also k
provide an idiom through which forms of social organization are expressed in human
societies.
KEYWORDS
alliance theory; alliances; culture; descent theory; kinship and social organization; mar-
riage; structuralism
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Article · September 2018

Tarring Pebble Modes Research View project

Kinship View project

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Kinship is a universal of human societies, built around systems of self-centric, recipro-

Life-cycle events and kinship relations

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.

recognized as legitimate members of the girl’s matrilineage. The absence of marriage

Forms of kinship relations

newborn may be considered illegitimate according to local criteria determining when a

Kin-term relations: Address terms and reference terms

Computation of kinship-term relations

Alternative views of kinship: Kinship as a nonsubject

From genealogy to kinship as a nonsubject

The “new kinship”

Unwarranted rejection of previous kinship research

Kinship as a system: Kin categories and relations among

Bridewealth and dowry

Descent theory and alliance theory

Comparison of descent theory with alliance theory

k Ethnographic exceptions to alliance theory k

Preferential parallel cousin marriages

Preferential cousin marriages

Ontology of the Kariera cross-cousin marriage rule

k Ontology of the Dravidian cross-cousin marriage rule k

Formal modeling of kinship relations

Kinship and the new reproductive technologies

In sum, no society considers the biological reproduction process alone to be a sufficient

<BLIND: BE196>; <BLIND: BE204>; <BLIND: BE271>; Section Marriage Systems;

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