From Kinshipology to Cultural Variability
Anthropologists once joked their own field had become “kinshipology” — but the obsession produced enduring insights about how societies organize without states, resist colonialism through family ties, and define who counts as kin. The anthropology of kinship shows how different societies reckon descent, arrange marriages, and create family bonds, revealing enormous cultural variability in what seems like the most “natural” human domain. These course notes accompany lectures using Essentials of Cultural Anthropology by Kenneth Guest. (Commissions earned.) For the broader topic area, see the Gender-Sex-Kinship Hub.
Key Concepts
- Kinshipology — Anthropology became so kinship-obsessed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that critics called the field “kinshipology.” The obsession produced enduring insights but also exposed how much of the analysis reflected anthropologists’ own British and American family assumptions.
- Radcliffe-Brown’s joking relationship — In Structure and Function in Primitive Society, Radcliffe-Brown analyzed how a young man and his mother-in-law made sex jokes in an otherwise prudish society. The ritualized teasing diffused a structurally tense relationship — classic structural-functionalism.
- Matrilineal vs. patrilineal authority — In matrilineal societies, the mother’s brother typically holds inheritance and lineage authority, often mattering more than the father (who belongs to a different lineage). Cousin terminology and marriage rules shift accordingly.
- Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer — The Nuer (1940) argued kinship organized societies resisting British colonialism without state governments. People drew on family ties when the colonial state was machine-gunning their villages.
- Universal incest taboos, variable lines — All societies have incest taboos, but where the line falls varies dramatically. Matrilateral cousins might be unmarriable in matrilineal societies and prime marriage partners in patrilineal ones.
- Polyandry preserves inheritance — Melvyn Goldstein’s “When Brothers Share a Wife” shows fraternal polyandry in highland Tibet keeps intact inheritance among middle-strata families — not the poorest, not the richest, but those preserving status.
- Kinship-making through food and substance — Kinship isn’t only biology; in Malaysian society, people who share food are understood to come to look and act alike, and breast milk has long been understood as creating kinship across biological lines.
- The nuclear family was never the norm — Kath Weston’s Families We Choose and Stephanie Coontz’s The Way We Never Were together argue the 1950s nuclear family was never the historical norm — extended and chosen families are closer to actual tradition.
When Anthropology Almost Became “Kinshipology”
A hundred years ago, the anthropology of kinship dominated the discipline. The reasoning seemed sound: biological reproduction is a human universal — everybody needs to do it — so kinship should provide a stable basis for comparison across societies. Anthropologists assumed all societies would reckon their kinship in similar ways, and began mapping elaborate kinship charts to compare different systems. The project became so consuming that critics joked anthropology was becoming “kinshipology” because kinship studies dominated everything else.
Understanding kinship requires recognizing how different societies organize descent and inheritance. Different societies use different kinship terms based on their descent systems. In Korean, for example, you call your father’s brothers “little father” or “big father” — using the same kinship word as “father” since they’re in the same generation. English doesn’t work this way, but the Korean system reflects how patrilineal societies organize relationships.
We have only one word for “cousin” that doesn’t distinguish between father’s side and mother’s side. However, in a patrilineal society, the distinction between father’s side cousins and mother’s side cousins is huge — you’d have different words for them, and you might not even consider yourself related to your mother’s side cousins since they belong to a different lineage. Conversely, in matrilineal societies, your patrilineal cousins wouldn’t be very important to you. The matrilateral cross-cousins — your mother’s brother’s children — would matter more.
In matrilineal kinship systems, the mother’s brother is a hugely important person because he’s the one getting the inheritance and often holds authority over the lineage. Your uncle on your mother’s side may be more important to you than your father, because your father belongs to a different lineage and will be looking after his own matrilineal cousins. These systems create different networks of obligation, authority, and belonging that shape how societies organize labor, property, and power.
Radcliffe-Brown: Structure and Function in Kinship
British anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown wrote Structure and Function in Primitive Society, developing what became known as structural-functionalism. His core argument: if you could figure out the structure of a society and its institutions — particularly kinship — you would be able to explain all kinds of customs and how these things functioned. His contributions to the anthropology of kinship showed how different descent systems led people to think of themselves as more related to certain people and less (or not at all) related to others.
One of Radcliffe-Brown’s most interesting findings was the “joking relationship.” He studied a society that was very buttoned-down and puritanical when it came to talking about sex — no dirty jokes, no sexual references, very proper. Except he noticed something odd: when a certain young man got together with a certain older woman, all of a sudden there was sex talk, pulling, pushing, laughing — completely different behavior. And it wasn’t just these two individuals; it was this specific kinship relationship throughout the society.
How were these people related? The young man and the older woman were in a mother-in-law relationship. Radcliffe-Brown argued this joking behavior was a way to diffuse tension in what’s often a tense relationship. The prescribed joking allowed people to acknowledge and defuse the tension, and then everybody could go on with their lives. This insight showed how kinship provides structured ways to manage social tensions that arise from specific relationships created by marriage alliances.
Radcliffe-Brown also documented avoidance relationships — the opposite strategy for managing kinship tension. Some societies use special language forms or communication patterns with in-laws, creating formal distance to prevent conflict. Both avoidance and joking recognize the same underlying tension that kinship creates when marriage brings families together, but manage it through opposite strategies.
Incest Taboos and Marriage Rules
All societies include incest taboos — rules about who you cannot marry because they’re considered too close. But where exactly that taboo extends varies considerably. In the anthropology of kinship, this variability is crucial: in a patrilineal society, your matrilateral cousins (mother’s brother’s children) might be considered potential marriage partners because you wouldn’t really be related to them — they’re in a different lineage.
Now, you might be thinking you don’t want to marry your cousin, and that’s fine. But geneticists say it’s not that big a deal if it happens occasionally rather than repeatedly, since we’re all so closely related anyway. The anthropological point is that all societies draw lines around who counts as “too close,” but those lines are drawn in different places depending on how the system reckons descent and relatedness. What counts as incest in one society might be an appropriate marriage in another.
Evans-Pritchard and The Nuer: Kinship Without States
One of the most famous studies in the anthropology of kinship is E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer, which examined how people organized society along lines of descent. Evans-Pritchard was trying to figure out how the Nuer, who had no state government, were organizing themselves — and how they were resisting British colonialism even though they didn’t seem to have a state structure to coordinate resistance.
He concluded that kinship was the key organizing principle. And it didn’t necessarily have to be completely biological kinship — simply the idea that you were in a lineage or a family provided the structure for social organization outside of government institutions. This contributed to anthropological understanding of how kinship can organize society beyond the nations and states we’re more familiar with. Kinship provided the framework for political alliances, military organization, dispute resolution, and resource distribution without requiring centralized state authority.
However, there’s an important caveat. In some ways, it was actually the anthropologists — and perhaps the British especially — who were obsessed with lineage, family trees, and tracing ancestry back to King Arthur. The Nuer and other societies seemed to be more flexible in practice than the kinship charts indicated. The abstract rules that older members of society explained to anthropologists (“this person married that person because they have this relationship”) often differed from the lived experience of who people were actually close to and why.
Additionally, the Nuer were in semi-active resistance to British colonialism when Evans-Pritchard studied them. They were pretty angry that the British had been machine-gunning their villages and being generally mean and colonial. Here’s a key question: if you’re in a situation of war or conflict, who do you draw on? Who can you trust? Your family, the people closest to you. So it may not be that the Nuer system was particularly rigid in peaceful times, but in situations of conflict — or when normal social structures break down — kinship provides the network you can rely on.
Marriage: Love, Alliance, and Kinship
Kinship comes from descent — who we’re descended from — but also from marriage, which creates new kinship ties. Guest’s textbook tells us that marriage has traditionally been very important for political alliances, inheritance, and economics. In the anthropology of kinship, marriage is less about individual romantic choice and more about how systems create bonds between families.
Something resembling the sentiment or emotion of love exists in all societies and is probably a human universal. Even people in arranged marriages talk about love, though they might describe it differently: “We weren’t in love at first, but over time we grew to love each other and appreciate each other.” So love is always around. But the idea that you could base your marriage on romantic love would be seen as crazy in most traditional societies, where marriage organizes property, creates political alliances, and structures inheritance between lineages.
Think about it this way: falling in love is often more the way you get out of a relationship than the way you get into one. Ever had your heart broken by someone you were in a relationship with who suddenly fell in love with somebody else? That’s why societies would say, “No, you can’t just base it on love.” People fall in and out of love all the time, always dancing around, being fickle, having three or four relationships because of love. It’s too fragile to be the foundation of marriage when stable alliances between families matter.
Around the world, people have increasingly talked about love as the basis for marriage, especially in Western societies over the last couple hundred years — emerging roughly with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice era. Interestingly, some societies that adopted romantic love as the marriage basis are now questioning that idea and going back to something more mixed — combining individual choice with family involvement in ways that recognize both love and the functions that marriage serves.
Exogamy and Endogamy
All societies have rules about who you can and should marry. The anthropology of kinship calls these rules exogamy and endogamy. Exogamy means you have to marry outside your group — you can’t marry too close, can’t marry your brother or sister, have to marry someone further away who’s not so related to you. These are the incest taboos we discussed earlier, which all societies maintain but define differently.
Endogamy means marrying within your group — whether defined by religion, caste, ethnicity, or social class. Many societies practice endogamy within certain boundaries while practicing exogamy across others, seeking the proper distance for marriage partners depending on whether they want political alliances with outsiders or to maintain wealth and status within the group.
For more on how endogamy operates in contemporary American society — particularly social class endogamy through residential segregation and educational sorting — see the marriage anthropology canonical.
Polygyny
Different societies permit different marriage forms. Polygyny — one man married to multiple wives — is legally permitted in the majority of the world’s societies, though it’s not actually practiced by most people in those societies because it’s very expensive. For example, in Islamic societies polygynous relationships are often permitted, but you have to provide separate houses for each wife. If you’ve tried having one house, you know that having two or three requires considerable wealth. So while legally permitted widely, polygyny isn’t a majority practice.
Polygyny tends to be allowed where resources are more abundant and more labor is needed. In “Shakespeare in the Bush,” one argument for why a king should have many wives was all the labor that had to be done in that area — more wives meant more labor and larger networks to draw upon.
Polyandry
Polyandry — one woman married to more than one man — is one of the rarest forms of marriage worldwide. The classic anthropological treatment is Melvyn Goldstein’s “When Brothers Share a Wife,” examining fraternal polyandry in highland Tibet.
Students often speculate about why polyandry exists. Maybe there aren’t enough women? But the demographics don’t support this — the population is roughly 50-50, and unmarried adult women exist. (The article’s unfortunate subtitle about “spinsterhood” confirms this.) Female infanticide? It occurs in some class-based societies with strict inheritance, but it’s not institutionally practiced here and can’t explain the pattern.
What about population control — keeping numbers down to prevent starvation? Goldstein shows that polyandry does regulate population growth, since multiple men married to one wife produce fewer children than if each had his own wife. But here’s the key insight: population control isn’t what the Tibetans themselves perceive as the goal. It’s a consequence, not a motivation. And if preventing starvation were the reason, polyandry would be practiced among the poorest people. It’s not.
Fraternal polyandry — brothers sharing a wife — is practiced by what we might call the middle strata: families with land worth preserving but not so much wealth that division wouldn’t matter. The poorest have nothing to divide; the richest have plenty to go around. It’s the families trying to maintain their standing who use this arrangement to avoid fragmenting inheritance across multiple households.
Goldstein compares this to what the English practiced 150-200 years ago: primogeniture, where the oldest son inherits everything. The family line and property stay intact — but then what happens to the other sons? One joins the military, another the priesthood. There are plenty of novels about what happens to people in such systems. Fraternal polyandry solves the same problem differently: instead of sending younger brothers away, everyone stays together with one wife, one household, one intact inheritance.
The people practicing polyandry aren’t necessarily enthusiastic about the arrangement — it’s not held up as an ideal the way polygyny sometimes is elsewhere. But it helps them preserve their place in society. Marriage, as this case vividly shows, organizes resources and inheritance as much as it organizes reproduction or romance.
Beyond Biology: Making Kinship Through Practice
Are biology, descent, and marriage the only basis for kinship? No. In the anthropology of kinship, researchers have found that in most societies, including our own, kinship — even if you consider yourself biologically related to somebody — is something you have to actively do or actively make. One way we do this is through sharing food. In some societies this is very explicit. In Malaysian society, people say those who share food together will look and act the same and be related. This is somewhat biologically true — if you’re always eating the same food growing up together, that affects your biological development.
Some people consider breastfeeding or breast milk as a substance that creates relatedness. There are different ideas across societies about sharing food or sharing substances that create kinship bonds beyond biological reproduction. This shows that kinship isn’t simply a reflection of biological facts — it’s a cultural construction that societies actively maintain and reproduce through daily practices.
Guest discusses Kath Weston’s Families We Choose, showing that many people — not just today but in other societies and times — place great importance on relationships not necessarily part of what we’d consider biological kinship. Some people don’t like this, arguing that changes are breaking down traditional family structures. But what is this “traditional family” they’re referring to?
The Nuclear Family Myth
The nuclear family — parents and children in an independent household — is often presented as the traditional kinship form. But has that been true? Is it as universal as people think? Guest cites Stephanie Coontz’s The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. Coontz demonstrates that we have this idea there used to be nuclear families and we were all in them. But if you look statistically, even at the 1950s era of black-and-white Leave It to Beaver TV shows, those representations weren’t accurate for how most Americans actually lived.
If we think about kinship historically, the “true traditional family” is probably something more like an extended family with much more flexible arrangements than the idealized nuclear family. So these families we choose — and the varied systems anthropologists document worldwide — are actually perhaps more in line with historical human kinship patterns than the mid-20th century nuclear family ideal.
Kinship and Nation-States
Evans-Pritchard’s work suggested people organized according to kinship outside the nation-state. There was also an assumption that as countries and nations developed, kinship would disappear or fade out as an organizing principle. But kinship metaphors and ideas about who we’re related to don’t necessarily fade out — they’re extended to what we’ve discussed as imagined communities. I imagine myself related enough to somebody from California that we can jump in a boat together, go across the world, and fight for our country. That’s kinship logic extended to the nation-state level.
One interesting contemporary issue involves new reproductive technologies — artificial insemination, donor mothers, and other techniques. What happens in Israeli society with these technologies? If Jewishness is passed down in a certain way according to traditional reckoning, and you’re using new reproductive technologies, are you still considered part of the group? This raises questions about how kinship adapts to technological change. While cutting-edge reproductive technologies are new, people have always tried to manipulate their fertility through various means — to either increase or decrease fertility as needed — and societies have always had to grapple with questions about who counts as related and why.
Cultural Variability Without Determinism
In the early days, researchers in the anthropology of kinship expected to find what we might call heteronormativity — that all people would have to get together in heterosexual relationships to reproduce the next generation. They believed that if people didn’t understand this, it meant they were “primitive” or didn’t know what was going on. They thought kinship evolved in a certain way toward becoming more modern, and you could rank societies in a hierarchy based on their kinship reckoning.
What anthropologists actually found was enormous cultural variability — how people reckon kin, make relationships, and organize families. People could change in ways that weren’t necessarily directional or hierarchical. The idea that certain changes would lead to social disorder proved false — most people can handle change, and it just becomes different, not inherently good or bad. If you think about how different societies reckon kinship and family, there are lots of different ways to do it. There are always tensions between different groups in any society, but there are lots of approaches to working with those tensions.
Understanding the anthropology of kinship is valuable for fighting ethnocentrism and determinism. It helps combat ideas that you can’t be part of a certain family or that people in other societies don’t have legitimate practices. However, there’s a trap: if you flip from fighting ethnocentrism to using deterministic ideas — saying “in this society they can ONLY marry their patrilateral cross-cousins because of their culture” — that’s not helpful either. Cultural ideas about kinship are important for understanding that human life comes in different possibilities, but we don’t want to think we’re locked into certain possibilities because of our “so-called culture.”
The history of kinship anthropology shows both the value and the limitations of structural approaches. Yes, kinship organizes society in patterned ways. Yes, understanding whether a society is matrilineal or patrilineal helps explain marriage rules, inheritance patterns, and political alliances. But systems are more flexible in practice than the charts suggest, people make kinship through daily actions beyond biology, and lived experience often differs from stated rules. The best approach recognizes both the patterns that kinship creates and the human agency that constantly remakes and renegotiates what kinship means.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is “kinshipology” in anthropology? A semi-joking term for the period in late 19th and early 20th century anthropology when kinship studies so dominated the discipline that critics said anthropologists did nothing else. The label captures both the genuine analytical productivity of kinship-focused work and the suspicion that the obsession reflected anthropologists’ own British and American family assumptions as much as the societies they studied.
What is a joking relationship? A.R. Radcliffe-Brown’s term for a kinship relationship governed by prescribed teasing, often including sexual joking, in societies that are otherwise prudish about such talk. The classic example is the young man and his mother-in-law: ritualized joking diffuses the structural tension in a relationship marriage forces into being. Joking relationships pair with avoidance relationships as opposite solutions to the same kinship problem.
Why is the mother’s brother important in matrilineal societies? In matrilineal kinship systems, descent and inheritance pass through the mother’s line. The mother’s brother — your maternal uncle — often holds inheritance and lineage authority on behalf of his sister’s children. Your father, by contrast, belongs to a different matrilineage and is looking after his own sister’s children. The result: matrilineal uncle relationships often carry the social weight that paternal relationships do in patrilineal societies.
How did Evans-Pritchard explain the Nuer’s resistance to British colonialism? In The Nuer (1940), Evans-Pritchard argued kinship and descent were the organizing principles for societies that had no state government. The Nuer could coordinate resistance to British colonialism because kinship networks provided the framework for political alliances, dispute resolution, and military organization without requiring centralized authority. When the colonial state was actively machine-gunning villages, kinship was who you trusted.
Was the 1950s nuclear family the historical norm? No. Stephanie Coontz’s The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap shows that statistically, even in the 1950s era of Leave It to Beaver television, the idealized nuclear family wasn’t representative of how most Americans lived. Historically, extended and flexible family arrangements are closer to the actual tradition. Kath Weston’s Families We Choose documents how people have always made families beyond biological norms.
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