Why "Kinship" and not just "Relatives"?

Anthropologists are quite fond of the term "kinship" when many Americans and people in other western cultures are content with "family" and "relatives." Why is this?

It is critical for anthropologists to understand ‘kinship’ because it defines the society around us, organizes us into set groups, and defines what we can and cannot do. A ‘kinship’ group helps to determine roles in all aspects of life and helps structure the behavior of individuals. However, the rest of the world does not necessarily define ‘kinship’ in the same ways that we do. The idea of ‘kinship’ as we know it in the West is not a universal idea, and so anthropologists must go beyond the terms ‘families’ and ‘relatives’ to understand the term ‘kinship.’

In the village of Ratakote in Rajasthan, India, people are born into a very strict kinship system called an arak. Children are born into an arak, or clan, and given the name of that arak. Even when women marry and join the araks of their husbands, they still retain the name of the arak that they were born into. It is a kinship system designed to provide strength and stability in their society. It is also critical to their practice of arranged marriages. People “tap into their kinship network to find out personal information about prospects.” Knowing their own arak and the arak of prospective brides and grooms assures that they will not marry their own relatives. The notion of belonging to a clan or kinship group of this sort also shows how critical family loyalty is in the Indian culture. For example, an Indian friend of mine applied as an undergraduate to Stanford University, but refused to tell me whether she had gotten in or not before she had told her parents. This devotion to relatives can somewhat be seen in American culture, but to a much lesser extent. Often Americans have other non-blood relative kinship networks that they rely on instead of their families.

Another example of a culture with a different view on kinship is the Na people of Southern China. What marks their kinship system is that they have no marriage. Instead, men and women take lovers that come secretly in the night. The children are raised by the mother, but do not recognize having a father. Women live with their brothers, who take care of their sister’s children as if they were their own. Kinship is defined only by their mothers.

In Malaysia, kinship rules are even further from the Western system. There, feeding defines who the mother is. Since children are often fed by women other then the birth mother, it is the other women who are called ‘mother.’ Also, what defines a ‘father’ is whoever donates semen throughout the pregnancy. This means that there could possibly be several fathers in their kinship group.

It is quite evident that even our notion of a father and a mother are not universally held, effectively dashing our ethnocentric view of kinship. Yet even in our own culture we have a very flexible idea of who is kin and who is not. For example, the most commonly held idea is that you must be biologically related to be kin. However, in the case of adopted children, there is no blood tie; yet there is still a strong bond of kinship between the adopted child and their adopted parents.

The idea of kinship, that people are in some way connected to each other, is a very fluid concept that shifts and changes from one culture to another. While all humans feel connected to others in some form or another, there are many different ways to define those relationships and the structured behavior that accompanies them. Anthropologists study the differences between kinship systems because it gives great insight into the behaviors, traditions, and taboos of each society.