In this article, I reconsider bio-essentialism in the study of kinship, centering on David Schneider's influential critique that concluded that kinship was " a non-subject " (1972:51). Schneider's critique is often taken to have shown the limitations of and problems with past views of kinship based on biology, genealogy, and reproduction, a critique that subsequently led those reworking kinship as relatedness in the new kinship studies to view their enterprise as divorced from such bio-essentialist studies. Beginning with an alternative narrative connecting kinship past and present and concluding by introducing a novel way of thinking about kinship, I have three constituent aims in this research article: (1) to reconceptualize the relationship between kinship past and kinship present; (2) to reevaluate Schneider's critique of bio-essentialism and what this implies for the contemporary study of kinship; and (3) subsequently to redirect theoretical discussion of what kinship is. This concluding discussion introduces a general view, the homeostatic property cluster (HPC) view of kinds, into anthropology, providing a theoretical framework that facilitates realization of the often-touted desideratum of the integration of biological and social features of kinship. [bio-essentialism, kinship studies, homeostatic property cluster kinds, Schneider, genealogy]

Family is a fundamental organizing aspect of human society, but family organization is understudied within bioarchaeology. Historically, bioarchaeological research has focused on kinship analysis, the reconstruction of biological relationships within archaeological contexts. Kinship analysis has generated important insights into past community organization and cultural practices, but it is rooted in biologistic and heteronormative values. As a result, traditional kinship research inadvertently emphasizes biological relatedness and nuclear family organization and limits our ability to recognize different ways of forming families. In this chapter, I propose an alternative framework that facilitates a more inclusive approach to family organization in the past. By approaching family as a multiscalar form of social identity, integrating multiple lines of bioarchaeological data, and using analytical methods that do not prioritize biological data, bioarchaeological family research can potentially identify diverse forms of family organization in archaeological contexts. Bioarchaeologists can leverage the knowledge produced using this framework to contribute to public discussions of “the family,” destabilize contemporary common sense conceptions of kinship rooted in the perceived naturalness of the nuclear family, and promote more inclusive conceptions of relatedness and ways of forming families.

This article explores social anthropology's relationship to, and conception of, language, and uses kinship as an example to show how the discipline presumes and entails a digital conception of social relations, which leaves little room for language as a constitutive phenomenon. By drawing on certain philosophies of language, the article deploys the notion of pitch to explore the published ethnography on the Lovedu of South Africa to show how language is constitutive of social relations and the manner in which these can be conceived of as analogue phenomena. On this basis, it is argued that language must be added to recent approaches as a central concern for kinship studies. Furthermore, it is held that the activity of listening can reconfigure our approach to, and conception of, language to attune ethnography to vernacular conceptual analyses.

Progress in kinship anthropology has been slowed both by real difficulties in analysing complex data and by poor communication between competing schools of thought. Formulating ethnographically-based insights as axioms should make it possible to explore their implications more thoroughly and to test them more systematically. It may also facilitate comparisons between theoretical and empirical results obtained by social and cultural anthropologists and those obtained by evolutionary anthropologists – with potential benefits for anthropology as a whole. 1 The ideas in this paper, including the appendix, have come together gradually. I am very grateful to colleagues at this Institute and on the Kinship and Social Security (KASS) project for many conversations about the themes discussed here. In the last three years I have also benefited greatly from the chance to participate in Dwight Read’s and Fadwa El Guindi’s kinship circle at the American Anthropological Association annual confere...

This article proposes a reflection on kinship starting from a recent debate between Marshall Sahlins and Warren Shapiro hosted by the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, between 2011 and 2012. The heated controversy about the " new kinship studies " , regarding sense, meaning, and ultimately the nature of human relatedness, finds the two anthropologists on divergent stances: on one hand kinship as mutuality of being, a locus for multiple ways to conceive and live relatedness, on the other kinship as biological and inescapable invariant of human relations. The article aims at highlighting how some key issues related to relations of power remain un-dertheorised in the " beyond constructivist " and " essentialist " views deployed in the Sahlins-Shapiro contention and underlines the ways that kinship issues engage with broad political stances. Finally, I introduce a reflection on gender as a possibly crucial, and yet eluded, dimension in the debate.

John Locke is known within anthropology primarily for his empiricism, his views of natural laws, and his discussion of the state of nature and the social contract. Marilyn Strathern and Marshall Sahlins, however, have offered distinctive, novel, and broad reflections on the nature of anthropological knowledge that appeal explicitly to a lesser-known aspect of Locke's work: his metaphysical views of relations. This paper examines their distinctive conclusions – Sahlins' about cultural relativism, Strathern's about relatives and kinship – both of which concern the objectivity of anthropological knowledge. Although Locke's own views of relations have been neglected by historians of philosophy in the past, recent and ongoing philosophical discussions of Locke on relations create a productive trading zone between philosophy and anthropology on the objectivity of anthropological knowledge that goes beyond engagement with the particular claims made by Sahlins and Strathern.

The world of anthropology has witnessed a recurring rhetorical title:"What Is Kinship All About?" and now this article titles itself "What is Kinship All About? Again." Why? Whereas we have over a century's worth of ethnography and theory focusing on the centrality of kinship in human society and in anthropological theory, in 2019 a Handbook is published that names itself "Kinship" but, despite its claim and to the contrary, it is not about kinship at all. The Handbook editor explicitly states that it is about "conceiving kinship," with kinship reduced to gendered social relatedness. In response, we reaffirm the centrality of kinship as a domain universal in human societies by way of a critique of the Handbook and a comprehensive review of its contributing chapters. Countering the Handbook's denialist-or in Harold Scheffler's famous term, dismantling-position, we bring to the fore the already determined universal properties that define the boundaries of the kinship domain and the logical properties that universally define the category of kinship.

In this article, I revisit debates about so-called matrifocal societies as a way to critique the centrality of heteronormative marriage and family in anthropology. Using gender as a tool of analysis, I argue that anthropologists have relied on the trope of the dominant heterosexual man, what I call the ‘‘Patriarchal Man,’’ to create and sustain concepts of ‘‘marriage’’ and ‘‘family.’’ By examining the discourse on matrifocality in studies of Afro-Caribbean and Minangkabau households, I show how it is the ‘‘missing man,’’ the dominant heterosexual man, who is the key to the construction and perpetuation of the matrifocal concept and, by extension, the motor of marriage, family, and kinship. This fixity on the dominant heterosexual man has led anthropologists to misrecognize other forms of relatedness as less than or weaker than heteronormative marriage. I suggest that, rather than positing a foundational model for human sociality, intimacy, or relatedness, researchers look for webs of meaningful relationships in their historical and social specificity.