Kinship as an Interdisciplinary Subject and the Future of Anthropology

Abstract (English)

Historically, anthropology as a holistic, multi-field study of humanity has put kinship studies at its core. The constructivist , post-colonial and feminist critique of kinship expanded anthropology beyond kinship by proposing that kinship was an ethnocentric construct (Schneider 1984). As a result of the dethroning of kinship as an organizing concept for the discipline, a myriad of anthropologies have emerged and flourished (anthropology of gender, anthropology of inequality, anthropology of crime, anthropology of science, anthropology of money, etc.) making anthropology a welcomed companion to other social-scientific and humanistic disciplines (sociology, philosophy, economics, political science, etc.) that traditionally handled such topics. At the same time, what anthropology stands for has become diluted. So did kinship. The more recent systematist (Read 2001) and ontological (Sahlins 2013) turns in anthropology have attempted to reconcile the physical and the cultural in kinship in an overall worldview of multiple co-dependencies. The Integrated Bibliography of Kinship Studies (Dziebel 2025) documents kinship studies as a multi-disciplinary endeavor in its own right (also Dziebel 2007). It appears that a requiem to kinship - as seen through an interdisciplinary lens - played by constructivist anthropologists is premature. Stemming from the fact that kinship continues to play a central role in the life of many if not all human cultures and its metaphors (e.g., relational logic, linguistic kinship, statistical correlation, etc.) have successfully entered the very metalanguage of science, kinship studies has a potential to continue to play the role of anthropology's centralizing theoretical framework. The future of anthropology can be envisioned as a hub-and-spokes model with interdisciplinary studies of kinship forming its hub and kinship concepts, metaphors and permutations serving as spokes connecting anthropology to other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.