Can There Be Anthropology Without Kinship Study?

Abstract (English)

Issues of social relations in general as challenging kinship study failed to obscure the significance of kinship in human societies and kinship study in anthropology. Recent data, much of which has been analyzed and published, confirm this as fact. There should be no hesitation in accepting a domain of relations as kinship and a category of kinship as universal by identifying the set of properties that unequivocally define them as such. This does not eliminate or undermine other kinds of relations, but rather recognizes a set of relations by which human populations around the world are organizing themselves and the study of which formed the core of anthropological ethnography and theory for decades. The polarity of kinship versus relatedness or kinship versus gender is false and does not assist anthropology moving forward. This presentation will share newly gathered field data which serve as the basis of which a re-analysis of kinship confirms this position.