What Is Kinship? Types of Family, Descent and Residence Across Cultures

What kinship means in anthropology

In anthropology, kinship refers to the ties between members of a family that a culture recognises as such. It includes consanguines, for example parents and children, and affines, the ties created by marriage, such as those with in-laws.

The textbook Perspectives, backed by the American Anthropological Association, adds that kinship can also take in people with no tie of blood or marriage who regard themselves as family. Adoptive parents are recognised culturally as parents, and in some Pacific island societies adopted children are thought lucky, since they have two sets of parents.

From this the textbook draws its conclusion: the documented variety of family systems shows a kinship that is shaped by culture and still evolving, with no fixed structure rooted in biology.

What are the types of family?

The textbook describes the family as the smallest group of people who feel bound to one another. Everywhere it answers basic needs: raising children, defining parental roles, regulating sexuality, passing on property and knowledge. Many different forms can meet them, and anthropologists sort them as follows.

Type of family	Who belongs to it
Nuclear	Parents in a relationship their culture recognises, such as marriage, and their young or dependent children
Extended	At least three generations living in the same home
Joint	A very large extended family across several generations: grown sons often stay at home with wives and children and hold property collectively
Plural	One man with several wives (polygyny) or one woman with several husbands (polyandry)

Polygamy, marriage with more than one partner, covers both polygyny and polyandry. In polyandry the husbands are often brothers. Treccani adds that in a polygynous family the wives are sometimes sisters and are often ranked in order.

Practical example: grandparents, a married couple and their two small children share a house. That is three generations under one roof, so the family is extended. The couple with the children, taken alone, would be a nuclear family.

Treccani speaks of a joint family when several married blood relatives live in one residential unit with their spouses and children, and notes that it is also called composite or, in English usage, extended. With patrilocal residence, often tied to patrilineal descent, the joint family is made up of related men across generations, the so-called patriarchal families. With matrilocal residence it is blood-related women who live together with husbands and children, an arrangement mostly associated with matrilineal descent.

Descent: who counts as kin

According to Treccani, most societies recognise kinship ties on both the father’s and the mother’s side. This is bilateral kinship, made of relations of consanguinity and affinity. Many societies start from filiation and draw from this network clearly defined groups of relatives, the descent groups. In most New Guinea societies only bilateral kinship exists, and kin groups are centred on the individual and fade with him.

Some cultures instead build kinship through a single parental line. In patrilineal societies mothers have close bonds with their children even though they do not belong to the father’s lineage: descent rules define who is recognised kin, but they do not limit affection. With bilateral descent, finally, a family is defined by tracing back through both the father’s side and the mother’s.

On gender roles, the textbook observes that matrilineal lineages are not matriarchal. In matrilineal societies men usually still hold more power, and women depend more on their brothers or maternal uncles than on their fathers. Among the Hopi, a matrilineal people, authority more often lies with the mother’s brother than with the father. Treccani adds that in these societies it is women’s brothers who look after women and their children.

One case the textbook describes is the Nayar of southern India in the 1600s and 1700s. According to the textbook, husband and wife did not live together after the wedding, because the husband, outside the matrilineage, was not regarded as kin. A woman’s brothers played the social role of father to her sisters’ children, yet Nayar communities were not matriarchies. Treccani describes them as large natolocal families, where residence coincided with the matrilineal descent group.

Treccani also cites the Ashanti of Ghana, who are matrilineal: men live with their mothers, sisters and the sisters’ children and spend little time with their wives.

Where the couple lives after the wedding

Patrilocal residence, in which the couple lives with the family of the groom’s father, is a widespread pattern and suits farming economies. Matrilocal residence, with the man moving in with his wife’s family, is less common; the Hopi, Navajo and Iroquois practised it. In the textbook’s account, among the matrilineal Iroquois women owned the longhouses and men went to live in their wife’s home. Neolocal residence has the couple settle in a new place, apart from the families they came from.

Practical example: on the Trobriand Islands, in Papua New Guinea, a young man often went to live with his maternal uncle rather than his father. From the uncle he inherited positions and magical knowledge: a chief’s son did not become chief, and the heir was his sister’s son. The textbook reports the case from the work of Annette Weiner.

Marriage and exchanges between families

In many societies a marriage is confirmed by an exchange of goods, either a dowry or a bride price. In some, when a husband dies the widow is expected to marry his brother (levirate), and a man who marries his late wife’s sister practises the sororate.

What relatives are called

Societies name their relatives in different ways. Lewis Henry Morgan, a lawyer and one of the first students of Native American cultures, recorded the terms the Iroquois language uses for family members. Treccani regards him as the founder of the anthropological study of kinship; his 1871 book is titled Systems of consanguinity and affinity of the human family. His evolutionary ideas were soon superseded, the entry notes, but the project of comparing kinship terminologies has stayed central to anthropological theory.

George Murdock was among the first to compare terminologies, and proposed sorting the world’s systems into six categories according to the terms used for relatives. The Hawaiian system has few terms, which tend to reflect generation and gender. First cousins are called brother and sister, as true siblings are, and uncles and aunts carry the names of the parents. Nuclear families are thereby merged into a wider group.

The system followed by most Americans, the textbook writes, is called Eskimo, after an old name for the Inuit. According to Treccani, alliance theory sees terminologies as expressing marriage exchange, while descent theory sees them as expressing the transmission of mutual rights and duties. The textbook adds that classifying cultures by terminology is no longer at the centre of current work on the subject.

Is the nuclear family really natural?

Treccani starts from one observation: the family is universal but takes remarkably varied forms, so much so that it is hard to find a trait that defines it in every case. The married-couple family is the most widespread social group. The truly irreducible unit, the entry points out, is a mother plus her children, which is why many anthropologists avoid calling the elementary family “nuclear”.

After the staged evolutionary theories, which described a path from promiscuity through polyandry and polygyny to monogamy, scholars turned their attention to how the family works and to the rules of membership.

The AAA textbook, for its part, states that the family exists in every society in one form or another, with a range of patterns able to meet the same needs.