Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
The study of kinship is so central to anthropology that Robin Fox has likened it to logic in philosophy, as ‘the basic discipline of the subject’ (1967:10). This is hardly surprising, since it deals quite literally with matters of life and *death, not to mention *identity and *personhood, *honour and shame, control of *property, and †succession to positions of authority.
Despite the importance of these themes, anthropologists have never agreed on what kinship is, let alone how to deal with it.
Their views on these matters are as varied, contested and multidimensional as human life itself, and †Needham’s iconoclastic statement that there is ‘no such thing as kinship’ (1971:5) was not meant to deny the significance of the topic, but rather to emphasize that like all such notions in comparative anthropology, kinship is not a clearly delimited ‘thing’ but an amorphous, polythetic concept (Barnard and Good 1984:188–9). This lack of precise definition may even be liberating rather than restrictive, since it helps undermine the persistent delusion that the task of kinship studies is to isolate and analyse semi-algebraic kinship ‘systems’. For any individual, kinship does not constitute a closed system, but an open-ended set of opportunities and constraints.
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