Social And Cultural Anthropology: The History Of Kinship

Kinship has traditionally been one of the key topics in social and cultural anthropology according to Robert Perkin. It describes the relationship between or among individuals that share a common origin in terms of historical ancestry, culture, or biological relationships. It is sometimes used as to classify people and form social groups in different societies. Although kinship has been studied under many disciplines, it is most prominent in the field of anthropology.

The way in which kinship is classified differs throughout communities, and even fields around the world. Under the study of anthropology, kinship regards relations forged through marriage and arising from descent as being very important when deciding which person is a part of

2) The presence of a marital bond that creates an enduring and socially regulated sexual and domestic relationship between two or more people. 3) A division of labor based on gender. 4) A prohibition on intercourse and marriage between close kin, which creates a widely articulated network of relationships between individuals related by marriage. These postulated universals are subject to extreme ranges of variation, which often challenge the validity of any generalizations. For example, the extension of kinship ties and the binding of individuals into kinship relationships assume a basic theory of sex and birth. However, cultures have different views about the "facts" of life and the meaning of marriage, parentage, and

Marriage is seen as a literal union of the husband and wife, who become "one flesh" as a consequence of the wedding sacrament. The resulting network of people linked by marriage become more than mere affines; they are transformed into kin in both spirit and substance. Consequently, canon regulations impose incest prohibitions are applied to a range of a person's spouse's relatives, which has varied over time but at one period included distant affinal cousins. In addition to this regulation, the Church applies standards of kinship to an individual's baptismal sponsors, or godparents, who are unrelated to the child by birth or marriage but who have entered into kinship through a shared sacrament. Anthropologists term this relationship fictive kinship, but this is an inaccurate designation for Catholic practice, which at one-time prohibited marriage not only between godparents and godchildren, but also between a godparent and a sponsored child's parent and between otherwise unrelated godchildren of the same godparents on the basis of shared