Essay About Kinship

This essay discusses the shift that kinship has undergone from being about determining/ reflecting social structure to shaping how people come to care for each other and consider themselves related in everyday practice. I will use the Malays in Palau Langkawi as an example of how kinship structures/practices has challenged Western assumption of how people are related. Also how we should understand kinship today.
Carstens (1995) explains in her article: the substance of kinship and the heat of the hearth: feeding, personhood, and relatedness among Malays in Palau Langkawi how their ideas of kinship challenge the Western notion of what kinship/relateness. In Langkawi, ideas about kinship are conveyed in terms of reproducing, nourishment and

Kinship can be found and studied in various forms in western societies, and has changed along with ethnological and broader social changes in those societies
A reduce interest in the comparative treatment of the culturally exotic kinship is not uniquely of especially important in non-western societies and so the focus on `primitive societies` in the study of kinship cannot be justifies
An emphasis on the particularity of such forms of kinship in studying new forms of kinship at home, we benefit from attention to particular often distinctive features that mark them of
Scepticism of universal and totalising claims about kinship. The detachment of kinship from its traditional biological base undermines the search for claims about kinship that generalise abbot societies and their relationship to one another and vice versa
The embrace of interdisciplinary approaches to kinship the study of kinship is inherently indisiplinary informed by and often part of several disciplines a well as multidisciplinary fields such as cultural studies, homosexuals studies, science family and relious