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The Importance Of Kinship In Cultural Anthropology

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Kingsborough Community College

Importance of Kinship in cultural anthropology

Student: Amulang Mantsynov

Professor: Igor Pashkovskiy

Kinship has traditionally been one of the key topics in social and cultural anthropology. There are two primary reasons for this. First, although not all communities are constituted on the basis of kinship, all humans have a kinship as individuals and are related to other individuals through it. Second, for the sorts of “tribal,” classless, economically unspecialized societies that anthropologists have mostly — though no longer exclusively — studied, kinship has appeared to be the main or even sole form of social organization. These observations led various theoretical approaches, especially the schools of functionalism and structuralism within social anthropology, to focusing on how social groups are formed. They got interested in studying of how individuals are related to one another through kinship, and what kinds of mutual rights and duties they have as a result. (R. Parkin. Kinship)

Parkin (2012) also points out that unlike the functionalists and structuralists, cultural anthropologists, elected to focus more greatly on the symbolic rather than socio-practical aspects of kinship. They are interested in the meanings attached to being a particular sort of relative. They also study how symbols of and perspectives on an individual, the body, and gender tell kinship ideas and practices. In broad terms, a study of kingship from the symbolic standpoint has prevailed in America since the beginning of the twentieth century and periodically has been reinvented and by the 1970s become more influential in world anthropology, especially in its poststructuralist phase. The field of study of a kinship can be divided into three major categories: descent (that is, relations between generations); affinity (marriage); and siblingship. However, the siblingship hasn't been studied as widely as the first two categories. (R. Parkin. Kinship).

By the definition provided in the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, kinship is "a relation between two or more persons that is based on common ancestry (descent) or marriage (affinity)." In his work

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