Social Organization in Kin-Based Societies

All societies, as we learned in Chapter 1, have notions of relatedness, including descent and kinship. Early anthropologists focused on studies of descent and kinship, but the topics declined in popularity in the United States in the late twentieth century when cultural anthropologist David Schneider (see Chapter 2) suggested that the study of kinship was more about molding societies into a Euro-American framework of “blood is thicker than water” than objectively investigating human relatedness. Schneider pointed out that not all notions of relatedness were based on the concept of shared blood. Basically, he was seeing that kinship in the ethnography of world cultures was being seen through the narrow lens of Euro-American ideas of family and kinship, which boils down to ethnocentrism. Schneider&s;s critique led to revisions, a decolonization in anthropology of how kinship was studied and used to understand social organization. It was especially decolonized with the introduction of the concept of human relatedness, which can be discerned in a variety of ways. Also important is the recognition that many small-scale societies are kin-based—another way of saying this is family relationships are of utmost importance for survival and happiness. In recent years, kinship has become increasingly important again in cultural anthropology, due to its association with issues relevant to sociocultural universals and variation, such as sex and sexuality, gender and the entire range of LGBTQ+, and human sociality (Chapter 2).