kinship

Also known as: kin, kinsfolk

Written by

Janet Carsten

Fact-checked by

Britannica Editors

History

While British social anthropologists were focused on the existence of social rules and the ways in which members of different societies acted within a given framework of ideas and categories, French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss had a very different starting point. His work was motivated by the question of how arbitrary social categories (such as those within kinship, race, or class) had originated. He was also concerned with explaining their apparent compulsory quality, or presence...