Anthropology and Kinship

As discussed briefly today, anthropology has long focused on kinship as it's been a central organizing principle for most societies.  Even our own, with its many, overlapping institutions and identities, kinship ties remain some of the strongest, most meaningful and longest lasting (I still talk to my parents, but most friends from high school I now only interact with through Facebook).

On Friday, we'll continue with the description of diagramming relationships, particularly with what criteria we use to organize and classify kin. Then, with a broad brush, we'll look at the kinds of social groups and networks that conceptions of kinship create.  Kinship has been and remains one of the most important ways that humans activate and actualize social cooperation.

For all of you kinship nerds out there (and I know there were some), I just stumbled across this site, which seems to provide a freeware program to depict and model kinship groups.