11.3 Reckoning Kinship across Cultures

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe the importance of kinship in social structure.
• Distinguish between different kinship systems.
• Illustrate three forms of kinship.

By defining relationships between individuals, cultural understandings of kinship create kinship systems or structures within society. This is the institutional aspect of kinship, and it is bigger than the family itself. In smaller societies with lower populations, kinship plays a major role in all social institutions. In larger societies with higher populations, kinship places the local and familiar in opposition to a wider, more amorphous society, where relationships have less and less significance. In effect, kinship frames the way the individual and family are viewed in relation to the larger society and embodies social values.