Ever since the onset of a constructivist turn in anthropology has reshaped the traditional
landscape of anthropological interests and approaches, there has not been any new
discipline-wide paradigm to respond to the growing complexity (Luhmann) of a multi-
polar, multinatural (Viveiros de Castro), multimedia and multiepistemological world.
When in the late 1960s growing constructivism began systematically exploiting the
presumed flaws of traditional kinship studies to propel forward as a new reflexive kind of
anthropology centered around the notion of “cultures,” it did not predict and could not
anticipate a recent global movement that became known as the “Return of Kinship
Studies.”
The enduring appeal of the concept of kinship as an epistemological tool offering a
greater analytical depth to the students of human cultures, societies and populations stems
from kinship’s several distinct properties. First, kinship as an object of study is
discipline-neutral. A whole variety of scholarly disciplines and subdisciplines – including
linguistics, logic, sociology, history, psychology, evolutionary biology, population
genetics, primatology, demography, epidemiology, theology – study kinship or use the
metaphor of kinship to analyze their subject matter. In many cases, these non-
anthropological traditions in the study of kinship have a long history going back to the
18th century and earlier. Second, kinship offers scholars an opportunity to study
macroprocesses through the analysis of microprocesses. As A. F. C. Wallace (1965, 233)
wrote, “kinship terms have been to the cultural anthropologist what rats have been to the experimental
psychologist: small warm objects readily manipulated in research design yet…sufficiently similar to larger
entities to justify their use as models of processes in a bigger world.”
Third, kinship straddles biological, social and cultural realities thus enabling a scholar to
avoid reducing the complexity of human realities to one dimension and one dimension
only.
