kinship
kinshipis not treated separately, at full length, in this Companion. ‘The promise of a unified and general theory of kinship has not been realized; indeed the very definition of the field is in dispute, some scholars arguing that the project of a comparative science of kinship rests on the illusion that in all societies “kinship” systems are ordered on similar principles’: so the anthropologist Adam Kuper begins his entry ‘Kinship’ in A. and J. Kuper (eds.), Social Science Encyclopedia, 2nd edn. (1996), 441–3; the reader is referred to Kuper's article for an up-to-date discussion of the theoretical position. However he concludes that ‘the resemblances between domestic institutions in societies all over the world are so remarkable that it is hard to understand why anthropologists should have lost sight of commonalities’. Certainly some modern criticisms (‘the cultural critique’) of traditional kinship study seem inappropriate to...
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