ABSTRACT
Why kinship? To a greater or lesser extent, part of everyone’s identity as a person is derived from knowledge about their birth and about how they were brought up. It follows that such knowledge is also social knowledge, in that it presumes connection and relationship with others. Those others are persons with their own identities, so that kinship entails intimate participation in the way other people construe their identity too. Here, among different populations or at different times in history, birth, nurture, inheritance and diverse ways of maintaining relationships have all received different emphasis. The late twentieth-century development of the means to alter what many would have said were immutable processes of birth has created a new and complex vehicle for conceptualising connections.
