ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the bioculturally diverse basisor basesfor kinship in various cultural contexts, and explores the ramifications of these for family building strategies. It describes the three most basic kinds of kinship namely classificatory, affinal, and consubstantial paying particular attention to cross-culturally variant dimensions of consubstantiality. The chapter explores the diverse understandings of when, how, and if life begins and explain the consequences that various understandings have for practices such as abortion. It explains how cultural ideas about kinship underwrite cross-cultural diversity in family-building strategies. Normative cultural ideas about kinship affect our strategies for building families and help to generate our desires for particular kinds of families to begin with. In non-Western contexts or where deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is not the main substance of kinship, adoption is much easier and it fits well for family building in more open, flexible kinship systems the kind that allow people to construct kinship postnatally from substances such as breast milk, food, nurturance.
