ABSTRACT
Kinship has enjoyed an anthropological renaissance in recent decades. As the discipline has expanded its focus to include global processes, technological innovation, and governmental strategies within its ambit, what it means to be related has invited continuing exploration. Thus the relations that emerge through assisted conception, transnational adoption, elopement, mail-order brides, migration, and Facebook have joined more classical types of kinship subjects, which examine not only interpersonal relationships, but also the patterns they constitute in different contexts. Lewis Henry Morgan is generally credited with defining the study of kinship as a reflection of systematic social organization, elaborated most fully in his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity. Thus, just as anthropology was beginning its reflexive turn associated with the emergence of postmodernism (see Lindstrom, Chap. 3), both “biology” and “nature” were challenged.
