ABSTRACT
Neurology and brain research are needed directions for revealing the uniqueness in highly structured human domains such as ritual and kinship. Anthropology’s long history of kinship study has recognized two pathways by which people are incorporated as kin: birth and marriage. Ethnography described many cross-cultural practices that do not fit within the duality of kinship and that created relations sharing features of kinship relations. Most prominent among such well-documented practices is compadrazgo, an institutionalized set of practices which many considered to be similar to kinship. The chapter considers kinship to be a domain that combines societal, cultural, biological, and cognitive qualities. Kinship touches all four aspects of anthropology, Biological Anthropology, Sociocultural Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology and Archeology, just as it touches all aspects of human life. An overall retreat from systematic study, and particularly of kinship, left a big void in sociocultural anthropology in the United States. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
