ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a shift in analytic focus away from nursing milk as a focal substance and nurture as being a fundamental character of the relationship. Sufficient analytic evidence supports the cultural view that the kind of suckling explored in the research project is considered kinship, alongside procreative and marital kinship. The chapter seeks to show that the structural property of transformationality is a key to revealing a kinship structure integrating procreative, marital, and suckling elements. Adoption processes affirm suckling to be not only as an additional way whereby persons are incorporated as kin members, itself considered important, but also, if not more importantly, it becomes itself a process by which a transformational property of kinship structure is revealed. The special nature of the kinship form suckling led to engaging the students in empirically devising elicitation techniques that would be adequate for the kind of data sought.
