ABSTRACT
Analysis of the original data from the Gulf Arabian project on kinship led to a reconsideration of unquestioned issues of kinship. Society interweaves biology and culture in which, in an interactive dance with the creative human cognitive capacity, kinship grows as the way humans regulate their social lives. Kinship is both a vital lived domain in much of the world today, and an analytic structure for anthropologists to generate insights to build knowledge on this uniquely human, universal phenomenon. The “procreation” is often used in kinship literature to mean reproduction, with reference to a primacy of the biological nature of kinship. The chapter considers the notion of “procreation” to consist of the dual process of birth and marital union which produces offspring, the foundation of continuity and succession in the social system. It describes how birth in the Arab sociocultural system is construed as both groin (male) and womb (female).
