Exploring the Culture of Relatedness in Kinship: Beyond Blood and Marriage

When we think about family, our minds instinctively go to blood ties and marriage certificates. But what if becoming someone’s kin had more to do with sitting around the same dinner table than sharing the same DNA? This question sits at the core of the culture of relatedness – a concept that has fundamentally reshaped how anthropologists and sociologists understand kinship. Far from being a fixed biological fact, kinship, as scholars now understand it, is something people actively build, practice, and experience in culturally specific ways.

What is “relatedness” and why does it matter? 🔗

Traditional kinship studies, developed through the work of theorists like Lewis Henry Morgan, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, treated kinship primarily as a system grounded in biological reproduction and formal marriage alliances. In this framework, who counts as your kin was determined by genealogy – the traceable lines of descent from shared ancestors. This approach dominated anthropology for most of the 20th century.

The shift began in earnest when anthropologist David Schneider challenged the very foundations of these theories. Schneider argued that kinship study was a product of Western cultural bias, and that anthropologists had been projecting their own cultural logic onto societies that defined family and relatedness in entirely different ways. For Schneider, concepts like “blood,” “love,” and “marriage” were not universal biological truths – they were culturally coded and embedded in local ideologies of personhood and morality. His work raised a provocative question: is “kinship” a cross-cultural category at all, or just a Western invention?

This critique, while powerful, left a theoretical gap. If we discard biology as the anchor of kinship, what replaces it? That is precisely where Janet Carsten’s concept of relatedness steps in.

Janet Carsten and the concept of “cultures of relatedness” 🔗

Janet Carsten, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, introduced the term relatedness as a deliberate move away from the pre-given distinction between the biological and the social that had long underpinned kinship analysis. In her edited volume Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (Cambridge University Press, 2000), she brought together ethnographic studies from diverse societies to show that the authors use “relatedness” in opposition to, or alongside, “kinship” in order to signal an openness to indigenous idioms of being related rather than a reliance on pre-given definitions.

Rather than assuming in advance what kinship is – biological ties, marriage rules, descent systems – Carsten proposed that we ask how people in any given society define, construct, and experience their connections to one another. This approach invites attention to the full range of practices, substances, and interactions through which people become related: shared meals, co-residence, care, bodily substance, and even emotional bonds. The result is a much richer, more culturally sensitive understanding of what family means across human societies.

Carsten’s After Kinship (2004) extended this argument further, examining how new reproductive technologies, changing family forms, adoption, and migration were all reshaping how people think about and practice relatedness in the modern world. The study of kinship, she argued, is not a relic of classical anthropology – it is deeply relevant to contemporary social life.

The Malay community of Pulau Langkawi: a case study 🔗

Carsten’s theoretical framework was not developed in the abstract. It grew directly from her extensive fieldwork among the Malay fishing community on the island of Pulau Langkawi in Malaysia – research she conducted over 22 months. What she found there challenged the biological model of kinship in a very concrete and specific way.

In her landmark 1995 article in American Ethnologist, “The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth,” Carsten showed that among Malays in Langkawi, people become complete persons – that is, kin – through living and consuming together in houses. Identity and substance are understood as mutable and fluid, not fixed at birth. This is a fundamentally processual view of kinship: relatedness is something you acquire over time, not something you simply are born with.

The hearth, food, and shared substance 🔗

Central to Carsten’s analysis is the role of food and feeding in creating kinship. In Langkawi, the core substance of kinship is understood to be blood – but blood, crucially, is produced through food. Eating shared food from the same hearth creates a common blood, and through that, a common substance that makes people kin. As Carsten documents, the trifecta of substances whose transfer indicates kinship in Langkawi consists of maternal blood, breast milk, and cooked rice – with the sharing of any of these indicating shared substance, hence relatedness.

The physical house itself is central to this process. In Langkawi, houses are structured around the hearth – the site of cooking – and it is through the daily act of cooking and eating together that relatedness is constructed and reinforced. Birth only begins the process of becoming a person in Langkawi; the process continues with feeding and living together in houses, with food creating both persons in a physical sense and the blood-substance by which they are related to each other.

This has striking implications. Personhood itself – not just kinship – is understood as something acquired through feeding, not simply given at birth. A child who grows up eating from a different hearth, or a fostered child raised by another family, gradually takes on the substance of those who feed and house them. Even marriage produces relatedness over time: spouses who share a hearth, cook and eat together, and raise children are understood to gradually come to share substance with each other.

Milk kinship and the limits of the biological/social divide 🔗

One of the most striking illustrations of this logic concerns milk kinship and the rules of incest. In Langkawi, incestuous relationships are defined not only by biological reproductive connections, but by the act of breastfeeding – a relationship between two children who have consumed the breast milk of the same woman, even if she is not biologically their mother, is considered incestuous. This is a powerful demonstration that in Langkawi, the relevant boundary of kinship is drawn around shared substance, not shared genes.

This logic entirely dissolves the distinction between “biological” and “social” kinship that Western theories take for granted. In Langkawi, relatedness is derived both from acts of procreation and from living and eating together – it makes little sense in indigenous terms to label some of these activities as “social” and others as “biological.” If blood is produced through food, is it then a biological or a social substance? The Langkawi case shows that this Western dichotomy is not universal – it is itself a cultural construct.

Moving beyond Schneider: Carsten’s contribution 🔗

Carsten explicitly builds on Schneider’s cultural critique of kinship but goes further. Schneider’s critique challenged the centrality of procreation as assumed by anthropologists, arguing that the category of kinship had no cross-cultural value because its definition was bound up in Western notions. But his conclusion was largely negative – he dismantled the concept without providing an alternative framework for cross-cultural comparison.

Carsten’s innovation was to rescue kinship from this impasse. Rather than abandoning the concept entirely, she reframed it through the lens of relatedness – a term open enough to accommodate indigenous understandings across cultures, and flexible enough to capture the processual, dynamic nature of how people actually become kin. Where Schneider had shown what kinship was not, Carsten showed what it could be: a study of how relatedness is constructed, enacted, and felt in everyday life.

This move also transformed what anthropologists and sociologists look at when they study kinship. Instead of drawing genealogical charts and mapping descent rules, researchers began paying attention to practices of feeding, fostering, co-residence, caregiving, and bodily substance. Carsten’s approach called for anthropologists to look at kinship in terms of how people themselves view and experience relatedness, rather than a preexisting set of rules derived from Eurocentric categories of descent.

Why the culture of relatedness matters today 🔗

The concept of relatedness is not just an academic abstraction – it speaks directly to how kinship is lived in societies around the world and how it is changing in our own. New reproductive technologies have made the distinction between the biological and the social no longer self-evident, raising fundamental questions about what this implies for cross-cultural comparison of kinship institutions. Donor conception, surrogacy, adoption, and same-sex parenting all present situations where kinship is built through practice and intention rather than straightforward biological reproduction.

The Langkawi case offers a framework for understanding these developments not as anomalies to be explained, but as variations on a much broader human pattern: kinship has always been made, not merely given. Across cultures, people have found multiple ways – through feeding, caring, living together, and sharing substance – to construct the relationships that matter most to them.

Carsten’s work reminds us that kinship is really about people’s everyday lives and the way they think about the relations that matter most to them – and that these relations are far more varied, creative, and socially constructed than a biology-first model would ever suggest.

What do you think? Does the idea that kinship is built through everyday practices like sharing meals and living together change how you see your own family relationships? And how might societies that define relatedness through shared substance and co-residence navigate the challenges posed by modern assisted reproductive technologies?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Schneider
2. https://press.umich.edu/Books/A/A-Critique-of-the-Study-of-Kinship
3. https://anthroholic.com/david-m-schneider
4. https://www.socialsciencespace.com/2016/01/janet-carsten-on-the-kinship-of-anthropology/
5. https://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam032/99015844.pdf
6. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/after-kinship/BF660970EC79E6A4847E76A38CBE1DB9
7. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1525/ae.1995.22.2.02a00010
8. https://seasia.yale.edu/janet-carstens-substance-kinship-heat-hearth
9. https://studieinfo.liu.se/download/coursedocument/47b31fcb-329d-4b85-a872-cbd7489f187e/Carsten.pdf
10. https://seasia.yale.edu/substance-kinship-and-heat-hearth-feeding-personhood-and-relatedness-among-malays-pulau-langkawi-0
11. https://www.studocu.com/in/document/university-of-delhi/sociology-of-kinship/copy-of-janet-carsten/60257684
12. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/79056/1/Unit-9.pdf
13. https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/interviews/the-25th-anniversary-of-the-substance-of-kinship-and-the-heat-of-the-hearth/