The Impact of Cultural Approach on Kinship Studies

For most of human history, kinship was treated as a simple biological fact – you were related to someone because you shared blood or genes. That assumption went largely unchallenged in academic circles for decades. Then, in the latter half of the 20th century, a group of anthropologists began asking a more pointed question: what if kinship is not really about biology at all, but about culture? The answers they came up with permanently changed how we study families, relationships, and what it means to “belong” to someone.

The problem with the biological view of kinship 🔗

Before the cultural turn in kinship studies, mainstream anthropology largely assumed that family structures were grounded in biological reproduction. Early researchers, shaped by Western European notions of blood and lineage, treated the nuclear family – defined by genetic ties – as the natural baseline for all human societies. Kinship was essentially a map of reproductive biology.

The problem with this framework is that it smuggled in a set of Western cultural assumptions and presented them as universal truths. If you define kinship through the lens of Euro-American “folk biology,” you will inevitably misread or dismiss the relational systems of societies that organize family life through entirely different principles – through shared meals, co-residence, spiritual bonds, or social agreements. That ethnocentric blind spot is precisely what the cultural approach set out to correct.

Schneider’s foundational challenge 🔗

David M. Schneider (1918-1995) is the central figure in this intellectual shift. An American cultural anthropologist who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, Schneider had conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Micronesia before turning his analytical lens on American kinship itself. What he found was striking: even in the United States, kinship was not simply about recognizing biological relatedness. Cultural and social considerations turned out to be more important than the rhetoric of “blood ties” suggested.

In his landmark works – most notably American Kinship: A Cultural Account (1968) and A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984) – Schneider argued that kinship is primarily a system of cultural symbols and meanings, not a biological given. He contended that the meanings people attach to relationships are not innate or universal, but are shaped by historical, social, and cultural factors. A society that emphasizes shared feeding as the basis of relatedness is not less sophisticated than one that emphasizes genes – it is operating with a different cultural logic, and that logic deserves to be understood on its own terms.

Schneider’s critique targeted the ethnocentrism embedded in Western kinship theory, arguing that prior anthropologists had imported their own cultural assumptions into fieldwork and called the result “universal.” His call to treat kinship as a cultural construct had a ripple effect far beyond anthropology, extending into gender studies, feminist theory, queer studies, and science and technology studies.

Janet Carsten and the culture of relatedness 🔗

Building directly on Schneider’s foundation, British anthropologist Janet Carsten introduced one of the most productive concepts in contemporary kinship studies: relatedness. Her edited volume Cultures of Relatedness (2000) brought together fieldwork from multiple societies to show how the boundaries of kinship are fluid, shaped by everyday practices and lived experience rather than fixed by genealogy.

Carsten’s own fieldwork among Malay fishing communities on the island of Pulau Langkawi in Malaysia was particularly instructive. She found that in this society, feeding – sharing food prepared on the same hearth – was itself a mechanism for creating kinship. People who ate together regularly became, in a culturally meaningful sense, related. Blood was not irrelevant, but it was one idiom of relatedness among several. As Carsten has explained, kinship is fundamentally about people’s everyday lives and the relationships that matter most to them.

By replacing the term “kinship” with “relatedness,” Carsten was not simply splitting hairs. She was deliberately suspending the built-in assumption that all kin relations trace back to biological reproduction. The new term opens the analysis to indigenous idioms of being related – idioms that vary dramatically across cultures and cannot be reduced to any single biological logic. Her work challenged the received wisdom at the heart of kinship studies, demonstrating that our most fundamental social relationships can no longer be taken for granted as grounded in biology or nature, especially given contemporary changes in reproductive technologies and family forms.

Feeding, dwelling, and becoming kin 🔗

One of the most important contributions of Carsten’s ethnographic work is the attention it draws to mundane, embodied practices as kinship-making activities. In many societies, living under the same roof, preparing and sharing food, or caring for someone during illness creates bonds that are every bit as binding – sometimes more so – than shared ancestry. This insight has proven useful well beyond Southeast Asia. It resonates with adoption studies, research on foster families, and contemporary discussions of care work, all of which show how relatedness is continuously made and remade through practice rather than simply inherited at birth.

Marilyn Strathern’s critique of biological determinism 🔗

Marilyn Strathern, one of the most influential social anthropologists of the 20th century, approached the problem from a different angle. Through her extensive work on Melanesian societies – particularly among the Hagen people of Papua New Guinea – and her theoretical writing on English kinship in After Nature (1992), Strathern systematically dismantled the assumption that Western biological categories are neutral or universal.

Strathern’s key argument was that relationships should be understood in terms of the social environment in which they are formed. In her studies of Melanesian societies, she demonstrated that people perceive relationships not as fixed by biology but as created through social transactions and exchanges, such as gift-giving and ceremonial obligations. A relationship in this context is not a static fact of birth – it is an ongoing achievement, constantly produced and reproduced through social action.

Strathern also critiqued how Western notions of individualism and gender shaped the conceptual tools anthropologists used in the field. She argued that when researchers assumed the individual biological person was the natural unit of kinship, they were projecting a specifically modern Western ontology onto societies organized along very different principles. Her work pushed the discipline toward a much more culturally sensitive, reflexive approach – one that interrogates its own assumptions rather than universalizing them.

The nature/culture boundary under scrutiny 🔗

A central contribution of Strathern’s work is her analysis of the nature/culture distinction itself. In modern Euro-American thought, “biology” is often treated as natural and therefore prior to – and more real than – social and cultural arrangements. Strathern challenged this hierarchy directly. She showed that what counts as “natural” in any kinship system is itself a cultural construction. The idea that genetic parenthood is the “real” form of parenthood, for instance, is not a timeless truth but a historically specific cultural belief. For feminist anthropologists, Schneider’s and Strathern’s ideas together freed kinship from the limitations of biology, providing a context for establishing gender as a cultural construct – with implications that extended far beyond kinship studies.

Kath Weston and families of choice 🔗

If Schneider and Strathern made the theoretical case against biological determinism in kinship, Kath Weston provided some of the most vivid empirical evidence for what kinship looks like when it is organized around choice rather than birth. Her 1991 book Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship documented the family-building practices of lesbian and gay communities in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-1980s, against the backdrop of the devastating HIV/AIDS crisis.

What Weston found was that many LGBTQ+ individuals – often rejected by their families of origin upon coming out – had constructed rich, durable networks of mutual support and love among friends, lovers, and chosen companions. These networks functioned in every meaningful sense as families: they provided care during illness, emotional support, shared resources, and a sense of belonging. Weston called these networks “families of choice,” and her analysis showed that they were not pale substitutes for “real” families – they were kinship in a full and legitimate sense.

The term “chosen family,” which derives from Weston’s work, has since become widely used to describe family groups constructed by choice rather than by biological or legal bonds. Research published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health describes chosen family as a defining feature of the queer experience, noting that these networks play a crucial role in health, illness, and mutual care – especially for individuals who have been rejected by biological relatives.

Beyond the LGBTQ+ community 🔗

While Weston’s concept emerged from LGBTQ+ communities specifically, the implications are much broader. The notion of families of choice resonates with a wide range of contemporary social realities: tight-knit communities of immigrants who support one another far from their countries of origin; elderly people whose primary caregivers are friends rather than children; intentional communities built around shared values rather than shared ancestry. In each case, kinship is forged through commitment, care, and mutual recognition – not through biology.

Weston’s work also had direct policy implications. By demonstrating that LGBTQ+ families were organized around genuine kinship values – reciprocity, care, love, and obligation – her research contributed to broader arguments for the legal recognition of same-sex partnerships and non-traditional family structures. Academic recognition of LGBTQ+ family structures began largely with Weston’s ethnographic study of lesbians’ and gay men’s efforts to form family ties among fictive kin, and it continued to reshape both social science and public policy in the decades that followed.

Why the cultural approach matters today 🔗

The insights generated by Schneider, Carsten, Strathern, and Weston are not merely of academic interest. They speak directly to some of the most pressing social questions of our time. As reproductive technologies advance – enabling surrogacy, donor conception, and genetic editing – the question of what makes someone a “real” parent becomes increasingly complex. As migration increases and households diversify, the people we rely on most may be neighbors, colleagues, or community members rather than biological relatives. As LGBTQ+ families gain greater legal recognition globally, the cultural approach to kinship provides the intellectual vocabulary to understand and affirm their legitimacy.

Schneider’s work bears on high-profile contemporary issues such as gay and lesbian partners and parents, surrogate motherhood, and new reproductive technologies – precisely because it established that these are not aberrations from some natural family norm, but legitimate expressions of how humans have always constructed kinship: through culture, meaning, and social practice. The cultural approach, in this sense, is not just a theoretical position. It is an argument for a more inclusive and accurate understanding of human relationships in all their diversity.

What do you think? If kinship is ultimately a cultural construction, does that mean all family forms – regardless of how they are constituted – deserve equal social and legal recognition? And how do the families you are closest to in your own life reflect biology, choice, or some combination of both?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Schneider
2. https://anthroholic.com/david-m-schneider
3. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/after-kinship/BF660970EC79E6A4847E76A38CBE1DB9
4. https://www.socialsciencespace.com/2016/01/janet-carsten-on-the-kinship-of-anthropology/
5. https://www.amazon.com/Cultures-Relatedness-Carsten/dp/0521656273
6. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249425673_Cultures_of_Relatedness_New_Approaches_to_the_Study_of_KinshipCultures_of_Relatedness_New_Approaches_to_the_Study_of_Kinship
7. https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/4701615
8. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Families-We-Choose:-Lesbians,-Gays,-Kinship-Weston/b70f5d61329acdd9b54606541749bb56f0583c9e
9. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7579626/
10. https://escholarship.org/content/qt0c52x7tp/qt0c52x7tp_noSplash_cef99d27078a2a08a43f2ea808dba412.pdf