Kinship: socio-cultural approaches: recent approaches

Many recent sociocultural approaches to the anthropological study of kinship have explicitly or implicitly responded to critiques leveled by Rodney Needham, David Schneider, and Pierre Bourdieu in the 1970s. Prioritizing emic, practical understandings of what it means to be related to others, these studies have questioned the extent to which kinship is primarily a matter of structure and of procreation, that is, something with which one is born, or, if it can be “made,” generated by processes of living together, sharing, and experiencing emotions toward others. Many anthropologists have been inspired by historical, feminist, or Marxist thought when exploring these topics. Research on assisted reproductive technologies, gay and lesbian kinship, and adoption has surpassed the scopes of their respective ethnographic contexts by productively problematizing received notions about gender, parenthood, “biological” families, “nature,” and the relationships between kinship and medical and legal systems.