Kinship is a concept that is central to anthropology and refers to the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies. It is a sociocultural construction that creates a network of social and biological relationships between individuals, and through kinship systems, humans create meaning by interpreting social and biological relationships. Although kinship is a universal concept in human societies, the specific rules about who is related and how closely vary widely.
Kinship can refer to the patterns of social relationships themselves, or it can refer to the study of the patterns of social relationships in one or more human cultures. Anthropology has developed a number of related concepts and terms in the study of kinship, such as descent, descent group, lineage, affinity/affine, consanguinity/cognate, and fictive kinship. Family relations can be represented concretely (mother, brother, grandfather) or abstractly by degrees of relationship (kinship distance) .
Kinship is a universal human phenomenon that takes highly variable cultural forms. It has been explored and analyzed by many scholars in ways quite removed from any popular understanding of what “being family” means. Kinship connections form the basis of social, economic, and political structures in certain societies. The study of kinship can also be applied to solving crimes as well as finding relatives.
