Nurture kinship

The concept of nurture kinship in the anthropological study of human social relationships (kinship) highlights the extent to which such relationships are brought into being through the performance of various acts of nurture between individuals. Additionally the concept highlights ethnographic findings that, in a wide swath of human societies, people understand, conceptualize and symbolize their relationships predominantly in terms of giving, receiving and sharing nurture. The concept stands in contrast to the earlier anthropological concepts of human kinship relations being fundamentally based on "blood ties", some other form of shared substance, or a proxy for these (as in fictive kinship), and the accompanying notion that people universally understand their social relationships predominantly in these terms. The nurture kinship perspective on the ontology of social ties, and how people conceptualize them, has become stronger in the wake of David M. Schneider's influential Critique of the Study of Kinship and Holland's subsequent Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship, demonstrating that as well as the ethnographic record, biological theory and evidence also more strongly support the nurture perspective than the blood perspective (see Human inclusive fitness). Both Schneider and Holland argue that the earlier blood theory of kinship derived from an unwarranted extension of symbols and values from anthropologists' own cultures (see ethnocentrism). Reports of kinship ties being based on various forms of shared nurture date back at least to William Robertson Smith's (1889) compiled Lectures on The Religion of the Semites: According to antique ideas, those who eat and drink together are by this very act tied to one another by a bond of friendship and mutual obligation... The idea that kinship is not purely an affair of birth, but may be acquired, has quite fallen out of our circle of ideas.

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Kin recognition

Kin recognition, also called kin detection, is an organism's ability to distinguish between close genetic kin and non-kin. In evolutionary biology and psychology, such an ability is presumed to have evolved for inbreeding avoidance, though animals do not typically avoid inbreeding. An additional adaptive function sometimes posited for kin recognition is a role in kin selection. There is debate over this, since in strict theoretical terms kin recognition is not necessary for kin selection or the cooperation associated with it.

Fictive kinship

Fictive kinship is a term used by anthropologists and ethnographers to describe forms of kinship or social ties that are based on neither consanguineal (blood ties) nor affinal ("by marriage") ties. It contrasts with true kinship ties. To the extent that consanguineal and affinal kinship ties might be considered real or true kinship, the term fictive kinship has in the past been used to refer to those kinship ties that are fictional, in the sense of not-real.

Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship

Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship: Compatibility between Cultural and Biological Approaches is a book on human kinship and social behavior by Maximilian Holland, published in 2012. The work synthesizes the perspectives of evolutionary biology, psychology and sociocultural anthropology towards understanding human social bonding and cooperative behavior.

The Fifth Typology

Pier Vittorio Aureli

Conception, organization and introduction Rafael Moneo once said that to talk about type in architecture is to talk about the essence of architecture. Indeed, when conceiving architecture is almost impossible to not start from an existing type, no matter h ...

2023

Analysing the effects of residential mobility behaviours on the composition of personal network in Switzerland

Vincent Kaufmann, Guillaume Simon Joseph Drevon, Gil Viry

Individual life courses are marked by residential mobility often associated with family and workplace changes and therefore likely to be related to the types of personal relationships people develop and maintain. Evidence about the relationship between res ...

2021

Understanding intergenerational fitness tracking practices: 12 suggestions for design

Pearl Pu Faltings

The paper presents a qualitative study to explore the use of fitness trackers and their social functions in intergenerational settings. The study covered three phases of semi-structured interviews with older and younger adults during individual and interge ...

SPRINGERNATURE2021