Talk:Kinship

message: (Sorry, I dont mean to preempt but we need to discuss the recent revision)Douglas R. White (talk) 16:07, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Comments made before major revision

message: It would be wonderful if someone would start adding the areas that relied on the kinship network, giving more information.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.172.101.250 (talk) 03:52, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Locations/cultures who used the Kinship network

message: Subject to advice and/or confirmation from others (particularly Wikipedia:WikiProject_Anthropology members), it would be my proposal to, initially, here on this talk page, collect together some of the key anthropological writings about kinship, arrange them chronologically, then annotate them.  
It is anticipated that such an approach has the potential to grow comprehensively .. and that as the annotated chronology grows .. annotations/writings will start to fall and/or bunch into groups with certain endeavours, kinds of findings, or kinds of conclusions .. which we might then 'label', and transform into narrative?
For any who may be interested in participating in an exercise of the above kind ..or simply expanding and upgrading the article in their own way, for interest, I include a quote I've just encountered:
"Few Academic Battlegrounds have been so littered with the ink-stained corpses of their protagonists as those surrounding kinship and cultural relativism."FEINBERG, Richard & OTTERMAN, Martin (Eds) (2001) The Cultural Analysis of Kinship: The Legacy of David M Schneider.  University of Illinois Press. Urbana and Chicago. Page1
Bruceanthro (talk) 13:02, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Some Initial Notes for Proposed Upgrade of this Article

message: MAINE, H.S. (1861) Ancient Law John Murray
:"English lawyer, Sir Henry Maine .. was chiefly interested in Indo-European institutions, and in particular in the 'patriarchal joint-family' - the family of fathers and sons holding property in common which was the main kinship unit in India, and, in Maine's opinion the orginal form of the Indo-European 'family' (Fox 1967: 18)
:[Maine] is best known for his work Ancient Law(1861) which concentrated on the evolution of legal systems as the key to social evolution.. he argued that the most primitive societies were patrilineal and patriarchal, a theory that contrasts with the views of other evolutionary thinkers whoput forward the primacy of primitive promiscuity or matriarchy.  Maine's broad evolutionary scheme was based on the development of society from systems based on kinship to those based on territoriality, from status to contract, and from civil to criminal law.." (Seymour-Smith 1986)
:* Maine, Henry Sumner. Ancient Law: Its Connection With the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas, London: John Murray, (1861); on line in Wikisource Bruceanthro (talk) 23:39, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: "Maine's Ancient Law expounded the patriarchal theory of the origin of society, arguing that the first social units were patriarchal families under the authority of the senior male.  the aggregation of such family units constitued the next stage of social evolution.  On the death of the senior male, Maine argued, his sons and their families would stay together, thus forming a larger unit based on extended consanguinal kinship ties.  Maine contrasted these 'blood' ties with the relationships based on territorial attachment or 'local contiguity' which become the basis of more advanced stages of social evolution." (Seymour-Smith 1986: 169)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bruceanthro (talk • contribs) 08:03, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1861_[[Henry James Sumner Maine|MAINE]]

message: MCLENNAN, J.F. (1865) Primitive Marriage  Black
:"Mclennan violently opposed Maines (above) conclusions as they violated his principle that kinship through females was the original form.  This debate between the matriarchal and patriarchal schools of thought proceeded with mounting acrimonyfor .. fifty years.." (Fox 1967: 18)  Bruceanthro (talk) 13:44, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1865_MCLENNAN

message: MORGAN, L.H. (1871)  "Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family". Smithson. Contrib. Know. Number 17. Page 218 [Confirm details!]:
:"..his study of kinship and marriage .. was .. to develop into a comparative theory .. This work is also a milestone in the development of anthropology, establishing kinship and marriage as central areas of anthropological enquiry and beginning an enduring preoccupation with kinship terminologies as the key to the interpretaton of kinship systems.." (Seymour-Smith 1986: 201.)Bruceanthro (talk) 16:16, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: "..the dominant emphasis .. was on Kinship Terminology, so that studies of kinship systems were organised around contrasting and explaining different terminological systems.." (Seymour-Smith 1986: 157)  Bruceanthro (talk) 13:45, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

text: See also Kinship Terminology for summary of Lewis Morgan's contribution .. though the article seems to be lacking in text citing/referencing.  Bruceanthro (talk) 00:16, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

text: "classificatory/descriptive kinship terminologies.  This distinction was originally made by MORGAN.  Classificatory kin terms subsume various biological kin types: specifically, the place lineal and collateral kin in the same category, while descriptive terms refer only to one specified biological kin type, and distinguish lineal from collateral relatives.  Morgan argued that the most primitive kinship terminologies were classificatory and the more advanced ones descriptive by nature" (Seymour-Smith 1986:39-40)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bruceanthro (talk • contribs) 14:31, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1871_[[Lewis H. Morgan|MORGAN]]

message: MORGAN, L.H (1877) Ancient Society. Henry Holt and Company. New York.
:"Lewis H. Henry (1877) .. concentrated on the evolutionary stages of kinship [and].. attempted to demonstrate that different marriage practices determined the various kinship systems he had classified .. Although Morgan overly stressed the importance of kinship terminology for reconstructing social evolutionary stages, he laid a sound foundation through his own observation and in his collection of questionnaires about kin terminologies from around the world" (Schusky 1972: 1)
:"Lewis Henry Morgan .. began collecting schedules of 'kinship terminologies' from all over the world and from the societies of classical antiquity.  He noted that many nations, far seperated in time and in space, had similar types of .. nomenclatures.  On the assumption that their words referred to biological relationships, he attempted to explain how the seemingly odd distribution came about  .. he traced a series of [evolutionary] stages comparable but different in detail from McLennans (above).  This roused the ire of the .. Scot [McLennan] who accused Morgan of putting too much faith in terminology which did not in any case have anything to do with the biological relationship but was merely a 'code of courtesies showing 'degrees of respect.  However the ship was launched and from then onwards anthropologists have been concerned with kinship terminologists .. For a time, indeed, the 'study of kinship' was virtually the study of kinship terms and a debate about the explanation of them." (Fox 1967: 19)
:"[Morgan] not only studied terminology but the  structure of social groups. He found, for example, that the Iroquois were organzed into kinship groups based on descent in the female line.  These groups were organized into larger groups which he called phratries.  When he turned to the ..town dwelling Aztecs, he found that they were organised into kinship groups based on descent in the male line, and again these were organised into larger units with the Spanish had called barrios .. he thought he had one of the clues to social evolution.  It fitted very well with the theory derived from terminology studies.  Out of promiscuity came 'kinship through females only' in the more primitive societies, then there was a change to 'kinship through males only' and the development of cities and civilisation" (Fox 1967: 20)
Bruceanthro (talk) 15:57, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: [Morgan preserved MAINES distinction between kinship and territory (see for example, his distinction between societas and civitas) though differing in the details of the evolution of family- and kin-based groups. Thus MORGAN [like MCLENNAN] argued that the original state of society was not patriarchy but primitive promiscuity, which was superceded first by matriliny and later by patrilny. (Seymour-Smith 1986: 169) Bruceanthro (talk) 07:55, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1877_[[Lewis H. Morgan|MORGAN]]

message: RIVERS, W. H. R. 1907. "On the origin of the classificatory system of relationships." in THOMAS, N.W (Ed) Anthropological Essays Presented to E. B. Tylor.  Clarendon. Oxford. Pages 309- 25.
RIVERS, W.H.R (1914) Kinship and Social Organization.  Oxford University Press.  London.
:"W.H.R Rivers improved ethnographic methodology by collecting lengthy genealogies, or actual kinship charts, from many individuals of a society.  From his real genealogies Rivers constructed the ideal systems that Morgan has gathered, but in addition, Rivers saw practices not reflected in the ideal terminology alone." (Schusky 1972: 1) Bruceanthro (talk) 13:37, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1914_[[W. H. R. Rivers|RIVERS]]

message: LOWIE, Robert H. (1928) "A Note on Relationship Terminologies " American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1928), pp. 263-267:
LOWIE, Robert H. (1937) History of Ethnological Theory. New York:
:"Lowie .. reached three important conclusions [within a sustained empiricist critque, commencing with BOAS, critquing MAINE, MORGAN, & MCLENNAN's patriachry/primitive promiscuity social evolutionary theories]:
:i.  that historically the family is present at every stage of culture, 
:ii. that there is no fixed evolutionary order of matriliny and patriliny, and 
:iii. that both bilateral family group and the unilineal kin group are based on territorial as well as consanguineal principles" (Seymour-Smith 1986: 169)  Bruceanthro (talk) 07:48, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1936_[[Robert Lowie|LOWIE]]

message: MALINOWSKI, B (1929) The Sexual Life of Savages Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bruceanthro (talk) 14:25, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Offers an account of a matrilineal society in which physiological paternity is denied. However, while paternity may be unknown in the "full biological sense", illegitimacy is considered socially undesirable, making the husband socially indispensible. Emphasis is therefore placed on the social role of fatherhood; the woman's husband is the "man whose role and duty it is to take the child in his arms and to help her in nursing and bringing it up" (p195); "Thus, though the natives are ignorant of any physiological need for a male in the constitution of the family, they regard him as indispensable socially" (p202). Robotforaday (talk) 03:03, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1929_[[Bronisław Malinowski|MALINOWSKI]]

message: LEVI-STRAUSS, Claude (1949) The Elementary Structures of Kinship
:See the article on Alliance theory which makes a stab at summarising Levi-Strauss' contribution. Robotforaday (talk) 03:55, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: "In spite of an early anthropological interest in forms of marriage alliance, the field kinship studies in the 20th century, both in the USA and in Britain was dominated for a long period by the almost exclusive emphasis on DESCENT to the exclusion of alliance.  The 'underlying spell of descent' .. was broken by the publication of Levi-Strauss's "The Elementary Structures of Kinship" ..The work of Levi-Strauss and anthropologists inspired by his method established the school of Alliance theory which redressed the balance in the study of systems of kinship .." (Seymour-Smith 1986: 157)  Bruceanthro (talk) 11:34, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

text: "Levi-Strauss .. conern[ed] himself with the structural properties and evolutionary implications of different types of alliance rule.  He postulated a distinction between elementary structures where a positive marriage rule exists (i.e the marriagable category is defined by kin status) and complex structures where the choice of marriage partner is based on non-kin crieria... [all] linked to .. tracing the logic of reciprocity and exchange in sociocultural systems ... One of the major areas of study within alliance theory has been the implications of different types of positive marriage rules in real-life social and political systems .. formal models of direct exchange, of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage, of patrilateral cross-cousin marriage and so on, with their implications for moieties, .. may or may not coincide with the empirical existence of the approriate system of wife-exchanging local groups .. " (Seymour Smith 1986: 9)
Opposition of alliance theory came from [descent theory]] ..  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bruceanthro (talk • contribs) 12:08, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1949_[[Claude Lévi-Strauss|LEVI-STRAUSS]]

message: MURDOCK, George (1949) Social Structure.  The Macmillan Company.  New York.:
:"..revived evolutionary [of kinship systems] interest" (Fox 1967: 23)
:"[Murdock] continued to reconstruct history through the comparison of kinship systems.  Similarities between kinship systems .. indicate the possibility of a common origin for societies, .. Murdock suggests a logical sequence of change through successive types of social structure." (Schusky 1972: 2)
:"[Murdock's] best known work is Social Structure in which he focused on family and kinship organization, seeking sets of functionally interrelated traits in a wide range of societies." (Seymour-Smith 1986: 202) Bruceanthro (talk) 14:04, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1949_[[George Murdock|MURDOCK]]

message: RADCLIFFE-BROWN, A. R. (1952) Structure and Function in Primitive Society. Free Press. Glencoe, Ill.:
:"[Radcliffe-Brown] argued against evolutionary perspectives  in anthropology, and advocated a synchronic or functional approach to the laws of social life .. preferring to analyse the social structure, a preference which was to be profoundly influential in shaping the nature of British [and Australian?]] anthropology." (Seymour-Smith 1986: 239) 
:"Radcliffe-Brown's insistence on studying a kinship system as a field of rights and obligations (the legal influence again), and of seeing it as part of the social structure, has been much more infuential [than Malinowski's psychological interests].  His comparative method has been less avidly adopted [than Malinowski's feild research methods], and his notion that the 'laws' of anthropology are comparable to the laws of natural science has been more or less abandoned." (Fox 1969: 21)
Bruceanthro (talk) 07:59, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Radcliffe-Brown argued that kin-based corporate groups were necessarily unilineal, since only unilineal descent could provide fixed and unambigious group membership. Thus unilineal descent groups were the natural solution to the problems of social stability and continuity in kin-based societies. (Seymour Smith 1986: 170) Bruceanthro (talk) 14:58, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1952_[[Alfred Radcliffe-Brown|RADCLIFFE-BROWN]]

message: LEACH, Edmund (1959) "Concerning Trobriand Class and the Kinship Category Tabo' in GOODY, J (Ed)
:Leach (1959) claims .. that 'kinship terms are category words by means of which the individual is taught to recognize the significant groupings in the social structure. Bruceanthro (talk) 12:40, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1954_[[Edmund Leach|LEACH]]

message: LEACH, Edmund (1962) Rethinking Anthropology. London
:Leach..[critiquing kinship typologies] argued that rather than prejudice the content of social relations by employing the labels 'patriliny' or 'matriliny' we should seek more value-free or 'mathmatical' ways of expressing the relations between structural elements." (Seymour-Smith 1986: 170)  Bruceanthro (talk) 15:45, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1962_[[Edmund Leach|LEACH]]

message: BARNES, J.A (1967) "Genealogies" in EPSTEIN, A.L (Ed) The Craft of Social Anthropology. Tavistock Publications. London.
:"Barnes (1967: 103) distinguishes pedigrees from genealogies in this way.  A pedigree is 'a genealogical statement made orally, diagrammatically, or in writing by an actor or informant', but a genealogy is 'a genealocigal statement made by an ethnographer as part of his feild record or tis' analysis.  In other words, a pedigree is our first order record of someone elses' statement of their kin relations to others, but a geneaology is our second-order statement of other people's account of their kin relations amongst themselves." (Rigsby 1999: 108)  Bruceanthro (talk) 16:14, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1967_BARNES

message: SCHNEIDER, D. M. (1968) American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Prentice-Hall. Englewood
Cliffs, N.J:
:"In .. [American Kinship: A Cultural Account].. he [Schneider]outlined American kinship as a cultural system, explicating it's symbolic logic. This was .. a path breaking work, exemplifying a symbolic approachto culture. Schneider argued that sexual reproduction was a core symbol of kinship in a system which was defined by two dominant orders, that of nature, or substance, and that of law or code.  The sexual union of two unrelated partners in marriage provided the symbolic link between these two orders.  It resulted in children connected to their parents through blood ties, or 'shared biogenetic substance', symbolising 'diffuse, enduring solidarity'.  The idiom of nature was crucial to American kinship 'The family is formed according to the laws of nature and it lives by rules which are regarded by Americans as self-evidently natural(from Carsten 2000):
All of the significant symbols of American kinship are contained within the figure of sexual intercourse,itself a symbolic course.  The figure is formulated in American culture as a biological entity and a natural act. Yet throughout, each elementwhich is culturally defined as natural is at the same time augmented and elaborated, built upon and informed by the rule of human reason, embodied in law and in morality.
:As Scheider wrote:
"..biological facts, the biological prerequisitesfor human existence, exist .. There is ,,a system of constructsin American culture about those biological facts. That system exists in an adjusted and adjustable relationship with these biological fastest .. But these biological constructs which depict these biological facts have another quality.  They have as one of their aspects a symbolic quality, which means they represent somehting other than what they are, over and above and in addition to their existence as biological facts andcultural constructs about biological facts.."  Bruceanthro (talk) 13:53, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1968_[[David M. Schneider|SCHNEIDER]]

message: BARNES, J.A. (1980) "Kinship Studies".  Man
:"Barnes suggests that ..[the]] development of functionally orientated approaches produced a rupture in kinship studies, reducing kinship .. to an aspect of other topics, while technical kinship studies continued to develop .. in isolation from other areas of anthropological theory"  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bruceanthro (talk • contribs) 14:10, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1980_BARNES

message: STRATHERN, Marilyn (1992) After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
:"The central point of Strathern's arguement is that nature can no longer be taken for granted in the late twentieth-century English culture .. the effects of technological developments - particularly new reproductive technologies .. have resulted in a destabilistation of nature .." (Carsten 2000: 9)
:"As Strathern .. makes clear, the significant shift is that what was taken to be natural has become a matter for choice .. The more nature is assisted by technology,and the more social recognition of parenthood is circumscribed by legislation, the more difficult it becomes to think of nature as independent of social intervention (Strathern 1992:87).  It follows from this that knowledge itself, which previously was seen as a 'direct reflection of nature' .. no longer has such a grounding in nature.."(Carsten 2000: 10)
:"Kinship has a critical role in these shifts in knowledge practices pecisely because, in the English view, kinship is defined as being the meeting place of nature and culture (Strathern 1992: 87) Kinship facts can be seen as simultaneously part of nature and part of culture.  Kinship performed a kind of dual function - it was based on a nature that was itself regardeded as the grounding for culture,and it also provided an image of the relation between culture and nature (Strathern 1992: 198)" (Carsten 2000: 10)
Bruceanthro (talk) 08:02, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1992_[[Marilyn Strathern|STRATHERN]]

message: SUTTON, Peter (1998) "Kinship, Descent and Aboriginal land tenure". SUTTON, Peter (Ed) Native Title and the Descent of Rights. National Native Title Tribunal. Perth. .
:Contents page of kinship etc section of this book, written to assist peoples involved in 'native title' cases before the Australian courts, reads as follows -
=====The Kinship polity=====
=====Was kinship the polity?=====
=====Basic Conventions and Terminology=====
=====Visual symbols=====
=====Kin term semantics=====
=====Actual and classificatory kin=====
=====Primary and extended meanings=====
=====Ego and propositus=====
=====Technical Terminology ..=====
=====Parentage and gender=====
=====Filiation=====
=====Descent=====
=====Complementary filiation=====
=====Mother's side, father's side=====
=====Parrallel v cross kin and marriage=====
=====Clans=====
=====Matriliny v matrfiliation=====
=====Direct matrifilial classes=====
=====Indirect matrifilial classes=====
===== ..Cognatic descent groups=====
===== Surname groups=====
===== Blood and bloodlines=====
===== Freedom and choice =====
===== The basic transformation =====
Bruceanthro (talk) 08:35, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 1998_SUTTON

message: Bruceanthro (talk) 08:35, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  The basic transformation 

message: CARSTEN, Janet (2000) "Introduction to cultures of relatedness" in CARSTEN, Janet (Ed) Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship Cambridge University Ptess. Cambridge. Pages 1 - 36
:Post 1970's .. social stability was no longer the central issue in anthropology ,, and in one way or another the study of kinship (whether in evolutionary, functionalist, or structuralist quise) - had been bound up with explanations of social stability
:..there is no doubt that the 'new kinship' (reborn in the 1990's) looks rather different from it's old-style forebears.   It has become more standard in works on kinship forgender, body and personhood to feature prominently in the analysis ,, while relationship terminologies are barely referred to, and kinship diagrams barely make an appearance. (2000: page 3)  Bruceanthro (talk) 13:55, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: "The authors in this volume describe relatedness in terms in terms of indigenous statements and practices - some of which may seem to fall quite outside of what anthropologists have conventionally understood as kinship" (p3). Use of the term "relatedness" to move away from assumptions about what is biological and what is social. Robotforaday (talk) 03:23, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: 2000_CARSTEN

message: User:SummerWithMorons has recently been editing the references to a fixed style, and while I felt he was going too far from the guidelines in WP:CITE, I suppose in fairness we do need to have a discussion about what kind of referencing to use; from my involvement in wikipedia, it seems there's a strong bias towards the style of referencing I have used in kinship and biological relationships section, including the use of Wikipedia:Citation templates, so my preference would be to follow use the citation templates for consistency with much of the rest of wikipedia, although I am happy to go along with consensus on this. Also, User:SummerWithMorons changed a couple of the page number references; the page numbers I used were from the original 1929 Routledge and Kegan Paul edition that I cited, and I have now double checked them so as to revert them. It is possible that he is using a later edition; however, I am confident that the page numbering I have provided is the page numbering in the original.
I plan on working some more on the article today. Robotforaday (talk) 12:24, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Recent edits to references

message: After all uncited material was deleted - leaving only a stub - I did a major overhaul of Incest taboo.  Hoping that it rises to our standards for good anthropology related articles, would people who watch this page mind looking it over, making any obvious improvements or commenting on the talk page?  Thanks, Slrubenstein   |  Talk 19:40, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  request for people who watch this page 

message: The disambiguation page at Scion lists this article as the number one direct link for the term.  And I think the disam page is correct the way it is now.  Yet this article does not use the word.  I'd prefer at least one sentence be added to the article that uses the word, preferably in a context that helps "disambiguates the reader" (that would be me, in this case).  Thanks.  —Aladdin Sane (talk) 19:25, 6 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Scion 

message: While "legal issues" are mentioned, I see no mention of the legal principle (occasioned in places in the U.S.) where a non-biological parent can be made financially liable for a child fathered by someone else...  TREKphiler any time you're ready, Uhura  13:50, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  ''Pater infamilias'' 

message: This article has extensive material and quotations from a thesis by Maximilian Piers Holland which may or may not have been added by the author himself. Unless the claims are peer-reviewed I see no reason to include them. If they are, the peer-reviewed sources should be given instead. Miradre (talk) 22:25, 18 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Regardless, the material needs to be severely pruned due to enormous undue weight to this particular thesis. Miradre (talk) 01:39, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I tend to agree, even though dissertations are reliable sources. Holland's thesis does not seem to have generated a lot of attention yet. And it is a further problem that he has added it himself. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 14:05, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

text: Miradre - good that you place importance on peer-reviewed, published sources. Holland's thesis is peer-reviewed and published. It therefore cannot be dismissed as 'claims'. (see Wikipedia:RS if you are unclear on WP guidelines on sources). I do agree that the direct quotations from the work are too long, I will shorten them.Discotechwreck (talk) 02:01, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Please do not mass revert carefully explained changes. Miradre (talk) 02:26, 22 August 2011 (UTC)

text: Miradre - your 'careful explanations' lend little evidence to justify your mass changes of major sections of the article, including its logical structure and also significant content changes; especially trying to re-cast peer-reviewed and published work as 'claims', apparently because they don't fit your favored perspective (for which, BTW, you are infamous all over wikipedia). I don't think editors or readers of this article want to uncritically swallow the products of any dogmatic adherence to a pseudo-scientific bandwagon based on ethnocentric anglo-saxon views of 'human nature' - I'm afraid on this page we still do anthropology with strands of cultural awareness woven-in. Any ambitions to dissolve all of social science with the universal acid of genetic reductionism will have to wait a bit longer, sorry.
Your explanations for your changes do not hold water. Regarding layout - why move coverage of debates and theories that are at the center of the discussion about how biological processes / social relationships may or may not interact out of the biology section?  The sociobiological perspective is seen as part of the same intellectual/cultural tradition from within anthropology (have you actually read Schneider 1984?) and should thus be in that section. Evolution has a more nuanced meaning with anthropology - why do you not stick with the 'sociobiology' or 'reductionist' nomenclature?  Why have you moved well established aspects of the debate (such that sociobioloical and anthropological perspectives have disagreed with each other from the 1970s onwards) into a section called Holland's thesis? What justifies that? This debate is very well understood to exist, by all involved and all informed observers. You seem to want to put all well established points lumped under this section, just so you can classify it as "holland argues", and thus suggest it is not the commonly understood view. Then you conveniently put a tag on the whole section - all the points, summaries and evidences - both widely established and more novel, as undue weight? Nice circular reasoning in your editorial posture there. Most of these points have been argued for decades by many anthropologists, not just by Holland. If an editor knew something about the study of kinship, s/he would surely be aware of that. If not.... what would they be doing editing this article..? Oh yeah, I remember.
Anyway, I'll rest my justifications for removing most of your changes there for now - We'll see how all this pans out. I'd be glad if others who have been curating this article could join in the discussion.Discotechwreck (talk) 03:34, 22 August 2011 (UTC)

text: First, anthropology is not the only field doing research on kinship. The article should not be written from an exclusive (cultural) anthropological perspective but include all significant views in a neutral way. Evolutionary psychology and sociobiology views need to be presented separately, not dismissed in a subtopic section among anthropology material. Second, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are not identical and "Reductionist" is a perjorative term used by critics. Third, there was an enormous undue weight given to material from Holland's thesis previously and despite this not giving a good representation of it. This has now been pruned to an appropriate size and clarified. Fourth, various factual error and pov descriptions has been corrected and updated material added.Miradre (talk) 03:46, 22 August 2011 (UTC)

text: But I do agree that a better section name would be "Evolutionary psychology and sociobiological views". Miradre (talk) 04:03, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Thesis 

message: Sentence Structure
It may be unclear which word is modified by "more." For clarity, consider rewording your sentence.
Sentence Structure
It may be unclear which word is modified by "more." For clarity, consider rewording your sentence.
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•	Consider: The boardroom needs more furniture that is comfortable. 
•	Or consider: The boardroom needs furniture that is more comfortable.
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•	Consider: Businesses are looking for employees that are more capable. 
•	Or consider: Businesses are looking for more employees that are capable.
If these words are not essential to the meaning of your sentence, use "which" and separate the words with a comma.
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•	Consider: The pet store closes on Valentine's Day.
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•	Consider: Mary has a map of The Hague
"That" or "Which"
If these words are not essential to the meaning of your sentence, use "which" and separate the words with a comma.
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 	Consider: I have a great book, which you can borrow for your vacation. 
 	Or consider: I have a great book that you can borrow for your vacation.
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 	Consider: We want to buy the photo, which Harry took. 
 	Or consider: We want to buy the photo that Harry took.
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•	Consider: The chefs have not yet made the eclairs. 
•	Or consider: We chefs have not yet made the eclairs
Reflexive Pronoun Use
Use pronouns ending in "self" in conjunction with a noun, as in "Andrew himself" or when the pronoun refers back to the subject, as in "I hit myself." Use "own" in conjunction with a pronoun only when referring back to the subject.
•	Instead of: They heard herself on the radio. 
•	Consider: They heard her on the radio.
•	Instead of: John watched her own meal get cold. 
•	Consider: John watched her meal get cold.
Please edit the text 
77.28.211.57 (talk) 20:56, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Problem with text found 

message: The article's main content jumps straight into Morgan and kinship terminology. Whilst this is an historically accurate account, it must seems strange for today's students who are (hopefully) aware that social group living is not just a human trait. I have therefore contextualized Morgan's research goals in their contemporary world-view, explaining that social group life was at the time largely believed to be an exclusively human trait. This caveat helps to make the subsequent content about how kinship studies developed more understandable, including the major revisionary influence of Schneider in the 1970s/80s.DMSchneider (talk) 00:23, 21 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Contextualizing the origin of kinship studies

message: should perhaps the page Kinship terminology be mergerd here. It seems to  be context-wise quite similar to this page88.114.154.216 (talk) 18:50, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: two different things actually.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 19:14, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

text: There could be some rebalancing of material between the articles (not sure why :File:Kinship Systems.svg is on this article, not the other one), but I don't think they should be merged -- "Kinship terminology" focuses on language, while this article has a very broad-ranging subject matter... AnonMoos (talk) 19:53, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  Yes, perhaps sync would be better then.88.114.154.216 (talk) 12:50, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  merger 

message: There have been for a long time two out-of-context sections in the middle of the article, as if someone was experimenting with a different article layout without following through properly and never cleared away their mess. Their inclusion was never recorded here on the talk page, nor argued for.
- 'Degrees' which is a table format with values of genetic overlap with no other text or introduction or explanation given of what it means, its relevance or its fit in the broader article. I suggest to remove this or put it at the end of the article as an appendix.
- 'extensions of the kinship metaphor' - which is just a heading with two subheadings with no content given or explanation given to readers of what this means. 
Since these currently break up the flow of the article and unnecessarily divide the first section 'concepts' and the later section 'history' I am going to move these to the end of the article and put them on probation unless their inclusion and their place within the flow of the article can be argued for either here or the talk page or within their own (future?) content.109.69.8.99 (talk) 12:34, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: tidy up

message: Given Schneider's very significant influence on kinship studies in the past 30+ years (since 1984 especially), I have created a new section in the history part of the article outlining his contributions (with quotes) and anthropologists' reactions. I hope other editors with knowledge of the subject will agree with me that Schneider has been a huge influence, and that it would be a disservice to wiki readers (wishing to understand the subject as it exists today) to not give a decent account of this influence. I intend to add more detail to the section 'kinship post-Schneider' in the coming days (and encourage other editors to add to these parts of the article).109.69.8.99 (talk) 01:13, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Schneider

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Kinship. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20040627101247/http://anthro.palomar.edu/kinship/ to http://anthro.palomar.edu/kinship/
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Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 13:17, 6 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Kinship. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20060716082552/http://www.ausanthrop.net/research/kinship/ to http://www.ausanthrop.net/research/kinship/
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 01:49, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Just an observation regarding the text membership in corporately organized dwellings rather than around descent groups or lineages, as in the "House of Windsor". In British usage the House of Windsor refers exclusively to the blood-line and marriage ties of the descendants of Edward 7th, it has nothing to do with any dwelling. The text appears to mean the opposite. Perhaps it's just a misplaced comma. JohnHarris (talk) 18:20, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  House of Windsor