Principles of Kinship

Undergraduate / Graduate

This introductory course is an attempt to think about the theoretical and historical debates around kinship and world-making practices in anthropology. People everywhere across time and space create meaning about the world they live in and their relations in that world. For this reason, anthropology, the study of human societies past and present, has been preoccupied with kinship relations since its inception as a discipline. Co-taught by an archeologist and a socio-cultural anthropologist, the course will explore different forms of making kin from the deep past to the present. We will ask how and why anthropologists have made kinship a central category in understanding ourselves and others, and review critiques of the concept. The ultimate goal of this course is to encourage students to recognize the ongoing importance of kinship in our own lives and in the contemporary world. By the end of the course we hope to have provided tools to think about kinship and its centrality in human societies from an informed, critical perspective.