Feminist anthropologies of kinship

The revitalization of kinship studies—what anthropologists call ‘the new kinship’—emerged from feminist and queer anthropology. That is, the very decolonial scholarship that rubbished kinship as an imperial project. The crucial move was refocusing on bottom-up ethnography of how human communities ‘do’ relatedness. This is a significant departure from the genealogical method and its fixation with translating and mapping ‘their’ relations into ‘our’ terms.Footnote ¹ Yet, at the same time, we cannot discount Western folk-theories of kinship, reproduction and descent, as scientific advancements in genetics and medicine have generalized these into novel global standards for how ‘kin’ are understood (Abel Reference Abel2021; Abel & Frieman Reference Abel and Frieman2023).

Rather than admit defeat and sidestep the issue entirely, we draw inspiration from the bottom-up ethnographic approach offered by the ‘new kinship’ in anthropology. The ‘difficult attachments’ approach (Goldfarb & Bamford Reference Goldfarb and Bamford2024; see also Franklin & McKinnon Reference Franklin and McKinnon2002) is the basis of a model of kinship in which we ground our discussion. Within this framework, forms of attachment, care and belonging are not simply conflated with positive sociality, or what Schneider (Reference Schneider1980, 50, 53) famously called ‘diffuse, enduring solidarity’ and Sahlins (Reference Sahlins2011a,b) re-worked as ‘mutuality of being’. By holding together theoretical questions about the complexities of social and cultural reproduction with the widespread investments people make in biological procreation, being born, and growing up, the new kinship studies wrestle with both the symbolic as well as reproductive dimensions of kinship. Much of the fruitful work in new kinship attends to the ‘slippage between theory and practice, the symbolic (ultimately arbitrary social conventions) and the reality-as-lived (the ways people break these conventions all the time in daily life)’ (Goldfarb & Bamford Reference Goldfarb and Bamford2024, 2). This slippage points us—analytically and methodologically—back to the materialities and substances of kinship (in some instances ‘blood’ ties, but also so much more).

Even when ideologies of descent and genetic relationships are strongly held, kinship systems can apply them in complex and contingent ways. A telling example is Goldfarb’s (Reference Goldfarb2016) ethnographic research on adoption and foster care in Japan. In a setting where biological descent is strongly sanctioned, including by state authorities, she finds a complex material semiotics of ‘coming to look alike’—families that invest a great deal of practical and symbolic work in appearing to be biologically related—as a way of incorporating ideologies of ‘blood ties’ into their familial relations. It is in this sense that we claim ‘kin-work’ takes considerable symbolic and material effort, not because logics of descent are superfluous or irrelevant, but because forging and stabilizing kin relations across difference (social, biological, generational) requires ongoing investments in ‘affinity’ and is never fait accompli.

Refocusing on the material dimensions of kinship offers a new lens through which to look at daily life. As many of us know from our own experiences, kinship and family are often hard, alienating, and even traumatic. Even ‘chosen’ and creative forms of relatedness can impose unwelcome burdens or asymmetrical and hierarchical systems of care (Goldfarb & Schuster Reference Goldfarb and Schuster2016). By focusing on how idealized and symbolic expectations are mobilized around ‘good’ sociality, while also gathering empirical accounts of the disappointments, distrust and disconnections that are the reality of human experiences, the ‘difficult attachments’ framework can account for both theory and practice.

Thus, here we work from the basic premise that kinship comprises substantial (emphasis here on substance: Carsten Reference Carsten1995) relations between people (and sometimes between people and non-humans). These bonds materialize shifting solidarities and partial connections, contributing to practices of both mutuality and affiliation on the one hand and boundary-making and social difference on the other. These relations are not intrinsic or permanent but shifting and fluid, manipulable and frequently manipulated. Hence the double entendre of ‘relative values’—these are partial, interested and contingent (Franklin & McKinnon Reference Franklin and McKinnon2002). Kin ties may emerge from biological relations, exist in spite of their absence, or may not reference biology at all. They may be cultivated and nurtured or allowed to wither. They may be shaped by or altered to fit broader economic or political structures. And they may be valued or devalued in different contexts simultaneously. Kinship, then, is a verb, not a noun. Failures to live up to the ideal should not be taken as outliers, but be seen as ‘constitutive qualities of kinship as it should be defined in the anthropological scholarship’ (Goldfarb & Bamford Reference Goldfarb and Bamford2024, 3), and the practices of making both amicable and difficult attachments should be at the centre of our theorization.

Kin temporalities

One entry into the social practice of kinship is to start from the premise that kin relations are widely recognized as temporal—that is, social relations that change and evolve over the course of an individual’s life. More broadly, aging is often said to be a social achievement rather than a universal biological marker—it only acquires salience and cultural significance when recognized and made important by other people. Age is an important factor in understanding other social dimensions like wealth, bodily transformations and, of course, kinship. Archaeologists have already developed the tools and analytical framework to understand how this operates in other social domains, such as the embodiment of gendered roles and practices (Frieman et al. Reference Frieman, Teather and Morgan2019; Gilchrist Reference Gilchrist2018; Joyce Reference Joyce2000; Sofaer Derevenski Reference Sofaer Derevenski2000), so adapting this approach to kinning practices is a logical extension.

The hierarchical organization of generations was foundational to W.H.R. River’s genealogical method (Rivers Reference Rivers1900). Genealogy, in turn, was informed by the prevailing assumption that the transfer of resources intergenerationally through inheritance tracked alongside principles of descent, generally understood to be patrilineal (Engels [Reference Engels1884] Reference Engels1902). The ongoing salience of the genealogical ideal underpins popular television programmes, like Succession, and the intergenerational disputes among media magnates that seem to have inspired it. The long-standing anthropological interest in mortuary practices and funerary rights emerges from and reinforces this intellectual tradition.Footnote ² Here, the material substances that constitute kinship are imagined to be ‘blood’, which also carries privileges of wealth and status across time (Schuster Reference Schuster2025), transcending death. And yet when the dynamics of generational relations and kinship-as-lifecourse come into focus ethnographically, the ideal of succession begins to fall apart. Andean kinship systems and complex forms of fostering are a classic case of mobilizing principles of descent beyond blood ties. But even these reveal fault lines between generations, which Jessica B. Leinaweaver calls ‘ingratitude’ (e.g. contentious relations between adult children and aging parents) as a valuable analytical tool to track emergent social inequalities within kinning practices, that is, practices that dynamically shape kin relations (Leinaweaver Reference Leinaweaver2013). Even the temporal markers of lifecourse development and the accumulation of wealth and status—marked socially through kinship idioms like marriage and parenthood—are vexed when we look at them in practice. The contemporary phenomenon of ‘waithood’, whereby younger generations fail to achieve socially recognized kin-based and economic milestones and instead are suspended in arrested development (Inhorn & Smith-Hefner Reference Inhorn and Smith-Hefner2020), points to generational succession through temporal progression as a tenuous achievement rather than an established norm.

The fact that descent continues to be the hegemonic temporalizing frame for studies of kinship and social reproduction is part of what makes facile assumptions about genealogical relatedness in palaeogenomics so immediately intuitive to both scientific and popular imaginaries. That generational succession is also bundled up with complex affective registers like gratitude and ingratitude, or sentiments like filial piety (Yanagisako Reference Yanagisako2002; Reference Yanagisako2015), can make logics of descent and genealogical relatedness ‘feel’ like the right fit for describing kinship systems. And yet intuitive does not always mean accurate. If we learned nothing from the kinship wars within anthropology in the 1970s–80s—and especially the fallout from Schneider’s (Reference Schneider1984) Critique—it should be this.

Ethnographic examples offer us insight into how personal temporalities shape kinning practices, sometimes counterintuitively. George Paul Meiu (Reference Meiu2017) revisited a classic case of kinship in the ethnographic record—Samburu age-grade systems in northern Kenya. Characteristic forms of dress and adornment mark each age grade (e.g. young male morans, recognizable as warriors clothed in red; wealthy ‘big men’ elders who have achieved marriage and property, father children, and own cattle). Structural-functionalist anthropology emphasized how age-set systems contributed to social reproduction and political organization, and were key mechanisms for producing social value, prestige and wealth.

Meiu’s study is distinctive for capturing more dynamic conceptions of time and age, and the conventionalized rituals that mark both. His ethnography of Samburu kinship and lifecourse identifies the ways that age-set based kinship systems remain powerfully appealing for people, and a key criterion for social reproduction. However, rapid social shifts, such as the tourist economy on Kenya’s beaches, have provided new economic resources that allow some young men to ‘skip’ age grades and achieve elder-hood much earlier than their classificatory kin. And inversely, some men strategically use the visually iconic moran dress to hustle tourists, choosing to remain ‘stuck’ as ‘beach-boy elders’ and embracing age-inappropriate dress and status. Some forms of sexuality are also subversive; not in the sense of same-sex desire, but rather sex and/or marriage across lines of nationality (e.g. with European tourists) and age (e.g. with older women).

From the material culture, marriage practices and circulation of wealth among Samburu people, we might think that kinship is largely unchanged from earlier generations. Forms of dress, material investments in marriage and funerary rites, and so on, all ‘look’ like they are reproducing established ideologies of genealogical succession and principles of descent. This superficial interpretation would miss what Meiu calls ‘queer moments’ within normative kinship and lifecourse—moments of contradiction and subversion. These are queer in the sense that they bend, reconfigure and creatively redeploy kin’s temporalities by investing in ‘inappropriate’ partners or relationships at ‘inappropriate’ times. Beach-boy elders and young big-men are queer figures in that their particular expressions of sexuality subvert normatively disciplined expectations of lifecourse and kinship.

Importantly, these are highly controversial means aimed at attaining deeply normative as well as socially and politically conservative ends (e.g. becoming an esteemed elder). Paying attention to these inconsistencies—not as outliers, but as constitutive features of kinship practices (Goldfarb & Bamford Reference Goldfarb and Bamford2024)—can help us see how new forms of age and time emerge in social practice. That is, how even quite structured kin systems exist in a sort of constant flow and shift, rebalancing relations and gendered practices as necessary to respond within a dynamic social context.

Biodistance and genetic pedigrees

Bioarchaeologists have maintained a strong interest in methods for inferring biodistance from phenotypic features of bones and teeth (Johnson & Paul Reference Johnson and Paul2016). This latter, of course, speaks directly to the present world of archaeogenetic research where identity by descent (IBD) models are yielding frequent evidence of biological connections between individuals in the past (Ringbauer et al. Reference Ringbauer, Huang and Akbari2024), shifting multigenerational patterns of geneflow to a human scale. With new computational tools and an increasing number of sequenced individuals, archaeologists are able to draw lines of shared ancestry between individuals buried together (e.g. Villalba-Mouco et al. Reference Villalba-Mouco, Oliart and Rihuete-Herrada2022), at great distance (e.g. Cordes et al. Reference Cordes, Philippsen, Varberg and Sørensen2022) and separated by generations (Cassidy et al. Reference Cassidy, Maoldúin and Kador2020). Particularly eye-catching results include the seven-generation genetic pedigree documented by Rivollat and colleagues (Reference Rivollat, Rohrlach and Ringbauer2023) within a single sixth-millennium bce cemetery in Gurgy, Yonne, France. Less enormous, though still significant pedigrees have been reconstructed for numerous individual burial monuments and cemeteries across Europe.

These genetic genealogies allow researchers a fine-grained understanding of the demography of the living population represented by these dead and offer us some insight into elements of identity which may have structured the funerary rites at these sites. For example, Fowler and colleagues (Reference Fowler2022) present a five-generation pedigree of 27 individuals buried in two chambers of the Hazleton North monumental tomb in Gloucestershire, UK. Here, they reconstruct four matrilines descended from women, three of them present in this tomb, who had children with the same male individual (not present). Fowler (Reference Fowler2022) and Cummings and Fowler (Reference Cummings and Fowler2023) have drawn on these data to argue that British and Irish monumental tombs, such as Hazleton North, were venues to negotiate and materialize lineage. However, given very different patterns in biological relatedness among individuals interred in near contemporary monuments in Ireland (Smyth et al. Reference Smyth, Carlin and Hofmann2025) and northwest France (Rivollat et al. Reference Rivollat, Thomas and Ghesquière2022), the generalization of this interpretation remains a live question.

The emergence of a genuine interest in kinship among archaeologists has arguably been spurred by the palaeogenomic tsunami which has swept over the discipline in the last two decades, and especially since the development of next-generation sequencing (Brück & Frieman Reference Brück and Frieman2021; Frieman Reference Frieman, Meller, Krause, Haak and Risch2023). Collaborations between archaeologists and geneticists have so far taken a quite limited perspective on kinship, with numerous articles published that seek to extrapolate from genetic connections elements (or even the totality) of social structure, including patterns of inheritance, gender roles and marriage rules (Fischer et al. Reference Fischer, Sjögren and Jensen2024; Fowler Reference Fowler2022; Knipper et al. Reference Knipper, Mittnik, Massy and Kociumaka2017; Kristiansen Reference Kristiansen2022; Mittnik et al. Reference Mittnik, Massy and Knipper2019; Monroy Kuhn et al. Reference Monroy Kuhn, Jakobsson and Günther2018; Rivollat et al. Reference Rivollat, Thomas and Ghesquière2022; Reference Rivollat, Rohrlach and Ringbauer2023; Schroeder et al. Reference Schroeder, Margaryan and Szmyt2019; Sjögren et al. Reference Sjögren, Olalde and Carver2020). These approaches build on mid-twentieth century normative and universalizing models of kinship, and frequently take inspiration from evolutionary anthropologies (Ensor Reference Ensor2017; Frieman & McNeil Reference Frieman, McNeil, Callan and Coleman2024).

Moreover, the tendency to focus on the genetic pedigrees reconstructed from a portion of the interred population, rather than the many unrelated individuals at each of these sites (and of course those unable to be sequenced due to poor preservation or choice of funerary rite, such as cremation), promotes exactly the sort of intuitive understanding of kinship critiqued by feminist anthropology. By positioning biological descent as the central organizing principle of social structure and funerary practice, pedigree-forward models efface other, non-biological patterns in funerary practice and deposition and implicitly emphasize heterosexual reproduction as the core structure of social belonging. It is no accident that individuals outside these pedigrees are relegated to the supplementary materials and are not core to the central narrative of the publication, notwithstanding the prominence, associations, or significance of their own funerary context (Booth et al. Reference Booth, Brück, Brace and Barnes2021; Frieman Reference Frieman2024).

Kinship other than genealogies

In attempts to speak to kinship beyond biodistance, archaeologists have explored various other domains which might reveal material evidence of kinship practices. The spatial and phenomenological aspects of domestic architecture have long been considered sites able to reveal small-scale aspects of social relations and daily practice, both functional and cosmological (Allison Reference Allison1999; Blanton Reference Blanton1994; Brück Reference Brück, Casella and Fowler2005; Cveček Reference Cveček2023; Hendon Reference Hendon2008; Tringham Reference Tringham, Gero and Conkey1991; Watkins Reference Watkins1990). The articulation of domestic space, ranging from the house to the settlement to the articulation of wider landscape occupation and manipulation, have also been treated as proxies for social organization and kin-making practices (Ensor Reference Ensor2013; Reference Ensor2021; Frieman Reference Frieman, Meller, Krause, Haak and Risch2023; González-Ruibal Reference González-Ruibal2006; Johnston Reference Johnston2020). In the American southwest, Mills and colleagues (Mills Reference Mills2018; Mills et al. Reference Mills, Clark and Peeples2013; Reference Mills, Clark and Peeples2016) have focused closely on ceramic technology to link intergenerational technical traditions and the dissemination of specific styles of decoration and use to patterns of community formation and marriage alliance. As the field develops, a focus on care—for both humans and non-humans—might be an avenue to exploring non-human kin and relations, and this could build naturally on ongoing work in social zooarchaeology and other environmental approaches (e.g. Adeleye et al. Reference Adeleye, Haberle, Harris, O’Connor and Bowdler2024; Nichols Reference Nichols2024).

However, at present the most common place to look for kin connections in the past is the funerary sphere, both for geneticists and in more social archaeological approaches (Booth et al. Reference Booth, Brück, Brace and Barnes2021; Brück Reference Brück2021). In part, this reflects the ongoing interest in bodies and the embodiment of social practice, but grave sites and their wider contexts have long held a privileged space in archaeological discourse as places offering special insight into social structure and identity (Tarlow & Stutz Reference Tarlow and Stutz2013). However, funerary sites are complicated, imperfect mirrors of the living world, its practices, identities and beliefs, and the data we glean from them cannot be neatly mapped onto a dynamic and fluid society (Frieman Reference Frieman, Meller, Krause, Haak and Risch2023, 46).

This disconnect is key to our ability to reconstruct and understand the articulations and practice of kinship in the past in ways that are not currently encompassed by kinship scholarship based on biodistance. For example, Cassidy and colleagues (Reference Cassidy, Maoldúin and Kador2020) identified a number of more-or-less distantly genetically connected individuals and one example of close-family incest, among the remains deposited in Irish passage graves, one of several types of megalithic monument built and used in funerary rites in the late fourth millennium bce. From this, they extrapolated a social structure whereby endogamous hereditary elites had demonstrated their power and status by exclusive access to major monumental sites like Newgrange and practised licit incest, in the model of Egyptian pharaohs (Curry Reference Curry2020). However, a holistic assessment of the broader archaeological context (both of Newgrange and the wider Irish Neolithic) does not support this model (Carlin et al. Reference Carlin, Smyth and Frieman2025; Smyth et al. Reference Smyth, Carlin and Hofmann2025). There is little evidence for settlement hierarchies or the hoarding or control of rare or valued materials. We see a proliferation of funerary rites at many different types of sites, suggesting no social control over cosmological practices. Moreover, the patterns of relation identified by Cassidy and colleagues are almost exclusively of fourth-degree or more distant relatives and were not contemporary, implying that, while the individuals buried (as opposed to those cremated, whose genetics cannot be investigated) in passage tombs were somewhat more closely related to each other than to the wider community, no tight controls on intermarriage or reproduction are evident. Indeed, human remains circulated at this time, with burials typically containing only a portion of a person’s body, as appears to be the case of the Newgrange petrous bone that yielded evidence of incest. It is further unclear how long this person’s remains were in circulation prior to their deposition, whether the people who placed them in Newgrange knew them in life, or whether they themself were aware of their own parentage. In this case, the genetic data represent good science married to poorly informed interpretation, leading to an overly simplistic and easily disproven model of kin structure.

The living and the dead

Nearly 30 years ago, Parker Pearson (Reference Parker Pearson1999) laid out a model of funerary archaeology that emphasized that burials are for the living. What this means is that the material we record and seek to interpret is the residue of complex actions—some of which may have taken considerable time to come to fruition—and may relate only tangentially to the decedent’s own identity or status in life. Recent publications by Booth and Brück (Booth & Brück Reference Booth and Brück2020; Brück & Booth Reference Brück and Booth2022), for example, made clear that a number of late third- and early second-millennium bce single burials from southern England, once thought to represent a wealthy elite, are actually burials of individuals long dead. Based on histological and radiocarbon evidence, we now understand that these individuals spent as much as three or four generations after their bodily death outside the grave—perhaps remaining with family or taking a different role as an important ancestor—prior to being buried. Here, there is no guarantee that the grave goods reflect any aspect of the person’s own lived experience, identity, or relations. Indeed, we should question whether they were known in life by the person or persons who dug their graves, chose the material that accompanied them, and placed them in the ground.

More interpretatively, Price (Reference Price2010) argues quite compellingly that Viking funerary assemblages could be understood as the residue of what he terms ‘mortuary drama’—a careful and considered theatrical staging of bodies, objects and practices that manifested stories. These, perhaps presaging the sagas, may have drawn on or featured the decedent, their relatives and family, their wider community, and the folkloric myths that gave shape to their cosmology. The dead played a role, but so did the living, meaning that the grave as discovered by archaeologists is like the stage at the end of Hamlet: all the players are still, the story is done, just the props and the sets are left to hint at what transpired.

This model of the grave as performance or composition, a site of drama and interaction, is visible in other contexts. Joanna Sofaer (Reference Sofaer2015, 137–48) speaks to the drama and tension of the burial rites enacted at the second millennium bce cemetery of Cârna, Romania. Here, cremated remains of single individuals were deposited in decorated ceramic vessels that were elaborated with stacks of other vessels on top and around them. The pots themselves were specially made for these burials and one can imagine how the tension would rise as stacks were assembled by a number of ritual specialists or kin, moving and shifting around the grave, lifting and placing pots. Here, the rite itself—stacking pots around a cremation—was more or less standardized and clearly carefully maintained over generations, but the rite’s performance could be dynamic, surprising and stressful based on the actions and choices of the people creating the stack around the decedent’s remains. In these performances we might see glimpses of negotiations as the living took over elements of the decedent’s social roles or status, re-structured their own relations with each other and the now-dead person, and manipulated all these relations in the highly emotive context of the funerary rite.