History of Kinship Studies
One of the founders of the anthropological relationship research was Lewis Henry Morgan, in his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871). As is the case with other social sciences, Anthropology and kinship studies emerged at a time when the understanding of the Human species' comparative place in the world was somewhat different than today. Evidence that life in stable social groups is not just a feature of humans, but also of many other primates, was yet to emerge and society was considered to a be uniquely human affair. As a result, early kinship theorists saw an apparent need to explain not only the details of how human social groups are constructed, their patterns, meanings and obligations, but also why they are constructed at all. Such explanations typically presented the fact of life in social groups as being largely a result of human ideas and values.
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