Fictive Kinship - Critiques

Critiques

Recently many anthropologists have abandoned a distinction between "real" and "fictive" kin because many cultures do not base their notion of kinship on genealogical relations as demonstrated by David M. Schneider, who described kinship rather as a kind of vague enduring solidarity. In response to this insight Janet Carsten developed the idea of "relatedness" . Carsten developed her initial ideas from studies with the Malays in looking at what was socialized and biological. Here she uses the idea of relatedness to move away from a pre-constructed analytics opposition which exists in anthropological thought between the biological and the social. Carsten argued that relatedness should be described in terms of indigenous statements and practices, some of which fall outside what anthropologists have conventionally understood as kinship.