Top Results for Kinship

Carol B. Stack is an American anthropologist whose research addresses African American communities, kinship, poverty, women and youth. Her 1974 book All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community is an ethnography of relationships and mutual support among Black residents living in poverty...

Marilyn Strathern (born 1941) is a British anthropologist whose work has profoundly influenced feminist anthropology and the study of kinship, gender, and social institutions. Her ethnographic research focuses primarily on the Melanesian societies of Papua New Guinea, specifically the Hagen people....

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) was a British social anthropologist who developed the theoretical approach known as structural functionalism, which analyzed societies as integrated systems of interdependent institutions. He conducted fieldwork in the Andaman Islands (1906–1908) and among...

George Peter Murdock was an American anthropologist known for comparative studies of kinship, social organization, and family systems. At Yale University he founded the Human Relations Area Files, an indexed archive that organizes ethnographic information by culture and topic for cross-cultural rese...

Edmund Leach (1910–1989) was a British social anthropologist who served as Provost of King's College, Cambridge, and held the university's first chair in social anthropology. His monograph Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954) challenged functionalist models by arguing that political structures...

Kath Weston is an American anthropologist whose work connects kinship studies with gender and sexuality. Her book Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, published in 1991, examined how gay men and lesbians formed families through friendship, partnership, community, and relationships with biolo...

Jack Goody (1919–2015) was a British social anthropologist who taught at Cambridge University for over five decades and produced wide-ranging comparative studies of African and Eurasian societies. His books The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977) and The Logic of Writing and the Organization of...

Lewis Henry Morgan was a foundational American anthropologist and social theorist whose work significantly shaped the discipline in the 19th century. In his book 'Ancient Society' (1877), he proposed a theory of cultural evolution that categorized human development into three stages: savagery, barba...

Meyer Fortes (1906–1983) was a South African-born British anthropologist who became a central figure in the development of British social anthropology. He is best known for his fieldwork conducted during the 1930s and 1940s among the Tallensi people of northern Ghana. His research focused on the dyn...

David M. Schneider was an American cultural anthropologist and professor at the University of Chicago who pioneered the symbolic approach to studying kinship. In his 1968 book "American Kinship," he analyzed how biological concepts like "blood" function primarily as cultural symbols of unity. He lat...

W. H. R. Rivers was a British psychiatrist, neurologist, and anthropologist who pioneered the genealogical method of studying kinship systems. As a core member of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, he helped establish modern fieldwork techniques in British social ant...

Robert H. Lowie (1883–1957) was an Austrian-born American anthropologist who trained under Franz Boas at Columbia University. He conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among the Crow (Apsáalooke) and other peoples of the North American Plains, producing detailed studies of social organization, k...

Peter Rivière is a British social anthropologist whose research focused on Indigenous societies of the Guianas and the wider Amazonian region. His book Marriage Among the Trio, published in 1969, examined marriage, kinship, and social organization among the Trio of Suriname and neighboring areas. He...

Floyd Lounsbury was an American anthropologist and linguist renowned for his foundational work in kinship systems and Mesoamerican linguistics. He significantly advanced the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs through his structural analysis of the Palenque inscriptions in the 1970s. Additionally, his...

Janet Carsten is a British social anthropologist and professor at the University of Edinburgh, known for her ethnographic research in Southeast Asia. Her work has significantly broadened the scope of kinship studies, particularly through her edited volume "Cultures of Relatedness" (2000), which exam...

Stephen Hugh-Jones is a British social anthropologist associated with the University of Cambridge who conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among the Barasana and other Tukanoan-speaking peoples of the Northwest Amazon in Colombia. His research, conducted within the structuralist tradition infl...

Sylvia Yanagisako is an American cultural anthropologist whose research explores the intersections of kinship, gender, and capitalism. Her early fieldwork focused on the family structures, gender roles, and cultural practices of Japanese Americans in Seattle. Later in her career, she shifted her eth...

Fred Eggan was an American anthropologist associated with the University of Chicago, recognized for his detailed ethnographic research on the social organization of Native American communities. He extensively studied the kinship systems, ritual practices, and social structures of the Pueblo peoples...

Henry Maine was a 19th-century British jurist, legal historian, and comparative anthropologist. In his 1861 work Ancient Law, he proposed that progressive societies develop from a system based on familial status to one based on individual contract. This thesis heavily influenced the emerging fields...

Rodney Needham (1923–2006) was a British social anthropologist and a prominent faculty member at the University of Oxford. His academic work was heavily influenced by structuralism, focusing extensively on the logical foundations of kinship theory, prescriptive alliance systems, and symbolic classif...

Irawati Karve was a prominent Indian anthropologist and sociologist who taught at Deccan College in Pune. She is recognized for her extensive research on Indian kinship, caste systems, and social structures. Her academic work includes the book Kinship Organization in India, published in 1953, which...

American anthropologist known for comparative legal anthropology and research on gender, marriage, and family among Native American communities and in rural Spain.

Kathleen Gough was a British anthropologist recognized for her extensive research on kinship and social structures in South India. She conducted notable fieldwork in the Malabar region from 1947 to 1949, focusing on the Nayar caste and matrilineal systems. As a Marxist, she often integrated politica...

Signe Howell is a Norwegian social anthropologist whose research has addressed kinship, adoption, personhood, morality, and indigenous cosmology. She is particularly associated with long-term ethnographic work among the Chewong, an Indigenous people of Peninsular Malaysia. Her scholarship is intende...

Peter Rivière is a British social anthropologist associated with the University of Oxford and the study of Indigenous societies in lowland South America. His ethnographic research among the Trio of Suriname examined social organization, marriage, kinship, settlement, and political relations. He also...

Nur Yalman is a Turkish-born social anthropologist who taught at Harvard University. His scholarship includes ethnographic and comparative work on kinship, marriage, caste, religion, and social change, particularly in Sri Lanka and Turkey. He is known for examining how systems of classification, hie...

Johann Jakob Bachofen was a Swiss jurist and anthropologist whose work helped shape nineteenth-century theories about kinship, gender, and the development of social institutions. His 1861 book Das Mutterrecht, usually translated as Mother Right, argued that some early societies had been organized ar...

Brenda Zara Seligman was a British anthropologist who worked with her husband, Charles Seligman, on ethnographic surveys in Sri Lanka and Sudan. She studied languages, kinship, genealogies, and the lives of women and children, and coauthored The Veddas in 1911. The Royal Anthropological Institute ga...