2. Kinship: Caring & Family

Welcome to Week 2 of Transforming Lives through Care at La Trobe University. Last week, you completed a brief introduction to anthropology and to care and we focused on two anthropological concepts: society and culture. Now we are going to another classic anthropological concept--kinship--in order to understand care. The contention is that the family is structured and it provides the most basic structure for providing of care in human societies. 

🎯 Learning Goals

By the end of this week, you should be able to:

• explain the idea of kinship
• use the concept of  kinship to analyse caring practices 
• critique the idea of kinship

🚦 Introduction: Kinship

Kinship is the study of families in different cultures—who counts as family, the roles family members play, and how these relationships are formed and understood. In every culture I know of, caring is a crucial part of family life. This week, we analyse the connection between kinship and care, exploring how kin are expected to care for one another—and how care itself can create and sustain kinship ties.

📚 Recommended Materials

Most weeks in TLC, you’ll find some recommended materials available. I’ve chosen these because I think they’ll make the essential materials easier to understand—and maybe even more enjoyable to explore. Take them at your own pace, and use them if they’re helpful to you. So if you're interested...

Visit my blog on kinship and learn about different anthropological approaches to kinship. 

 Read Levi-Strauss "Problem of the Avunculate" from Structural Anthropology pp. 41-51.  Anthropologists call the relationship between a man and his sister's son the  "avuncular relationship". Levi-Strauss approaches it from a structural perspective.

Read this abridged version of Winarnita & Herriman, Caring and Family before tackling the whole thing.

📘 Essential Materials

Read my summary of Levi-Strauss's analysis of the avuncular relationship. If you're still have trouble understanding, watch the following presentation.  The "avuncular" is just a tiny, almost-forgotten question in kinship. I haven't seen any structural anthropology published in the last 40 years. So why did you study it in the 2nd week of you anthropology course on caring? Because kinship is foundational. Even exploring a small, overlooked corner—like the avuncular—can open up big insights into how care, authority, and obligation are structured across cultures. Plus, you need to get familiar with classic anthropological theories, like structuralism, that still shape how we think about relationships today.

Watch  the presentation Marriage Migration among the Cocos Malays by Winarnita (my wife and co-researcher) and me. Here are the slides if you want. 

Read the entire Caring & Family article.

To sum it all up watch this presentation:

and check out the slides here.

🗣️ Interactive tasks

Complete the Kinship Puzzles worksheet. This includes a quiz you can test yourself.

Depict care relations on your genealogy. Make a list of the last five "presents" you gave and the last five "presents" received. Who did you receive them from? What did they mean to you? How would Mauss analyse these gifts. If any of these gifts came from family members, indicate on the genealogy using a squiggly line.

🏁 Conclusion

Summary

Care is not just rooted in biology. Instead, it is shaped by cultural ideas of kinship—like the caring role of a mother’s brother. And kinship, in turn, is created through acts of care, as we saw in examples like Cocos Malay adoption, milk-parenting, and marriage migration.

Significance

What feels natural—like who cares for you in your family—is actually structured. Since most care happens through kinship, and kinship is socially shaped, we can see that care itself is culturally structured.

Next week

Next, we lean how another classic anthropological concept--the Gift--can be used to analysed care.

🔎 Further Research

Make sure you enrol in La Trobe's ANT3KAM Kinship, Gender, & Marriage. In this subject, you can examine the role and significance of kinship and marriage in many different societies, looking at the diverse ways humans create families

Understanding structural anthropology is NOT necessary for this subject. But if you are interested in finding out more, visit visit my blog Symbols & Thought Structures: Levi-Strauss.

If you want to find out more about Cocos Malay adoption read my fieldnotes"The Special Gift: Adoption & Kinship".

And for more on milk parents and milk children read my fieldnotes "Sharing Breastmilk & Creating Family".