Kinship is a genuine belief in common familial descent from a real ancestor between group members. As an identity, kinship is an unusually strong form of social orientation. Kinship groups based on kinship identity have the power to connect many different people under a common banner, and kinship authority can serve as a powerful idiom for allocating power within these groups. As a concept, kinship helps scholars to unlock important social science puzzles concerning the relationship between identity politics and resource distribution in states. Understanding its role in each of these issue areas requires first explaining what kinship is and how it operates as a political phenomenon.

Tracing the evolution of kinship as an academic concept is a useful starting point for this explanation, impacting the applicability of the model to the Brazilian Surui, Ugandan Vonoma, the Cambodian Khmer Loeu, and other kinship groups. Different groups may understand kinship in different ways. However, definitional clarity helps scholars determine how well the term applies to different groups and eliminates some of the conceptual clutter in the field created by a myriad of similar terms. Differences between words like ‘tribe’, ‘caste’ and ‘clan’ are often ambiguous. In contrast to these terms, kinship refers not only to a type of group but also a modality of organisation. By better defining and understanding kinship in this way, scholars can also better theorise the political role these groups play both in societies and in their interaction with states. Definitional clarity also prevents analytical ambiguity that contributes to the conceptual stretching of kinship.

The Study of Kinship

While political science has often used functionalist definitions of kinship, anthropologists have given considerable thought to defining the term. Kinship is based on a notion of common descent, but this concept is not as clear as it first appears. Married couples do not share common descent inherently, but they are in a sense kin. Adopted children may be considered kin by their families. Close family friends may also be treated as kin with the friendly moniker ‘aunt’ or ‘uncle’. Brothers and sisters may be addressed without reference to birth order in some societies but not in others.