Kinship

In anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated.

Leach's interest in kinship was first exemplified by his 1951 article (which won the Curl Essay Prize), and it was here that he first cites Levi-Strauss, disagreeing with several aspects of the latter's kinship theory outlined in Elementary Structures of Kinship.

These studies paved the way for what has since come to be known as the new kinship studies.

He returned to Tikopia on research visits several times, although as travel and fieldwork requirements became more burdensome he focused on family and kinship relationships in working- and middle-class London.

His ethnographic work was concerned especially with the kinship system of the Tallensi of Northern Ghana ( The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi , 1949) and segmentary political systems ( African Political Systems , 1940).

David Murray Schneider (November 11, 1918, Brooklyn, New York - October 30, 1995, Santa Cruz, California) was an American cultural anthropologist, best known for his studies of kinship and as a major proponent of the symbolic anthropology approach to cultural anthropology.

He is famous for his fieldwork on the shift of agriculturalists in Madagascar, Japan and other parts of the world, and has also contributed important neo-Marxian work on power, history, kinship, and ritual.