Editing Cultural anthropology (section)

===Kinship and family===
{{main|Kinship}}
Kinship refers to the anthropological study of the ways in which humans form and maintain relationships with one another and how those relationships operate within and define social organization.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|title=Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age|last=Guest|first=Kenneth J.|publisher=W.W. Norton & Company|year=2013|location=New York|pages=349–91}}</ref>

Research in kinship studies often crosses over into different anthropological subfields including [[Medical anthropology|medical]], [[Feminist anthropology|feminist]], and [[public anthropology]]. This is likely due to its fundamental concepts, as articulated by linguistic anthropologist Patrick McConvell: {{blockquote|Kinship is the bedrock of all human societies that we know. All humans recognize fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, husbands and wives, grandparents, cousins, and often many more complex types of relationships in the terminologies that they use. That is the matrix into which human children are born in the great majority of cases, and their first words are often kinship terms.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=McConvell|first=Patrick|date=2013|title=Introduction: kinship change in anthropology and linguistics|journal=Kinship Systems: Change and Reconstruction|location=Salt Lake City|publisher=University of Utah Press|pages=1–18}}</ref>}}Throughout history, kinship studies have primarily focused on the topics of marriage, descent, and procreation.<ref name=":1">{{Cite journal|last=Peletz|first=Michael G.|date=1995|title=Kinship Studies in Late Twentieth-Century Anthropology|journal=Annual Review of Anthropology|volume=24|pages=345–56|doi=10.1146/annurev.anthro.24.1.343}}</ref> Anthropologists have written extensively on the variations within marriage across cultures and its legitimacy as a human institution. There are stark differences between communities in terms of marital practice and value, leaving much room for anthropological fieldwork. For instance, the [[Nuer people|Nuer]] of Sudan and the Brahmans of Nepal practice [[polygyny]], where one man has several marriages to two or more women. The Nyar of India and Nyimba of Tibet and Nepal practice [[polyandry]], where one woman is often married to two or more men. The marital practice found in most cultures, however, is [[monogamy]], where one woman is married to one man. Anthropologists also study different marital taboos across cultures, most commonly the incest taboo of marriage within sibling and parent-child relationships. It has been found that all cultures have an incest taboo to some degree, but the taboo shifts between cultures when the marriage extends beyond the nuclear family unit.<ref name=":0" />

There are similar foundational differences where the act of procreation is concerned. Although anthropologists have found that biology is acknowledged in every cultural relationship to procreation, there are differences in the ways in which cultures assess the constructs of parenthood. For example, in the [[Nuyoo Mixtec|Nuyoo]] municipality of [[Oaxaca]], [[Mexico]], it is believed that a child can have partible maternity and partible paternity. In this case, a child would have multiple biological mothers in the case that it is born of one woman and then breastfed by another. A child would have multiple biological fathers in the case that the mother had sex with multiple men, following the commonplace belief in Nuyoo culture that pregnancy must be preceded by sex with multiple men in order have the necessary accumulation of semen.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction|url=https://archive.org/details/socialculturalan00mona|url-access=limited|last1=Just|first1=Peter|last2=Monaghan|first2=John|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2000|location=Oxford|pages=[https://archive.org/details/socialculturalan00mona/page/n91 81]–88|isbn=978-0-19-285346-2 }}</ref>

====Late twentieth-century shifts in interest====
In the twenty-first century, Western ideas of kinship have evolved beyond the traditional assumptions of the nuclear family, raising anthropological questions of consanguinity, lineage, and normative marital expectation. The shift can be traced back to the 1960s, with the reassessment of kinship's basic principles offered by [[Edmund Leach]], [[Rodney Needham|Rodney Neeham]], [[David M. Schneider|David Schneider]], and others.<ref name=":1" /> Instead of relying on narrow ideas of Western normalcy, kinship studies increasingly catered to "more ethnographic voices, human agency, intersecting power structures, and historical context".<ref name=":2">{{Cite book|title=New Directions in Anthropological Kinship|last=Stone|first=Linda|publisher=Rowman & Littlefield Publishers|year=2001|location=Lanham, MD|pages=1–368}}</ref> The study of kinship evolved to accommodate for the fact that it cannot be separated from its institutional roots and must pay respect to the society in which it lives, including that society's contradictions, hierarchies, and individual experiences of those within it. This shift was progressed further by the emergence of second-wave feminism in the early 1970s, which introduced ideas of marital oppression, sexual autonomy, and domestic subordination. Other themes that emerged during this time included the frequent comparisons between Eastern and Western kinship systems and the increasing amount of attention paid to anthropologists' own societies, a swift turn from the focus that had traditionally been paid to largely "foreign", non-Western communities.<ref name=":1" />

Kinship studies began to gain mainstream recognition in the late 1990s with the surging popularity of feminist anthropology, particularly with its work related to biological anthropology and the intersectional critique of gender relations. At this time, there was the arrival of "[[Postcolonial feminism|Third World feminism]]", a movement that argued kinship studies could not examine the gender relations of developing countries in isolation and must pay respect to racial and economic nuance as well. This critique became relevant, for instance, in the anthropological study of Jamaica: race and class were seen as the primary obstacles to Jamaican liberation from economic imperialism, and gender as an identity was largely ignored. Third World feminism aimed to combat this in the early twenty-first century by promoting these categories as coexisting factors. In Jamaica, marriage as an institution is often substituted for a series of partners, as poor women cannot rely on regular financial contributions in a climate of economic instability. In addition, there is a common practice of Jamaican women artificially lightening their skin tones in order to secure economic survival. These anthropological findings, according to Third World feminism, cannot see gender, racial, or class differences as separate entities, and instead must acknowledge that they interact together to produce unique individual experiences.<ref name=":2" />

====Rise of reproductive anthropology====
Kinship studies have also experienced a rise in the interest of reproductive anthropology with the advancement of [[Assisted reproductive technology|assisted reproductive technologies]] (ARTs), including [[In vitro fertilisation|in vitro fertilization]] (IVF). These advancements have led to new dimensions of anthropological research, as they challenge the Western standard of biogenetically based kinship, relatedness, and parenthood. According to anthropologists [[Marcia C. Inhorn|Maria C. Inhorn]] and Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli, "ARTs have pluralized notions of relatedness and led to a more dynamic notion of "kinning" namely, kinship as a process, as something under construction, rather than a natural given".<ref name=":3">{{Cite journal|last1=Birenbaum-Carmeli|first1=Daphna|last2=Inhorn|first2=Maria C.|s2cid=46994808|date=2008|title=Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Culture Change|journal=Annual Review of Anthropology|volume=37|pages=182–85|doi=10.1146/annurev.anthro.37.081407.085230}}</ref> With this technology, questions of kinship have emerged over the difference between biological and genetic relatedness, as gestational surrogates can provide a biological environment for the embryo while the genetic ties remain with a third party.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation|last1=Franklin|first1=Sarah|last2=Ragoné|first2=Helena|publisher=University of Pennsylvania Press|year=1998|location=Philadelphia|page=129}}</ref> If genetic, surrogate, and adoptive maternities are involved, anthropologists have acknowledged that there can be the possibility for three "biological" mothers to a single child.<ref name=":3" /> With ARTs, there are also anthropological questions concerning the intersections between wealth and fertility: ARTs are generally only available to those in the highest income bracket, meaning the infertile poor are inherently devalued in the system. There have also been issues of reproductive tourism and bodily commodification, as individuals seek economic security through hormonal stimulation and egg harvesting, which are potentially harmful procedures. With IVF, specifically, there have been many questions of embryotic value and the status of life, particularly as it relates to the manufacturing of stem cells, testing, and research.<ref name=":3" />

Current issues in kinship studies, such as adoption, have revealed and challenged the Western cultural disposition towards the genetic, "blood" tie.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Logan|first=Janette|date=2013|title=Contemporary Adoptive Kinship|journal=Child & Family Social Work|volume=18|issue=1|pages=35–45|doi=10.1111/cfs.12042}}</ref> Western biases against single parent homes have also been explored through similar anthropological research, uncovering that a household with a single parent experiences "greater levels of scrutiny and [is] routinely seen as the 'other' of the nuclear, patriarchal family".<ref>{{Cite book|title=Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction|last1=Ginsburg|first1=Faye G.|last2=Rapp|first2=Rayna|publisher=University of California Press|year=1995|location=Berkeley and Los Angeles}}</ref> The power dynamics in reproduction, when explored through a comparative analysis of "conventional" and "unconventional" families, have been used to dissect the Western assumptions of child bearing and child rearing in contemporary kinship studies.

==== Critiques of kinship studies ====
Kinship, as an anthropological field of inquiry, has been heavily criticized across the discipline. One critique is that, as its inception, the framework of kinship studies was far too structured and formulaic, relying on dense language and stringent rules.<ref name=":2" /> Another critique, explored at length by American anthropologist David Schneider, argues that kinship has been limited by its inherent Western [[ethnocentrism]]. Schneider proposes that kinship is not a field that can be applied cross-culturally, as the theory itself relies on European assumptions of normalcy. He states in the widely circulated 1984 book ''A critique of the study of kinship'' that "[K]inship has been defined by European social scientists, and European social scientists use their own folk culture as the source of many, if not all of their ways of formulating and understanding the world about them".<ref>{{Cite book|title=A critique of the study of kinship|last=Schneider|first=David M.|publisher=University of Michigan Press|year=1984|location=Ann Arbor}}</ref> However, this critique has been challenged by the argument that it is linguistics, not cultural divergence, that has allowed for a European bias, and that the bias can be lifted by centering the methodology on fundamental human concepts. Polish anthropologist [[Anna Wierzbicka]] argues that "mother" and "father" are examples of such fundamental human concepts and can only be Westernized when conflated with English concepts such as "parent" and "sibling".<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Wierzbicka|first=Anna|date=2016|title=Back to 'Mother' and 'Father': Overcoming the Eurocentrism of Kinship Studies through Eight Lexical Universals|url=https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/152274/2/01_Wierzbicka_Back_to_%2527Mother%2527_and_%2527Father%2527_2016.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/152274/2/01_Wierzbicka_Back_to_%2527Mother%2527_and_%2527Father%2527_2016.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live|journal=Current Anthropology|volume=57|issue=4|pages=408–28|doi=10.1086/687360|hdl=1885/152274|s2cid=148193954|hdl-access=free}}</ref>

A more recent critique of kinship studies is its solipsistic focus on privileged, Western human relations and its promotion of normative ideals of human exceptionalism. In ''Critical Kinship Studies'', social psychologists Elizabeth Peel and Damien Riggs argue for a move beyond this human-centered framework, opting instead to explore kinship through a "posthumanist" vantage point where anthropologists focus on the intersecting relationships of human animals, non-human animals, technologies and practices.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Critical Kinship Studies|last1=Peel|first1=Elizabeth|last2=Riggs|first2=Damien W.|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan|year=2016|location=Basingstoke, UK|pages=10–20}}</ref>