Kinship

Kinship is the analytic framework anthropologists use to describe how a society organizes descent, marriage and relatedness, and which relationships carry rights, obligations and inheritance. Nineteenth century anthropologists including Tylor used kinship terminology comparatively to trace social evolution; Claude Levi-Strauss's The Elementary Structures of Kinship, published in 1949, treated marriage rules as a system of exchange between groups and made kinship analysis central to structuralism. Kinship diagrams and terminologies remain a standard tool anthropologists use to record a community's social structure in the field.