Kinship

Nobody doubts that human kinship has something to do with biology and reproduction and, at the same time, biology and reproduction are clearly insufficient to explain it. The unexplained part of human kinship by the biology of human reproduction is what anthropologists call ‘social’ kinship. Whereas the biology of human kinship does not seem to differ in any significant way from that of any sexually reproducing species, it is unclear how that social kinship should be accounted for, specifically, how it should be related with its biological counterpart. The purpose of this text is to suggest a possible solution to this time-honored theoretical controversy in anthropology. My approach is based on Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness and its development and formalization by means of the Price equation. My proposal shall be that it is the concept of sameness that which makes both biological and social kinship amenable to the same type of analysis.