Cultural Approach to The Study of Kinship

Kinship is the essential premise of organizing individuals into social groups, roles, and categories. It serves as the premier universal and fundamental aspect of all human relationships and relies on blood and marriage ties. Hence, Kinship is vital to an individual and a community's well-being because different societies connote Kinship differently. They also set the rules governing Kinship, which are sometimes legally defined and sometimes implied. This paper focuses on the cultural approach to the study of Kinship. Somebody can explore the cultural approach to kinship study through David M. Schneider's powerful framework, American Kinship: A Cultural Account, published in 1968. It was a part of the more extensive debate on the nature of Kinship. It bore on the anthropological definition of Kinship, and it explains whether or not it was necessary to refer to Kinship's biological dimension. Schneider examined Kinship as a cultural system that is based on shared symbols and meanings. This type of analysis became known as the culturalist approach. He offered a two-part answer to the question of how North American culture defined a relative. The study is based on approximately 100 interviews. Two symbolic kinship orders included nature and the law. In terms of character, relatives shared natural, biogenetic substances as symbolized by the indigenous word 'blood.' In terms of regulation, relatives were persons who followed a particular code of conduct. North American Kinship involved an opposition between two sets of symbols; first being the kinship 'by blood,' which was material, permanent and inalienable, and the second one is the kinship 'by marriage,' based on a human imposed order and referring to morals, law, and custo