Entries linking to kinship
kin (n.) c. 1200, from Old English cynn "family; race; kind, sort, rank; nature" (also "gender, sex," a sense obsolete since Middle English), from Proto-Germanic *kunja- "family" (source also of Old Frisian.
How did kinship originate?
Kinship, system of social organization based on real or putative family ties. The modern study of kinship can be traced back to mid-19th-century interests in comparative legal institutions and philology.
Who came up with kinship?
The anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan invented kinship studies. In the 1850s and 1860s he watched the Iroquois, a Native American group in the Northeastern United States. He was mostly interested in what was keeping societies together.
