Best Kinship

Marilyn Strathern (born 1941) is a British anthropologist whose work has profoundly influenced feminist anthropology and the study of kinship, gender, and social institutions. Her ethnographic research focuses primarily on the Melanesian societies of Papua New Guinea, specifically the Hagen people....

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) was a British social anthropologist who developed the theoretical approach known as structural functionalism, which analyzed societies as integrated systems of interdependent institutions. He conducted fieldwork in the Andaman Islands (1906–1908) and among...

Edmund Leach (1910–1989) was a British social anthropologist who served as Provost of King's College, Cambridge, and held the university's first chair in social anthropology. His monograph Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954) challenged functionalist models by arguing that political structures...

Jack Goody (1919–2015) was a British social anthropologist who taught at Cambridge University for over five decades and produced wide-ranging comparative studies of African and Eurasian societies. His books The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977) and The Logic of Writing and the Organization of...

Lewis Henry Morgan was a foundational American anthropologist and social theorist whose work significantly shaped the discipline in the 19th century. In his book 'Ancient Society' (1877), he proposed a theory of cultural evolution that categorized human development into three stages: savagery, barba...

Meyer Fortes (1906–1983) was a South African-born British anthropologist who became a central figure in the development of British social anthropology. He is best known for his fieldwork conducted during the 1930s and 1940s among the Tallensi people of northern Ghana. His research focused on the dyn...

David M. Schneider was an American cultural anthropologist and professor at the University of Chicago who pioneered the symbolic approach to studying kinship. In his 1968 book "American Kinship," he analyzed how biological concepts like "blood" function primarily as cultural symbols of unity. He lat...

W. H. R. Rivers was a British anthropologist and psychiatrist who joined the 1898 Torres Strait expedition and later treated shell shock in World War I.

Robert H. Lowie (1883–1957) was an Austrian-born American anthropologist who trained under Franz Boas at Columbia University. He conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among the Crow (Apsáalooke) and other peoples of the North American Plains, producing detailed studies of social organization, k...

Floyd Lounsbury was an American anthropologist and linguist whose Oneida work and 1973 Palenque analysis advanced Maya hieroglyphic decipherment.

Janet Carsten is a British social anthropologist and professor at the University of Edinburgh, known for her ethnographic research in Southeast Asia. Her work has significantly broadened the scope of kinship studies, particularly through her edited volume "Cultures of Relatedness" (2000), which exam...

Stephen Hugh-Jones is a British social anthropologist associated with the University of Cambridge who conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among the Barasana and other Tukanoan-speaking peoples of the Northwest Amazon in Colombia. His research, conducted within the structuralist tradition infl...

Sylvia Yanagisako is an American cultural anthropologist whose research explores the intersections of kinship, gender, and capitalism. Her early fieldwork focused on the family structures, gender roles, and cultural practices of Japanese Americans in Seattle. Later in her career, she shifted her eth...

Fred Eggan was an American anthropologist associated with the University of Chicago, recognized for his detailed ethnographic research on the social organization of Native American communities. He extensively studied the kinship systems, ritual practices, and social structures of the Pueblo peoples...

Henry Maine was a British jurist whose 1861 Ancient Law made him a founder of legal anthropology through the thesis of movement from status to contract.

Rodney Needham (1923–2006) was a British social anthropologist and a prominent faculty member at the University of Oxford. His academic work was heavily influenced by structuralism, focusing extensively on the logical foundations of kinship theory, prescriptive alliance systems, and symbolic classif...

Irawati Karve was an Indian anthropologist and sociologist at Deccan College, Pune, known for Kinship Organization in India, published in 1953.

American anthropologist known for comparative legal anthropology and research on gender, marriage, and family among Native American communities and in rural Spain.

Kathleen Gough was a British anthropologist known for South Asian kinship studies, including fieldwork in Malabar from 1947 to 1949.

Signe Howell is a Norwegian anthropologist known for studies of kinship, adoption, and Chewong people in Malaysia.

Peter Rivière is a British social anthropologist associated with the University of Oxford and the study of Indigenous societies in lowland South America. His ethnographic research among the Trio of Suriname examined social organization, marriage, kinship, settlement, and political relations. He also...

Nur Yalman is a Turkish-born social anthropologist who taught at Harvard University. His scholarship includes ethnographic and comparative work on kinship, marriage, caste, religion, and social change, particularly in Sri Lanka and Turkey. He is known for examining how systems of classification, hie...

Johann Jakob Bachofen was a Swiss jurist and anthropologist whose 1861 Das Mutterrecht proposed influential theories of prehistoric mother-right.

Brenda Seligman was a British anthropologist who coauthored The Veddas in 1911 and won the Rivers Memorial Medal in 1933 for fieldwork.