Best Kinship

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...