Abstract
This paper builds on earlier analyses of primary data on kinship in Qatar. Its conceptualization centers kinship as a highly structured universal human phenomenon in the study of humankind. As lived practices, kinship forms a bounded, identifiable domain that is distinguishable from other societal relations. Going beyond reducing kinship to fitness (biology) or nurture (culture study), analysis of primary ethnographic data gathered as part of a grant-funded field research project on kinship practices in Qatar, including suckling practices along with kinship by birth and by marriage, is presented to demonstrate how complex anomalies emerging at the level of kinship experience reveal in analysis properties of kinship as a transformational triadic structure, here proposed as a universal feature of kinship and a dynamic aspect of its structure.
Highlights
This paper builds on earlier analyses of primary data on kinship in Qatar
Going beyond reducing kinship to fitness or nurture, analysis of primary ethnographic data gathered as part of a grant-funded field research project on kinship practices in Qatar, including suckling practices along with kinship by birth and by marriage, is presented to demonstrate how complex anomalies emerging at the level of kinship experience reveal in analysis properties of kinship as a transformational triadic structure, here proposed as a universal feature of kinship and a dynamic aspect of its structure
Conceptual Beginnings This paper1 takes kinship study beyond the attempts from biology to explain societal institutions as adaptive fitness or claims from culture studies of new directions that reduce kinship to nurture, which I contend leave out the significant core in kinship ethnography and theory
Summary
This paper builds on earlier analyses of primary data on kinship in Qatar. Its conceptualization centers kinship as a highly structured universal human phenomenon in the study of humankind. The approach in this paper considers kinship a construct of universal analytical value and an experientially bounded, culturally identifiable, sphere of sociocultural relations unique to humans and distinguishable from other societal relations. As will be demonstrated in this paper, support a uniqueness characteristic to the domain of kinship, through universal social organizational features, and by logical properties of an analytic category. Insights from this approach would build on the vast existing body of conceptual and ethnographic knowledge and classical theoretical debates
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