Contemporary social and medical changes – such as the rising divorce rates and rates of subsequent remarriage, the introduction of new fertility techniques and rising longevity – trigger public debates about kinship, nature and culture. At the same time, ‘ the master narrative ’ telling how kinship declined in the course of modernization has been largely rejected by historians. Now, however, ‘ ...

As many as 3% of children in the United States live in kinship care arrangements with caregivers who are relatives but not the biological parents of the child. A growing body of evidence suggests that children who cannot live with their biological parents fare better, overall, when living with extended family than with nonrelated foster parents. Acknowledging this, federal laws and public polic...

Kinship was one of the key areas of research interest among anthropologists in the nineteenth century, one of the most hotly debated areas of theory in the early and mid-twentieth century, and yet an area of waning interest by the end of the twentieth century. Since then, the study of kinship has experienced a revitalization, with concomitant disputes over how best to proceed. This special issu...

Computational facial models that capture properties of facial cues related to aging and kinship increasingly attract the attention of the research community, enabling the development of reliable methods for age progression, age estimation, age-invariant facial characterization, and kinship verification from visual data. In this paper, we review recent advances in modelling of facial aging and k...

A natural numerical measure of consanguinity is developed that applies to individuals with arbitrary multiple kinship connections. For simple relationships the consanguineal distance specializes to the civil degree, less two if the relationship goes through full siblings. This measure is deduced from axioms motivated by an heuristic picture of blood mixtures. The formula suggests a quantum mech...

Kinship is commonly inferred from behaviour in primate field studies, but the validity of such inferences has not yet been documented. A comparison of the relationships of six three-year-old yellow baboon (Papio cynocephalus) females with 14 adult females showed that when a juvenile's mother was living she could easily be identified from behavioural data. The most useful behaviour in this conte...

This paper discusses likely causes of a thirty-year delay in quantifying the kinship, or relatedness, between random members of ethnic groups. The introduction consists of reporting that quantification (Harpending 2002; Salter 2002), briefly discussing its constituent theoretical steps, and pointing to its theoretical importance. The main goal is to discuss some of the misconceptions that delay...