Kinship is the central part of human behaviour. When social anthropology claims to understand mankind as a whole, and tries to study the similarities and differences in human societies, the study of kinship in primary.
It is easy to bring out differences in human society through kinship behaviour. Social anthropology in India has not explored the field of kinship among the tribals much. Likewise, very little has been done in building theories of kinship behaviour.
However, the European including British, and the US social anthropology have done some substantial work in the field of kinship. The notable theoretical contributions in kinship refer to Morgan, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Levi-Strauss, Rivers, Fortes, Evans-Pritchard and many more anthropologists.
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In India, we have a few scholars like Iravati Karve who have done some work in the field of kinship. Her study Kinship Organization in
India (1965) is an outstanding contribution, which is both historical and empirical. Besides, she has focused on the whole country.
Besides Karve a few other minor kinship studies have been conducted which are oriented to ethnology. They are not theoretical or empirical in their analysis. They are only narrative.
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Again, these studies are restricted to the study of village or a part of a region. Here, in this section, we shall first refer to some kinship studies which have contributed towards the understanding of the theme of kin behaviour. Then, findings of these micro studies will be compared with the Karve’s macro study.