ABSTRACT
Beginning in the 1970s, anthropologists began to critique the dominance of analytic models that presupposed a universal biological foundation underlying the social relations of kinship. Many people accused David Schneider (1972, 1984), the main proponent of this critique, of bringing about the “death” of kinship studies. Despite the accusation, Schneider’s critique simply shifted the grounds for the comparative study of kinship from functional to meaningful relations and from universal biological referents to semiotic systems (Schneider 1972, 1984; Boon and Schneider 1974; Wagner 1977; Boon 1982). Rather than presupposing universal categories, domains, and relations, it became imperative to ask of each culture not only what the relevant units are and how they are related (Schneider 1972) but also what is understood to be given in the nature of the world and what must be created (Wagner 1967, 1977; Yanagisako and Collier 1987; M. Strathern 1988; Viveiros de Castro 2009; see McKinnon in press for an account of this transformation).
