Originally the term referred to the ancestral deity (kami) of a family or clan (uji), blood kinship forming the basis of the spiritual relationship.
Thus, British social anthropologists explored the ways in which kinship provided a basis for forming the kinds of groups discrete, bounded, and linked to a particular territory that were seen as necessary for a stable political order.
Sovereigns often mobilized innovation through the creation of new forms of kinship, the traditional basis of the political order.
Somali society has functioned for centuries without a state, on the basis of kinship, customary law and Islam.
Karzai's best asset is that he knows how his country works, with loyalties transacted on the basis of kinship, faith and cash.
Like most other tribes of Plains Indians, the Comanche were organized into autonomous bands, local groups formed on the basis of kinship and other social relationships.
The wider groupings recruited through kinship, which were the basis of political and economic organization, were much more culturally variable and hence of greater interest.
Here Schneider was making an opposition between American cultural perceptions of the "natural" basis of kinship, which he posited lay in blood (genetic) ties, and of the legally enshrined code for conduct that regulated marital ties.
Rather than taking the ideological basis of kinship for granted or assuming it to be of less importance than strategic interests related to status and property, Schneider examined kinship as a cultural system that is based in shared symbols and meanings.
Among Sahrawi refugees, social relations have been established and/or reformulated around camel husbandry on the basis of kinship (e.g. between refugees and nomads) and on Polisario governance (e.g. for access to the liberated territories).
