Fadwa El Guindi - Suckling: Kinship More Fluid

Scan of original correspondence between Claude Levi-Strauss and David Schneider regarding the controversial issue of kinship is a non-subject

Sent by the late Roy Wagner to me and Dwight W. Read by email.

On another note, very interesting recent research concerning kinship was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), describing a detailed study of a late Neolithic mass grave from southern Poland (Schroeder et al. 2019) containing the remains of 15 men, women, and children who were shown to be killed by blows to the head. The researchers looked at the data in three contexts: kinship (ancestry), violence, and population movements. The kinship analysis performed on sequenced genomes revealed that the individuals belonged to a large extended family. The bodies had been carefully laid out according to kin relationships by someone who evidently knew the deceased. It was proposed that the violence may have been connected with expansion by neighboring groups and the competition for resources. Combined with archaeological evidence, their analyses provide us with insights into the kinship structure, burial behavior, and violence in a Late Neolithic community. These and other research developments across the four fields of anthropology concerning kinship show great promise.

Consider the observation by Adam Kuper made as a Huxley Lecture in 2007, published in 2008 in