Kinship names the systems of relation that organize social, economic, and political life. Who counts as kin, what obligations flow between kin, and how kinship is established vary across cultures — but every society organizes through kinship in some form.
In many Indigenous contexts, kinship is not metaphorical or sentimental. It is constitutive: kinship relations structure governance, resource distribution, land stewardship, and mutual responsibility. Lakota tiospaye (extended family groups) are political and economic units, not just domestic ones. Kinship determines who has obligations to whom, who can make decisions about what, and how resources move through a community. These are not customs layered on top of individuals — they are the relations through which people become who they are.
This makes kinship the social practice analog of relationality’s ontological claim: that things are constituted through their relations rather than existing independently and then entering into relations. Kinship does not connect pre-existing individuals. It produces the social persons who participate in it.
Western anthropology has historically treated kinship as a classificatory system — a way of labeling biological relationships. This reduction strips kinship of its political, economic, and spiritual dimensions and domesticates it into a subcategory of family studies. Restoring kinship’s full meaning requires attending to the traditions that never reduced it.