Kinship and gender

Students of kinship or of gender have to confront a similar problem. Their inquiries are made possible by the hard fact that human beings reproduce sexually. The two sexes have complementary and immutable functions in the reproductive process; that is, men impregnate and women gestate and give birth to infants. Therefore, each human child owes her existence to and, we say, is related by birth to, at least two other persons, who are, we say, his or her parents, and who themselves have two parents each, and so on ad infinitum. These relations are the stuff of kinship, which is often described by anthropologists as the social recognition or reinterpretation of the facts of biological reproduction.