David Schneider

American anthropologist

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In kinship: Culturalist accounts
The American anthropologist David Schneider’s American Kinship (1968) is generally acknowledged as one of the first important anthropological studies of kinship in a 20th-century industrialized setting. Rather than taking the ideological basis of kinship for granted or assuming it to be of less importance than strategic interests related…
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In kinship: Challenging the conceptual basis of kinship
…Rodney Needham and the aforementioned David Schneider launched powerful critiques of the comparative study of kinship. At issue was the relationship between “physical” and “social” ties. Since the early 20th century, anthropologists had generally emphasized that they studied the social aspects of kinship. The actual physical or biological relationships were…
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