Milk kinship is a form of kinship formed during nursing by a non-biological mother, historically functioning as a mechanism for building allegiance and alliance between community members and families, one that did not exclude particular groups so that class and other hierarchical distinctions did not bar participation. The practice predates the early modern period but became an especially widely used mechanism for forging alliances within hierarchical societies during that era, working through the wet-nursing of a child either from within the same community or from a neighboring one. The wet nurse who breastfed a child not her own played a strategic role in creating a bond between her own family and the family of the nursed child, a relationship that extended outward to link both families' broader communities as well.
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Milk kinship, recognized in Islamic law as arising when a woman breastfeeds a child not her own, is a specific documented form of fictive kinship that creates marriage prohibitions equivalent to blood relation.
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