Family Structures

The basic household and kin-group forms kinship studies distinguishes: the nuclear family of parents and children, the extended family incorporating further generations or collateral kin under shared obligation, and fictive kinship, a socially recognized kin bond with no biological or marital basis, such as ritual sponsorship or blood brotherhood. Belongs here: a named family or household form. Does not belong here: the ritual act that creates a fictive bond, such as blood brotherhood as a practiced ceremony, grouped under the Ethnography and Cultural Practices category, this subcategory covering the resulting kin structure rather than the ceremony that produces it.