{First in an occasional series celebrating 100 years of Claude Lévi-Strauss, born 28 November 1908.}
Of course, the biological family is ubiquitous in human society. But what confers upon kinship its socio-cultural character is not what it retains from nature, but, rather, the essential way in which it diverges from nature. A kinship system does not consist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity between individuals. It exists only in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a real situation.
Someone really needs to get CL-S a blog going…