Fictive Kinship

Fictive kinship refers to relationships that carry the obligations, affection, and terminology of kinship but are not based on blood or marriage, including godparenthood, adoption customs, blood brotherhood, close family friends treated as aunts or uncles, and chosen families. Anthropologists documented compadrazgo, the ritual co-parenthood system of Latin America, in studies by Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf, who showed how it extends networks of mutual aid and ties across class lines. Carol Stack's All Our Kin described how poor Black families in an urban community relied on cooperative networks of kin and friends who were treated as family for survival. Kath Weston's Families We Choose analyzed how lesbian and gay people build kinship through friendship and chosen ties, and David Schneider's critique of the biological assumptions of kinship opened the way for these approaches. Janet Carsten's concept of relatedness stressed shared living, feeding, and care, while Robin Dunbar and others have studied how social bonds scale. Migration, displacement, and the decline of extended families increase reliance on such ties. Critics note that fictive kinship can carry unequal obligations. Fictive kinship remains central to research on family, migration, community, and care.