Growing up in Europe: The European concept of kinship and how it shapes society and the state

Abstract

I argue that theories of kinship and their critique have been dominated by emic perspectives on Euro-American (European, for short) relatedness which has confused kinship for the whole of European relatedness. I review a string of nineteenth- to twenty-first-century European social theories, demonstrating that they are all about European relatedness: a dynamic spectrum integrated through the notion of growing up. As such European relatedness is an integral part of the social structure and the state.