Kinship
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Kinship was one of the first fields where anthropologists discovered logical patterns and social structure in non-Western societies. The pioneer in kinship studies was the 19th century American anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan; later, British structural functionalists and French structuralists carried on the tradition. The study of kinship opened up opportunities to map cultural variation within a relatively limited and well-bounded empirical field, and was thus a perfect point of departure for comparative conclusions. In egalitarian societies, kinship often functions as a kind of universal institution, which organizes everything from economy to religion. (See also network, lineage.)