Additionally the concept highlights ethnographic findings that, in a wide swath of human societies, people understand, conceptualize and symbolize their relationships predominantly in terms of giving, receiving and sharing nurture.
Both Schneider and Holland argue that the earlier blood theory of kinship derived from an unwarranted extension of symbols and values from anthropologists' own cultures (see ethnocentrism).
However, later observations focused on the nurturing qualities of food-sharing behavior, allowing a potential distinction between the earlier emphasis on kinship as shared substance (e.g. food or blood) and kinship as performance (of care-giving or nurturing behaviors): I want to examine the human relationships of a primitive society as determined by nutritional needs, showing how hunger shapes the sentiments which bind together the members of each social group.
Since the 1970s, an increasing number of ethnographies have documented the extent to which social ties in various cultures can be understood to be built upon nurturant acts.
[6] Marshall on the Trukese (now known as the Chuukese) of Micronesia: All sibling relationships – natural or created – involve the height of sharing and "feelings of strong sentimental attachment."
Whenever I attempted to discover if there were ideas of genealogical relatedness between kin, I was told that there is nothing that links a parent to their children, or siblings to each other, apart from the bonds of affection and sentiment that they feel for each other.
(Storrie 2003, 420)[10]Viegas on a Bahian Amerindian Community in Brazil: Adults who early in their lives had been taken to become raised children [fostered] state clearly that the situation had never displeased them.
It is in this sense that kinship is constituted as memory of being related through caring and feeding, along the lines developed in large part by Peter Gow and within other South Amerindian contexts.
This has prompted some to suggest that an inter-disciplinary collaboration might be useful: Bowlby argued that attachment behaviour in humans and other animals is instinctive, i.e. that evolutionary pressures have selected this psychological trait.
... Now: might Bowlby's realist approach – which defines these behaviours as universal and instinctive, which examines their consequences through naturalistic observation, and which stresses their central role in intensifying human relatedness – be a useful starting point for anthropologists?
... Extrapolating from the work of Myers [on emotions], one could make the case that all anthropological discussions of relatedness – e.g. the accounts by Malinowsky, Mauss, and a great many others of the ways in which gift exchange and reciprocity, or commensality and the sharing of "substance", help to constitute human relatedness – are also by definition, dealing with intractable problems of attachment and separation in social life.
Drawing on animal studies from the 1950s onwards, John Bowlby[13] and colleagues described how—for all primates, including humans—the reliable provision of nurture and care leads to strong bonds of attachment between the carer and cared-for.
Attachment theorists now suggest that infants are biologically predisposed to emit signals such as tracking visually, crying, smiling, vocalising, clinging, etc., to elicit nurturance and proximity not only to their mother, but also to their father or any other caregiver (Ainsworth, Bell & Stayton, 1974; Lamb, 1978b).
Mothers, fathers and other caregivers, by their different styles of responding, create a different set of expectations and an array of attachment relationships of various qualities and flavours (Bretherton, 1985; Bridges, Connell & Belsky, 1988; Stroufe, 1988).
(Geiger 1996, 6)[14]Following the nurture kinship approach thus allows a synthesis[6] between the extensive cross-cultural data of ethnographers and the long-standing findings of psychology on the nature of human bonding and emotional ties.
However, this does not entail that the proximate mechanisms governing the expression of such social traits in primates and humans necessarily depends on (or are determined by) conditions of genetic relatedness per se.
In this case, nurture kinship, the interaction between related individuals, simply as a result of living in each other's proximity, is sufficient for kin selection, given reasonable assumptions about population dispersal rates.
Overall the 'nurture kinship' perspective does not necessarily mean that human non-blood relationships such as the relationships based on nurturing are more important than the ones based on blood-kinship, since their motivation is also related to one's survival and perpetuation, or that people are necessarily bound to the culture they are inserted in, nor can it be generalized to the point of claiming all individuals always undervalue blood-kinship in the absence of nurturing.
Herbert Gintis, in his review of the book Sex at Dawn, critiques the idea that human males were unconcerned with parentage, "which would make us unlike any other species I can think of".
[18] Pascal Boyer, in his work "Minds make Societies", presents that anthropologists tell us that biological fathers everywhere have some connection to their children — so it would seem that there are common features to human families after all.