On the Study of Kinship in Serbia – An Overview of Works and Approaches

Résumé

Kinship, as one of the classical fields of anthropological research, in Serbia was not constituted as a separate field of inquiry during most of the existence of the discipline in the way that was the case in British, American, and French anthropology. In other words, kinship has not been the subject of systematic and theoretically based analyses such as we find in other anthropological traditions. However, this does not mean that it was not a subject of interest for researchers. Writing about social relations that we call kinship was often integrated into broader studies, most often within the framework of family and marriage, but also zadruga, folk customs, and organizations of life in communities. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the works that touched on the topics that we today classify in the domain of kinship as a special research field. Through the analysis of these works, main approaches and theoretical assumptions that shaped the understanding of kinship will be presented.  To rephrase it, this paper tries to show how through the reading of works that explicitly or implicitly deal with kinship, one can see the broader theoretical assumptions that determined the discipline from its formative period until the moment when kinship was introduced as an academic subject.