So why bother?

If "networked" affinity groups already match a shifting or cognate "family" pattern, why even bother with a kinship lexicon or reference? After all, it's an artifact of something many would gladly see an end to. Beyond the strictly genealogical which can easily be ignored – there are adoptions – the abolition of kinship might encourage horizontality and discourage the almost inevitable "nobility" factor, a nepotism seen along kinship lines (not to mention race or sex) when genetics/blood is the only acceptable standard. Of course we already see this operating when relationships are reckoned along many other sets of criteria such as class-line or political-economic orientation (when it's not a matter or circle of shared interest). The focus stays on difference rather than any commonality. But don't count out kinship yet: we call anyone with whom an intimate recognition is shared around almost any criteria a "kindred spirit".

The fact is we've been stuck on words so long, we've labeled cultures by a single criteria around which people organise, and at some point, thought that was all of it. Kinship is easy to spot because everyone does it one way or other, but that's not the only thing they do. This becomes obvious when such social forms are not mutually exclusive, nor are they found exclusively anywhere or when except where they're legislated; even long-held custom's not as rigid as an enforced morality or decree by an authority. Freedom only means that everything is shifty and the most stable patterns witnessed over time are only recognised because they're ever changing. It's only use of single criteria we object to, and that makes matching patterns disappear; it excludes them even when they're here; it makes for rigid thinking and poor vision needing ever-stronger glasses or psychiatric tinkering.

Besides the womb which all mammals emerge from, the other clue to why we might retain the concept or its reckoning is learned from orphans (alienation tends to make us all at least subjective orphans), but also from the elderly. Taxonomy need not imply a hierarchy as the vertical is only an attribute of the metaphor when we think of time as an up-and-down relation and space as side-to-side. There is some room for vertical reckoning which can add dimension to solidarity unrelated by necessity to power. I'd call it vertical empathy. The flat-out horizontal often leads to an ageist view which, just like any other renders others invisible. The vertical allows one to notice that the preceding generation is also made of siblings and cousins; top-down empathy is also known as pride and love and nurturing from grandfathers and mothers.

In cognatic social organisations, for example, all one's mother's female age-mates might be called "mother" and the distant ones "Aunt". From their viewpoint, you are their child, or after visits, "niece" or "nephew". (There was a time not long ago when any elder might call us "son" or "daughter", and in my dad's time, he called his female elders "mother" – it was only the authorities he called "cocksucker"). The orphanage should be almost impossible except in a dystopean fiction or nightmare (and they are warning clues that really almost anything is possible, even if unlikely – a flying pig would likely have to reside in a different galaxy, or at least where issues of gravity are very different, else it is a metaphor like 'superstitious thinking, for how we got the flu or need to murder all the chickens).

The marriage ceremony is only a rite of passage or transformation. One goes from cousin to sibling, but after the public ritual (and public is the most important clue) the social role has changed to neither sibling nor cousin but spouse, a completely "other". As other, all matters become irrelevant, your subject to mass retaliation as if a total stranger: domestic abuse itself would be the most self-limiting behaviour. But in this situation, the wedding band or marriage bond is not a tie or demand of any kind. It's a synergetic third emerged from symbiosis producing new generations – the "other" (than kin), if endearing, allows the community to endure beyond a life-time. The bond itself can split at any time thereafter, but amicably when there's been another ceremony transforming an other back into a sister or a brother, distant cousin should they walk very far away. We should know by now that extreme motion's all that cancels gravity allowing bodies to leave their orbits: "I'm outa here", they say.

A family is defined by recognition of three to five dimensions over time, spread thin or wide, as one's most immediate live affinity group – the life-span's called a generation but reckoning extends as far as one can, not only or even recall, but resonate. What's blood or even species got to do with it? Every reason in the book has been used to affiliate, but the funnest projects consistently rally around the null criterion, that is, it's when its for the hell of it. Null means nothing's there to make it permanent, where even life-long friends are not constrained by the relationship. Anything else is just a box for your booty.