Closeness to Non - Primary Relatives in the American Kinship System

American ties with secondary or more distant kin are nearly always mediated through ties with both parents in one’s own household. The structuring of kinship through affinal linkages takes place distinctively within the domestic household cycle, with relatives more important in the childhood/young married rather than the puberty/middle age phase. Additionally further differentiation and patterning develops around sex, generational, lineal, and collateral divisions of family organization. In absence of clear-cut corporate systems of kinship the ties developing through affinal relatives take on a significance as yet unappreciated by students of American social organization. Seventeen substantive conclusions are listed at the close of the paper.