Kinship is social relationships that are prototypically derived from the universal human experiences of mating, birth, and nurturance. Mating refers to marriage and birth refers decent, but nurturance can be seen as closely related to mating and birth. In the U.S. it is called adoption, but each society has its own definition. Kinship is also a social organization, in which each society decides how it will be organized, what aspects of the ‘human experiences’ will be emphasized and which will not. Because each society uses different terms to refer to people they recognize as kin, anthropologists have found six major patterns of kinship terminology. These six patterns are based on ho