In almost every family there is an “uncle” who does not appear in any family tree. It is the parents’ friend who accompanied them to football matches, the neighbor who always offered an ice cream, the neighborhood shopkeeper who knew everyone by name: in short, that adult person who, since childhood, has been perceived as part of the family. No blood relationship, no documents, yet everyone called him “uncle”. It is “fictive kinship”, a fictitious kinship, a social bond that unites people who do not have blood relations with each other. Today the word has also become a typical expression of youth slang: “Oh uncle!”, “Great uncle!”. But where do these uses come from that have nothing to do with kinship in the biological sense? The answer must be sought in the way in which human beings build relationships, define relationships of trust and, above all, decide to consider someone “one of their own”.
When kinship is a social construction: the theory of fictive kinship
For a long time, scholars assumed that kinship was a simple biological matter. In the twentieth century, however, anthropology gradually dismantled this belief.
Already Bronilslaw Malinowski, in his famous Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), observing the populations of the Trobriand Islands, showed how family ties could not be explained exclusively through genetic descent. Followed by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, in Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1952), and Meyer Fortes, with Kinship and the Social Order (1969), highlighted that what makes a person “kin” is not just biology, but the system of obligations, rights, responsibilities and mutual expectations that a community builds around that relationship.
From these reflections the concept of fictitious kinship was born (fictive kinship), which is today one of the pillars of social anthropology. The expression indicates all those relationships that are experienced as family even though they are not founded either on blood or marriage. It is a surprisingly universal phenomenon: godfathers and godmothers in the Christian tradition; The compadrazgo widespread in Latin America; blood brothers present in many African and Asian societies; the mutual aid networks created to guarantee solidarity, protection and belonging.
This perspective reaches one of its most innovative points with David M. Schneider, who, in the volume Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984), radically questions the Western idea according to which blood represents the natural foundation of kinship. According to Schneider, the very belief that biological bonds are “truer” than social ones is a cultural construction typical of the West. In many other societies, in fact, it is coexistence, sharing food, mutual care or participation in daily life that define who is truly “family”.
Why do young people say “uncle”: the brain turns strangers into relatives
The universal diffusion of fictitious kinship suggests that there is more than just a linguistic convention behind this phenomenon. Various disciplines, from evolutionary anthropology to social psychology, have attempted to explain why humans are naturally inclined to symbolically expand their family network.
According to evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar, in Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (1996), the ability to create stable relationships beyond the biological core has been one of the main evolutionary innovations of our species.
In human societies, cooperation could not be limited to blood relatives: surviving means building alliances, developing trust and maintaining ever larger communities cohesive. Language played a decisive role in this process. Attributing a kinship term to someone, calling them “brother”, “sister”, “mother” or “uncle”, is equivalent to symbolically reducing social distance, transforming a simple member of the community into a person towards whom moral obligations and expectations of reciprocity are recognised.
A completely different perspective is that of the sociologist Pierre Bordieu, who in Language and Symbolic Power (1991) describes language as a tool capable of producing social realities. Calling someone an “uncle” doesn’t simply mean describing an existing relationship: it means helping to build it. Words, in this sense, do not only reflect social ties, but actively participate in their formation, creating social capital, trust and a sense of belonging.
The family we choose: an ancient need that still survives today
Contemporary anthropology increasingly tends to abandon a rigid definition of family, to focus on the practices through which people build meaningful relationships.
It is in this direction that the work of Marshall Sahlins, who in the volume, inserts What Kinship Is-And Not (2013) proposes to understand kinship as a form of mutuality of being: a condition in which people’s lives become mutually intertwined, regardless of the presence of a shared genetic heritage. What makes someone a family member is not so much biology, but the fact of sharing responsibilities, experiences, care and participation in each other’s lives.
Maybe this is precisely why we continue to call “uncle” those who are not uncles. Behind that word, an ancient social strategy survives: assigning a specific place in our network of relationships to people we trust and with whom we share a sense of belonging.
The same mechanism continues today in digital communities, where expressions such as “bro”, “sis”, “fam”, “beasts” or “fratm” construct new forms of symbolic kinship. The words change, the contexts change, but the principle remains surprisingly unchanged: human beings have always needed to create families larger than those defined by biology, because it is often culture, much more than DNA, that decides who we feel really close to.
