Let us begin with the proposition that all human relationships are analogous to one another. This includes those relationships that anthropologists have called "kin relationships," which, for that reason, will form the subject matter of our discussion. This means that kin relationships, as well as the relatives identified through those relationships, will be considered as basically alike in some important way. Note that I am making this assumption purely for analytic reasons; I do not mean to imply that this basic quality of analogy or alikeness i s somehow "given," or innate in the nature of things. I am merely introducing the proposition as a foil to the traditional anthropological assumption of the innateness of kin differentiation-the notion that the genealogical breakdown into "father," "mother," and so forth, i s a natural fact, and that it i s a human responsibility to integrate them into particular kinship "systems" (or discover such integrations).Consider, then, a situation in which all kin relations and all kinds of relatives are basically alike, and it i s a human responsibility to differentiate them. The responsibility of doing so will be our task i n understanding kin relationships, as it is man's role in perhaps the majority of human societies. A mother is another kind of a father, fathering i s another kind of mothering; a sister might be a better sister for the fact that she i s "a little mother" t o her siblings, and a good father i s often "like a brother" to his sons. A certain solicitude (perhaps epitomized by Schneider's "enduring, diffuse solidarity") i s quintessential to all ideal kin relationships, regardless of how they may be defined or in what forms the solicitude is expressed. And this solicitude represents, as well as anything can represent, what I mean by the basic analogy of all kin relationships to one another. From the standpoint I have chosen,

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