Kinship is based on filiation and descent, not on a mere privilege accorded to alliances.
Kinship is a technology for producing the material and semiotic effect of natural relationship, of shared kind.
Kinship is, in the contemporary western world, contrary to HIV/AIDS activists whose lay expertise transformed clinical research and treatment, is informed by complex genetic tests, which are neither fully understood nor simple enough to be administered by individuals.
Kinship is concerned with 'mutual persons', that is people that are intrinsic to one another's existence insofar as 'we are made up of many other people'.
Kinship is, in New Guinea, such that strangers can become your kin (as much as if you had the same parents) by eating from the land where your ancestors are buried, and thereby sharing in 'ancestral being'.
Kinship is in English families what boils down to 'people who belong to one another' whereas for the nyakyusa, kinsmen are 'members of one another'.
Kinship is a mutuality of being, meaning that kinfolk are members of one another, intrinsic to each other's identity and existence such that 'kinfolk live each other's lives and die each other's deaths'.