Field research among Gulf Arabians to study the practice of suckling strange infants led to conclusions confirming the validity of the ethnographic presence of a third path to kinship manifesting itself differently across cultures. The other two paths of incorporating individuals to become relatives which are commonly addressed in ethnography and theory are biological birth and marital (or marital-like) unions. The focus on the latter two paths led to assumptions that the incorporation path to kinship is binary, birth and marriage, while other forms were described by terms such as ‘fictive’, ‘pseudo’, and ‘ritual’, among others, suggesting those paths as not being real kinship. Examples of this third path are adoption, compadrazco, or god-parenthood, and what became referred to as ‘milk kinship’. My research conclusion on suckling demonstrated that the phrase milk kinship was too encompassing since it included fosterage, wet nursing, and other forms that cannot be demonstrated to share the criteria that constitute the category kinship. The systematic study I conducted among Gulf Arabians shows that suckling is a practice that shares all the criteria of the category kinship and thus qualifies to be another path to incorporate individuals (or groups by extension) into the domain considered to be kinship. Accordingly, it was shown that individuals turn into kin through the three paths of incorporation – birth, marriage and suckling (the latter in the case of particular cultural traditions). In this paper, this third path will be discussed and criteria determined empirically as characterizing certain practices as kinship are identified. This places kinship analysis in the heart of anthropological theory.
