similar ethnographic accounts have emerged from a variety of cultures since schneider's intervention. the concept of nurture kinship highlights the extent to which kinship relationships may be brought into being through the performance of various acts of nurture between individuals. additionally the concept highlights ethnographic findings that, in a wide swath of human societies, people understand, conceptualize and symbolize their relationships predominantly in terms of giving, receiving and sharing nurture. these approaches were somewhat forerun by malinowski, in his ethnographic study of sexual behaviour on the trobriand islands which noted that the trobrianders did not believe pregnancy to be the result of sexual intercourse between the man and the woman, and they denied that there was any physiological relationship between father and child. nevertheless, while paternity was unknown in the "full biological sense", for a woman to have a child without having a husband was considered socially undesirable. fatherhood was therefore recognised as a social and nurturing role; the woman's husband is the "man whose role and duty it is to take the child in his arms and to help her in nursing and bringing it up"; "thus, though the natives are ignorant of any physiological need for a male in the constitution of the family, they regard him as indispensable socially".