before the questions raised within anthropology about the study of 'kinship' by david m. schneider and others from the 1960s onwards, anthropology itself had paid very little attention to the notion that kinship bonds were anything other than connected to consanguineal (or genealogical) relatedness (or its local cultural conceptions). schneider's 1968 study of the symbolic meanings surrounding ideas of kinship in american culture found that americans ascribe a special significance to 'blood ties' as well as related symbols like the naturalness of marriage and raising children within this culture. in later work (1972 and 1984) schneider argued that unexamined genealogical notions of kinship had been embedded in anthropology since morgan's early work because american anthropologists (and anthropologists in western europe) had made the mistake of assuming these "particular cultural values" of 'blood is thicker than water', common in their own societies, were 'natural' and universal for all human cultures (i.e. a form of ethnocentrism). he concluded that, due to these unexamined assumptions, the whole enterprise of 'kinship' in anthropology may have been built on faulty foundations. his 1984 book "a critique of the study of kinship" gave his fullest account of this critique.