Ever since the onset of a constructivist turn in anthropology has reshaped the traditional landscape of anthropological interests and approaches, there has not been any new discipline-wide paradigm to respond to the growing complexity (Luhmann) of a multi- polar, multinatural (Viveiros de Castro), multimedia and multiepistemological world. When in the late 1960s growing constructivism began systematically exploiting the presumed flaws of traditional kinship studies to propel forward as a new reflexive kind of anthropology centered around the notion of “cultures,” it did not predict and could not anticipate a recent global movement that became known as the “Return of Kinship Studies.” The enduring appeal of the concept of kinship as an epistemological tool offering a greater analytical depth to the students of human cultures, societies and populations stems from kinship’s several distinct properties. First, kinship as an object of study is discipline-neutral. A whole variety of scholarly disciplines and subdisciplines – including linguistics, logic, sociology, history, psychology, evolutionary biology, population genetics, primatology, demography, epidemiology, theology – study kinship or use the metaphor of kinship to analyze their subject matter. In many cases, these non- anthropological traditions in the study of kinship have a long history going back to the 18th century and earlier. Second, kinship offers scholars an opportunity to study macroprocesses through the analysis of microprocesses. Third, kinship straddles biological, social and cultural realities thus enabling a scholar to avoid reducing the complexity of human realities to one dimension and one dimension only. Three case studies, namely interactions between artificially intelligent agents and humans, the animal-human interface and the new reproductive technologies serve to illustrate the enduring theoretical and methodological value of kinship studies as an epistemological tool to reduce the growing complexity of what it means to be human.