Cognatism and blood ties:: The creativeness of marriage under canon law.

By concentrating on the religious conceptions underlying marriage in the Catholic Church and on the relations between theology and canon law, we can assess the consequences of this type of marriage on the limits of the kin groups defined through canon law's matrimonial prohibitions. For this structural interpretation, methodological considerations are worked out in order to break the stalemate to which predominant views, claiming to be sociological, have led in the study of European kinship.