Does learning about kinship systems in small-scale societies really help us understand modern family structures, or is that just academic nostalgia? I spent a summer doing fieldwork in a rural community and saw how their kinship terms shaped daily decisions, yet back home, my neighbors negotiate family roles through apps and legal contracts. Maybe the old models are too rigid for how we live now, but I also wonder if we lost something essential when we stopped mapping relationships so explicitly. Could a comparative approach still offer insights, or is it time to build entirely new frameworks from scratch?