Chapter 9 summarises the most important contributions of the book. Weaving together archaeological and anthropological approaches makes it possible to characterise forms of relatedness in ancient Egypt as a process, as a phenomenon based on practice.

The main methodology relies on group approaches to monuments and people. Stelae need to be integrated within clusters into so-called memorial chapels, and analysed as parts of a wider landscape. Those objects can be regarded as agents, having a clear impact on their audiences and affecting the perception and construction of social fabric.

As people should not be treated in isolation, this book focuses on kin groups instead of individual kin types. Kin group is seen as an etic grid that acquires emic content through careful analysis of the primary sources. Although six attributes of these groups are proposed, not all need to occur at the same time. Kin groups are then analysed through koinography, taking the kin group as the preferred unit of social analysis in a diachronic framework. Overall kinship is understood as a process that by being displayed in monuments contributes to creating and disseminating ideas about ancient Egyptian social fabric.

Chapter 5 discusses methodologies for the analysis of social groups in ancient Egypt, addressing their benefits as well as their limitations. Anthropological study of kinship has usually been undertaken in living societies, but can also be tackled for cultures no longer existing Some methodologies used for social analysis in the past include the Lévi-Straussian notion of house societies, Social Network Analysis, prosopography, or sociography. The choice of method is reliant on the type of evidence that is available; in particular, the limited number of sources in ancient Egypt favours qualitative over quantitative analysis.

For that reason, I propose a model called koinography that combines suggestions from several of these approaches. It is based on the idea that social groups, and not individuals, should be treated as the preferred unit of social analysis, and that the factor of time is a fundamental tool to explore the position and role of that group in wider society. In particular, the model of the developmental cycle of the group originally proposed by Meyer Fortes has served as inspiration for the incorporation of a more dynamic and diachronic dimension into the study of ancient Egyptian groups.