family resemblance

plural family resemblances

1. Physical similarities shared between close relatives, especially between parents and children and between siblings.
2. human sciencesOne of a series of overlapping similarities between two or more comparanda.

   1 more example

   What does it mean to be part of the racial majority, and how have different social groups achieved that? Whiteness studies wanted to know. This was a significant shift of the theoretical and empirical gaze, from the subordinate to the dominant, from the minority to the majority, and it shared a family resemblance to the contemporaneous shift in women's studies from studying women to studying men and masculinities.

   2006, Matt Wray, Not Quite White, page 4