The cooperation and prosociality are among traditional research issues in many scholarly disciplines, whereby they also have received attention in ethnology. In the text I address the complex relationship between forms of cooperation and kinship. My aim is to analyse particular types of cooperation recorded during ethnographic research and to show what mechanisms support its effective functioning. When resolving this research issue I apply the theoretical perspective of evolutionary anthropology, which is a powerful tool to explain how universal characteristics, such as cooperation, manifest themselves in different social and cultural contexts. The treatise is based on empirical data collected during ethnographic research in a rural setting in western Slovakia. Long-term ethnographic research based on the method of ethnographic interviewing and participant observation makes it possible to describe and analyse all the nuances of cooperation in a particular locality. The village in which the research took place is located in the White Carpathians near the border with the Czech Republic, and it features a scattered settlement. The treatise analyses specific mechanisms supporting the functioning and maintenance of cooperation in the locality: kinship, reciprocity (direct and indirect) and reputation. As resulting from the data analysis, the people do not limit cooperation to close or distant relatives. The choice of a cooperation partner depends on many factors, with the degree of kinship being only one of them.