In the context of robot manipulation, Salisbury's taxonomy is the common standard used to define the types of contact interactions that can occur between the robot and a contacted object; the basic concept behind such classification is the modeling of contacts as kinematic pairs. In this paper, we extend this notion by modeling the effects of a robot contacting a body as kinematic chains. The introduced kinematic-chain-based contact model is based on an extension of the Bruyninckx–Hunt approach of surface–surface contact. A general classification of nonfrictional and frictional contact types suitable for both manipulation analyses and robot hand design is then proposed, showing that all standard contact categories used in robotic manipulation are special cases of the suggested generalization. New contact models, such as ball, tubular, planar translation, and frictional adaptive finger contacts, are defined and characterized. An example of manipulation analysis that lays out the relevance and practicality of the proposed classification is detailed.