Based on the lives of two real Amish brothers, Jacob and John Mast, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1750, this book traces their descendants throughout the 18th and 19th century based on oral history, historical documents, and historical imagination as written by co-authors African-American Sharon Cranford and Anglo-American Dwight Roth. At age 20, John Mast moved to North Carolina, left the Amish and within two generations his progeny became slaveholders. Jacob and his descendants stayed Amish Mennonite and lived in the area of Morgantown and Elverson, Pennsylvania.
From the pain of religious persecution to the horrors of slavery, followed by the inhumanities of Black codes and Jim Crow, Kinship Concealed sheds light on a mixed race family's struggle to reach its view of the American dream.
In this pithy two-part essay, Marshall Sahlins reinvigorates the debates on what constitutes kinship, building on some of the best scholarship in the field to produce an original outlook on the deepest bond humans can have. Covering thinkers from Aristotle and Lévy- Bruhl to Émile Durkheim and David Schneider, and communities from the Maori and the English to the Korowai of New Guinea, he draws on a breadth of theory and a range of ethnographic examples to form an acute definition of kinship, what he calls the “mutuality of being.” Kinfolk are persons who are parts of one another to the extent that what happens to one is felt by the other. Meaningfully and emotionally, relatives live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths. In the second part of his essay, Sahlins shows that mutuality of being is a symbolic notion of belonging, not a biological connection by “blood.” Quite apart from relations of birth, people may become kin in ways ranging from sharing the same name or the same food to helping each other survive the perils of the high seas. In a groundbreaking argument, he demonstrates that even where kinship is reckoned from births, it is because the wider kindred or the clan ancestors are already involved in procreation, so that the notion of birth is meaningfully dependent on kinship rather than kinship on birth. By formulating this reversal, Sahlins identifies what kinship truly is: not nature, but culture.
"Make kin, not babies!", Donna Haraway demands in an attempt to offer new and creative ways of thinking what kinship might mean in an age of ecological devastation. At the same time, the emergence of a seemingly new culture of public protest and political opinion have provoked scholars such as Judith Butler to address the contexts and dynamics of public collective action. This volume explores the dynamic relationship between structures of kinship and the (material) conditions under which collective action emerges from a literary and cultural studies perspective. How are kinship and collective action negotiated in literature, the arts, or in specific historical moments, and how does this affect the role of representation? How have conceptualizations of both concepts developed over time, and what can we infer from this for questions of kinship and collective action today?
Dziebel has doctorates in both history and anthropology and is currently both advisor to the Great Russian Encyclopedia and senior anthropologist at Crispin Porter + Bogusky advertising agency. His extremely dense work is actually three books in one. The first is a history of kinship studies from the early 19th century to the present. The second is a comparative study of kinship terminology among non-Indo-European languages, for which he has also prepared a data base published on the internet. The third section, highly controversial, as he admits, uses anthropology, mitochondrial studies and linguistics to suggest that the "out of Africa" model of human origins may be in error and that the first humans actually came from the Americas and spread from there to the rest of the world.
Presenting a new approach to the history of Chinese kinship, this book attempts to bridge the gap between anthropological and historical scholarship on the Chinese lineage. It explores the historical development of kinship in the villages of the Fuzhou region of southeastern Fujian province.
Through twenty engaging essays exploring cultures ranging from ancient Judaic civilization to contemporary Brazil, Gender, Kinship and Power places important contemporary issues related to kinship--such as parental responsibility and female-headed households--in their proper comparative and historical framework.
