What Kinship Is-And Is Not
What Kinship Is-And Is Not

Author: Marshall Sahlins

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-01-25

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 0226925137

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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.

What Kinship Is-And Is Not
What Kinship Is-And Is Not

Author: Marshall Sahlins

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-01-25

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 0226925129

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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.

A Critique of the Study of Kinship
A Critique of the Study of Kinship

Author: David Murray Schneider

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 9780472080519

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Schneider views kinship study as a product of Western bias and challenges its use as the universal measure of the study of social structure

American Kinship
American Kinship

Author: David M. Schneider

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-06-01

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 022622709X

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American Kinship is the first attempt to deal systematically with kinship as a system of symbols and meanings, and not simply as a network of functionally interrelated familial roles. Schneider argues that the study of a highly differentiated society such as our own may be more revealing of the nature of kinship than the study of anthropologically more familiar, but less differentiated societies. He goes to the heart of the ideology of relations among relatives in America by locating the underlying features of the definition of kinship—nature vs. law, substance vs. code. One of the most significant features of American Kinship, then, is the explicit development of a theory of culture on which the analysis is based, a theory that has since proved valuable in the analysis of other cultures. For this Phoenix edition, Schneider has written a substantial new chapter, responding to his critics and recounting the charges in his thought since the book was first published in 1968.

Relative Values
Relative Values

Author: Sarah Franklin

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2002-02-22

Total Pages: 531

ISBN-13: 0822383225

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The essays in Relative Values draw on new work in anthropology, science studies, gender theory, critical race studies, and postmodernism to offer a radical revisioning of kinship and kinship theory. Through a combination of vivid case studies and trenchant theoretical essays, the contributors—a group of internationally recognized scholars—examine both the history of kinship theory and its future, at once raising questions that have long occupied a central place within the discipline of anthropology and moving beyond them. Ideas about kinship are vital not only to understanding but also to forming many of the practices and innovations of contemporary society. How do the cultural logics of contemporary biopolitics, commodification, and globalization intersect with kinship practices and theories? In what ways do kinship analogies inform scientific and clinical practices; and what happens to kinship when it is created in such unfamiliar sites as biogenetic labs, new reproductive technology clinics, and the computers of artificial life scientists? How does kinship constitute—and get constituted by—the relations of power that draw lines of hierarchy and equality, exclusion and inclusion, ambivalence and violence? The contributors assess the implications for kinship of such phenomena as blood transfusions, adoption across national borders, genetic support groups, photography, and the new reproductive technologies while ranging from rural China to mid-century Africa to contemporary Norway and the United States. Addressing these and other timely issues, Relative Values injects new life into one of anthropology's most important disciplinary traditions. Posing these and other timely questions, Relative Values injects an important interdisciplinary curiosity into one of anthropology’s most important disciplinary traditions. Contributors. Mary Bouquet, Janet Carsten, Charis Thompson Cussins, Carol Delaney, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Sarah Franklin, Deborah Heath, Stefan Helmreich, Signe Howell, Jonathan Marks, Susan McKinnon, Michael G. Peletz, Rayna Rapp, Martine Segalen, Pauline Turner Strong, Melbourne Tapper, Karen-Sue Taussig, Kath Weston, Yunxiang Yan

The Cultural Analysis of Kinship
The Cultural Analysis of Kinship

Author: Richard Feinberg

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 9780252026737

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In the mid-1970s, David M. Schneider rocked the anthropological world with his announcement that kinship did not exist in any culture known to humankind. This volume provides a critical assessment of Schneider's ideas, focusing particularly on his contributions to kinship studies and the implications of his work for cultural relativism. Schneider's deconstruction of kinship as a cultural system sounded the death knell for a certain kind of kinship study. At the same time, it laid the groundwork for the re-emergence of kinship studies as a centerpiece of anthropological theory and practice. Now a mainstay of cultural studies, Schneider's conception of cultural relativism revolutionized thinking about kinship, family, gender, and culture. For feminist anthropologists, his ideas freed kinship from the limitations of biology, providing a context for establishing gender as a cultural construct. Today, his work bears on high-profile issues such as gay and lesbian partners and parents, surrogate motherhood, and new reproductive technologies. Contributors to The Cultural Analysis of Kinship appraise Schneider's contributions and his place in anthropological history, particularly in the development of anthropological theory. Situating Schneider's work and influence in relation to major controversies in the history of anthropology and of kinship studies, they examine his important insights and their limitations, consider where his approach might lead, and offer alternative paradigms. Inspiring many with his keenly critical mind and willingness to flout convention, discomfiting others with his mercurial temperament, David Schneider left an ineradicable mark on his field. These frank observations on the man and his ideas offer a revealing glimpse of one of modern anthropology's most complex and paradoxical figures.

Making Kin Not Population
Making Kin Not Population

Author: Adele E. Clarke

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780996635561

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As the planet's human numbers grow and environmental concerns proliferate, natural scientists, economists, and policy-makers are increasingly turning to new and old questions about families and kinship as matters of concern. From government programs designed to fight declining birth rates in Europe and East Asia, to controversial policies seeking to curb population growth in countries where birth rates remain high, to increasing income inequality transnationally, issues of reproduction introduce new and complicated moral and political quandaries. Making Kin Not Population ends the silence on these issues with essays from leading anti-racist, ecologically-concerned, feminist scholars. Though not always in accord, these contributors provide bold analyses of complex issues of intimacy and kinship, from reproductive justice to environmental justice, and from human and nonhuman genocides to new practices for making families and kin. This timely work offers vital proposals for forging innovative personal and public connections in the contemporary world.

Not in This Family
Not in This Family

Author: Heather Murray

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-02-10

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 0812207408

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Many Americans hold fast to the notion that gay men and women, more often than not, have been ostracized from disapproving families. Not in This Family challenges this myth and shows how kinship ties were an animating force in gay culture, politics, and consciousness throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. Historian Heather Murray gives voice to gays and their parents through an extensive use of introspective writings, particularly personal correspondence and diaries, as well as through published memoirs, fiction, poetry, song lyrics, movies, and visual and print media. Starting in the late 1940s and 1950s, Not in This Family covers the entire postwar period, including the gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the establishment of PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Ending her story with an examination of contemporary coming-out rituals, Murray shows how the personal that was once private became political and, finally, public. In exploring the intimate, reciprocal relationship of gay children and their parents, Not in This Family also chronicles larger cultural shifts in privacy, discretion and public revelation, and the very purpose of family relations. Murray shows that private bedrooms and consumer culture, social movements and psychological fashions, all had a part to play in transforming the modern family.

Kinship in International Relations
Kinship in International Relations

Author: Kristin Haugevik

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-08-28

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0429016794

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While kinship is among the basic organizing principles of all human life, its role in and implications for international politics and relations have been subject to surprisingly little exploration in International Relations (IR) scholarship. This volume is the first volume aimed at thinking systematically about kinship in IR – as an organizing principle, as a source of political and social processes and outcomes, and as a practical and analytical category that not only reflects but also shapes politics and interaction on the international political arena. Contributors trace everyday uses of kinship terminology to explore the relevance of kinship in different political and cultural contexts and to look at interactions taking place above, at and within the state level. The book suggests that kinship can expand or limit actors’ political room for maneuvereon the international political arena, making some actions and practices appear possible and likely, and others less so. As an analytical category, kinship can help us categorize and understand relations between actors in the international arena. It presents itself as a ready-made classificatory system for understanding how entities within a hierarchy are organized in relation to one another, and how this logic is all at once natural and social.

Kinship in Action
Kinship in Action

Author: Andrew Strathern

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-07-02

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1317346971

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For courses in Social Organization, Kinship, and Cultural Ecology.Kinship has made a come-back in Anthropology. Not only is there a line of noted, general, introductory works and readers in the topic, but theoretical discussions have been stimulated both by technological changes in mechanisms of reproduction and by reconsiderations of how to define kinship in the most productive ways for cross-cultural comparisons. In addition, kinship studies have moved away from the minutiae of kin terminological systems and the “kinship algebra” often associated with these, to the broader analysis of processes, historical changes and fundamental cultural meanings in which kin relationships are implicated. In this changed, and changing context both Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart -- both of the University of Pittsburgh -- bring together a number of interests and concerns, in order to provide pointers for students, as well as scholars, in this field of study. Taking an explicitly processual approach, the authors examine definitions of terms such as kinship itself, approach the topic in a way that is invariably ethnographic, and deploy materials from field areas where they themselves have worked.