Kinship and Identity: Introduction

Kinship, 2022

The world of anthropology has witnessed a recurring rhetorical title:"What Is Kinship All About?" and now this article titles itself "What is Kinship All About? Again." Why? Whereas we have over a century's worth of ethnography and theory focusing on the centrality of kinship in human society and in anthropological theory, in 2019 a Handbook is published that names itself "Kinship" but, despite its claim and to the contrary, it is not about kinship at all. The Handbook editor explicitly states that it is about "conceiving kinship," with kinship reduced to gendered social relatedness. In response, we reaffirm the centrality of kinship as a domain universal in human societies by way of a critique of the Handbook and a comprehensive review of its contributing chapters. Countering the Handbook's denialist-or in Harold Scheffler's famous term, dismantling-position, we bring to the fore the already determined universal properties that define the boundaries of the kinship domain and the logical properties that universally define the category of kinship.

Kinship, 2022

The world of anthropology has witnessed a recurring rhetorical title:"What Is Kinship All About?" and now this article titles itself "What is Kinship All About? Again." Why? Whereas we have over a century's worth of ethnography and theory focusing on the centrality of kinship in human society and in anthropological theory, in 2019 a Handbook is published that names itself "Kinship" but, despite its claim and to the contrary, it is not about kinship at all. The Handbook editor explicitly states that it is about "conceiving kinship," with kinship reduced to gendered social relatedness. In response, we reaffirm the centrality of kinship as a domain universal in human societies by way of a critique of the Handbook and a comprehensive review of its contributing chapters. Countering the Handbook's denialist-or in Harold Scheffler's famous term, dismantling-position, we bring to the fore the already determined universal properties that define the boundaries of the kinship domain and the logical properties that universally define the category of kinship.

In Katharina Schramm David Skinner Richard Rottenburg Editor Identity Politics and the New Genetics Re Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging Oxford Berghahn Books 2012 P 79 96, 2012

is available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched. OA ISBN: 978-1-78920-471-1. this leads to greater biological determinism in reckoning kinship, race, identity and personhood (Lippman 1991; Nelkin and Lindee 1995), it is also helpful to mark the continuities with previous modes of thinking and to recognize the persistent coexistence of determinist with less determinist modes of thinking. People appropriate and deploy scientific knowledge in varied ways that are more and less deterministic. Biology, while being subject to representation as the underlying key to everything, is now also potentially understandable as less determinate and more 'cultural', due precisely to the technological manipulations to which it is subject and to the increasing perception, by Western publics at least, that science is not outside society (

American Ethnologist, 2010

Journal of Biosocial Science, 2009

CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research - Zenodo, 2021

Kinship is the essential premise of organizing individuals into social groups, roles, and categories. It serves as the premier universal and fundamental aspect of all human relationships and relies on blood and marriage ties. Hence, Kinship is vital to an individual and a community's well-being because different societies connote Kinship differently. They also set the rules governing Kinship, which are sometimes legally defined and sometimes implied. This paper focuses on the cultural approach to the study of Kinship. Somebody can explore the cultural approach to kinship study through David M. Schneider's powerful framework, American Kinship: A Cultural Account, published in 1968. It was a part of the more extensive debate on the nature of Kinship. It bore on the anthropological definition of Kinship, and it explains whether or not it was necessary to refer to Kinship's biological dimension. Schneider examined Kinship as a cultural system that is based on shared symbols and meanings. This type of analysis became known as the culturalist approach. He offered a two-part answer to the question of how North American culture defined a relative. The study is based on approximately 100 interviews. Two symbolic kinship orders included nature and the law. In terms of character, relatives shared natural, biogenetic substances as symbolized by the indigenous word 'blood.' In terms of regulation, relatives were persons who followed a particular code of conduct. North American Kinship involved an opposition between two sets of symbols; first being the kinship 'by blood,' which was material, permanent and inalienable, and the second one is the kinship 'by marriage,' based on a human imposed order and referring to morals, law, and custom.

Structure and Dynamics: eJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences

Back to Kinship III is the third Special Issue of the e-journal, Structure and Dynamics sponsored by the group, Kinship Circle. Each issue is dedicated to current kinship research. The first two issues have both been very successful, as shown by the number of downloads. Back to Kinship I (Read and El Guindi 2013) has had a total of 2,696 download since it was published in 2013, which is an average of 207 downloads per article and an average of 385 downloads per year. Back to Kinship II (El Guindi and Read 2016) has had a total of 2,405 downloads since it was publication in 2016, which is an average of 172 downloads per article and an average of 601 downloads per year. These numbers reflect the ongoing intense interest in kinship research worldwide. These two issues of Back to Kinship focus on the challenges facing kinship research that began to appear in the 1970s, and on the impact these challenges have had on kinship research. As El Guindi (2020:42) puts it in her just published book, ongoing kinship research has confronted "trivializing or dismissive attempts and unfounded claims which diminish the importance of the kinship phenomenon." El Guindi continues: "The history of anthropology has shown that kinship knowledge is integral to the cultural knowledge humans acquire and generate, about what constitutes 'social universe' and what it means to be a relative. A complex notion of society and culture is unique to humans… and is irreducible to a simplistic transmission of traits or an assumed overarching tradition of nurture" (p. 42). She goes on to describe how kinship study today "involves revisiting old issues with fresh data or generating new models to provide new insights while creatively building bridges with different disciplines which would enhance the conceptualization of kinship" (p. 42).

American Ethnologist, 2001

List of illustrations page vi List of contributors vii Acknowledgements ix 1 Introduction: cultures of relatedness 1 janet carsten 2 Chinese patriliny and the cycles of yang and laiwang 37 charles stafford 3 Identity and substance: the broadening bases of relatedness among the Nuer of southern Sudan 55 sharon elaine hutchinson 4 Sentiment and substance in North Indian forms of relatedness 73 helen lambert 5 Kindreds and descent groups: new perspectives from Madagascar 90 rita astuti 6 How Karembola men become mothers karen middleton 7 `He used to be my relative': exploring the bases of relatedness among In Ä upiat of northern Alaska barbara bodenhorn 8 Including our own jeanette edwards and marilyn strathern 9 Figures of relations: reconnecting kinship studies and museum collections mary bouquet Bibliography Index v Illustrations 1 The Bedamini dancer. Photo: Annette Sletnes.

The Politics of Making Kinship. Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Erdmute Alber, David Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Tatjana Thelen. Oxford: Berghahn, 2021

Late nineteenth-century anthropology already seems to have split into two cultures: racial anthropology on the one hand and social anthropology on the other. However, an intriguing analytical method exists that mediates this divide between nature and culture, the so-called “genealogical method.” I will trace the emergence of this method from Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869) and Lewis H. Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity (1871) to W. H. R. Rivers “Genealogical Method of Anthropological Inquiry” (1910) and Franz Boas’ The Mind of Primitive Man (1911). My aim in doing this is to re-contextualize the genealogical method. This method originated in, and continues to represent, a long-standing Western tradition of analyzing, and potentially interfering with, reproductive relations within populations. Rather than being grounded in the “naturalization” of a particular family model, therefore, the genealogical method originated as an analytical tool that mapped out these reproductive relations in a manner that was as consistent and exhaustive as possible. As such, it was not grounded in biology but rather in legal traditions of measuring kinship by degrees, as well as practices of administering and surveying populations in which notions of racial belonging often played a crucial role.