Families Redefined: Kinship Groups That Deserve Benefits

Journal of Marriage and Family

This article reviews the recent history of kinship research, noting the relative neglect of the topic in recent decades. The lack of scholarly and empirical work on kinship has been hampered by both the absence of survey and qualitative research on contemporary kinship practices. The author focuses on what is known and not known about how individual put into practice kinship in the standard, nuclear form of the family. There is surprising in attention to the ceremonial family and, little is know about how families draw boundaries and construct kinship on ritual occasions in the literature. The author concludes by suggesting research strategies for examining both how kinship is constructed and practiced in the United States and in other advanced economies. Across the Western world and in other nations with advanced economies, a remarkable transformation in family systems took place during the final third of the 20th century. The institution of marriage, once nearly hegemonic, lost its nearly universal appeal. Marriage now takes place later in life in virtually all nations with advanced economies and, not uncommonly, it is delayed indefinitely. New family forms have proliferated, gaining legitimacy in the 21st century as alternatives to heterosexual marriage

Journal of Marriage and Family

This is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as

SSRN Electronic Journal

Their insights are reflected and their articles are cited at many points ... in the.pres essay. Most recenly, Professor Jorge Nicolis Lafferiere's article, The Challenges that Developments in Genetics and Artificial Reproduction Present to Imergenerational Solidarity (cited infra) has been the inspiration and source of several of the insights set forth herein.

LaSA, 2019

Call for papers for a conference in sociology and anthropology of kinship and family - 27-29th of May 2019 - BESANCON - France deadline : 1st of March

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale

Divorce, remarriage and new partnerships create blended families with complex configurations of emotional and financial engagements. The latest reform of the Danish Inheritance Act in 2008 was an attempt to cope with the legal challenges posed by blended families with regard to inheritance. The solution was to grant the surviving spouse greater rights as well as a greater share of the estate, thus favouring the horizontal conjugal bond between current spouses. Since the surviving spouse is often not the parent of all the deceased's children, the vertical transfer of assets and heirlooms between generations is challenged. This has consequences for the way material things can generate continuities and act to reproduce kinship over time, as a way of kinning former and coming generations. This article addresses the role of inheritance and heirlooms in processes of kinning and de-kinning. Résumé Divorce, mariages et nouveaux partenaires créent des familles recomposes avec des configu...

2019

With the emergence of modern reproductive technologies, issues of kinship and family relations have returned as objects of controversial sociocultural, political and juridical debates. Current societal interest in genetics, epigenetics and DNA research indicates a trend to renaturalising kinship and subjecthood based on genetic bonds and genealogy. In various academic disciplines, this trend has been received critically. The interdisciplinary conference, organised by Inge Kroppenberg, Nikolaus Linder and Barbara Schaff (all Göttingen), brought together various researchers from the fields of anthropology, bioethics, law, political science, literature, gender and sociology to unfold the versatile facets of how Western kinship was and is negotiated. The first panel Concepts and Theories, chaired by Barbara Schaff, was opened by SUSANNE LETTOW (Berlin) who outlined historical and philosophical considerations on kinship concepts. Initiated by the transformation of family structures in th...

Czech Sociological Review

Two major positions have emerged in the debate about the nature of kinship. One argues that kinship can only be analysed from the framework of the biological necessities of human reproduction. The other argues that this position is nothing more than ethnocentric view of kinship derived from European culture and that only a broader cultural approach can provide a meaningful analysis of kinship. In this approach it is necessary to analyse kinship around the world from a perspective derived from within each different culture. Recent developments have pointed out the inadequacies of both of these positions and call for a new approach to kinship. This article suggests one possible approach that goes beyond the debate between biology and culture. It based upon the complementarity of human social behaviour.

2013

The definition of a legal family is changing and e volving in our contemporary legal system. Many important changes a r currently taking place in the development of contemporary legal systems in this sphere. Most of these involve the institution of matrimony, which no long er constitutes the sole, exclusive title on which recognition of the legal f amily is based. At the same time, the concept of marriage itself is changing and evol ving from the past, to the point of including the union between two persons of the same sex. Complex aspects are involved in each case, which are not fr ee from internal inconsistencies.

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).