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99 books match the query 'Kinship' and 11 start with a

cover of A Critique of the Study of Kinship

A Critique of the Study of Kinship

David M. Schneider

University of Michigan Press, 1984

Schneider challenges the assumptions on which anthropology has depended for the last century by showing that one of the major categories in terms of which social life has been understood is largely untenable. The idea of kinship is subject to penetrating scrutiny. Unlike the proverbial Emperor, it is not that kinship has no clothes. The question is whether there is anything at all underneath those clothes. And even when the clothes appear to be shreds and patches held together by a web of illusions.
 
The critique uses a novel device in that the same set of ethnographic “facts” are looked at through different theories. This reveals a good deal about the different theories. By the same token, of course, this critique goes into the question of what a “fact” of “kinship” might be and how to recognize one either at home or in the field.
 
Schneider’s critique also uses history to raise cogent questions about how kinship has been studied. But it is not as 20/20 hindsight that history is used. Due respect is paid to the climate of the time, as well as the climatic changes and the ways in which these helped to create the emperor’s clothes. Right, wrong, or indifferent, Schneider’s study of how the emperor “kinship” was dressed and then redressed as the winds of change threatened disarray, proves challenging to the theories by which anthropology lives, as well as to the specifically privileged domain of “kinship.” The implications of this study for a wide range of problems within theoretical anthropology are striking.
 
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cover of Access to Origins: Affines, Ancestors, and Aristocrats

Access to Origins

Affines, Ancestors, and Aristocrats

By Mary W. Helms

University of Texas Press, 1998

In many non-industrial, non-Western societies, power and prestige are closely linked to the extent of an individual's or group's perceived connection to the supernatural realm, which also explains and validates tangible activities such as economic success, victories in war, or control over lucrative trade. Affines (in-laws), ancestors, and aristocrats, in particular, are connected to the realm of creative cosmological origins (i.e., to Genesis), which accords them distinctive, supernatural powers and gives them a natural and legitimate right to worldly authority.

This is the hypothesis that Mary W. Helms pursues in this broadly cross-cultural study of aristocracy in chiefly societies. She begins with basic ideas about the dead, ancestors, affines, and concepts of cosmological origins. This leads her to a discussion of cosmologically defined hierarchies, the qualities that characterize aristocracy, and the political and ideological roles of aristocrats as wife-givers and wife-takers (that is, as in-laws). She concludes by considering various models that explain how societies may develop or define aristocracies.

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cover of Adoptive Families in a Diverse Society

Adoptive Families in a Diverse Society

Wegar, Katarina

Rutgers University Press, 2006

In recent years, different family types have begun demanding recognition to an unprecedented extent. Despite notable changes to our cultural and academic landscapes, however, adoptive families remain overlooked. According to census data, about two and a half percent of children in the United States are adopted. But mere numbers do not begin to indicate the profound impact that these families have on cultural definitions of kinship.

Adoptive Families in a Diverse Society brings together twenty-one prominent scholars to explore the experience, practice, and policy of adoption in North America. While much existing literature tends to stress the potential problems inherent in non-biological kinship, the essays in this volume consider adoptive family life in a broad and balanced context.

Essays explore our current fascination with genetics, showing how our intense belief that we are produced, shaped, and controlled by our genes has affected the authenticity and value that we credit to adoptive parent/child relations. Other essays look at identity development, community attitudes toward adoption, gay adoptive fathers’ experiences, the ways in which single mother adoptive families create kinship, and the ways in which cultural assumptions about race and class operate in the system. 

Bringing new perspectives to the topics of kinship, identity, and belonging, this path-breaking book expands more than our understandings of adoptive family life; it urges us to rethink the limits and possibilities of diversity and assimilation in American society.

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cover of Affective Circuits: African Migrations to Europe and the Pursuit of Social Regeneration

Affective Circuits

African Migrations to Europe and the Pursuit of Social Regeneration

Edited by Jennifer Cole and Christian Groes

University of Chicago Press, 2016

The influx of African migrants into Europe in recent years has raised important issues about changing labor economies, new technologies of border control, and the effects of armed conflict. But attention to such broad questions often obscures a fundamental fact of migration: its effects on ordinary life. Affective Circuits brings together essays by an international group of well-known anthropologists to place the migrant family front and center. Moving between Africa and Europe, the book explores the many ways migrants sustain and rework family ties and intimate relationships at home and abroad. It demonstrates how their quotidian efforts—on such a mass scale—contribute to a broader process of social regeneration.
           
The contributors point to the intersecting streams of goods, people, ideas, and money as they circulate between African migrants and their kin who remain back home. They also show the complex ways that emotions become entangled in these exchanges. Examining how these circuits operate in domains of social life ranging from child fosterage to binational marriages, from coming-of-age to healing and religious rituals, the book also registers the tremendous impact of state officials, laws, and policies on migrant experience. Together these essays paint an especially vivid portrait of new forms of kinship at a time of both intense mobility and ever-tightening borders.
 
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cover of Aging Nationally in Contemporary Poland: Memory, Kinship, and Personhood

Aging Nationally in Contemporary Poland

Memory, Kinship, and Personhood

Jessica C. Robbins

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Active aging programs that encourage older adults to practice health- promoting behaviors are proliferating worldwide. In Poland, the meanings and ideals of these programs have become caught up in the sociocultural and political-economic changes that have occurred during the lifetimes of the oldest generations—most visibly, the transition from socialism to capitalism. Yet practices of active aging resonate with older forms of activity in late life in ways that exceed these narratives of progress. Moreover, some older Poles come to live valued, meaningful lives in old age despite the threats to respect and dignity posed by illness and debility. Through intimate portrayals of a wide range of experiences of aging in Poland, Jessica C. Robbins shows that everyday practices of remembering and relatedness shape how older Poles come to be seen by themselves and by others as living worthy, valued lives.
 
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cover of All in the Family: Childhood and Fictive Kinship in Roman Society

All in the Family

Childhood and Fictive Kinship in Roman Society

Gaia Gianni

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Gaia Gianni’s All in the Family explores how children shaped the development of pseudo-familial bonds, or fictive kinship, in Roman society during the early imperial period. Previous scholarship on the Roman family has primarily emphasized the patriarchal and nuclear structure of the Roman family, with children often represented as passive actors in a vacuum. Believing this to be an oversimplification of how the Roman family functioned, Gianni in her  study focuses on the ways in which Roman families raised children and formed long-term relationships with individuals outside of the nuclear family, such as friends, neighbors, nurses, and caretakers, who gradually became full-fledged members of the family unit. Through a wide variety of literary works, legal documents, and funerary epitaphs for children set up by their families and caregivers, Gianni borrows from modern sociological and anthropological theories to argue that children acted as catalysts or connecting nodes in the creation of fictive kinship with individuals who were not part of the biologically determined family. In addition to illuminating the roles and experiences of these figures, All in the Family reveals how this social network was integrated into the family both in practice and in ideology, presenting a more complex view of the Roman family than the traditional nuclear structure. 
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cover of American Kinship: A Cultural Account

American Kinship

A Cultural Account

David M. Schneider

University of Chicago Press, 1980

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.
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cover of Ancestors in Borneo Societies: Death, Transformation, and Social Immortality

Ancestors in Borneo Societies

Death, Transformation, and Social Immortality

Edited by Pascal Coudrec and Kenneth Sillander

National University of Singapore Press, 2012

Death, eschatology and exotic indigenous deathways have long held a privileged position in the ethnographic and popular literature on Borneo. Until the publication of this study, however, ancestors have remained a strangely neglected topic. Differing from classic ethnographic representations of ancestor worship based on Sino-African material, this volume will be not just of interest to regional specialists; it will also enrich the general anthropological theory of ancestors, kinship and religion.
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cover of Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge

Ancestral Connections

Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge

Howard Morphy

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Ancestral Connections unlocks the inner meaning of Australian Aboriginal bark painting. Drawing on more than ten years of fieldwork among the Yolngu—an Aboriginal people of Northeast Arnhem Land—and applying both anthropological and art historical methods, Howard Morphy explores systematically the graphic representation of traditional knowledge in Yolngu art. He also charts the role that art has played in Aboriginal society both present and past.

The rich symbolism of Yolngu art links the Yolngu directly with the "Dreaming," the time of world-creation that continues as the spiritual dimension of the present. Morphy shows how a complex dialectic of "inside" and "outside" interpretations of painting structures the system of knowledge in Yolngu society, and how European interest in this art has caused certain changes in the conditions of its production. The "inside" significance of the art, however, has not changed; it retains its dual ability to represent and to constitute relationships between things.

Ancestral Connections is a major contribution to the anthropology of art. A subtle commentary on the colonial encounter in northern Australia, the book demonstrates how the Yolngu have used their art—against all odds—as an instrument of cultural survival and as a component of the economic and political transformation of their society.

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cover of Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship

Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship

Ladislav Holy

Pluto Press, 1996

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cover of Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe

Argonauts of West Africa

Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe

Apostolos Andrikopoulos

University of Chicago Press, 2023

Examines the paradoxes of kinship in the lives of unauthorized African migrants as they struggle for mobility, employment, and citizenship in Europe.

In rapidly changing and highly precarious contexts, unauthorized African migrants turn to kinship in search of security, stability, and predictability. Through the exchange of identity documents between “siblings,” assistance in obtaining such documentation through kinship networks, and marriages that provide access to citizenship, new assemblages of kinship are continually made and remade to navigate the shifting demands of European states. These new kinship relations, however, often prove unreliable, taking on new, unexpected dynamics in the face of codependency; they become more difficult to control than those who enter into such relations can imagine. Through unusually close ethnographic work in West African migrant communities in Amsterdam, Apostolos Andrikopoulos reveals the unseen dynamics of kinship through shared papers, the tensions of race and gender that develop in mutually beneficial marriages, and the vast, informal networks of people, information, and documentation on which migrants rely. Throughout Argonauts of West Africa, Andrikopoulos demonstrates how inequality, exclusionary practices, and the changing policies of an often-violent state demand innovative ways of doing kinship to successfully navigate complex migration routes.
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