Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship

by Edited by Janet Carsten

• ISBN13: 9780521651936
• ISBN10: 052165193X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-03-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Our understanding of what makes a person a relative has been transformed by radical changes in marriage arrangements and gender relations, and by new reproductive technologies. We can no longer take it for granted that our most fundamental social relationships are grounded in 'biology' or 'nature'. These developments have prompted anthropologists to take a fresh look at idioms of relatedness in other societies, and to review the ways in which relationships are symbolised and interpreted in our own society. Defamiliarizing some classic cases, challenging the established analytic categories of anthropology, the contributors to this innovative book focus on the boundary between the 'biological' and the 'social', and bring into question the received wisdom at the heart of the study of kinship.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	vi
List of contributors	vii
Acknowledgements	ix
Introduction: cultures of relatedness	1	(36)
Janet Carsten
Chinese patriliny and the cycles of yang and laiwang	37	(18)
Charles Stafford
Identity and substance: the broadening bases of relatedness among the Nuer of southern Sudan	55	(18)
Sharon Elaine Hutchinson
Sentiment and substance in North Indian forms of relatedness	73	(17)
Helen Lambert
Kindreds and descent groups: new perspectives from Madagascar	90	(14)
Rita Astuti
How Karembola men become mothers	104	(24)
Karen Middleton
`He used to be my relative': exploring the bases of relatedness among Inupiat of northern Alaska	128	(21)
Barbara Bodenhorn
Including our own	149	(18)
Jeanette Edwards
Marilyn Strathern
Figures of relations: reconnecting kinship studies and museum collections	167	(24)
Mary Bouquet
Bibliography	191	(17)
Index	208