FRANKLIN, Sarah and Susan McKINNON, eds., RELATIVE VALUES: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies

Abstract

FRANKLIN, Sarah and Susan McKINNON, eds., RELATIVE VALUES: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham. NC: Duke University Press, 2001, 519 pp., $21.95 softcover, $64.95 hardcover.The editors of the present collection of papers, Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, have compiled (zusammengestellt) 17 articles discussing the question whether or not or to what extent 'kinship' still is a sound concept suitable for informing research on families or what the authors assembled in this volume might prefer to call 'lived experience of relatedness' following the example of one contributor to the volume, Janet Carsten. This was also the question discussed during the Wenner-Gren International Symposium 'New Directions in Kinship Studies: A Core Concept Revisited' which took place from 27 March to 4 April 1998 in Palma de Malarkey and which resulted in the present volume: With one exception contributors to this volume were participants in this symposium. It brings together scientists from different fields within anthropology, but also from the, history of science, women's studies and medicine and therefore represents the interdisciplinary discourse on 'kinship'.In an introduction to the volume authored by the editors the reader is familiarized with the notion of 'kinship as a Western preoccupation' (p. 2) and the debate that arose from David Schneider's famous 1984 'A Critique of the Study of Kinship' in which he skilfully argued that the concept of kinship depicts a biological and therefore Areocentric concept. The remainder of the introduction elaborates on how each paper contributes to the critical discussion of kinship as a concept and as social practice.While the editors' grouping of the following papers into five parts seems somewhat arbitrary, the papers might - simplistically, but effectively - be assigned to either one type focussing on the history of kinship studies as a special branch within anthropology in order to identify the Areocentric character of the concept of kinship as it is underlying traditional kinship studies, or a second type that investigates into the distortions or limitations of the concept of kinship as one being based on 'natural facts' or 'biology', when confronted with phenomenon such as transnational adoptions, reproductive technologies or gay/lesbian families. To the first type of papers belong - among others - Gillian Feeler-Harnik's chapter on The Ethnography of Creation: Lewis Henry Morgan and the American Beaver', Carol Delany's 'Cutting the Ties That Bind: The Sacrifice of Abraham and Patriarchal Kinship' and Sarah McKinnon's The Economics in Kinship and the Paternity of Culture: Origin Stories in Kinship Theories'. …