Love, intimacy, and passion: Shapers of family and kinship

Abstract

Reviews in Anthropology, Vol. 21, pp. 85-93 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only ©1992 Gordon and Breach Science Publishers S.A. Printed in the United States of America Love, Intimacy, and Passion: Shapers of Family and Kinship Karen Leonard Hewlett, Barry S. Intimate Fathers: The Nature and Context of Aka Pygmy Paternal Infant Care. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. viii + 201 pp. including references and index. $27.95 cloth. 'frawick, Margaret. Notes on Love in a Tamil Family. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. xx + 299 pp. including notes, references, and index. $40.00 cloth. Weston, Kath. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. xi + 261 pp. including notes, refer- ences, and index. $35.00 cloth. United by a concern with feelings and the role they play in structuring families and kinship, these three books stretch the mind, both empirically and theoretically. The reader moves from Kath Weston's delineation of gay and lesbian constructions of family and kinship in San Francisco to Margaret 1.i'awick's exploration of love in a Tamil-speaking South Indian family to Barry Hewlett's documentation of the intimacy between central African Aka fathers and their infants. All three are ambitious works which combine fieldwork with thoughtful and provocative chal- lenges to existing theory. Weston contends that gay and lesbian discourse about chosen families can transform contemporary discourse about family and kinship in the United States. Trawick argues for a person-centered account of the Dravidian kinship system in India, one that places love at its center. Hewlett speculates about what the parent-child and marital relationships in Aka Pygmy society can tell us about fathers' roles in human evolution and sexual equality in and across cultures. All three are comparative works, although to different degrees. Weston compares constructions of family and kinship within the United States; Trawick compares her own Western notions of love to Tamil and other Indian notions of love and kinship; and Hewlett compares paternal infant care among Aka Pygmies to infant care among hunter-gatherers and others for whom there ]s comparable data. Two of the KAREN LEONARD is Professur of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research centers on caste and ethnicity, and family and life histury. Recent publications include Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi-Mexican-Americans (Temple 1992) and •Ethnic Identity and Gender: South Asians in the United States (In Ethnicity, Identity, and Migration, M. Israel and N. K. Wagle (Eds.), University of Toronto, 1991).