What is Kinship About? Again. Critique of the Cambridge Handbook of Kinship, Edited by Sandra Bamford

Abstract

The world of anthropology has witnessed a recurring rhetorical title:“What Is Kinship All About?” and now this article titles itself “What is Kinship All About? Again.” Why? Whereas we have over a century’s worth of ethnography and theory focusing on the centrality of kinship in human society and in anthropological theory, in 2019 a Handbook is published that names itself “Kinship” but, despite its claim and to the contrary, it is not about kinship at all. The Handbook editor explicitly states that it is about “conceiving kinship,” with kinship reduced to gendered social relatedness. In response, we re-affirm the centrality of kinship as a domain universal in human societies by way of a critique of the Handbook and a comprehensive review of its contributing chapters. Countering the Handbook’s denialist — or in Harold Scheffler’s famous term, dismantling — position, we bring to the fore the already determined universal properties that define the boundaries of the kinship domain and the logical properties that uni-versally define the category of kinship.