Relational Anthropology Research Articles

The Quiet Migration Redux: International Adoption, Race, and Difference.

Demographers frame international adoption primarily as an unusual kind of migration. This insight offers anthropologists new ways to think about kinship. Drawing on demographic scholarship and anthropological kinship and migration studies, this article develops a new and hybrid approach to international adoption as a complex social process that is both migratory and productive of kinship. Viewing international adoption as a form of migration reveals how the stated "push factors" and actual "pull factors" of international adoption do not align perfectly. Using an anthropological life course perspective, the article then explores how the experiences of these "migrants" and those close to them, over time, are better understood as racialization than solely the product of migration. Looking at adoptees' lives through a migration lens reveals some of the persistent discomforts that prevent open conversations about racial difference and minority status in an adoptive context, that is, one where children have been caused to migrate, recruited into families. This article draws on data from ethnographic fieldwork with Spanish parents who have adopted Peruvian children to argue that international adoption is a unique form of immigration that produces a minority category within a majority population.

Language in the Constitution of Kinship

Kinship has been an “essentially contested concept” in social and cultural anthropology. Nevertheless, linguistic and anthropological linguistic studies of kinship terminologies, grammar, and pragmatics have developed in parallel with anthropological ones. Lacking, however, is a broad overview of the range of linguistic variation across languages that would build a bridge between the linguistics and anthropology of kinship. Toward that end, this article explores the role of language in the constitution of kinship. It asks, on what linguistic resources do people of different cultures and languages draw in order to constitute kinship as an institution?

THE INFLUENCE OF MOBILE TECHNOLOGY CULTURE: BLIND TRUST, NAVET, OR SKEPTICISM

The bedrock of journalism ethics, the “fourth estate,” has traditionally been placed with publishers, managing editors, writers of print media, and network news broadcasters whom the public has been taught to rely upon for trusted verifiable sources of information. The Digital Age of the 21 st century has accelerated the demand for new voices and global borderless news producers; and audiences must now weigh the credibility and accuracy of content against the speed of information that continues to evolve exponentially. This research is an exploration of the concept of trust, also termed credibility of news sources, within social media. Furthermore, this inquiry considers whether a difference in behavior exists between Digital Natives when compared to an older population. While it was expected that younger respondents would more likely trust online sources outside of traditional media relationships, this study found that digital users responded similarly regardless of age. The discussion also includes the constructs that define the differences between the traditional anthropological kinship relationships from virtual relationships; and posits several social-cultural factors that influence trust behavior in virtual mediums, such as personalization, echo chambers, trolling, convenience, and efficiency verses complete accuracy and veracity as a result of always being connected.

Youth and the revolution in Egypt: what kinship tells us

Studies of youth in Arab societies have tended to posit and explore their social exclusion, marginalization and even de-politicization. Events sparked by the January 25 uprising in Egypt have reconstructed youth in a contradictory light, hailing them as new symbols of the nation. Careful consideration of current thinking in the anthropology of kinship and the nation, however, cautions the audience of the revolution to think twice. Taking for granted the ‘blurred boundaries’ between kinship and the nation, this paper suggests that the transformation from ‘totalizing and patricentric rule’ in Egypt evokes the symbolism of kinship and its wider metaphorical uses, manipulations and transformations. It uses kinship to re-examine the role of youth in the Egypt revolution, on the one hand, and the end of Hosni Mubarak's totalizing and patricentric regime, on the other. Firstly, it shows how a discursive concern with youth's place in the revolution is simultaneously and more strongly a concern with kinship. It then sheds light on the kinship idiom that has defined the Egyptian nation since its birth to its ‘demubarakization’. Finally, it shows how kinship and nation are mutually susceptible to manipulations and transformations in the aftermath of the revolution. The paper concludes by noting the relevance of kinship to contemporary political events.

Women and Gender in Tibetan Medicine

This introductory essay reviews gendered productions, transmissions and practices of Tibetan medicine; it both discusses the representation of women in medical literature and illustrations, and addresses Tibetan medicine’s relations with reproductive healthcare. So far, in the history of Tibetan medicine, called Sowa Rigpa (the 'science of healing', gso ba rig pa), most of its practitioners and authors have been men. Both the learning and practice of Sowa Rigpa and its associated texts have been closely connected to monastic institutions. This however, is only part of the (his)story. Sowa Rigpa was also learnt outside monasteries, within medical lineages, where knowledge and practice was often transmitted from father to son, uncle to nephew, and, as we shall see, from father to daughter, uncle to niece, and mother to daughter and son. Here we suggest the concept of the 'house' that derives from anthropological kinship theory as a useful and encompassing tool for analysing the transmission and practice of Tibetan medicine outside lay and monastic institutions, for it draws out the relations between what in Tibetan are termed medical lineages (sman gyi rgyud) and medical houses (sman grong). Further, we discuss whether, as has been suggested in earlier work by Gyatso and Havnevik (2005), Tibetan medicine has posed a relatively open field for women and, if so, how women’s status in medicine compares to their positions in other domains of Tibetan socio-cultural life and religious institutions.

Autoethnographic Expression and Cultural Translation in Tian Yage's Short Stories

AbstractThis article explores how three short stories set in 1980s Taiwan by the Taiwanese aboriginal writer Tian Yage (Tuobasi Tamapima) can be read as autoethnographic fiction as well as modern fiction, portraying contemporary Taiwanese aboriginal society caught between indigenous folkways and colonial modernity, and how the narrators of the stories tackle cultural translation. I begin with a discussion of Sun Ta-chuan's caution in 1991 as the Taiwan Aboriginal Movement was evolving into the Taiwan Aboriginal Cultural Revivalist Movement. After analysing anthropology's relationship with aborigines and imperialism, I apply Mary Louise Pratt's concept of autoethnography to the aboriginal activists' ethnographic studies and personal narratives. I argue that, prior to the Taiwan Aboriginal Cultural Revivalist Movement, Tian sought to construct an aboriginal cultural identity vis-à-vis the metropolis and to envision a cultural revival within the indigenous community, while he also explored the dilemmas and difficulties that arose from these. In the last section, I apply Homi K. Bhabha's theory of the untranslatable in cultural translation to further examine the language, the narrative voice and the form of both autoethnographic fiction and modern fiction in Tian's stories. I argue that writing Chinese-language modern fiction is a tacit recognition on Tian's part of the legacy of colonial modernity, but the purpose is to manoeuvre for a rethinking of the Taiwanese modern subject. As the narrative voice of his stories is one of an aboriginal speaking as a subject rather than an object, speaking with the backdrop of the aboriginal village as the locus of indigenous traditions vis-à-vis the dominant society, Tian is implicitly demanding aboriginal rights and a reconsideration of the Taiwanese modern subject as well as a shift in the paradigm of historiography on Taiwan.

Substance and Relationality: Blood in Contexts

This article examines the way bodily substance has been deployed in the anthropology of kinship. Analytically important in linking kinship with understandings of the body and person, substance has highlighted processes of change and transferability in kinship. Studies of organ donation and reproductive technologies in the West considered here challenge any simple dichotomy between idioms of a bounded individual body/person and immutable kinship relations in Euro-American contexts and more fluid, mutable bodies and relations elsewhere. Focusing on blood as a bodily substance of everyday significance with a peculiarly extensive symbolic repertoire, this article connects material properties of blood to the ways it flows between domains that are often kept apart. The analogies of money and ghosts illuminate blood's capacity to participate in, and move between, multiple symbolic and practical spheres—capacities that carry important implications for ideas and practices of relationality.

"We Don't Live like That Anymore": Native Peoples at the Smithsonian's Festival of American Folklife, 1970-1976

"We Don't Live like That Anymore":Native Peoples at the Smithsonian's Festival of American Folklife, 1970-1976 William S. Walker (bio) When American Indian activists occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay in November 1969, one of their central demands was for the federal government to cede the island for the construction of an "All-Indian University and Cultural Complex." The proposed complex reflected the desire on the part of the island's occupiers for Native control over the study of American Indian society, culture, and religion and was part of a burgeoning trend among American Indians both on reservations and in cities toward revitalizing Native cultures and reorienting scholarship on American Indians.1 It demonstrated the widespread attitude among Native peoples that conventional, white-dominated institutions did not fairly or accurately represent their lives and traditions. One such institution was the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, which had been one of the leading collectors and interpreters of Native "artifacts" since the late nineteenth century.2 In July 1970, while the occupation of Alcatraz continued, however, the Smithsonian experimented with a new approach to the exhibition of Native cultures, one that held the promise of fundamentally transforming the institution's relationship with American Indians. That summer, the Smithsonian's Festival of American Folklife, an annual event on the National Mall featuring tradition bearers from around the country, premiered a new American Indian program that combined presentations of Native traditions with panel discussions of contemporary social, political, and economic issues facing Native communities.3 More than three decades before the National Museum of the American Indian opened in Washington, the Smithsonian debuted a type of exhibition that involved American Indians interpreting their own histories and cultures. [End Page 479] This period of turmoil was the beginning of a long journey for the Smithsonian—and American museums, in general—toward new modes of exhibiting and interpreting Native histories and cultures. It was also the start of a journey for Native scholars and activists such as George Horse Capture, who found inspiration and empowerment through participation in the Alcatraz occupation and whose career path eventually led to an important position as a curator and administrator at the National Museum of the American Indian. Horse Capture was part of a rising generation that drew on the impetus that Alcatraz provided to pursue new cultural, political, and intellectual projects that ultimately moved Native scholars and activists to the center of national conversations about American Indians.4 From the 1960s onward, American Indian leaders, scholars, and communities embraced the social and political goal of self-determination at the same time as they embarked on cultural renewal and revitalization projects. Tribal museums and cultural centers often played important roles in these efforts, and, over time, particular tribes, cultural organizations, and individuals were able to construct powerful narratives of Native history and culture that challenged dominant representations at institutions such as the Smithsonian. Starting in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s, Smithsonian officials began responding to internal and external pressures to revise dated representations of American Indians in the institution's museums and initiate programs that drew more Native peoples into the process of collecting, preserving, and interpreting Native objects. This process took decades and was deeply contested, and it has been well documented elsewhere.5 Smithsonian officials not only wrestled with the major issue of if and how to create a separate American Indian museum but also were at the center of the repatriation controversy and debates over how to repair the discipline of anthropology's relationship with Native peoples and communities. Moreover, curators struggled with how best to incorporate Native histories into the broader narrative of American history. Despite the relatively large (and growing) body of literature on the Smithsonian and American Indians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, however, one of the Smithsonian's earliest and most intriguing projects in this broader effort to accommodate the shifting landscape of Native representation has not received much attention. The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife's American Indian [End Page 480] presentations offered an experimental, even radical, alternative to conventional museum displays. No doubt inspired by what was occurring among Native...

English ancestors: the moral possibilities of popular genealogy

This article considers the meanings of ordinary genealogy for English practitioners in East Anglia, and in the popular BBC television series Who do you think you are? It argues against the view, most forcibly expressed by Segalen, that genealogy is a ‘narcissistic‘ pursuit which compensates for individual or collective deracination in modernity. Contra Schneider, it draws attention to family history as a form of care for the dead, and a moral terrain on which the English living and dead are mutually constituted as relatives. This permits a reconsideration of the analysis of ‘self’ in the anthropology of kinship, and its relation to the categories of religion and secularity. Résumé L'article examine les significations de la généalogie ordinaire pour les généalogistes anglais d'East Anglia et dans la populaire émission de la BBC Who do you think you are? (Pour qui vous prenez-vous ?). L'auteure réfute l'idée, exprimée en particulier par Segalen, que la généalogie est une quête « narcissique » compensant le déracinement individuel et collectif dans le monde moderne. À l'opposé de Schneider, elle attire l'attention sur l'histoire familiale en tant que forme d'attention envers les morts et terrain moral sur lequel les vivants et les morts anglais sont constitués mutuellement en tant que parents. Il revisite ainsi l'analyse du « soi » dans l'anthropologie de la parenté et sa mise en relation avec les catégories de la religion et du séculier.

Feminism and the Anthropology of 'Development': Dilemmas in Rural Mexico

Feminist promotion of gender equity in development began in the 1970s, challenging development policy and practice and producing a rich body of debate and scholarship. Feminist anthropologists, through scholarship and activism, made important contributions to the project of reforming development. A recent anthropological critique of development, however, referred to as the anthropology of 'development', has raised important questions about anthropology's relationship to development, presenting new challenges to feminist anthropologists who would engage with development. This new approach, despite its attention to power, has not had questions about gender at its centre. Drawing on fieldwork in southeastern Campeche, Mexico, this paper explores challenges of a feminist anthropology of 'development', including pressures for engagement and disengagement, and the apparent contradiction between reflexive critiques of, and feminist engagements with, development.

‘She's just like my mother’: measuring motherhood in the context of the HIV epidemic in South Africa

This paper emerges from an ethnographic study conducted in Kwazulu-Natal in 2010 that explored the practices of a humanitarian intervention providing psychosocial support for and strengthening of the bonds between orphans and children made vulnerable by HIV and their non-biological guardians. Examining the interface between the programme and its participants, this paper focuses on the social politics that emerged out of the organisation's bond strengthening vision. Providing a platform for the expression of a diversity of perspectives, I demonstrate the complex ways in which interventionist intention is reworked at ground level and how an essentially humanitarian goal was ‘twisted’ into a tool with which to ‘measure’ motherhood. This paper hopes to move both beyond the limitations of the polarised literature around the impact of the epidemic on African families, and by directly addressing the radical HIV-related reworking of motherhood, open up alternative avenues for the emergence of a ‘new’ and more nuanced anthropology of kinship in Africa.

‘The Family of Denmark’ and ‘the Aliens’: Kinship Images in Danish Integration Politics

Applying insights from newer anthropological kinship studies, this article suggests that the current Danish immigration regime is based on and legitimized by a certain kind of ‘kinship images’ that are used and reproduced in Danish public and political discourses. Since 2002, every Danish citizen applying for family reunification with foreign spouses has been met with a ‘requirement of national attachment’, which basically distinguishes within the pool of citizens between the ‘real’ and the ‘not-quite-real’ Danes. The article discusses the possibilities of ‘integration’ in the current situation where Danish legislation and public discourses tend to distinguish between Danish citizens on the basis of their family history and national attachment. The article furthermore discusses different strategies of ‘kinning’ through which the ‘not-quite-real’ can aspire to become ‘real’ Danes.

Conclusion: Guinea-Bissau Yesterday… and Tomorrow

I had the pleasure of commenting on the articles in this issue when they were first presented as papers at the 2006 annual meeting of the African Studies Association, and the remarks that follow remain true to the character of those comments while acknowledging that the original papers have been reworked and updated. These provocative articles, coupled with my experiences doing ethnographic research in Guinea-Bissau—first among Manjaco in the village-cluster of Bassarel more than twenty years ago, and more recently (and briefly) among immigrant Manjaco in Lisbon—have led me to reflect upon anthropology's relationship to recent history, and to what anthropologists can contribute to an understanding of Guinea-Bissau: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Anthropology has a peculiar relationship to events, especially events that affect whole nations or regions. Anthropologists wish to be current, and we want to illuminate the big picture. And yet we have to acknowledge that there are inherent constraints in our work: the investigations we engage in are usually time consuming, our reports are therefore always belated, and our conclusions are the product of an intimate engagement with relatively few people who are, moreover, often situated on the periphery or at the margins of the state. Thus, even when the articles in this issue were first presented, “today” was already history because their focus was on the period after the war of 1998–99, which began as an attempt by the military to oust President Vieira and ended up as a protracted conflict (largely restricted to the capital, Bissau) that destroyed important infrastructure, caused NGOs to cease operations throughout the country, and led to the mass exodus of at least a quarter-million people from the capital city to seek refuge as “guests” in rural villages (see Vigh 2006).

China Analysis

Two recent works reintroduce China into the anthropology of kinship. Cai Hua and Laurent Barry are both students of Francoise Heritier, who at the College de France has revitalised our understanding of the systems of African kinship. Their two books, similarly constructed, devote considerable space to the systems of the Han. The anthropology of kinship, a discipline founded in 1870 by Lewis Henry Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, and revived in 1949 by the th...

The primal path to kinship: a critical review of Bernard Chapais, Primeval Kinship: How Pair-Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society

Like other major aspects of sociality, kinship receives distinctive treatments from biologists and anthropologists. For anthropologists, the study of kinship has traditionally been an arena for documenting cultural diversity, and about finding patterns in the midst of, and trajectories through, that diversity. Throughout most of anthropology’s disciplinary history, kinship was thought to hold at least one key to understanding human cultures, both to how those cultures are related to one another and to understanding the structure and function of other large-scale cultural institutions, such as those associated with religion or economic exchange. By contrast, mention kinship to your average biologist and you’ll likely be directed to research focused on Hymnoptera and Termita, and models addressing general evolutionary puzzles—for example, the problem of evolutionary altruism and the phenomenon of reproductive specialization—that have been applied paradigmatically to the social insects, with secondary applications to creatures more obviously like us, such as mammals in general and nonhuman primates in particular. The trans-disciplinary contrast here has been exacerbated by a recent, decidedly anti-biological turn in the study of kinship in anthropology. Influential internal critiques of the study of kinship as involving little more than the ethnocentric projection of cultural forms from the West to the Rest, such as those of David Schneider 1972; Schneider 1984, identified biological conceptions of kinship as lying at the core of such a projection: while we conceptualize our kinship structures in terms of notions of reproduction, shared biological substances, and genetic codes, this is not what one finds in other societies. On this view, the traditional claim that kinship was a universal feature of human societies that had developed over time from more primitive to contemporary forms turns out to be little more than a projective fantasy in the minds of anthropologists. This critique led to a decided lull in kinship studies that displaced the study of kinship from the centre of the

Citizens, Experts, and Anthropologists: Finding Paths in Environmental Policy

The papers in this special section address anthropology's relationship to the creation and implementation of environmental policy. The authors describe anthropologists attempting to flatten hierarchical decision making by acting as cultural brokers who must navigate public advocacy, multidisciplinary research and collaborations with environmental managers, natural resource exploiters, or government agencies. The essay describes how an anthropology that builds trust via holistic ethnography, ethics, and credibility contributes to policy success and allows for policy collaboration to enhance anthropology as a discipline. Involving students in policy will help them build skills and confidence necessary to engage policy throughout their careers.

Etienne van de Walle, ed. African Households: Censuses and Surveys. Amonk, N.Y., and London: M.E. Sharpe, 2006. xxxix + 247 pp. Figures. Maps. Tables. References. Index. $104.95. Cloth.

Etienne van de Walle, ed. African Households: Censuses and Surveys. Amonk, N.Y, and London: M.E. Sharpe, 2006. xxxix + 247 pp. Figures. Maps. Tables. References. Index. $104.95. Cloth. Peter Laslett first showed us the sociological information available in historical census data. African census and survey data are rarely employed to such ends, so the African Census Analysis Project, a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania and African institutions, arranged an Internet conference on African households in November 2001. These are the published results. Here the is merely a unit of enumeration. It generally contains members of at least one family, plus, often, unrelated others. Censuses take one of two definitions of the household. Francophone researchers tend to adopt a de jure, or social, definition of the household, thus including those who are absent on the enumeration day, while Anglophone researchers prefer a de facto, or residential, definition, and count only those physically present. The former runs the risk of double counts, while die latter tends to manufacture extra households and female heads. All of this is explained in van de Walle's masterful introduction. He notes that African censuses are weak when it comes to coding for intrahousehold relationships. In consequence, grandchildren, children's spouses, and domestic employees are often lumped together under the impenetrable category of other relative. The most useful censuses are those that link husbands and wives, and mothers to their children. Three of the chapters here examine the merits of various censuses and surveys. Van de Walle and Gaye's comparison of the Senegalese and Gambian censuses finds that Senegal's de jure census, just by including questions on marriage type and the rank of polygynous wives, is far more informative than the Gambia's more elaborate de facto census. Next, Labov shows the limitations of Tanzania's minimalist de facto census, which, however, does reveal that Tanzania's solitary females are usually separated, divorced, or widowed, and that the urban ones are more likely to be household heads than their rural counterparts. Then Hosegood and Timaeus's work on KwaZulu, Natal, shows how their time-consuming de jure survey accurately captures the emic realities of household composition, the high levels of individual and household mobility, the number of nonresidential members, and memberships in multiple households. Vimard and Fassassi's chapter on the 1975-98 structural changes in Cote d'lvoire's households is the only one with a central focus upon economics. They show that the recent increase in family breakups has less to do with a drift toward nuclear families than with households' relative prosperity. Single-parent households and coresident relatives are now permanent social fixtures. Four of the chapters focus upon children. Townsend, Madhavan, Collinson, and Garenne's work in South Africa's Northern Province successfully traces personal relationships within and across household boundaries by training enumerators to use the six basic anthropological kinship terms. …

The Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries (review)

James D. Faubion (ed.) Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. 277 pp. This is a book about ethics of affect as manifested in kinship relations. James Faubion asked a number of one-time doctoral students of anthropology at Rice University (Texas) and two like-minded colleagues to write essays about their own personal experiences of kinship. resulting collection is very welcome as it not only constitutes an interesting read in its own right but is also a contribution for present renewal of debates in anthropology of kinship. Each of contributors chose to focus on some aspect of their own kinship history which they somehow problematized. result is a number of fascinating essays dealing with what one might call margins of kinship:1 forgotten' relatives, manipulations of law of kinship, clandestine adoptions, love and hate, class and kinship, sibling cooperation and rivalry, sexual preference and legal family, etc., all accumulate to bring out a marvellously varied picture of middle-class kinship in United States. Indeed, although a number of contributors expound interestingly on their family histories in diverse places of origin around world (Eastern Europe, North Africa, Indian subcontinent, Trinidad), what they tell us are stories of kinship as lived in America. As a matter of fact, whilst writing their accounts, most of contributors not born in United States were undertaking a move to permanent residence there-to use Nityanand Deckha's words, they were becoming new citizens of West (153). book resonates with this sense of America as land of success and liberation which merges with authors' own pride in their individual success within academia as doctoral students. Karim, for example, tells us of her diasporic urge to remake myself into a subject who transcended kinship ties and was not bound by local and national habits and prejudices-a cosmopolitan subject. (118) Reddy, Deckha and Youngblood all make similar statements. Nevertheless, their location is decidedly in North America, which belies their cosmopolitanism. Indeed, not all venues and not all classes can grant aura of cosmopolitan subjecthood. Cosmopolitanism is a paradoxically local privilege that only some can exercise when they are accepted by certain countries and belong to certain classes. As Susan Ossman puts it elsewhere, The abstract, far-sighted nature of this cosmopolitan vision can easily lead us to ignore actual movements of people (2006: 561). In essays, logic of marginality2 is put to work wonderfully to reveal both relation between kinship and other aspects of social life and relation between people's discursive practices and those aspects of their lives which they know and share but which they normally have no means to speak of. Clearly, judging from emotional depth of accounts, for every single one of contributors, exercise came to have a self-revelatory, exutorial function. Thus, book is both a good read and a comment on how anthropological examination can breakthrough convention. Denise Youngblood (presently editor at CountryWatch, Houston) writes an essay about her family background in Trinidad, dealing mostly with issue of marriage across race and its relation to ethnicity, nation, and color. She shows us how the ideology of cosmopolitanism in Trinidad relates to production of both family and nation (48). She turns interestingly to Bourdieu's notion of symbolic capital to show how marital and extra-marital sexual relations were used to produce family in a context where, due to dramatic boom and bust cycles which characterize Trinidad's economic history, wealth was seen as rather transient. According to her account, intermarriage3 is actually encouraged in Trinidad, as it produces a hybrid identity which furthers nation's sense of itself as cosmopolitan. …

Kinship and Family: An Anthropological Reader (review)

Robert Parkin & Linda Stone (eds.), and Family: An Anthropological Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004.496 pp. stated purpose of this collection of readings is to trace ...the development of mainstream kinship theory... (viii) and to provide intellectual genealogy of its treatment. To accomplish this purpose, two original contributions and 22 previously published materials are provided along with a general introduction, four separate section introductions, a glossary, and an index. contributions are organized into two major parts: as Social Structure: and Alliance and as Culture, Process, and Agency. first part primarily concerns anthropological kinship from its inception to the 1970s while the latter focuses upon its decline and subsequent resurgence since then. Each part contains two sections. Part One is divided into Descent and Marriage and Terminology and Affinal Alliance. second part is divided into the sections; The Demise and Revival of Kinship and Contemporary Directions in Kinship. Although loosely organized along historical lines, the readings do not provide the reader with a full historical tracing of influential thoughts and concerns in kinship. selection of materials is fairly restricted. In the first part, the focus is upon descent and alliance theories. Here, early as well as post1970 materials are included to principally provide a critique of these theories. second part principally deals with Schneider's critique of kinship and the contemporary focus upon culture as a symbolic system in understanding fundamental social relations. In this part, the editors see culture ...as a better way of understanding indigenous notions of kinship or 'relatedness' than the more analytical schools of the (ix). There is little attention paid to recent evolutionary biological explanations of human social behavior. In any collection of readings, one expects that editorial decisions to include or exclude materials will not agree completely with those someone else may choose. However, it was still surprising to me to discover that writings of past luminaries such as Morgan, Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown, were absent. While the editors have included some interesting readings by authors not as well known, the absence of the writings of important contributors to the history of kinship, Morgan's work, for example, seems inexcusable. editors obviously recognize the importance of his work since there is a detailed discussion of Morgan's contribution to kinship in the general introduction. Approximately 20% of the twenty-page general introduction is directly concerned with Morgan. There are also descriptions of the reactions to his ideas in this introduction. Furthermore, throughout the book there are over three dozen references to Morgan's work and influence. Since Morgan's contribution is clearly significant, why isn't there a sample of his work? Isn't it appropriate for a student to see original material and let it speak for itself? An original document would be preferable to lengthy references to the work by an editor. Isn't the purpose of a Reader to allow the student direct access to the ideas of the original author? editorial role, it seems to me, should be primarily choosing the readings and providing the necessary background for this material. It should not be to write exegeses of the significant contributions to kinship that have been omitted from the collection of writings. Those should be kept for a separate book. reason Morgan's and others' writings have been omitted from the collection of readings can be deduced from the editors' choice of readings for the first section. This section, misleadingly titled Descent and Marriage, begins with a discussion of social groups and a critique of Morgan's evolutionary scheme by Robert Lowie. He, using a range of ethnographic examples, argues that the distribution of matrilineal and patrilineal systems is not due to some simple evolutionary sequence or differences in the intellectual capabilities of people but is the expression of responses to cultural environments. …

A Note on Transnational Consanguinity, or, Kinship in the Age of Terrorism

Introduction There is no need to remind my readers that recent studies of kinship in anthropology have turned a number of interesting corners. The self-interrogatory that British social anthropology initiated in the wake of Asian and African decolonization, involving scholars such as Gellner, Beattie, Needham, and others-and a bitter bickering among them-reached a high point with Schneider's now classic, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984) and more importantly, the feminist intervention through a series of significant contributions, and also the intervention of the French structural Marxism.1 Through much debate over past practice on over-privileging kinship relations as a social relation in dominance in the primitive societies, the assumption that kinship provided a base of society and the taken-for-granted, or in Marilyn Strathern's words, unthinking manner (1992b: 5) by which anthropologists approached kinship came to be not only openly criticized, but also, so to speak, publicly executed. Major universities stopped offering undergraduate courses such as kinship 1, kinship 2, and advanced kinship, leading to the current constitution of graduate population that has never heard of agnatic or cognatic, let alone avunculate. Things such as the Nuer ghost marriage, Nayar tali ritual, Yapese tabinau, Iban bilek, levirate, and parallel or cross cousins, are somewhat relegated to the museum showcase. In the recent decade or so, however, following the momentary demise, kinship studies in anthropology appears to have been revitalized. Feminist anthropology-unlike the Structural Marxism that disappeared along with Louis Althusser-contributed enormously to this effect, but also the intervention of science studies that set focus on new technologies of reproduction and pronatalism joined in the journey for critique of kinship studies as its fellow-traveler.2 Indeed, their contribution to recent revival or transformation of kinship studies into the area of exciting inquiry that can successfully bridge science and nature, gender and power, has been remarkable. This transformation is accompanied by a number of shifts. First, there is the shift of location of the studies of kinship from the non-west to the west. The second is the shift of expertise required for kinship studies, from multiple-role generalist (as in the case of classical anthropology) to a division of labor and hence, collaboration among highly specialized experts (Strathern 2001, e.g.). The third is recognized in the shift of emphasis from the encoding of systems to the micro documentation of individually oriented strategies, interpretations, and experiences. One powerful, yet under-estimated effect of the recent impact of science studies is that it reminds us that there is a strong continuity between the findings of the traditional kinship studies and the cutting-edge technologies of kinship. For example, in Charis Thompson's fascinating report on a Californian infertility clinic, clients craft their own ways of interpreting closeness of relation by selectively deploying categories such as genes and ethnicity; surrogacy involving brother-sister pregnancy (a man's sperm and his wife's egg delivered through the pregnancy of his sister) is carefully distanced by the implication of incest, yet relative closeness or blood tie between the donor and the receiver (or the surrogate) always appears to be a deeply significant factor for all the parties involved (Thompson 2001; see also Cussins 1998). Incest, no. Blood, yes. This, we may note, is also the fundamental and age-old principle of Korean kinship. Besides, this is no secret that surrogacy was practiced for centuries in the form of concubinage when a man wanted to have the heir that his wife could not produce. Or indeed, when a woman could not have a child-as in the Nuer ghost marriage (Evans-Pritchard 1940)-surrogacy was practiced. Widow inheritance or sister marriage comes to a close analogy to the idea of soliciting a surrogacy or egg-donation from the wife's sister. …