Politics Of Kinship Research Articles

Identity in Flux: Finding Boris Kolomanovich in the Interstices of Medieval European History

The politics of kinship and of monarchy in medieval eastern Europe are typically constructed within the framework of the modern nation-state, read back into the past. The example of Boris Kolomanovich, instead, highlights the horizontal interconnectivity of medieval Europe and its neighbors and demonstrates the malleability of individual identity within kinship webs, as well as the creation of situational kinship networks to advance individuals’ goals.

Politik Kekerabatan dan Kualitas Kandidat di Sulawesi Selatan

This paper aims to elaborate the increase of political kinship phenomenon in South Sulawesi, especially from the perspective of political legacy of a candidate from particular political family. Utilizing a qualitative research method, the paper reveals that in kinship politics, interest in politics is transferred through political discussions within family, activities in political parties and social organizations. There is also process of transferring networks and family brands that will help a candidate to gain public supports. This paper also reveals that direct elections of local leaders and majority votes of proportional open list election system open more opportunities for political family to increase more power as family members are being elected in political leaderships. However, the quality of candidates tends to decrease as shown by relatively younger candidates with less political experience. The new political parties and the lack of regeneration provide opportunities for the members of political family to gain power in their early age. This paper suggests that the quality of candidate is an important feature of kinship politics which will enrich the previous studies in the characteristics of kinship politics as argued by Hess, Casey, Asako as well as Dal Bo and Querobin.

Autochthony and “Family”: The Politics of Kinship in White Kenyan Bids to Belong

For white Kenyans descended from colonial settlers, the question of how to establish their right to belong in Kenya provokes considerable anxiety. Some whites attempt to suture themselves to Kenya through kinship narratives that reach backward in time, as well as laterally across races. Whites’ relationship to colonial ancestors indexes a bloodline on Kenyan soil, a version of autochthony that some hope will establish entitlement to land or broader legitimacy as cultural citizens. Many also posit a kind of kinship with their Afro-Kenyan domestic staff based on affective ties and, sometimes, the time-depth of their families’ association. Both narratives invoke white Kenyans’ sense that they are important stewards or patrons in Kenya, aspiring to write their belonging into Kenyan history and establish themselves as part of the nation. Yet both kinship narratives re-invoke problematic racial hierarchies.

Michael Young, the Institute of Community Studies, and the Politics of Kinship.

This article examines the East London-based Institute of Community Studies, and its founder, Michael Young, to show that sociology and social research offered avenues for left-wing political expression in the 1950s. Young, who had previously been Head of the Labour Party Research Department during the Attlee government, drew upon existing currents of psychological and sociological research to emphasize the continuing relevance of the extended family in industrial society and to offer a model of socialist citizenship, solidarity and mutual support not tied to productive work. Young and his colleagues at the Institute of Community Studies promoted the supportive kinship networks of the urban working class, and an idealized conception of the relationships between women, to suggest that family had been overlooked by the left and should be reclaimed as a progressive force. The article shows that the Institute's sociological work was informed by a pre-existing concern with family as a model for cooperative socialism, and suggests that sociology and social research should be seen as important sources of political commentary for scholars of post-war politics.

Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship

Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship

Ritual Formation of Peaceful Publics: Sacrifice and Syncretism in South Sudan (1991-2005)

During the most violent days of Sudan’s civil war in the 1990s, a peacemaking initiative known as People-to-People Peacemaking emerged to address ongoing conflict perpetuated by rival Dinka and Nuer rebel movements. The ritual of bull sacrifice, a central feature of the peace process, sealed peace between Nuer and Dinka and formed public alliances between church leaders and kinship authorities represented by elders and chiefs. Joining indigenous and Christian practices in a single ritual space allowed inclusive participation by a variety of actors, many of whom interpreted the ritual quite differently. Utilizing various methods of ritual analysis, this essay suggests that a seemingly religious ritual enabled new forms of political action, previously unavailable through rebel movements’ politics or kinship politics. While rebel leaders often perpetuated political power by manipulating ethnic sentiments, elders and Christian leaders developed forms of politics based on peaceful coexistence and shared identity between Dinka and Nuer.

Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship. By Kristi Brian. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012.Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption. By Laura Briggs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewReframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship. By Kristi Brian. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption. By Laura Briggs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.Kim Park NelsonKim Park NelsonMinnesota State University at Moorhead Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 39, Number 2Winter 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/673127 Views: 82Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship by Kristi Brian

Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship by Kristi Brian

Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship. KristiBrian. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. 214 pp.

Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship. KristiBrian. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. 214 pp.

Race and Power in the Shadows of Family Making Kristi Brian . 2012 .Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship. Philadelphia, PA : Temple University Press .

Race and Power in the Shadows of Family Making Kristi Brian . 2012 .<i>Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship</i>. Philadelphia, PA : Temple University Press .

Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship (review)

From 1945 through 2004, the number of intercountry adoptions in the United States increased steadily as families increasingly considered ways to expand outside of biological relations. Initially, this phenomenon was linked to a more sentimentalized vision of childhood and the social chaos amid the aftermath of World War II. Although some postwar adoptees were of Japanese descent, most were of European descent and could be accepted as a natural part of the family. Two US organizations, the League for Orphan Victims in Europe (LOVE) and the American Joint Committee for Assisting Japanese-American Orphans, helped to create an infrastructure to address the needs of orphaned children, many of whom were fathered by US soldiers.Beginning in 1955, transracial adoptions began to take offas Korea, also recovering from the social chaos of war, placed more children for intercountry than any other country. Despite these overwhelming trends, the last several years have seen the numbers of adoptions decline from a high of 22,991 in 2004 to only 11,058 in 2010.1 Also changed are the rationale for adoption, the countries sending children out for adoption, United Nations' and state legislation, and popular and scholarly understandings of adoption. Kristi Brian's compelling book, Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship, focuses on one form of transracial/transnational adoption-the of Korean children by white American parents (6). Known as Korean-American Adoption (KAA), this form of has declined in numbers since the 1990s but has still resulted in 160,000 Korean children being placed in US families, most of whom are white. In interviews, Brian asks involved in the process about how they navigate US understandings of race and kinship, and offers her reflections on the formerly overshadowed and silenced participants in this quiet migration (18).Over the last decade, scholars of intercountry have analyzed through post-colonial relationships, cultural identity, and understandings of race and power (e.g., Eng 2003, Volkman 2005, Dorow 2006, Kim 2010). Noting that adoptive kin making in the United States must always contend with racialized social policies and legislation (17), Brian utilizes a critical race feminist methodology that promises to probe the micro to better understand their dialectical relationship with social structures and hierarchies at the macro level (16) and the ways in which certain knowledge has been subjugated within practices and discourse (17). Brian lays bare the structural inequalities inherent in the transnational practice of KAA, including the new racism of today...that preserves white supremacy in a mostly 'kinder and gentler' way (175). Reframing Transracial Adoption ultimately argues that the of overseas from Korea, which began with the lure of 1950s American prosperity, will hopefully come to a close through collaborative efforts to move beyond histories of denial, racialized rescue missions, and the privatization of the (176).Brian effectively analyzes the inherently political act of family building. In Chapter 1, she describes why and also addresses the matters of adoption. Keeping the focus on KAA, she provides an important and comprehensive overview of the history of this form of transracial and transnational adoption. Beginning in the 1950s, Henry Holt institutionalized his child rescue mission rooted in notions of Christian salvation and the perceived best interests of children devastated by war and related catastrophe. These salvation narratives, combined with Holt's charisma, patriotism, and New World optimism, led him to found an agency and establish the formal networks that would enable the transfer of children from Korea to the US (13). KAA was made popular at a time in which the stigma of unwed motherhood, and the lack of reproductive services constituted an adoption mandate. …

The Politics of Patronage and the Politics of Kinship: The Meeting of the Ways

Scholarship on patronage in the ancient Mediterranean world abounds but is not unanimous in its understanding of how the patronage system worked, how it was present in the pre-Roman Greek world, and what were the differences, if any, in how it functioned in the Roman West and East. Moreover, little is known about how the system worked among non-elites. In two of Paul's relationships, with Philemon and with Phoebe (Rom 16:1-2), we can see the informal patronage system at work among friends with common community ties.

Philippines Kinship Politics and Women's Political Participation

Philippines Kinship Politics and Women's Political Participation

Stalin and the Politics of Kinship: Practices of Collective Punishment, 1920s–1940s

At a Kremlin reception on 7 November 1937, Stalin declared that enemies should be eliminated as kinship groups: “And we will eliminate every such enemy [of the state and peoples of the USSR]… . we will eliminate his entire lineage (rod), his family! … Here's to the final extermination of all enemies, both themselves and their clan (rod).”1In the Soviet Union, political enemies were rounded up in groups of kin, family ties marked people as disloyal, and “counterrevolutionary” charges against one person threatened also his or her relatives. The Soviet security police or OGPU-NKVD issued detailed instructions regarding the punishment that should be assigned to the spouses, children, siblings, parents, and even ex-wives of state enemies. Campaigns against anti-Soviet elements rounded up kinship groups, whether these counterrevolutionaries were identified as so-called kulaks, enemies of the people, or traitors to the motherland. To be sure, the collective punishment of kin did not accompany every act of Stalinist repression. The regime's draconian criminal legislation also constituted a form of terror, yet persons sentenced under such laws as those punishing theft of socialist property were dealt with individually; their relatives were not targeted. Only the “politicals,” that is, people accused of disloyalty, treason, or other counterrevolutionary activities experienced terror as family units. It was the collective punishment of kin that made political repression under Stalin truly a mass phenomenon.

The Nation and its Shadow Imagining Subversion in Post-‘911’ Pakistan and Holland

The 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington have led to renewed public debates on national identity in various countries. The A. focuses on two of them: Pakistan and the Netherlands. Starting from the assumption that the nation is a project of liberation from a pre-nation past, he argues that these debates necessarily imply an increased reflection on the nature of this pre-nation past, which is called the nation's shadow. In Pakistan, the nation is imagined as an Islamic liberation from feudalism, kinship solidarity, and ethnic loyalties. In Holland, the nation is imagined as secular and opposed to a Dutch history of pillarization in which religious authorities acted as intermediaries between the citizen and the state. What are considered the loyalties and sentiments of the past are allowed in private. However, they also inform the imagination of a subversive domain that encroaches upon the nation. Hence, subversion politics in Pakistan is imagined as a form of illicit kinship politics, whereas in Holland subversion is linked to religious - primarily Islamic - mentalities.

Photos in Wiradjuri Biscuit Tins: Negotiating Relatedness and Validating Colonial Histories

ABSTRACTTins, cardboard boxes and albums hold one of the most prized and jealously guarded of all Wiradjuri Aboriginal ‘material’ possessions, the family photos. They are used to tell and recall stories, introduce people to kin, as items of exchange and as important statements of identity and belonging in the spatial and temporal politics of kinship. In this ethnographic study of Indigenous photo collections in south‐east Australia, I argue that photos have the capacity to extend the face‐to‐face nature of kin‐relatedness through time and space; they are important in negotiations of sociality; and they validate the past in contexts in which recourse to both myth and history have been constrained.

Postcolonial Sun Dancing at Wakpamni Lake

Postcolonial theory assists in making apparent the essentialism of self and other that characterizes Eurocentric colonial discourse. A North American postcolonial hermeneutic is proposed that focuses on the oral voice of tradition embodied in the lived experience of an indigenous community. Postcolonial interpretation entails an interpreter entering into ritual relationship with a traditional community so that the hegemonic pattern of dominant-culture discourse is circumvented. The traditional practices of the Wakpamni Lake community on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota provide the local context for understanding Sun Dancing as a postcolonial undertaking. The postcolonial character of Sun Dancing at Wakpamni Lake is identified through four interrelated features described as four ways of respect. This Sun Dancing expresses a religious praxis, described as a politics of kinship, that contradicts the colonizing power relations rooted in European American cultural heritage. This politics of kinship offers the dominant culture a way to intercultural relationship that disarms the entrenched essentialism of self and other.

Postcolonial sun dancing at Wakpamni Lake

Postcolonial theory assists in making apparent the essentialism of “self” and “other” that characterizes Eurocentric colonial discourse. A North American Postcolonial hermeneutic is proposed that focuses on the oral voice of tradition embodied in the lived experience of an indigenous community. Postcolonial interpretation entails an interpreter entering into ritual relationship with a traditional community so that the hegemonic pattern of dominant-culture discourse is circumvented. The traditional practices of the Wakpamni Lake community on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota provide the local context for understanding Sun Dancing as a postcolonial undertaking. The postcolonial character of Sun Dancing at Wakpamni Lake is identified through four interrelated features described as four ways of respect. This Sun Dancing Expresses a religious praxis, described as a politics of kinship, that contradicts the colonizing power relations rooted in European American cultural heritage. This politics of kinship offers the dominant culture a way to intercultural relationship that disarms the entrenched essentialism of “self” and “other.”

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Robert M. Ariss with Gary Dowsett. Against Death: The Practice of Living with HIV. Thomas Barfield. (ed.). The Dictionary of Anthropology. Donna Birdwell‐Pheasant and D. Lawrence‐Zuñiga. (eds.). House Life‐Space, Place and Family in Europe. Jan van Bremen and Akitoshi Shimizu. (eds). Anthropology and Colonialism in Asia and Oceania: Reflections on the Japanese, Dutch, Chinese and Indian Experiences. Donald L. Donham. History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropology. Derek Freeman. The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of her Samoan Research. Michael W. Young. Malinowski's Kiriwina: Fieldwork Photography 1915–1918. Susan F. Hirsch. Pronouncing and Preserving Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African Islamic Court. Michael Humphrey. Islam, Multiculturalism and Transnationalism: from the Lebanese Diaspora. Richard Jenkins, (ed.). Questions of Competence: Culture, Classification and Intellectual Disability. Sarah Joseph. Interrogating Culture: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Social Theory. Thousand Oaks Verena Keck. (ed.). Common Worlds and Single Lives: Constituting Knowledge in Pacific Societies. Andrew B. Kipnis. Producing Guanxi: Sentiment, Self and Subculture in a North China Village. George E. Marcus. (ed.). Critical Anthropology Now: Unexpected Contexts, Shifting Constituencies, Changing Agendas. Anne Maxwell. Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the ‘Native’ and the Making of European Identities. Lise McKean. Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement. Virginia D. Nazarea. (ed.). Ethnoecology: Situated Knowledge/Located Lives. Mark Nuttall. Protecting the Arctic: Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Survival. Rowena Robinson. Conversion, Continuity and Change: Lived Christianity in Southern Goa. Mena Roces. Women, Power, and Kinship Politics: Female Power in Post‐War Philippines. Dorothy Shineberg. The People Trade: Pacific Islander Laborers and New Caledonia, 1865–1930. Daya Somasundaram. Scarred Minds: The Psychological Impact of War on Sri Lankan Tamils. Mandy Thomas. Dreams in the Shadows: Vietnamese‐Australian Lives in Transition. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. 1999. 220pp., index, bibliog., $A38.43 (Hc.), ISBN 1–86448‐862‐X. Andrew Walker. The Legend of the Golden Boat: Regulation, Trade and Traders in the Borderlands of Laos, Thailand, China and Burma.

Mina Roces, Women, Power, and Kinship Politics: Female Power in Post-War Philippines (Manila: Anvil Publishing Inc., 2000), 214 pp.

Mina Roces, Women, Power, and Kinship Politics: Female Power in Post-War Philippines (Manila: Anvil Publishing Inc., 2000), 214 pp.