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6 - The Stuff of Kinship
- from Part I - Opening Frameworks
- Edited by Sandra Bamford, University of Toronto
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- The Cambridge Handbook of Kinship
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- 22 April 2019
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- 02 May 2019, pp 133-150
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Contributors
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- By Rose Teteki Abbey, K. C. Abraham, David Tuesday Adamo, LeRoy H. Aden, Efrain Agosto, Victor Aguilan, Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Charanjit Kaur AjitSingh, Dorothy B E A Akoto, Giuseppe Alberigo, Daniel E. Albrecht, Ruth Albrecht, Daniel O. Aleshire, Urs Altermatt, Anand Amaladass, Michael Amaladoss, James N. Amanze, Lesley G. Anderson, Thomas C. Anderson, Victor Anderson, Hope S. Antone, María Pilar Aquino, Paula Arai, Victorio Araya Guillén, S. Wesley Ariarajah, Ellen T. Armour, Brett Gregory Armstrong, Atsuhiro Asano, Naim Stifan Ateek, Mahmoud Ayoub, John Alembillah Azumah, Mercedes L. García Bachmann, Irena Backus, J. Wayne Baker, Mieke Bal, Lewis V. Baldwin, William Barbieri, António Barbosa da Silva, David Basinger, Bolaji Olukemi Bateye, Oswald Bayer, Daniel H. Bays, Rosalie Beck, Nancy Elizabeth Bedford, Guy-Thomas Bedouelle, Chorbishop Seely Beggiani, Wolfgang Behringer, Christopher M. Bellitto, Byard Bennett, Harold V. Bennett, Teresa Berger, Miguel A. Bernad, Henley Bernard, Alan E. Bernstein, Jon L. Berquist, Johannes Beutler, Ana María Bidegain, Matthew P. Binkewicz, Jennifer Bird, Joseph Blenkinsopp, Dmytro Bondarenko, Paulo Bonfatti, Riet en Pim Bons-Storm, Jessica A. Boon, Marcus J. Borg, Mark Bosco, Peter C. Bouteneff, François Bovon, William D. Bowman, Paul S. Boyer, David Brakke, Richard E. Brantley, Marcus Braybrooke, Ian Breward, Ênio José da Costa Brito, Jewel Spears Brooker, Johannes Brosseder, Nicholas Canfield Read Brown, Robert F. Brown, Pamela K. Brubaker, Walter Brueggemann, Bishop Colin O. Buchanan, Stanley M. Burgess, Amy Nelson Burnett, J. Patout Burns, David B. Burrell, David Buttrick, James P. Byrd, Lavinia Byrne, Gerado Caetano, Marcos Caldas, Alkiviadis Calivas, William J. Callahan, Salvatore Calomino, Euan K. Cameron, William S. Campbell, Marcelo Ayres Camurça, Daniel F. Caner, Paul E. Capetz, Carlos F. Cardoza-Orlandi, Patrick W. Carey, Barbara Carvill, Hal Cauthron, Subhadra Mitra Channa, Mark D. Chapman, James H. Charlesworth, Kenneth R. Chase, Chen Zemin, Luciano Chianeque, Philip Chia Phin Yin, Francisca H. Chimhanda, Daniel Chiquete, John T. Chirban, Soobin Choi, Robert Choquette, Mita Choudhury, Gerald Christianson, John Chryssavgis, Sejong Chun, Esther Chung-Kim, Charles M. A. Clark, Elizabeth A. Clark, Sathianathan Clarke, Fred Cloud, John B. Cobb, W. Owen Cole, John A Coleman, John J. Collins, Sylvia Collins-Mayo, Paul K. Conkin, Beth A. Conklin, Sean Connolly, Demetrios J. Constantelos, Michael A. Conway, Paula M. Cooey, Austin Cooper, Michael L. Cooper-White, Pamela Cooper-White, L. William Countryman, Sérgio Coutinho, Pamela Couture, Shannon Craigo-Snell, James L. Crenshaw, David Crowner, Humberto Horacio Cucchetti, Lawrence S. Cunningham, Elizabeth Mason Currier, Emmanuel Cutrone, Mary L. Daniel, David D. Daniels, Robert Darden, Rolf Darge, Isaiah Dau, Jeffry C. Davis, Jane Dawson, Valentin Dedji, John W. de Gruchy, Paul DeHart, Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards, Miguel A. De La Torre, George E. Demacopoulos, Thomas de Mayo, Leah DeVun, Beatriz de Vasconcellos Dias, Dennis C. Dickerson, John M. Dillon, Luis Miguel Donatello, Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev, Susanna Drake, Jonathan A. Draper, N. Dreher Martin, Otto Dreydoppel, Angelyn Dries, A. J. Droge, Francis X. D'Sa, Marilyn Dunn, Nicole Wilkinson Duran, Rifaat Ebied, Mark J. Edwards, William H. Edwards, Leonard H. Ehrlich, Nancy L. Eiesland, Martin Elbel, J. Harold Ellens, Stephen Ellingson, Marvin M. Ellison, Robert Ellsberg, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Eldon Jay Epp, Peter C. Erb, Tassilo Erhardt, Maria Erling, Noel Leo Erskine, Gillian R. Evans, Virginia Fabella, Michael A. Fahey, Edward Farley, Margaret A. Farley, Wendy Farley, Robert Fastiggi, Seena Fazel, Duncan S. Ferguson, Helwar Figueroa, Paul Corby Finney, Kyriaki Karidoyanes FitzGerald, Thomas E. FitzGerald, John R. Fitzmier, Marie Therese Flanagan, Sabina Flanagan, Claude Flipo, Ronald B. Flowers, Carole Fontaine, David Ford, Mary Ford, Stephanie A. Ford, Jim Forest, William Franke, Robert M. Franklin, Ruth Franzén, Edward H. Friedman, Samuel Frouisou, Lorelei F. Fuchs, Jojo M. Fung, Inger Furseth, Richard R. Gaillardetz, Brandon Gallaher, China Galland, Mark Galli, Ismael García, Tharscisse Gatwa, Jean-Marie Gaudeul, Luis María Gavilanes del Castillo, Pavel L. Gavrilyuk, Volney P. Gay, Metropolitan Athanasios Geevargis, Kondothra M. George, Mary Gerhart, Simon Gikandi, Maurice Gilbert, Michael J. Gillgannon, Verónica Giménez Beliveau, Terryl Givens, Beth Glazier-McDonald, Philip Gleason, Menghun Goh, Brian Golding, Bishop Hilario M. Gomez, Michelle A. Gonzalez, Donald K. Gorrell, Roy Gottfried, Tamara Grdzelidze, Joel B. Green, Niels Henrik Gregersen, Cristina Grenholm, Herbert Griffiths, Eric W. Gritsch, Erich S. Gruen, Christoffer H. Grundmann, Paul H. Gundani, Jon P. Gunnemann, Petre Guran, Vidar L. Haanes, Jeremiah M. Hackett, Getatchew Haile, Douglas John Hall, Nicholas Hammond, Daphne Hampson, Jehu J. Hanciles, Barry Hankins, Jennifer Haraguchi, Stanley S. Harakas, Anthony John Harding, Conrad L. Harkins, J. William Harmless, Marjory Harper, Amir Harrak, Joel F. Harrington, Mark W. Harris, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Van A. Harvey, R. Chris Hassel, Jione Havea, Daniel Hawk, Diana L. Hayes, Leslie Hayes, Priscilla Hayner, S. Mark Heim, Simo Heininen, Richard P. Heitzenrater, Eila Helander, David Hempton, Scott H. Hendrix, Jan-Olav Henriksen, Gina Hens-Piazza, Carter Heyward, Nicholas J. Higham, David Hilliard, Norman A. Hjelm, Peter C. Hodgson, Arthur Holder, M. Jan Holton, Dwight N. Hopkins, Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, Po-Ho Huang, James Hudnut-Beumler, Jennifer S. Hughes, Leonard M. Hummel, Mary E. Hunt, Laennec Hurbon, Mark Hutchinson, Susan E. Hylen, Mary Beth Ingham, H. Larry Ingle, Dale T. Irvin, Jon Isaak, Paul John Isaak, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Hans Raun Iversen, Margaret C. Jacob, Arthur James, Maria Jansdotter-Samuelsson, David Jasper, Werner G. Jeanrond, Renée Jeffery, David Lyle Jeffrey, Theodore W. Jennings, David H. Jensen, Robin Margaret Jensen, David Jobling, Dale A. Johnson, Elizabeth A. Johnson, Maxwell E. Johnson, Sarah Johnson, Mark D. Johnston, F. Stanley Jones, James William Jones, John R. Jones, Alissa Jones Nelson, Inge Jonsson, Jan Joosten, Elizabeth Judd, Mulambya Peggy Kabonde, Robert Kaggwa, Sylvester Kahakwa, Isaac Kalimi, Ogbu U. Kalu, Eunice Kamaara, Wayne C. Kannaday, Musimbi Kanyoro, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Frank Kaufmann, Léon Nguapitshi Kayongo, Richard Kearney, Alice A. Keefe, Ralph Keen, Catherine Keller, Anthony J. Kelly, Karen Kennelly, Kathi Lynn Kern, Fergus Kerr, Edward Kessler, George Kilcourse, Heup Young Kim, Kim Sung-Hae, Kim Yong-Bock, Kim Yung Suk, Richard King, Thomas M. King, Robert M. Kingdon, Ross Kinsler, Hans G. Kippenberg, Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Clifton Kirkpatrick, Leonid Kishkovsky, Nadieszda Kizenko, Jeffrey Klaiber, Hans-Josef Klauck, Sidney Knight, Samuel Kobia, Robert Kolb, Karla Ann Koll, Heikki Kotila, Donald Kraybill, Philip D. W. Krey, Yves Krumenacker, Jeffrey Kah-Jin Kuan, Simanga R. Kumalo, Peter Kuzmic, Simon Shui-Man Kwan, Kwok Pui-lan, André LaCocque, Stephen E. Lahey, John Tsz Pang Lai, Emiel Lamberts, Armando Lampe, Craig Lampe, Beverly J. Lanzetta, Eve LaPlante, Lizette Larson-Miller, Ariel Bybee Laughton, Leonard Lawlor, Bentley Layton, Robin A. Leaver, Karen Lebacqz, Archie Chi Chung Lee, Marilyn J. Legge, Hervé LeGrand, D. L. LeMahieu, Raymond Lemieux, Bill J. Leonard, Ellen M. Leonard, Outi Leppä, Jean Lesaulnier, Nantawan Boonprasat Lewis, Henrietta Leyser, Alexei Lidov, Bernard Lightman, Paul Chang-Ha Lim, Carter Lindberg, Mark R. Lindsay, James R. Linville, James C. Livingston, Ann Loades, David Loades, Jean-Claude Loba-Mkole, Lo Lung Kwong, Wati Longchar, Eleazar López, David W. Lotz, Andrew Louth, Robin W. Lovin, William Luis, Frank D. Macchia, Diarmaid N. J. MacCulloch, Kirk R. MacGregor, Marjory A. MacLean, Donald MacLeod, Tomas S. Maddela, Inge Mager, Laurenti Magesa, David G. Maillu, Fortunato Mallimaci, Philip Mamalakis, Kä Mana, Ukachukwu Chris Manus, Herbert Robinson Marbury, Reuel Norman Marigza, Jacqueline Mariña, Antti Marjanen, Luiz C. L. Marques, Madipoane Masenya (ngwan'a Mphahlele), Caleb J. D. Maskell, Steve Mason, Thomas Massaro, Fernando Matamoros Ponce, András Máté-Tóth, Odair Pedroso Mateus, Dinis Matsolo, Fumitaka Matsuoka, John D'Arcy May, Yelena Mazour-Matusevich, Theodore Mbazumutima, John S. McClure, Christian McConnell, Lee Martin McDonald, Gary B. McGee, Thomas McGowan, Alister E. McGrath, Richard J. McGregor, John A. McGuckin, Maud Burnett McInerney, Elsie Anne McKee, Mary B. McKinley, James F. McMillan, Ernan McMullin, Kathleen E. McVey, M. Douglas Meeks, Monica Jyotsna Melanchthon, Ilie Melniciuc-Puica, Everett Mendoza, Raymond A. Mentzer, William W. Menzies, Ina Merdjanova, Franziska Metzger, Constant J. Mews, Marvin Meyer, Carol Meyers, Vasile Mihoc, Gunner Bjerg Mikkelsen, Maria Inêz de Castro Millen, Clyde Lee Miller, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Alexander Mirkovic, Paul Misner, Nozomu Miyahira, R. W. L. Moberly, Gerald Moede, Aloo Osotsi Mojola, Sunanda Mongia, Rebeca Montemayor, James Moore, Roger E. Moore, Craig E. Morrison O.Carm, Jeffry H. Morrison, Keith Morrison, Wilson J. Moses, Tefetso Henry Mothibe, Mokgethi Motlhabi, Fulata Moyo, Henry Mugabe, Jesse Ndwiga Kanyua Mugambi, Peggy Mulambya-Kabonde, Robert Bruce Mullin, Pamela Mullins Reaves, Saskia Murk Jansen, Heleen L. Murre-Van den Berg, Augustine Musopole, Isaac M. T. Mwase, Philomena Mwaura, Cecilia Nahnfeldt, Anne Nasimiyu Wasike, Carmiña Navia Velasco, Thulani Ndlazi, Alexander Negrov, James B. Nelson, David G. Newcombe, Carol Newsom, Helen J. Nicholson, George W. E. Nickelsburg, Tatyana Nikolskaya, Damayanthi M. A. Niles, Bertil Nilsson, Nyambura Njoroge, Fidelis Nkomazana, Mary Beth Norton, Christian Nottmeier, Sonene Nyawo, Anthère Nzabatsinda, Edward T. Oakes, Gerald O'Collins, Daniel O'Connell, David W. Odell-Scott, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Kathleen O'Grady, Oyeronke Olajubu, Thomas O'Loughlin, Dennis T. Olson, J. Steven O'Malley, Cephas N. Omenyo, Muriel Orevillo-Montenegro, César Augusto Ornellas Ramos, Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator, Kenan B. Osborne, Carolyn Osiek, Javier Otaola Montagne, Douglas F. Ottati, Anna May Say Pa, Irina Paert, Jerry G. Pankhurst, Aristotle Papanikolaou, Samuele F. Pardini, Stefano Parenti, Peter Paris, Sung Bae Park, Cristián G. Parker, Raquel Pastor, Joseph Pathrapankal, Daniel Patte, W. Brown Patterson, Clive Pearson, Keith F. Pecklers, Nancy Cardoso Pereira, David Horace Perkins, Pheme Perkins, Edward N. Peters, Rebecca Todd Peters, Bishop Yeznik Petrossian, Raymond Pfister, Peter C. Phan, Isabel Apawo Phiri, William S. F. Pickering, Derrick G. Pitard, William Elvis Plata, Zlatko Plese, John Plummer, James Newton Poling, Ronald Popivchak, Andrew Porter, Ute Possekel, James M. Powell, Enos Das Pradhan, Devadasan Premnath, Jaime Adrían Prieto Valladares, Anne Primavesi, Randall Prior, María Alicia Puente Lutteroth, Eduardo Guzmão Quadros, Albert Rabil, Laurent William Ramambason, Apolonio M. Ranche, Vololona Randriamanantena Andriamitandrina, Lawrence R. Rast, Paul L. Redditt, Adele Reinhartz, Rolf Rendtorff, Pål Repstad, James N. Rhodes, John K. Riches, Joerg Rieger, Sharon H. Ringe, Sandra Rios, Tyler Roberts, David M. Robinson, James M. Robinson, Joanne Maguire Robinson, Richard A. H. Robinson, Roy R. Robson, Jack B. Rogers, Maria Roginska, Sidney Rooy, Rev. Garnett Roper, Maria José Fontelas Rosado-Nunes, Andrew C. Ross, Stefan Rossbach, François Rossier, John D. Roth, John K. Roth, Phillip Rothwell, Richard E. Rubenstein, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Markku Ruotsila, John E. Rybolt, Risto Saarinen, John Saillant, Juan Sanchez, Wagner Lopes Sanchez, Hugo N. Santos, Gerhard Sauter, Gloria L. Schaab, Sandra M. Schneiders, Quentin J. Schultze, Fernando F. Segovia, Turid Karlsen Seim, Carsten Selch Jensen, Alan P. F. Sell, Frank C. Senn, Kent Davis Sensenig, Damían Setton, Bal Krishna Sharma, Carolyn J. Sharp, Thomas Sheehan, N. Gerald Shenk, Christian Sheppard, Charles Sherlock, Tabona Shoko, Walter B. Shurden, Marguerite Shuster, B. Mark Sietsema, Batara Sihombing, Neil Silberman, Clodomiro Siller, Samuel Silva-Gotay, Heikki Silvet, John K. Simmons, Hagith Sivan, James C. Skedros, Abraham Smith, Ashley A. Smith, Ted A. Smith, Daud Soesilo, Pia Søltoft, Choan-Seng (C. S.) Song, Kathryn Spink, Bryan Spinks, Eric O. Springsted, Nicolas Standaert, Brian Stanley, Glen H. Stassen, Karel Steenbrink, Stephen J. Stein, Andrea Sterk, Gregory E. Sterling, Columba Stewart, Jacques Stewart, Robert B. Stewart, Cynthia Stokes Brown, Ken Stone, Anne Stott, Elizabeth Stuart, Monya Stubbs, Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, David Kwang-sun Suh, Scott W. Sunquist, Keith Suter, Douglas Sweeney, Charles H. Talbert, Shawqi N. Talia, Elsa Tamez, Joseph B. Tamney, Jonathan Y. Tan, Yak-Hwee Tan, Kathryn Tanner, Feiya Tao, Elizabeth S. Tapia, Aquiline Tarimo, Claire Taylor, Mark Lewis Taylor, Bishop Abba Samuel Wolde Tekestebirhan, Eugene TeSelle, M. Thomas Thangaraj, David R. Thomas, Andrew Thornley, Scott Thumma, Marcelo Timotheo da Costa, George E. “Tink” Tinker, Ola Tjørhom, Karen Jo Torjesen, Iain R. Torrance, Fernando Torres-Londoño, Archbishop Demetrios [Trakatellis], Marit Trelstad, Christine Trevett, Phyllis Trible, Johannes Tromp, Paul Turner, Robert G. Tuttle, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Peter Tyler, Anders Tyrberg, Justin Ukpong, Javier Ulloa, Camillus Umoh, Kristi Upson-Saia, Martina Urban, Monica Uribe, Elochukwu Eugene Uzukwu, Richard Vaggione, Gabriel Vahanian, Paul Valliere, T. J. Van Bavel, Steven Vanderputten, Peter Van der Veer, Huub Van de Sandt, Louis Van Tongeren, Luke A. Veronis, Noel Villalba, Ramón Vinke, Tim Vivian, David Voas, Elena Volkova, Katharina von Kellenbach, Elina Vuola, Timothy Wadkins, Elaine M. Wainwright, Randi Jones Walker, Dewey D. Wallace, Jerry Walls, Michael J. Walsh, Philip Walters, Janet Walton, Jonathan L. Walton, Wang Xiaochao, Patricia A. Ward, David Harrington Watt, Herold D. Weiss, Laurence L. Welborn, Sharon D. Welch, Timothy Wengert, Traci C. West, Merold Westphal, David Wetherell, Barbara Wheeler, Carolinne White, Jean-Paul Wiest, Frans Wijsen, Terry L. Wilder, Felix Wilfred, Rebecca Wilkin, Daniel H. Williams, D. Newell Williams, Michael A. Williams, Vincent L. Wimbush, Gabriele Winkler, Anders Winroth, Lauri Emílio Wirth, James A. Wiseman, Ebba Witt-Brattström, Teofil Wojciechowski, John Wolffe, Kenman L. Wong, Wong Wai Ching, Linda Woodhead, Wendy M. Wright, Rose Wu, Keith E. Yandell, Gale A. Yee, Viktor Yelensky, Yeo Khiok-Khng, Gustav K. K. Yeung, Angela Yiu, Amos Yong, Yong Ting Jin, You Bin, Youhanna Nessim Youssef, Eliana Yunes, Robert Michael Zaller, Valarie H. Ziegler, Barbara Brown Zikmund, Joyce Ann Zimmerman, Aurora Zlotnik, Zhuo Xinping
- Edited by Daniel Patte, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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- The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity
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- 05 August 2012
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- 20 September 2010, pp xi-xliv
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3 - Gender, Bodies, and Kinship
- Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh
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- After Kinship
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- 24 November 2003, pp 57-82
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Summary
The Hungarian Vlach Gypsies studied by Michael Stewart (1997) view men's and women's bodies as fundamentally different from each other. Their differences result from the polluting consequences of sexuality, which mean that women's bodies are potentially dangerous, and for this reason the separation between their lower and upper bodies must be symbolically marked. Women's lower bodies are covered by several layers of clothing, and cleanliness of the body is always rigidly marked off from processes of cooking and eating.
Among the Malay Muslims whom I studied on the island of Langkawi, women's behavior is often strikingly assertive, and women and men interact in many everyday contexts in a relaxed manner. And yet in more formal contexts, and at certain stages of their lives, quite strict rules of sex segregation apply. In a somewhat confusing way, these Malays seem to assert that men's and women's bodies are quite similar, but also appear in other ways to think of these bodies as quite different from each other.
In southern India, an old anthropological chestnut, Dravidian kinship, has recently been reanalyzed in terms of gendered similarity and gendered difference. Cecilia Busby (1997a, 2000) suggests that, rather than dividing the world simply into two, in terms of which relatives one may marry and which one may not, Dravidian kinship is fundamentally based on a radical distinction of relatedness that occurs between those of the same sex and between those of opposite sex.
Contents
- Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh
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- After Kinship
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Bibliography
- Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh
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- After Kinship
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- 24 November 2003, pp 191-206
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After Kinship
- Janet Carsten
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This innovative book takes a look at the anthropology of kinship and the comparative study of relatedness. Kinship has historically been central to the discipline of anthropology but what sort of future does it have? What is the impact of recent studies of reproductive technologies, of gender, and of the social construction of science in the West? What significance does public anxiety about the family, or new family forms in the West have for anthropology's analytic strategies? The study of kinship has rested on a distinction between the 'biological' and the 'social'. But recent technological developments have made this distinction no longer self-evident. What does this imply about the comparison of kinship institutions cross-culturally? Janet Carsten gives an approachable view of the past, present, and future of kinship in anthropology, which will be of interest not just to anthropologists but to social scientists generally.
Frontmatter
- Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh
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- After Kinship
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Acknowledgments
- Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh
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- After Kinship
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- 24 November 2003, pp xi-xiv
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1 - Introduction: After Kinship?
- Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh
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- After Kinship
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- 24 November 2003, pp 1-30
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Summary
Nineteen-ninety-five, Nottinghamshire, England. Stephen Blood, critically ill with bacterial meningitis, lies in a coma on life support machines. His sperm are removed without his prior written consent. Within a few days he is dead. Although he and his wife, Diane Blood, had been trying to conceive a child before his death, the British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) refuses to grant permission for Diane Blood to undergo artificial insemination using her husband's sperm. Diane Blood challenges the decision in the High Court. In October 1996 the challenge is dismissed on the same grounds as the original HFEA ruling.
Diane Blood announces her intention to take the ruling to the Court of Appeal: “I think that I have the most right of anybody to my husband's sperm and I desperately wanted his baby” (The Guardian 18.10.96). Sir Stephen Brown, president of the High Court's Family Division, comments sympathetically, “My heart goes out to this applicant who wishes to preserve an essential part of her late beloved husband. The refusal to permit her so to do is for her in the nature of a double bereavement. It stirs the emotions and evokes what I believe to be universal sympathy for the applicant.” “Leading fertility expert” Lord Winston describes the decision of the High Court as “cruel and unnatural.” Baroness Warnock, chair of the Parliamentary Committee that led to the setting up of the HFEA, reportedly blames herself: “We didn't think of the kind of contingency which has actually arisen” (The Guardian 18.10.96).
5 - Uses and Abuses of Substance
- Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh
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- After Kinship
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In the shift from kinship to relatedness, we have seen how a focus on the person, gender, and house provided ways to open up kinship to new kinds of analysis. One other key term, used by anthropologists to dismantle kinship in its more classic guises, has been substance. In this enterprise, David Schneider's work was highly influential. Substance was one of Schneider's key terms, which he used to unlock the cultural meanings of American Kinship (1980). Anthropologists working in India and Papua New Guinea, among other places, have adopted substance as a way of understanding kinship in more processual terms, looking at how persons were constituted through their relations with others.
Substance was a kind of catch-all term that can be used to trace the bodily transformation of food into blood, sexual fluids, sweat, and saliva, and to analyze how these passed from person to person through eating together, living in houses, having sexual relations, and performing ritual exchanges. It thus necessarily links together some of the topics I have covered in previous chapters – the house and feeding, personhood and relations, bodies, and gender. In this chapter, I explore exactly how and why anthropologists have used the term substance, and where this focus has taken the study of kinship. I begin with some brief examples before putting substance into its anthropological context.
4 - The Person
- Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh
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Diane Blood's protracted litigation in Britain to establish her claim to undergo artificial insemination using the sperm of her deceased husband, and Anna's long search in Scotland to make a connection to a birth mother from whom she had been separated since babyhood, are very much contemporary Western stories. These vignettes with which I began this book both apparently speak to very topical issues at the heart of how the person is perceived.
It seems of obvious significance that such stories can be framed around the importance of knowledge about genetic connection, or in terms of the “rights” of individual human beings. But I shall show in this chapter that it is also possible to read these stories in a different way, as illuminating how close kin ties are intrinsic to the social constitution of persons. The obviousness of this observation, which has long been central to anthropological analyses of how the person is constituted in many non-Western contexts, has been obscured by the assumption that kinship is of much more marginal significance in Western capitalist societies. So, this chapter sets out to do two kinds of work: to delineate some of the complexity, and the different sources, of Western ideas about the person, and also to trace the history of anthropological understandings of personhood crossculturally. Upsetting a rather oversimplified dichotomy between a Western individualized person and a non-Western “joined-up” person makes clear the centrality of locally and historically specific practices and discourses of relatedness.
Index
- Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh
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- 24 November 2003, pp 207-216
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2 - Houses of Memory and Kinship
- Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh
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- 24 November 2003, pp 31-56
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For many people, the memories of houses inhabited in childhood have an extraordinary evocative power. Perhaps this is attributable to the dense and myriad connections that link together what goes on in houses – processes of feeding and nurturance, the emotionally charged social relations of close kinship, and repetitive bodily practice through which many rules of social life are encoded – quite apart from their more practical, material, and aesthetic dimensions.
My own powerful “house memories” focus on a large kitchen table at which not only cooking and eating but also most family discussions, communal homework, and many games took place. This was the warm, at times overheated, hearth of a house, which combined, in curious ways, elements of an early twentieth century Central European, bourgeois, Jewish culture with the unconventionalities of left-wing bohemianism of the 1930s and of the postwar London intelligentsia. The house had a distinctly old-fashioned air, or at least an “out of time” quality, which no doubt partly resulted from my parents' uprooting from Nazi Germany and their subsequent dislike of change for its own sake. The enormous and often chilly “living room” was home to an ill-assorted collection of somewhat ponderous antique furniture and paintings. It presumably expressed rather accurately the tastes of a solid upper-middle-class home in 1920s Berlin. Needless to say, very little living actually took place there; this was a space reserved for special occasions and rather formal dinner parties.
6 - Families into Nation : The Power of Metaphor and the Transformation of Kinship
- Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh
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- After Kinship
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In the last chapter, I began to examine the distinction between substance and code that is at the heart of David Schneider's analysis of American kinship. It can also be linked to a wider set of oppositions that are quite familiar in the anthropological study of kinship and beyond: the distinction between nature and culture, and between the biological and the social. As we saw, the deployment of these terms in anthropological analysis appears to have carried quite strong implications about the different nature of kinship in the West and “the rest.”
Schneider regarded the combinatory potential of substance and code as at the heart of what constituted a blood relative in American ideas (1980: 28). But it is worth pausing for a moment to consider the nature of this combination, and the work that both the separation and the combination of these elements do – both for indigenous ideas about kinship, and for their analysis by anthropologists. In this chapter, I focus on relationships that apparently have no basis in substance, but yet are couched in an idiom of “natural” ties – for example, adoptive ties, “fictive” kinship, and gay kinship. What is the force of casting such relations in a natural idiom? And what tensions are entailed in this kind of work of kinship?
8 - Conclusion
- Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh
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Summary
I began this book with three vignettes: Diane Blood's attempt, conducted through the British courts, to use her deceased husband's sperm in fertility treatment; a Scottish woman's account of her search for her birth mother from whom she had been separated in infancy; and the debates of the Orthodox rabbinate over the procurement and use of non-Jewish sperm in Israel. What do these stories reveal, I asked, and what do they have in common? Above all, why do they matter?
In search of further inspiration, I have glanced through newspaper clippings from the turn of the new century on issues that are salient to public debate on family and kinship. I am struck both by the range of issues and by the prominence of their coverage. There are four that particularly catch my attention. The first is a report on the suffering of birth fathers whose babies had been put up for adoption (“I can still smell my baby's scent. It's always with me” [The Guardian, 9.8.00]). The second is the decision by the British government to allow cells to be taken from embryos less than fourteen days old for the purposes of research on degenerative diseases – the use of embryonic stem cells for therapeutic cloning (“Medical Science at New Frontier,” The Guardian, 17.8.00).
7 - Assisted Reproduction
- Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh
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- Book:
- After Kinship
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 24 November 2003, pp 163-183
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Summary
In the previous chapter, a consideration of the ways in which relations that apparently have no basis in kinship may be cast in an idiom of kinship, or transformed over time into kin relations, led me to touch on processes of naturalization. The political salience of discourses about the nation that invoke naturalized images of the family would be hard to exaggerate. In this chapter, however, I look at naturalization from a different angle – that provided by recent advances in technologies of assisted reproduction.
Developments in reproductive medicine – including sperm and egg donation, surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, and cloning – have assumed a common currency in popular renditions of science and the family. The “technologization” of nature apparently has the potential to shake our most fundamental assumptions about kinship as a domain in which relations are given rather than produced through technological intervention. And this too gives rise to concerns that are publicly articulated and politically contested. It is not difficult to understand why recent studies in the sociology of science, as well as the anthropology of kinship, should have given so much attention to reproductive technologies. In this chapter, I take up some of this recent work and consider the significance of technological advances in reproductive medicine both for academic knowledge practices and for everyday notions of kinship.
9 - Borders, boundaries, tradition and state on the Malaysian periphery
- Edited by Thomas M. Wilson, Queen's University Belfast, Hastings Donnan, Queen's University Belfast
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- Border Identities
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- 02 December 2009
- Print publication:
- 22 January 1998, pp 215-236
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Summary
One of the more embarrassing memories from my fieldwork on the island of Langkawi concerns a trip that my relatives in the village of Sungai Cantik planned to make by fishing boat across the border to southern Thailand. Pulau Langkawi forms part of the northern Malay state of Kedah. It lies off the west coast of the Malay peninsula, just south of the border between Malaysia and Thailand. The purpose of the trip was to do some cheap shopping, to visit friends and relatives, and to stay for a few days of enjoyment before returning loaded up with bargain Thai merchandise. The excursion was planned with considerable excitement – this was an out of the ordinary event, although not altogether unheard of – and I was invited to go along. Without thinking too hard about what might be involved, I accepted.
In the following days, doubts about the trip itself – on an overcrowded fishing boat – were reinforced by doubts of a more bureaucratic kind. Were there risks involved? What about my status as a foreign researcher if we were apprehended without proper documentation – visas, licences, passports? I demurred at the last moment, on the pretext of feeling unwell. The puzzlement and disappointment of my relatives, and particularly my foster mother's look of scepticism over my supposed illness, still bring back a sense of embarrassment and inadequacy undoubtedly recognisable to most anthropological fieldworkers.
About the House
- Lévi-Strauss and Beyond
- Edited by Janet Carsten, Stephen Hugh-Jones
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- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 04 May 1995
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The domestic unit is inseparable from its homestead, and the 'house', at once a physical place and a social unit, is often also a unit of production and consumption, a cult group, and even a political faction. Inspired by Lévi-Strauss's suggestion that the multi-functional noble houses of medieval Europe were simply the best-known examples of a widespread social institution, the contributors to this collection analyse 'house' systems in Southeast Asia and South America, exploring the interrelationships between buildings, people, and ideas. They reveal some of the ways in which houses can stand for social groups and serve as images of process and order.
Contents
- Edited by Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh, Stephen Hugh-Jones, University of Cambridge
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- Book:
- About the House
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- 05 June 2012
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- 04 May 1995, pp ix-x
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Notes
- Edited by Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh, Stephen Hugh-Jones, University of Cambridge
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- Book:
- About the House
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 04 May 1995, pp 253-269
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