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After Kinship

After Kinship

After Kinship

Janet Carsten , University of Edinburgh
January 2004
Available
Paperback
9780521665704

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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.

    • Takes up insights drawn from the study of gender and personhood, substance, the house, and new reproductive technologies
    • Problematizes the separation between the 'social' and the 'biological', which has been at the heart of kinship analysis in anthropology
    • Written to be accessible to a wide audience of readers

    Reviews & endorsements

    'In this creative book, Janet Carsten unsettles and reorients our traditional ideas about kinship. Through her deep understanding of kinship theory and comparative eye, we see kinship as it is made in shared experience, and interwoven with concepts of the house, person, gender, nationality, and new technologies. Kinship studies may once again become the heart of anthropology. After Carsten, they will never be the same.' Stephen Gudeman, The Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences

    '… the book provides students with good examples for the variable, local meanings of kinship …' Social Anthropology

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    Product details

    June 2006
    Adobe eBook Reader
    9780511191992
    0 pages
    0kg
    This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.

    Table of Contents

    • 1. Introduction: after kinship?
    • 2. Houses of memory and kinship
    • 3. Gender, bodies, and kinship
    • 4. The person
    • 5. Uses and abuses of substance
    • 6. Families into nation: the power of metaphor and the transformation of kinship
    • 7. Assisted reproduction.
      Author
    • Janet Carsten , University of Edinburgh