In the mid-1970s, David M. Schneider rocked the anthropological world with his announcement that kinship did not exist in any culture known to humankind. This volume provides a critical assessment of Schneider's ideas, focusing particularly on his contributions to kinship studies and the implications of his work for cultural relativism. Schneider's deconstruction of kinship as a cultural system sounded the death knell for a certain kind of kinship study. At the same time, it laid the groundwork for the re-emergence of kinship studies as a centerpiece of anthropological theory and practice. Now a mainstay of cultural studies, Schneider's conception of cultural relativism revolutionized thinking about kinship, family, gender, and culture. For feminist anthropologists, his ideas freed kinship from the limitations of biology, providing a context for establishing gender as a cultural construct. Today, his work bears on high-profile issues such as gay and lesbian partners and parents, surrogate motherhood, and new reproductive technologies. Contributors to The Cultural Analysis of Kinship appraise Schneider's contributions and his place in anthropological history, particularly in the development of anthropological theory. Situating Schneider's work and influence in relation to major controversies in the history of anthropology and of kinship studies, they examine his important insights and their limitations, consider where his approach might lead, and offer alternative paradigms. Inspiring many with his keenly critical mind and willingness to flout convention, discomfiting others with his mercurial temperament, David Schneider left an ineradicable mark on his field. These frank observations on the man and his ideas offer a revealing glimpse of one of modern anthropology's most complex and paradoxical figures.

American Kinship is the first attempt to deal systematically with kinship as a system of symbols and meanings, and not simply as a network of functionally interrelated familial roles. Schneider argues that the study of a highly differentiated society such as our own may be more revealing of the nature of kinship than the study of anthropologically more familiar, but less differentiated societies. He goes to the heart of the ideology of relations among relatives in America by locating the underlying features of the definition of kinship—nature vs. law, substance vs. code. One of the most significant features of American Kinship, then, is the explicit development of a theory of culture on which the analysis is based, a theory that has since proved valuable in the analysis of other cultures. For this Phoenix edition, Schneider has written a substantial new chapter, responding to his critics and recounting the charges in his thought since the book was first published in 1968.

Our understanding of what makes a person a relative has been transformed by radical changes in marriage arrangements and gender relations, and by new reproductive technologies. We can no longer take it for granted that our most fundamental social relationships are grounded in 'biology' or 'nature'. These developments have prompted anthropologists to take a fresh look at idioms of relatedness in other societies, and to review the ways in which relationships are symbolised and interpreted in our own society. Defamiliarizing some classic cases, challenging the established analytic categories of anthropology, the contributors to this innovative book focus on the boundary between the 'biological' and the 'social', and bring into question the received wisdom at the heart of the study of kinship.

In this pithy two-part essay, Marshall Sahlins reinvigorates the debates on what constitutes kinship, building on some of the best scholarship in the field to produce an original outlook on the deepest bond humans can have. Covering thinkers from Aristotle and Lévy- Bruhl to Émile Durkheim and David Schneider, and communities from the Maori and the English to the Korowai of New Guinea, he draws on a breadth of theory and a range of ethnographic examples to form an acute definition of kinship, what he calls the “mutuality of being.” Kinfolk are persons who are parts of one another to the extent that what happens to one is felt by the other. Meaningfully and emotionally, relatives live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths. In the second part of his essay, Sahlins shows that mutuality of being is a symbolic notion of belonging, not a biological connection by “blood.” Quite apart from relations of birth, people may become kin in ways ranging from sharing the same name or the same food to helping each other survive the perils of the high seas. In a groundbreaking argument, he demonstrates that even where kinship is reckoned from births, it is because the wider kindred or the clan ancestors are already involved in procreation, so that the notion of birth is meaningfully dependent on kinship rather than kinship on birth. By formulating this reversal, Sahlins identifies what kinship truly is: not nature, but culture.

The essays in Relative Values draw on new work in anthropology, science studies, gender theory, critical race studies, and postmodernism to offer a radical revisioning of kinship and kinship theory. Through a combination of vivid case studies and trenchant theoretical essays, the contributors—a group of internationally recognized scholars—examine both the history of kinship theory and its future, at once raising questions that have long occupied a central place within the discipline of anthropology and moving beyond them. Ideas about kinship are vital not only to understanding but also to forming many of the practices and innovations of contemporary society. How do the cultural logics of contemporary biopolitics, commodification, and globalization intersect with kinship practices and theories? In what ways do kinship analogies inform scientific and clinical practices; and what happens to kinship when it is created in such unfamiliar sites as biogenetic labs, new reproductive technology clinics, and the computers of artificial life scientists? How does kinship constitute—and get constituted by—the relations of power that draw lines of hierarchy and equality, exclusion and inclusion, ambivalence and violence? The contributors assess the implications for kinship of such phenomena as blood transfusions, adoption across national borders, genetic support groups, photography, and the new reproductive technologies while ranging from rural China to mid-century Africa to contemporary Norway and the United States. Addressing these and other timely issues, Relative Values injects new life into one of anthropology's most important disciplinary traditions. Posing these and other timely questions, Relative Values injects an important interdisciplinary curiosity into one of anthropology’s most important disciplinary traditions. Contributors. Mary Bouquet, Janet Carsten, Charis Thompson Cussins, Carol Delaney, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Sarah Franklin, Deborah Heath, Stefan Helmreich, Signe Howell, Jonathan Marks, Susan McKinnon, Michael G. Peletz, Rayna Rapp, Martine Segalen, Pauline Turner Strong, Melbourne Tapper, Karen-Sue Taussig, Kath Weston, Yunxiang Yan

New paperback edition of Robin Fox's study of systems of kinship and alliance, which has become an established classic of social science literature.

This work constitutes the first book-length examination of Balinese kinship in English and an important theoretical analysis of the central ethnographic concept of "kinship system." Hildred and Clifford Geertz's findings challenge the prevailing anthropological notion of a kinship system as an autonomous set of institutionalized social relationships. Their research in Bali suggests that kinship cannot be studied in isolation but must be perceived as a symbolic subsystem governed by ideas and beliefs unique to each culture.

For courses in Social Organization, Kinship, and Cultural Ecology.Kinship has made a come-back in Anthropology. Not only is there a line of noted, general, introductory works and readers in the topic, but theoretical discussions have been stimulated both by technological changes in mechanisms of reproduction and by reconsiderations of how to define kinship in the most productive ways for cross-cultural comparisons. In addition, kinship studies have moved away from the minutiae of kin terminological systems and the “kinship algebra” often associated with these, to the broader analysis of processes, historical changes and fundamental cultural meanings in which kin relationships are implicated. In this changed, and changing context both Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart -- both of the University of Pittsburgh -- bring together a number of interests and concerns, in order to provide pointers for students, as well as scholars, in this field of study. Taking an explicitly processual approach, the authors examine definitions of terms such as kinship itself, approach the topic in a way that is invariably ethnographic, and deploy materials from field areas where they themselves have worked.

Professor Lévi-Strauss’s first major work, Les Structures élémentaires de la Parenté, has acquired a classic reputation since its original publication in 1949; and it has become the constant focus of academic debate about central theoretical concerns in social anthropology. It is, however, a long and difficult book for many students to read in French, and its arguments have consequently become known, even among professional anthropologists, largely through critical analysis. It was republished in a revised French edition in 1967 with a new foreword by the author, and it is this text with his further emendations that has been used in this translation. Lévi-Strauss applies his intellectual powers to the perennial problem of incest, which he elucidates by means of the concept of exchange as formulated by Marcel Mauss in his famous analysis of the gift (Essai sur le don, 1925). He distinguishes two elementary modes of exchange which govern not only the conventional variety of goods and services but also the transfer of women in marriage: these are “restricted” and “generalized” exchange. With a mass of ethnographic evidence he demonstrates how the formidable intricacy of marriage customs, comprising moral and jural ideas and institutions (which appear to be essentially arbitrary), can be seen as local and historical rules of exchange. Charles Lévi-Strauss traces these rules throughout a vast range of simple societies, chiefly in Australia and mainland Southeast Asia but also in the Americas, in Oceania, and in other parts of the world. To this survey he adds two extended sections on the great civilizations of China and India. He continues with a briefer consideration of the passage from elementary to complex structures, with particular reference to African societies, and concludes with a stimulating chapter on the principles of kinship, exchange as the universal basis for marriage prohibitions, and the formal relations between the sexes as part of a universe of communication. Although much of the work is technical, consisting of detailed analyses of types of social organization with which social anthropologists will be most familiar, it also contains much that will be of interest to psychologists, linguists, and philosophers, and to all who are interested in the possibility and the technique of the structural analysis of human activity. After the successes, moreover, of Lévi-Strauss’s subsequent books—notably Structural Anthropology, Tristes Tropiques, Totemism, and The Savage Mind—this new edition of the work which founded his present outstanding reputation will have additional value as a further means of contact with one of the original minds of this century. The translation has been made by James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, of the University of New England, Australia, and by Rodney Needham, of the University of Oxford. Dr. Needham also acted as general editor and supplied the work with a new general index. He is the translator of Lévi-Strauss’s Le Totemisme aujourd’hui and author of Structure and Sentiment (1962) and numerous papers which have contributed to the recognition of Professor Lévi-Strauss’s work in the English-speaking world.

The most comprehensive reader on kinship available, Kinship and Family: An Anthropological Reader is a representative collection tracing the history of the anthropological study of kinship from the early 1900s to the present day. Brings together for the first time both classic works from Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss, Leach, and Schneider, as well as articles on such electrifying contemporary debates as surrogate motherhood, and gay and lesbian kinship. Draws on the editors’ complementary areas of expertise to offer readers a single-volume survey of the most important and critical work on kinship. Includes extensive discussion and analysis of the selections that contextualizes them within theoretical debates.