Click and Kin is an interdisciplinary examination of how our increasingly mobile and networked age is changing the experience of kinship and connection. Focusing on how identity formation is affected by quick media such as instant messaging, video chat, and social networks, the contributors to this collection use ethnographic and textual analyses, as well as autobiographical approaches, to demonstrate the ways in which the ability to communicate across national boundaries is transforming how we grow together and apart as families, communities, and nations. The essays in Click and Kin span the globe, examining transnational connections that touch in the United States, Canada, Mexico, India, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Together, they offer a unique reflection on the intersection of new media, identity politics, and kinship in the twenty-first century.

The essays in Click and Kin span the globe, examining transnational connections that touch in the United States, Canada, Mexico, India, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

Kin is a dazzling family epic from one of Croatia's most prized writers. In this sprawling narrative which spans the entire twentieth century, Miljenko Jergović peers into the dusty corners of his family's past, illuminating them with a tender, poetic precision. Ordinary, forgotten objects - a grandfather's beekeeping journals, a rusty benzene lighter, an army issued raincoat - become the lenses through which Jergović investigates the joys and sorrows of a family living through a century of war. The work is ultimately an ode to Yugoslavia - Jergović sees his country through the devastation of the First World War, the Second, the Cold, then the Bosnian war of the 90s; through its changing street names and borders, shifting seasons, through its social rituals at graveyards, operas, weddings, markets - rendering it all in loving, vivid detail. A portrait of an era.

A daughter of freed African American slaves, Daisy Turner became a living repository of history. The family narrative entrusted to her--"a well-polished artifact, an heirloom that had been carefully preserved"--began among the Yoruba in West Africa and continued with her own century and more of life. In 1983, folklorist Jane Beck began a series of interviews with Turner, then one hundred years old and still relating four generations of oral history. Beck uses Turner's storytelling to build the Turner family saga, using at its foundation the oft-repeated touchstone stories at the heart of their experiences: the abduction into slavery of Turner's African ancestors; Daisy's father Alec Turner learning to read; his return as a soldier to his former plantation to kill his former overseer; and Daisy's childhood stand against racism. Other stories re-create enslavement and her father's life in Vermont--in short, the range of life events large and small, transmitted by means so alive as to include voice inflections. Beck, at the same time, weaves in historical research and offers a folklorist's perspective on oral history and the hazards--and uses--of memory. Publication of this book is supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the L. J. and Mary C. Skaggs Folklore Fund.

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It explores the rise of self-tracking, quantified self and informal practices of care at distance as part of contemporary household dynamics.

Winter Massey is a former U.S. marshal who has made too many enemies on both sides of the law. Lucy Dockery is a judge’s daughter who’s never had to fight for anything in her life. But now Lucy and her young son have been kidnapped and sentenced to die–unless her father agrees to set a vicious criminal free. Winter Massey is the closest thing to salvation they have, but he doesn’t know that the beautiful FBI agent who brought him into the case may be playing a chilling double game–and that a circle of treachery has begun to tighten around him. For Lucy, the time has come to scratch and claw for survival. For Massey, it’s time to stop trusting the people he trusts most. Because in a storm of betrayal, there’s only one way out.

Australia is unique in the world for its diverse and interlocking systems of Indigenous social organisation. On no other continent do we see such an array of complex and contrasting social arrangements, coordinated through a principle of 'universal kinship' whereby two strangers meeting for the first time can recognise one another as kin. For some time, Australian kinship studies suffered from poor theorisation and insufficient aggregation of data. The large-scale AustKin project sought to redress these problems through the careful compilation of kinship information. Arising from the project, this book presents recent original research by a range of authors in the field on the kinship and social category systems in Australia. A number of the contributions focus on reconstructing how these systems originated and developed over time. Others are concerned with the relationship between kinship and land, the semantics of kin terms and the dynamics of kin interactions.

First Published in 2005. In 19th century plantation literature, the runaway slave in the swamp was a recurring bogey-man whose presence challenged myths of the plantation system. By escaping to the swamps with its wild and threatening connotations, the runaway gained an invisibility that was more threatening to the institution than open rebellion. In part, the proslavery plantation novel served to transform that image of the free slave in the swamp from its untouchable, abstract state to a form that could be possessed, understood, and controlled. Essentially, writers defending the institution would conjure forth the rebellious image in order to dispel it safely.

The period just prior to the birth of one's child is a time of deep personal development. Expecting Teryk is an intimate exploration, written in the form of a letter from a parent to her future son, that reclaims a rite of passage that modern society would strip of its magic. Dawn Prince-Hughes, renowed author of Songs of a Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism, considers the ways her disabilities might inform her parenting. She candidly narrates her experience of becoming a parent as part of a lesbian couple-from meeting her partner and the questions they ask about their readiness to become parents, to the practical considerations of choosing a sperm donor. Expecting Teryk is expressed through the lens of autism as Prince-Hughes shares the unique way she sees and experiences. Contemplating the evolutionary traditions of motherhood, and embedded in the reassurances that nature offers, Expecting Teryk is a work of sensuous wonder that speaks to the deeper realities and archetypal experiences shared by all who embark on the journey of parenthood.