Kinship and Relatedness (Anthropology)

In Interpreting Ancient Egyptian Narratives, Martin Pehal applies structural analysis to four New Kingdom narrative compositions. The study explains the strong configurational character of ancient Egyptian (mythological) thought which has the ability to connect various ontological levels of human experience with the surrounding world into complex synchronic structures. These symbolical systems are shown to be mediating between the various cultural paradoxes which were inherent to ancient Egyptian society. Axial role in this process is attributed to the institution of positional kingship represented by the Pharaoh. Its transformative function is also put into relation to the special status of female characters who are shown to play the part of the “powerful powerless ones” further personifying the aspects of the mediating function of myth. Gradually, the study outlines a genuinely Egyptian “structural net” of basic mythemes and explains in what way it was possible for such a system to change and incorporate foreign mythological motifs especially from the Near East.

Silvae 5.2 is an encomium addressed to Crispinus upon the occasion of his appointment as tribunus militum. This paper investigates how Statius employs epic intertexts in order to address potentially negative judgments of Crispinus caused by the young man's inexperience and the memory of his mother's crime. Allusions to Virgil's Aeneid affirm Crispinus's ability to emulate his father, exclude his criminal mother as a formative influence, and specify the roles of the young man's preceptors. Recollections of Statius's Thebaid, meanwhile, highlight the emperor's successful resolution of Crispinus's familial conflict through contrast with the epic's fratricidal violence.

The concept of family is a social construct, and the one used in Western countries fails to accommodate the complex systems of interaction between parenthood practices, relationships between spouses and siblings, vertical and horizontal relationships among relatives, conjugal ties, marriage contracts, domestic arrangements in other countries-the more so as these relations are frequently conducted at a distance. Nonetheless, the term "family"is widely used in studies of migration and mobility, though often uncritically. This introduction intends to expose the pitfalls incidental to this uncritical perspective and aims to clear up some of the misunderstandings that can occur when migration and mobility studies adopt an ethnocentric idea of family. Far from being inflexible and forging the self-same links whatever the migration circumstances, kinship ties adapt and help others adapt to the novel situations encountered in new countries, thereby proving a resource and an essential part of the culture of mobility.

In recent years, there has been a widespread fascination with age-dissimilar, heterosexual romantic relationships. This interest is not new - these types of couples have been featured in Western media for decades, even centuries - yet qualitative research into such relationships has been limited.

This book examines how the romantic relationships of age-dissimilar couples are understood. Based on a range of interviews, McKenzie argues that historical shifts toward greater personal autonomy in partner selection, within relationships, and in marriage and relationship dissolution have been greatly overstated. Through her focus on age-dissimilar couples, whose increasing prevalence have often been seen to be part of this shift, she suggests that these relationships are an avenue through which shared cultural understandings of relatedness, as well as individualism, might be further analysed. McKenzie argues for an approach that emphasises cultural continuity, and which accounts for complexity and contradiction in how age-dissimilar relationships and romantic love are understood.

Examining key issues of kinship, ageing and emotion, Age-Dissimilar Couples and Romantic Relationships will appeal to scholars of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Family Studies and Sociology.

Forms of plural marriage, or polygamy, are practiced within most of the world's cultures and religions. The amazing variation, versatility and adaptability of polygamy underscore that it is not just an exotic non-Western practice, but also exists in modern Western societies. Polygamy: A Cross-cultural Analysis provides an examination and analysis of historical and contemporary polygamy. It outlines polygamy's place in anthropological theory and its rich sociocultural diversity in countries ranging from the USA and UK to Malaysia, India, regions of Africa and Tibet. Polygamy also addresses often difficult and controversial issues facing modern polygamists, such as prejudice, HIV/AIDS and women's emancipation. Polygamy: A Cross-cultural Analysis offers an anthropological overview of the fascinating yet often misunderstood institution of polygamy.

The volume "New Directions in Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties Across the Abrahamic Religions," edited by Todne Thomas, Asiya Malik and Rose Wellman, undertakes a comparative analysis of "spiritual kinship" (such as God-parenthood) in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. My chapter, "Kinship as Ethical Relation," starts by questioning the usefulness of spiritual kinship as a category for the understanding of Judaism and expands that critique into an alternate model that might be more useful for comparative purposes. I argue that the idea of "Spiritual Kinship" emerges precisely from an a set of Christian taxonomies that are often implicitly or explicitly anti-Jewish (kinship of the flesh vs. kinship of the spirit, the letter and the spirit of the law, etc.) which makes it unsuitable as an "Abrahamic" category. Moreover, the specific ways in which it is unsuitable for comparative purposes actually demonstrate the importance of this category for understanding of Christianity and of the anthropological kinship categories (affinal, consanguineal and fictive)  that were in large measure adapted from European Christian sources. Viewing kinship as a set of ethical relations, by contrast, does indeed allow for useful comparison across these religious divides and makes better sense of the ethnographic and textual data. Examples are brought from both modern and medieval Jewish life.

Kinship in Thucydides is a new contribution to the study of Thucydides and the social history of the ancient Greek world. Drawing on modern anthropological enquiries on kinship and sociology of ethnicity and emotions, and scholarly work on kinship diplomacy and Greek ethnicity, it argues that intercommunal kinship has a far more pervasive importance in Thucydides than has been acknowledged so far. It revisits the stereotype of Thucydides as an ancient theorist of Realpolitik, and seeks to reveal new aspects of his authorial sophistication. Through close reading, contextualization in a variety of sources, and special attention to ancient and modern audiences, Fragoulaki explores the whole spectrum of intercommunal kinship in the ancient Greek world, by studying the various ways in which ancient Greek communities could be related to each other (colonization, genealogies, membership of the same ethnic group, socio-cultural symbols, political mechanisms and institutions) and the preponderantly cultural, emotional and ethical character and expression of these ties.
Kinship in Thucydides provides a fresh and up-to-date discussion of Thucydides’ kinship terminology, and has wider implications for our understanding of terms such as syngeneia and oikeiotes. Through test-cases, organized in terms of geography, ethnicity and kinship categories, it reveals a complex web of intercommunal ties and their interaction with the practical aspects of the War. The kinship theme offers an excellent angle from which to study Thucydides’ artful construction of his narrative, his technique of significant understatement, his challenging silences, his interaction with other genres, and his intense engagement with Herodotus. New readings of much discussed parts of the History are provided, and the problem of Athenian kleruchies is re-opened in Appendix I. Appendix II substantiates the complementary relationship in the amount and distribution of kinship information in Thucydides and Herodotus in the form of a table.

Part I of this essay argues that an intricate system of succession strategies existed in ancient Egypt with the so-called "positional succession" at its centre. The text explains how these succession strategies (mix of bio-genealogically and culturally defined kinship relations) were valid simultaneously, resulting in paradoxes axial to the ancient Egyptian symbolic system. The text describes the impossibility of individuals, attempting to navigate these cultural dynamics with the intent of manipulating them to their advantage, of escaping such symbolic polyvalence. This essay therefore aims-among other things-to be a contribution to the discussion on the modalities of the individual-society interaction. The argument also illustrates that even though these succession strategies concern the pinnacle of ancient Egyptian society (office of the king), the underlying symbolic dynamics, conceptualised by the ka, are constitutive for ancient Egyptian society as a whole and can thus be readily applied to other areas as well (funerary concepts, kinship system, cosmology, etc.). The analysis is based primarily on New Kingdom material. Part II then tentatively extrapolates these principles to the Old Kingdom context with the intent of identifying possible similarities. If the supporting arguments of this article's thesis are found satisfactory, then the suggested workings of the "positional succession" strategy within the ancient Egyptian symbolic system would have major impact on our understanding of ancient Egyptian royal ideology, kinship system and cultural dynamics in general.

This text tries to describe the existence of a series of cultural mechanisms in the ancient Egyptian symbolic system which negotiated between internal tensions created by the existence of mutually divergent sociocultural realities. The axial premise of the Egyptian system was the definition of a unique, human–divine mediator in the person of the king. This was enabled by the cultural concept of the coexistence of the bodyphysical
and body-political within every king, mediated by the royal ka. At the same time, the system also preferred that sons succeed their fathers. To ascertain the uniqueness of the king’s position (“without his equal”), bio-genealogical filial relationships to the ruling pharaoh were severed through the mechanism of “cultural fratricide”, creating “sons” out of a large group of male kinsmen with various degrees of biogenealogical relationship to the king. This created a strong tension within the symbolic system by pitting the bio-genealogical order (sons succeed fathers) against the cultural order (“cultural fratricide”). At the moment of a pharaoh’s death, at least two equally legitimate “sons” arose. The deceased’s king’s oldest biological son and the oldest “cultural son” (brother/uncle, but theoretically any male relative). This tension is mirrored in the ambivalent term sn designating simultaneously a relationship of complementary duality and rivalry. To mitigate this tension, another cultural mechanism was introduced – positional succession. Once applied, the issue of which “eldest son” has the right to the throne becomes irrelevant, because the individual on the throne becomes identified with his own predecessor, i.e. his own (divine) father, redefining the kinship structure of those in relation to him. This ascertains the pharaoh’s unique position through his self-begetting ability, making him reproductively subsistent. Even though the positional succession mechanism is cultural par excellence, it is (paradoxically) framed in a biogenealogical
idiom of sonship. This means that even though we can, on the one hand, analytically
distinguish bio-genealogical succession strategies (focusing either directly on the father’s male line in case of lineal descendants, or—alternatively—through the female line in case of collateral descendants), and cultural strategies (“cultural fratricide”, positional succession), the emic Egyptian discourse fused both idioms by speaking about cultural strategies in bio-genealogical terms. Thus, the ka, being a cultural concept of filial relationship, is understood in terms of procreation. The title “Son of Re” founded a cultural identity of all royal office holders, yet the solar cycle of the pharaoh’s divine father was described as a biological process related to his daily birth as the sun from Nut. This Egyptian approach, in fact, creates a more fluid environment of various succession strategies, in which individuals could negotiate their individual needs by taking advantage of the paradoxes imbedded within the system and contextually switching in-between bio-genealogical and cultural codes, as their situation required, without the danger of uprooting the symbolic system itself. We may go even a step further and claim that precisely through the diverging needs of the individuals are symbolic systems, composed of series of unsolvable paradoxes, made firmer. Order has always been founded upon disorder; one cannot exist without the other.

This essay examines tensions emerging around public spaces in a mixed-income development built to replace a distressed public housing project on Chicago's West Side. It argues that the disorienting experiences of moving through these spaces prodded new and long-term residents of the area to examine the practices of sociability they subscribed to. Specifically, it prodded them to examine what it would take to become more or less vulnerable to each other, and in the process, better able to care for themselves and those in their immediate vicinity. I show that scholarly attention to the reconfiguration of sociability in such places helps us better understand post-Welfare social collectivities and the conditions of belonging to them. [housing projects, public space, welfare, race and class, Chicago] " Another public space "

What is this place we call “home”? How does it feel? How do lesbians and feminists inhabit it? What kind of affects emerge in this process? What does “coming- out” entail? How do feminists and lesbians imagine and talk about home? This article explores the narratives of activist lesbians and feminists in Athens on home and belonging. It unravels the notion of “home” as an affective spatiotemporal category on which activist lesbians and feminists attach multiple and divergent meanings and desires: From the childhood home experienced as exile and imbued with feelings of estrangement and loss to the family home seen as a site of remembrance and self- reconciliation. The notion of home is further explored in relation to a non-confessional mode of “coming- out” as well as a kind of “arrival” to an identity. The makings of the queer and lesbian feminist community are loaded with homely desires and fantasies of an ideal queer home. All in all, home is represented as a place to which one arrives, leaves, returns, moves back-forth, attaches to people, relationships, objects and smells, only to realize that she/he already feels a “stranger at home.”

This chapter analyses the interlacing of migration, national belonging, and familial ties across Ethiopia and Eritrea, a context where the process of defining nation-state borders can be observed in the making. The independence of Eritrea and the war of 1998-2000 both determined new criteria for defining nationalities and citizenship rights and introduced the idea of impassable boundaries, making many families " transnational " , which has had significant consequences for intimate relationships. By focusing on the children of mixed couples, this chapter explores how their incoherent biographical paths challenge monolithic representations of national identity, but, at the same time, produce and reproduce nationalistic belonging; ultimately, the chapter aims to highlight the affective, symbolic and practical connections of kinship and nationalism. Moreover, for people in-between, these connections and the new possibilities of handling family networks open innovative ways of global and local mobility through which new futures may be invented. Kinship, citizenship and mobility create an interplay made up of strategic and arduous choices, fortuitous and forced positions, and opposed and conflicting options, suggesting to reflect on individuals and their actions. Nevertheless, while the category of choice is usually linked to a process of liberation from constraining social and family roles, in a context crossed by irreconcilable differences, it seems rather a cause of suffering, because of the losses felt each time.

Salas Carreño, Guillermo. 2018. “On Quechua Relatedness to Contemporary and Ancient Dead.” In Non-Humans in Amerindian South America. Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals and Songs, edited by Juan Javier Rivera, 197–223. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Blant Wolof-talende folk i det rurale Gambia anses overføring av brystmelk for å konstituere spesielt nære sosiale bånd. Skepsis mot ekteskap mellom slekt forbundet gjennom kvinnelige ledd begrunnes også lokalt med referanse til at folk er forbundet «gjennom bryst», til tross for at mange av dem det er snakk om ikke har diet fra samme fysiske bryst. I regional litteratur har referanser til melk og bryst i slike sammenhenger primært vært tolket som symbolske uttrykk for underliggende sosial struktur, ofte avgrensede grupper definert matrilineært eller matrilateralt, eller som lokale symbolske elaboreringer av «melkeslektskap» slik dette er definert i muslimske lovtekster. I artikkelen tas det utgangspunkt – både teoretisk og empirisk – i sirkulasjon, og flyten av melk utforskes. Det spørres hvor, eller til hvem og hvordan, melken flyter, og hva som overføres ved eller «etterlates» av denne flyten, i konkret og ikke overført betydning. Formålet er å få frem hvordan melkerelasjoner blant Wolof er relevante i vurderinger av sosial nærhet og avstand, og hvordan overføringer av brystmelk fra kvinner til barn knytter an til relasjonelle aspekter ved person og sosialitet. På denne måten trekkes oppmerksomheten bort fra gruppemedlemskap. Det er signifikant i denne sammenhengen at melk kan blandes ut, og at arten av tilknytning gjennom brystet er gradvis, heller enn et spørsmål om art. Egenskaper ved flyten av brystmelk, og det sosiale feltet av nærhet og avstand som det er forbundet med, gjør moralske vurderinger av passende og upassende ekteskapspartnere grunnleggende fleksible og ikke kategoriske. Fokuset på sirkulasjonen av melk gir dermed et inntak til forstå trekk ved ekteskapsmønstre.
Key words: milk, kinship, marriage, morality, materiality

In this article, I reconsider bio-essentialism in the study of kinship, centering on David Schneider's influential critique that concluded that kinship was " a non-subject " (1972:51). Schneider's critique is often taken to have shown the limitations of and problems with past views of kinship based on biology, genealogy, and reproduction, a critique that subsequently led those reworking kinship as relatedness in the new kinship studies to view their enterprise as divorced from such bio-essentialist studies. Beginning with an alternative narrative connecting kinship past and present and concluding by introducing a novel way of thinking about kinship, I have three constituent aims in this research article: (1) to reconceptualize the relationship between kinship past and kinship present; (2) to reevaluate Schneider's critique of bio-essentialism and what this implies for the contemporary study of kinship; and (3) subsequently to redirect theoretical discussion of what kinship is. This concluding discussion introduces a general view, the homeostatic property cluster (HPC) view of kinds, into anthropology, providing a theoretical framework that facilitates realization of the often-touted desideratum of the integration of biological and social features of kinship. [bio-essentialism, kinship studies, homeostatic property cluster kinds, Schneider, genealogy]

This chapter explores the relation between colonialism, Malayali reform movements and the transformations occurred in the domestic shpere and in middle-class trajectories of mobility more broadly. It discusses specifically the historical context in which the ‘Yoka Kshema Sabha’ (YKS) developed to voice reformist ambitions of young Nambudiris.  The YKS ethos will be discussed in relation to colonial de-legitimation of indigenous kinship and to the broader history of kinship reform that marked middle-classes in Kerala and India. Analysis of the YKS documents will highlight how the debate on kinship expressed the intention to draw a ‘divine elite’ into the arena of inter-community competition. Differently from other contexts of colonial India, ‘the domestic’ was not identified as the inviolable domain of Indian authenticity but as the symbol of community corruption and generational decline. The chapter will suggest how the YKS remained an ‘elitist movement within the elite’, and failed to gather the support of Brahmins from different sub-castes. The second part of the chapter will connect the analysis of colonial family changes to the one of postcolonial developments such as land reforms, family planning and mass emigration. This will introduce the reader to the final part of the chapter which discusses changes in material practices and entitlements of kinship that occurred due to the YKS and to subsequent reforms. In tracing collective trajectories of revolution, decline and renewed social mobility this chapter sets the context for the analysis of the political implication of contemporary memories.

This article builds on sociological accounts of the negotiated, creative character of kinship and on previous studies of children's involvement in family life to ask how children actively create and define kinship and relatedness. Drawing on data from a qualitative study with children aged 7—12 in the north of England, the authors identify five interconnected ways in which children made sense of kinship. They explore how children understood genealogical kinship conventions, creatively deployed or interpreted kin terms, and defined some unrelated others as `like family'. The interplay between children's creative agency and adults' involvement in children's kinship is considered.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568208097201

This paper examines continuity and change in Lakota belief and ritual, focusing on the social organization of contemporary Lakota ceremonial life. For many Lakotas of Pine Ridge Reservation ritual structures life. The contemporary religious landscape consists of a number of ritual groups, which I call ritual thiyóšpayes, after the Lakota word for band or lodge group, the extended family and historical basic unit of kinship. At the center of these groups is a religious practitioner, a symbol of group identity and solidarity. Ritual thiyóšpayes consist of core and sub-core member families that regularly attend rituals and other corporately sponsored social events. The cohesion of a ritual thiyóšpaye is based largely on equality, mutual help, participation, and one-mindedness. The relationship between a practitioner and his ritual thiyóšpaye is dynamic, characterized by reciprocity, mutual influence, and exchange: the practitioner shapes the beliefs, worldview, and identity of his followers, symbolizing the group to both members and nonmem-bers, while simultaneously being shaped by his followers as a representative of their social, psychological, and religious needs, beliefs, and values. Although patterns of social interaction have changed since the dawn of the reservation period, there remains a distinct and undeniable continuity with past traditions. Ontological approaches in anthropology have been hotly debated in recent years (Posthumus 2017). Some unifying themes in this diverse body of research involve the exploration of the composition and character of alter worlds and the assumption that different peoples inhabit different, oftentimes conflicting realities (see Descola 2013; Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007; Posthumus 2018; Viveiros de Castro 1998). While there are many trends and foci in anthropology's ontological turn, not all suffer from the methodological problems noted in a number of critical assessments. According to Michael L. Cepek, some recent anthropological investigations of ontology "focus on the bare content of abstract propositions while paying little attention to their pragmatic function, epistemological stance, affective tone, and position in a division of linguistic and conceptual labor" (Cepek 2016, 624). While this may be true of some inflections of ontologically minded anthropology, other studies pay careful attention to history and context, producing accurate ethnographies that are also theoretically engaging. For instance , neither Cepek (2016) nor Graeber (2015) mention the work of Philippe Descola (2013) in their critiques of ontological anthropology. I questioned Graeber about this omission via email, and his response was that he does not think Descola is really entirely an ontologically inclined anthropologist, per se, but rather he is a structuralist describing models that are never purely instantiated as such. In this article, I explore the role of ceremony in the social organization of contemporary Lakota (Western [Teton] Sioux) culture. Although I firmly believe in the importance of describing to the best of our abilities the worldviews of people different from ourselves and seriously engaging with alter belief systems, my attention to religion in this article does not take on the baggage of cosmological concerns. Rather, it demonstrates how ceremonial life or religious belief and ritual is interconnected with other aspects of life, in this case kinship and social organization, and how carefully contextualizing studies of alter worlds in their cultural, historical, and sociopolitical frameworks can hopefully remedy the meth-odological problems plaguing some of the studies in the so-called ontological turn.

Kinship terminologies consist of the terms used to reference culturally recognized kinship relations between persons. These
terms have been assumed to identify categories of genealogical relations (despite ethnographic evidence to the contrary), and kinship terminologies are classified using differences in genealogical referents of kin terms. Recent analysis, however, by building on ethnographically validated procedures for computing kin relations from kin terms without reference to genealogy makes evident the underlying generative logic for the structure of kinship terminologies. Making the generative logic of terminologies explicit provides a more rigorous comparative basis for the study of kinship terminology systems.

KINSHIP TERMINOLOGY
Summary
The terminology of kinship classifies the social field of relationships and governs the social context of behaviors. The following text is part of the course of Anthropology of kinship I taught in the postgraduate and undergraduate curriculum of the Department of Social Anthropology (University of the Aegean, Lesvos, Greece) from 1987 to 2000. The analysis of the Albanian terminology of kinship that will follow in a subsequent publication, is a 1997 study. Also refer to the book “Genealogy and Ideology” (N. Vernicos and S. Daskalopoulou, in Greek, «Γενεαλογία και Ιδεολογία»), published in 2005.

What is the relationship between friendship and human flourishing? This is a central topic in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and one to which Maimonides also returned throughout his career. Despite the relative neglect of this topic in recent scholarship, I argue that friendship (philia) was an important link between moral and intellectual perfection for Maimonides. He identified Aristotle’s virtue friendship with the love between students and teachers and also interpreted many of the divine commandments as efforts to promote both family and virtue friendship among the Jewish people. Friendship was aligned thematically in Maimonides’ writings with topics like kinship and sexuality, circumcision, and the ethics of speech, all of which point in different ways to the unresolved tension between rational and sensual aspects of our human condition. This article therefore contributes to the investigation of the relationship between Maimonides’ legal and philosophical writing on social themes. While Aristotle clearly influenced his reading of biblical and rabbinic texts for example, I will also argue that Maimonides’ religious and communal commitments helped to push his reading of Aristotle in a broadly inclusive direction— both with respect to the range of different goods that are appropriate to an ideal human life as well as the potential accessibility of those goods to different classes of persons. I offer this article as a corrective to the exaggerated focus on seclusion and solitary contemplation that has characterized academic scholarship on Maimonides.

Souvent évoqués dans les médias, la vie des gays et les enjeux de la visibilité comme de la réalité au quotidien des couples de même sexe méritaient une étude scientifique sérieuse. C'est chose faite avec le travail de Courduriès qui ouvre une voie prometteuse. Si l'auteur n'enquête que sur les couples masculins et s'en tient à un échantillonnage limité (il s'agit d'un éventail des possibles, à travers la diversité des situations et des personnes), la méthode qu'il a su mettre en place pour atteindre l'intime, si délicat à dévoiler, le recours aux réseaux de chat sur Internet et l'usage du courriel qui renouvelle le rapport enquêteur/enquêté en usage en ethnographie, font de cette recherche un moment fort pour l'étude des conjugalités quelle que soit la composition sexuée des couples.

El presente ensayo consiste en un balance sobre los estudios de parentesco y organización social consagrado a las poblaciones campesino-indígenas de las tierras altas de los Andes Centrales. La exposición está ordenada en tres partes. La primera está dedicada a exponer las tres teorías más reputadas sobre el parentesco incaico en relación con las teorías más generales sobre parentesco supuesto en ellas. La segunda expone los estudios etnohistóricos y etnográficos de sociedades rurales pretéritas y contemporáneas ordenados a partir del influjo que sobre ellos ejercieron las teorías mencionadas. La tercera, por último, introduce algunas de las nuevas perspectivas con nexos más o menos directos con el conjuntos de las temáticas tratadas.

A partir de investigaciones que muestran cómo la provisión de comida y la cohabitación son fundamentales en la construcción del parentesco en los Andes, el autor muestra cómo esta misma lógica está presente en otras interacciones sociales: desde aquellas entre una persona y sus afines, vecinos, paisanos, extraños, e inclusive muertos, hasta aquellas con montañas, lagunas, campos de cultivo, avenidas o plazas, esto es, con lugares que pueden ser también parientes.
El autor recurre al término ruwales para referirse estos lugares con nombre propio a los que se les atribuye agencia e intencionalidad y, a través de comparaciones históricas, muestra las diferentes maneras en que estos seres se relacionaban con los hacendados y las instituciones estatales antes y después de la reforma agraria; con la minería de socavón previa al boom minero; y con la actual minería de tajo abierto.
El libro combina un enfoque procesual de análisis del parentesco, que no asume la reproducción sexual como el fundamento universal del parentesco, con trabajos recientes alrededor de socialidades que exceden a los seres humanos, la multiplicidad ontológica y la cosmopolítica indígena en la antropología contemporánea.

In 1984, two important facts take place in the anthropological field of Kinship, and in the family representation in art that have a powerful influence from that moment. They change the way in which are reinterpreted family relations and Kinship theories at the anthropology field. At the same time, intimacy and family representation at the visual arts context are immersed in an important process of deconstruction, provocation and renewal.

RESUMEN
En 1984 coinciden dos hechos importantes en la antropología del parentesco y en la representación de la familia en el arte que influyen poderosamente en la manera en la que a partir de ese momento se reinterpretan las relaciones familiares, las teorías del parentesco más arraigadas y, al mismo tiempo, la representación de la intimidad y de la familia en las artes visuales se ve inmersa en un importante proceso de deconstrucción, provocación y renovación.

The papers in this issue trace a particular set of Māori interventions in anthropology, arts, museums and heritage in the early twentieth century and consider their implications for iwi ‘tribal communities’, development and environmental management today. They follow Apirana Ngata, Te Rangihīroa (Peter Buck) and some of their Māori and Pākehā (European New Zealander) allies at the Polynesian Society through the Dominion Museum expeditions, on Te Poari Whakapapa (the Board of Maori Ethnological Research) and in a variety of community research initiatives. The authors explore how engagement with ancestral tikanga ‘practices’ and with western technologies and institutions allowed these scholars and leaders to imagine te ao hou ‘a new world’ in Aotearoa New Zealand. Through the analysis of surviving photographs, films, artefacts, collections and displays, as well as the extensive written archives that were produced through their efforts, the articles in this issue explore how relational concepts and practices including whakapapa ‘kin networks’ and tuku ‘exchange of treasures (taonga)’ were mobilised as practical ontologies, that is, as methods for bringing new things (artefacts, systems, concepts) into being. The lasting effects of these collaborative projects on museums, scholarship, government administration and tribal cultural heritage are investigated, showing the enduring relevance of this work in the present.

В статьях 17-го выпуска альманаха обсуждаются теоретические и методологические проблемы реконструкции исторической динамики терминов родства и свойства (на иранском и древнеанглийском материалах). Исследуются проявления межэтнических контактов в системах терминов родства дравидийских, северокавказских и прибалтийско-финских языков. Рассматриваются соотношение категорий «этничность» и «родство», «генеалогия» и «родство», а также актуальные вопросы инкорпоральной репродукции и биотехнологических аспектов родства. Предлагается оригинальная трактовка обычаев матри(суи)цида, анализируются особенности родства по кормлению у арабов Катара и специфика статуса «умм-валад (мать ребенка)» в арабской и восточноафриканской системах родства. Характеризуется терминология родства и свойства чеченцев, води и юкагирских субэтносов.

This essay focused on marriage system from anthropology point of view. The writer take marriage between ethnic in Batak Toba’s case. The attention in focused on how to settled a man non Batakness that has no family name into system of ‘Dalihan Na Tolu” or ‘Tungku Yang Tiga’. ‘Dalihan Na Tolu’ are the wife ’ family name, the husband’s family name, and all relatives with the sama family name. This three are the base of stucture relation of batak’s society.

Keyword: perkawinan, batak, antar suku

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Dec 2021

Corrected!

I am leaving the bibliography out--please check out JAAR website to download the full article--also have a look at the whole issue, it is great! https://academic.oup.com/jaar/issue/89/4

Reproduction occurs through processes of tourism
and travel and across borders. This article explores the phenomenon
of Euro-American women as mobile social actors
bearing children out of relations with local men in Costa Rica
and the various material-relational effects of their reproductive
decisions. By looking at the pregnancies and bicultural
children born out of transnational relations from various actors’
perspectives—foreign mothers, Costa Rican fathers and
townspeople—contestations over the social and cultural meanings
and motivations for cross-border reproduction become
apparent. ‘‘Reproductive mobility’’ depends on how places are
imagined and can lead to new opportunities for, as well as
new inequities and rifts over, kinship formation.

Descrivendo la quotidianità delle relazioni domestiche, questo libro offre uno sguardo sul modo in cui le famiglie adottive trasformano l’iniziale estraneità dei suoi membri in familiarità, intimità, affetti, cura e come fabbricano, nel tempo, le nuove esistenze e le soggettività dei parenti ‘per legge’. La letteratura sull’argomento ha illustrato soprattutto i temi del dislocamento del bambino, dell’alienazione delle famiglie adottive, dei poteri esercitati dai paesi di arrivo sui paesi di origine. Una prospettiva etnografica e narrativa, ancorata alle riflessioni dei Critical Kinship Studies e all’idea di ‘famiglia post-familiare’, restituisce un’appassionante lettura dell’esperienza adottiva dal punto di vista dei genitori, dei figli e di molti altri parenti coinvolti nella ricerca. Pratiche e sentimenti del fare e sentirsi famiglia attraversano così il mondo quotidiano, le relazioni e le storie di vita dei testimoni, situandosi fra la dimensione pubblica dell’essere parenti adottivi e la dimensione più intima e privata.

In tribute to the foundational, yet productively contentious, nature of the ethnographic imagination in anthropology, this series honors the creator of the term "ethnographic theory" himself. Monographs included in this series represent unique contributions to anthropology and showcase groundbreaking work that contributes to the emergence of new ethnographically-inspired theories or challenge the way the "ethnographic" is conceived today.

The term kinship is used to refer to a system of relations, both biological and also the socio cultural. The early authors treated kinship as primarily a biological relationship with the cultural aspect the mere recognition of its existence with other features trailing along in second place. Kinship has to do with the reproduction of human beings and the relations between human beings that are the concomitants of reproduction. The reproduction of human beings is formulated as a sexual and biological process. Sexual reproduction creates biological links between persons. Whatever the place of biology, there has been virtual unanimity in defining kinship in terms of human reproduction. Whether purely social for Durkheim, the social as dictated by biological circumstances for Malinowski, a reflection of the facts of consanguinity for Morgan, the social control over the means of human reproduction for Marx, kinship is essentially about reproduction. So kinship is defined by social scientists and anthropologists in particular, as having to do with reproduction because reproduction is viewable as a distinct and vitally important feature of social life. (Schneider: 1984) David Schneider's two main works, American Kinship (1976) and A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984), founded a new kind of study in the field of kinship. The central theme of these works was the relationship between nature and culture or between biological and social aspects of kinship. Schneider framed his analysis of American Kinship around a distinction between the order of nature and order of law or between substance and code. In A Critique of the study of Kinship, he demonstrated that kinship theory was steeped in Euro American folk assumptions about the primacy of ties derived from sexual procreation, and that these assumptions do not apply cross culturally. In this way Schneider opened up a whole field of enquiry, which has been taken up more recently by a number of authors in studies of reproductive technologies. By the late 1980's, however, one could discern that kinship was beginning to undergo something of a renaissance. Studies of gender and personhood began to feed back into kinship, revitalizing it and contributing to a reformulation of what kinship was all about and how it should be studied. The other main impetus to the rebirth of kinship was provided by developments in reproductive technologies. Techniques such as artificial insemination by donor and in vitro fertilization raised new questions about the possibility of different multiple connections between children and their parents. Marilyn Strathern(1992), in particular has used discourses about recent technological developments to question the place of nature not just in kinship, but in wider knowledge practices in Euro American culture. Nature, she argues, can no longer be considered as the grounding for culture or as simply there to be revealed or discovered. It is partly produced through technological intervention. Kinship, Strathern argues is of particular significance precisely because, in Euro American ideas, it has been thought of as a realm where nature and culture interconnect. Nature is of course the necessary ground from which culture emerges, and kinship like culture is thought of

Turkey has witnessed a proliferation of Islamic television channels since the liberalization of broadcasting in the 1990s. The programming of these TV channels was initially distinctly theological in character, with shows focusing on the doctrinal, scriptural, and ritualistic aspects of Islam. More recently, however, they have started producing family-friendly entertainment programs as well as shows aimed at “strengthening the family.” Islamic broadcasters intend their family-focused programming as civil initiatives against what they see as the increasing corrosion of the “moral fabric of the family” and devaluation of “family values” in contemporary Turkish society. In these TV shows, audiences are provided with guidance and techniques that would help them cultivate ethical dispositions, knowledge, and skills so that they could assume autonomy and responsibility for administering their families more effectively. Islamic broadcasters explicitly identify their role as assisting the state in  fighting social problems through their programming. Moreover, the discourses and sensibilities promoted on television articulate with the biopolitical concerns of the nation-state and the emerging rationalities of governance. While Islamic television professionals’ self-ascribed mission to “strengthen the family” emerges from a religiously inspired moral imperative to provide service, it simultaneously indicates their internalization of neoliberal rationalities of governance that promote the responsibilization of non-governmental actors for providing social services as well as that of individuals for supporting and caring for their family members. [Keywords: Islam, television, media, family, family values, secularism, neoliberalism, Turkey]

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