Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only €10,99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Reconnecting State and Kinship
    Reconnecting State and Kinship
    Reconnecting State and Kinship
    Ebook384 pages5 hours

    Reconnecting State and Kinship

    By Tatjana Thelen and Erdmute Alber

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Within the social sciences, kinship and statehood are often seen as two distinct modes of social organization, sometimes conceived of as following each other in a temporal line and sometimes as operating on different scales. Kinship is traditionally associated with small-scale communities in stateless societies. The state, meanwhile, is viewed as a development away from kinship as political order toward rational, impersonal, and functional forms of rule. In recent decades, theoretical and empirical scholarship has challenged these notions, but the underlying presumption of a deep-rooted opposition between kinship and the (modern) state has remained surprisingly stable.

    That this binary is so deeply engrained in Western self-understanding and knowledge production poses a considerable challenge to decoding their coproduction. Reconnecting State and Kinship seeks to trace the historical shifts and boundary work implied in the ongoing reproduction of these supposedly discrete or even opposing units of analysis. Contributors ask whether concepts associated with one sphere —including corruption, patronage, lineage, and incest—surface in the other. Policies and interventions modeled upon the assumed polarity can have lasting consequences for mechanisms of marginalization and exclusion, including decisions about life and death.

    Reconnecting State and Kinship not only explores the boundary-related and classificatory practices that reinforce the kinship/statehood binary but also tracks the traveling of these concepts and their underlying norms through time and space ultimately demonstrating the ways that kinship and "the state" are intertwined.

    Contributors: Erdmute Alber, Apostolos Andrikopoulos, Helle Bundgaard, Jeanette Edwards, Karen Fog Olwig, Victoria Goddard, Michael Herzfeld, Eirini Papadaki, Frances Pine, Ivan Rajković, Tatjana Thelen, Thomas Zitelmann.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Pennsylvania Press
    Release dateNov 2, 2017
    ISBN9780812294415
    Reconnecting State and Kinship

    Related to Reconnecting State and Kinship

    Related ebooks

    Anthropology For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Torture By Water

      Feb 12, 2019

      Torture By Water
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Rise Of The “Gamers”

      Jul 1, 2020

      If one is to profoundly understand a society and era, as the sociologist Max Weber superbly taught, one must grasp the character and spirit of their dominant class.1A great deal that is central to American society and history since 1965 has been shap

      20 min read

    • Article

      Slavery In Ancient Rome

      Aug 6, 2020

      Slavery In Ancient Rome
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Abbey Church Of Saint-denis

      Jul 7, 2023

      The Basilica of Saint-Denis is dedicated to Saint Dionysius (Denis in French), first bishop of Lutetia Parisiorum (the Latin name of the Roman city where Paris later developed). He was martyred in the third century on the hill of Montmartre, the Mons

      5 min read

    • Article

      Statuary Rivals

      Nov 17, 2020

      Perched high above the Chicago tomb of Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln’s famed political rival, stands a larger-than-life statue. It was once as famous as any outdoor memorial in the North. Ironically, it was created by an artist who knew

      9 min read

    • Article

      A Lesson of Virtue

      Jul 28, 2022

      Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule recently launched his new book Common Good Constitutionalism. In last week’s edition of Beijing Review, Vermeule and John Pang, Malaysian senior fellow at Bard College in New York, described the shared cla

      4 min read

    • Article

      To Rescue Democracy, Go Outside: Real spaces, not digital ones, will fix our politics.

      Oct 13, 2016

      When I see a liberal writer’s description of Donald Trump, or a conservative writer’s views of Hillary Clinton, I am embarrassed for them both. I wouldn’t let a 5-year-old child make such impolite and obviously extreme statements—and yet, today, extr

      6 min read

    • Article

      Beware of Bad Ideas

      Dec 23, 2020

      Beware of Bad Ideas
      9 min read

    • Article

      Books Liberalism And Its Content

      Apr 26, 2019

      From reshaping banking theory to exploring how capitalism sowed its own seeds of des­truction (Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists) or how providing subsidised credit to allay widening income inequality and rising job insecurity in the US ended u

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Ideological Commissar And The Institutionalization Of Indoctrination

      Jul 18, 2022

      The social organization of indoctrination and propaganda is a well-known and yet a very little understood phenomenon. It is a commonplace to note that political systems have embedded into their structures distinctive organizational arrangements whose

      36 min read

    • Article

      The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty

      Aug 4, 2021

      By Daren Acemoglu and James A. Robinson New York: Penguin Press, 2019. Pp. xvii, 558. $32 hardcover. Amid heightened economic, social, and political divides, social unrest, and rising popularity of antiliberty arguments, Daren Acemoglu and James A. R

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Conversation

      Feb 9, 2018

      The Conversation
      8 min read

    • Article

      Two Years Since George Floyd’s Killing: What Have Scientific Societies Done?

      Oct 25, 2022

      It’s been two years since George Floyd’s killing and the uprising that followed it. Something clicked for a lot of people at the time. This is why more people went out to protest in the United States than ever before to demand change. This is also wh

      5 min read

    • Article

      Can Civics Save America?

      May 15, 2021

      Can Civics Save America?
      9 min read

    • Article

      Atheism, the Computer Model

      Feb 16, 2017

      In the United States, the nones have it. The nones being people with no organized religion and increasingly no belief in God or a universal spiritual power. They have the momentum, attention, and an expectation that in the future they will become a m

      10 min read

    • Article

      Aziz Rana

      Jun 1, 2024

      Why do so many Americans seem to worship the Constitution? In his new book, The Constitutional Bind, Aziz Rana argues that today’s reverence for the document—among both Democrats and Republicans—is a distinctive product of the 20th century and the Co

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Reconnecting State and Kinship

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Reconnecting State and Kinship - Tatjana Thelen

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1