Description
Book SynopsisHas kinship become more structureless, commodified, and flexible in the global era? Do such representations overlook the diffuse, enduring ties that kinship has long signified? What has been the effect of contemporary bio-politics on kinship practices and theories? This title deals with these questions.
Trade Review“This important collection of inter-disciplinary essays on the new kinship shows diverse ways that relative values, shifting solidarities, and partial connections of truth and affect today create the ties that bind.”—Paul Rabinow, University of California, Berkeley
“This is one of the few books which crosses disciplinary terrains with clear and brilliant consequences. It not only brings anthropology into every sphere, but shows that fundamental thinking on life and kinship under conditions of globalization compel us to accept and work with a radical remapping of knowledge. This text considers these issues with prismatic illumination and is unprecedented in its success.”—Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley
"The challenge of recoding our kinship studies and our kinship behaviour remains, but the essays in
Relative Values provide a broad template that makes meeting the challenge possible—and necessary. Scholars in a multitude of fields will be grateful for this finely executed collection." -- Judith S. Modell, * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *
Table of ContentsIllustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies / Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon
Part I. Substantial-Codings: From Blood to Hypertext
1. Substantivism, Antisubstantivism, and Anti-antisubstantivism / Janet Carsten
2. The Ethnography of Creation: Lewis Henry Morgan and the American Beaver / Gillian Feeley-Harnik
3. Making Kinship, with an Old Reproductive Technology / Mary Bouquet
4. Kinship in Hypertext: Transubstantiating Fatherhood and Information Flow in Artificial Life / Stefan Helmreich
Part II. Kinship Negotiations: What’s Biology Not/Got to Do with It
5. Kinship, Controversy, and the Sharing of Substance: The Race/Class Politics of Blood Transfusion / Kath Weston
6. Strategic Naturalizing: Kinship in an Infertility Clinic / Charis Thompson
7. Self-Conscious Kinship: Some Contested Values in Norwegian Transnational Adoption / Signe Howell
8. Practicing Kinship in Rural North China / Yunxiang Yan
9. The Shift in Kinship Studies in France: The Case of Grandparenting / Martine Segalen
Part III. Nature, Culture, and the Properties of Kinship
10. The Economies in Kinship and the Paternity of Culture: Origin Stories in Kinship Theory / Susan McKinnon
11. Biologization Revisited: Kinship Theory in the Context of the New Biologies / Sarah Franklin
Part IV. ‘R’ Genes Us? The Uses of Gene/alogies
12. Blood/Kinship, Governmentality, and Cultures of Order in Colonial Africa / Melbourne Tapper
13. “We’re Going to Tell These People Who They Really Are”: Science and Relatedness / Jonathan Marks
14. Genealogical Dis-Ease: Where Heredity Abnormality, Biomedical Explanation, and Family Responsibility Meet / Rayna Rapp, Deborah Heath, and Karen-Sue Taussig
Part V. Ambivalence and Violence at the Heart of Kinship
15. Ambivalence in Kinship since the 1940s / Michael G. Peletz
16. Cutting the Ties that Bind: The Sacrifice of Abraham and Patriarchal Kinship / Carol Delaney
17. To Forget Their Tongue, Their Name, and Their Whole Relation: Captivity, Extra-Tribal Adoption, and the Indian Child Welfare Act / Pauline Turner Strong
Contributors
Index
