Kinship

Using anthropological kinship as a framework for the cross-cultural study of gender, this book focuses on human reproduction & the social & cultural implications of male & female reproductive roles. The book provides coverage of the field of kinship at the introductory level while exploring the major issues & debates in the study of the interrelation of gender & culture.

The study of the transmission of status has tended to concentrate on the descent of patrilineal and matrilineal status. This text examines how the status of group affiliation affects the rules.

Tamara K. Hareven is Unidel Professor of Family Studies and History at the University of Delaware.

The ideal introduction to this discipline, defining and discussing the central terms with clarity and authority.

Modern anthropology would be radically different without this book. Published in 1871, this first major study of kinship, inventive and wide-ranging, created a new field of inquiry in anthropology. Drawing partly upon his own fieldwork among American Indians, anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan examined the kinship systems of over one hundred cultures, probing for similarities and differences in their organization. In his attempt to discover particular types of marriage and descent systems across the globe, Morgan demonstrated the centrality of kinship relations in many cultures. Kinship, it was revealed, was an important key for understanding cultures and could be studied through systematic, scientific means.

This collection reaffirms the importance of kinship, and of studying kinship, within the framework of social anthropology.The contributors examine both the benefits and burdens of kinship across cultures and explore how 'relatedness' is inextricably linked with other concepts which define people's identities - such as gender, power and history. With examples from a wide range of areas including Austria, Greenland, Portugal, Turkey and the Amazon, it covers themes such as:* how people choose and activate kin* leadership, spiritual power and kinship* inheritance, marriage and social inequality* familial sentiment and economic interest* the role of kinship in Utopian communes Dividends of Kinshipprovides a timely and critical reappraisal of the place of familial relations in the contemporary world. It will be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics in anthropology, and across the social sciences.

The latest in the successful Oxford Modern Britain series, Kinship and Friendship in Modern Britain provides a succinct introduction to key aspects of kin and friend relationships in Britain today. Graham Allan reviews a cross-section of research to examine the major issues surrounding contemporary kinship and friendship, analysing the personal - and social - consequence of these ties. The author examines key aspects of interpersonal relations to discuss the nature and importance of kinship in the late twentieth century. After studying modern perspectives on informal relationships, he focuses on kinship solidarities, highlighting their increased complexity in modern Britain, and reviewing the obligations and commitments between different categories of kin. In later chapters, he examines patterns of friendship, concentrating in particular on how they are organized and their social implications. Graham Allan also studies alternative views of kinship and friendship as negotiation and as economic exchange, also analysing how relationships may change in later life. Kinship and Friendship in Modern Britain provides the student with an invaluable introduction to the fundamental aspects of the sociology of family and friendship in contemporary British life.

This book concerns the history of the family in eighteenth-century England. Tadmor provides a new interpretation of concepts of household, family and kinship through her analysis of contemporary language (in diaries, conduct treatises, novels by Richardson and Haywood, and other sources). She emphasizes the importance of the household in constructing notions of the family, and shows how ties of "friendship" formed vital social, economic and political networks. Her book makes a substantial contribution to eighteenth-century history, and will be of value to all historians and literary scholars of the period.