Description
What need is there for kinship? What good is it anyway? The questions are as old as anthropology itself, but few answers have been enduringly persuasive. Kinship systems can contribute to our enslavement, but more often they permit, channel, and facilitate our relations with others and our further fashioning of ourselves-as kin but also as subjects of other kinds. When they do, they are among the matrices of our lives as ethical beings. Each contributor to this innovative book treats his or her own alterity as the touchstone of the exploration of an ethnographically and historically specific ethics of kinship. Together, the chapters reveal the irreducible complexity of the entanglement of the subject of kinship with the subject of nation, class, ethnicity, gender, desire. The chapters speak eloquently to the sometimes liberating stories that we cannot help but keep telling about our kin and ourselves.
About the Author
James Faubion is associate professor of anthropology at Rice University.
Reviews
The much desired reawakening of interest by anthropologists in the topic of kinship, central to the history of their discipline, has depended on making coherent use of the outpouring of rich culture theories of recent years concerning the concept of the self, gender, issues of subjectivity, and finally, ethics. This compelling and highly readable volume of interwoven narratives and analyses not only sets the terms of this renaissance but also the kinds of debates by which it could be sustained. -- George Marcus, author of Anthropology As Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences
The resulting collection is very welcome as it not only constitutes an interesting read in its own right but is also a contribution for the present renewal of debates in the anthropology of kinship. -- Joao de Pina-Cabral, University of Lisbon * Anthropological Quarterly *
Only a few collections exist to give readers an overview of this expanding subfield, and of these, none meld theory with autoethnography in the way undertaken by this collection. The Ethics of Kinship will make an original and provocative contribution to the growing literature on the new kinship studies. -- Kath Weston, Harvard University
Book Information
ISBN 9780742509566
Author James Faubion
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Publisher Rowman & Littlefield
Weight(grams) 445g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 154mm * 22mm
About the Author
James Faubion is associate professor of anthropology at Rice University.
Reviews
The much desired reawakening of interest by anthropologists in the topic of kinship, central to the history of their discipline, has depended on making coherent use of the outpouring of rich culture theories of recent years concerning the concept of the self, gender, issues of subjectivity, and finally, ethics. This compelling and highly readable volume of interwoven narratives and analyses not only sets the terms of this renaissance but also the kinds of debates by which it could be sustained. -- George Marcus, author of Anthropology As Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences
The resulting collection is very welcome as it not only constitutes an interesting read in its own right but is also a contribution for the present renewal of debates in the anthropology of kinship. -- Joao de Pina-Cabral, University of Lisbon * Anthropological Quarterly *
Only a few collections exist to give readers an overview of this expanding subfield, and of these, none meld theory with autoethnography in the way undertaken by this collection. The Ethics of Kinship will make an original and provocative contribution to the growing literature on the new kinship studies. -- Kath Weston, Harvard University
Book Information
ISBN 9780742509566
Author James Faubion
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Publisher Rowman & Littlefield
Weight(grams) 445g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 154mm * 22mm
