Full Description
Politics and Kinship: A Reader offers a unique overview of the entanglement of these two categories in both theoretical debates and everyday practices. The two, despite many challenges, are often thought to have become separated during the process of modernisation. Tracing how this notion of separation becomes idealised and translated into various contexts, this book sheds light on its epistemological limitations. Combining otherwise-distinct lines of discussion within political anthropology and kinship studies, the selection of texts covers a broad range of intersecting topics that range from military strategy, DNA testing, and child fostering, to practices of kinning the state.
Beginning with the study of politics, the first part of this volume looks at how its separation from kinship came to be considered a 'modern' phenomenon, with significant consequences. The second part starts from kinship, showing how it was made into a separate and apolitical field - an idea that would soon travel and be translated globally into policies. The third part turns to reproductions through various transmissions and future-making projects. Overall, the volume offers a fundamental critique of the epistemological separation of politics and kinship, and its shortcomings for teaching and research. Featuring contributions from a broad range of regional, temporal and theoretical backgrounds, it allows for critical engagement with knowledge production about the entanglement of politics and kinship.
The different traditions and contemporary approaches represented make this book an essential resource for researchers, instructors and students of anthropology.
Contents
Politics and Kinship: An Introduction Part I. Starting from Politics: Partitions and boundaries 1. Introduction to African Political Systems 2. Kinship within and beyond the 'Movement of Progressive Societies' 3. Kinship Weaponized: Representations of Kinship and Binary Othering in U.S. Military Anthropology 4. Father State, Motherland, and the Birth of Modern Turkey 5. The Village Headman in British Central Africa: Introduction 6. State Kinning and Kinning the State in Serbian Elder Care Programs Part II. Starting from Kinship: Technologies and travels 7. General Results 8. Doubt is the Mother of All Invention: DNA and Paternity in a Brazilian Setting 9. The Algebra of Genocide 10. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Gender and Morality in the Making of Race 11. Genomics en Route: Ancestry, Heritage and the Politics of Identity across the Black Atlantic12. Making Merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Social Life of Caste Part III. Reproductions: Transmissions and future making 13. The Origins of the Family, Property, and the State 14. Including Our Own 15. Parenthood and Social Reproduction 16. No School without Foster Families in Northern Benin: A Social Historical Approach 17. Defining Parents, Making Citizens: Nationality and Citizenship in Transnational Surrogacy
