Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise

ISBN-13: 9780521849920 / Angielski / Twarda / 2005 / 240 str.

Marilyn Strathern

Opis

Marilyn Strathern takes up an issue at the heart of studies of society--anthropologists using relationships to uncover relationships. The role of relations in western (Euro-American) knowledge practices, from the scientific revolution onwards, raises a question about the extent to which Euro-American kinship is the kinship of a knowledge-based society. This argument takes the reader through current issues in biotechnology, new family formations and legal interventions, as well as intellectual property debates, to matters of personhood and ownership afforded by material from Melanesia and elsewhere.

Recenzje

'Strathern's work has been devoted to the creative redeployment of the discipline's 'conventions' and aesthetic 'constraints', including such contrasts as nature and culture, gifts and commodities, and 'Melanesian' and 'Euro-American' forms of knowledge. At a time when it is fashionable to collapse these dichotomies, the exercise has demanded a considerable degree of analytical care and control on her part. It is Strathern's extraordinary capacity to control these contrasts that has enabled her to show how an anthropological analysis could flow radically differently within its own aesthetic constraints.' Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Spis treści

Preface; Part I. Divided Origins: Introduction: divided origins; 1. Relatives are always a surprise: biotechnology in an age of individualism; 2. Embedded science; 3. Emergent properties; Part II. The Arithmetic of Ownership: Introduction: the arithmetic of ownership; 4. The patent and the Malanggan; 5. Losing (out on) intellectual resources; 6. Divided origins and the arithmetic of ownership; Notes; References; Author index; Subject index.