Recent years have seen a growing impetus to explain social life almost exclusively in biological and mechanistic terms, and to dismiss cultural meaning and difference. Daily we read assertions that everything from disease to morality not to mention the presumed characteristics of race, gender, and sexuality can be explained by reference primarily to genetics and our evolutionary past. Complexities mobilizes experts from several fields of anthropology cultural, archaeological, linguistic, and biological to offer a compelling challenge to the resurgence of reductive theories of human...
Recent years have seen a growing impetus to explain social life almost exclusively in biological and mechanistic terms, and to dismiss cultural meanin...
Among a growing number of ethnographies of eastern Indonesia that deal with cosmology, exchange, and kinship, From a Shattered Sun is the first to address squarely issues originally broached by Edmund Leach and Claude Levi-Strauss concerning the relation between hierarchy and equality in asymmetric systems of marriage. On the basis of extensive fieldwork in the Tamimbar islands, Susan McKinnon analyzes the simultaneous presence of both closed, asymmetric cycles and open, asymmetric pathways of alliance-of both egalitarian and hierarchical configurations. In addition, Tamimbarese...
Among a growing number of ethnographies of eastern Indonesia that deal with cosmology, exchange, and kinship, From a Shattered Sun is the fi...
The essays in Relative Values draw on new work in anthropology, science studies, gender theory, critical race studies, and postmodernism to offer a radical revisioning of kinship and kinship theory. Through a combination of vivid case studies and trenchant theoretical essays, the contributors--a group of internationally recognized scholars--examine both the history of kinship theory and its future, at once raising questions that have long occupied a central place within the discipline of anthropology and moving beyond them. Ideas about kinship are vital not only to understanding but...
The essays in Relative Values draw on new work in anthropology, science studies, gender theory, critical race studies, and postmodernism to off...
The essays in Relative Values draw on new work in anthropology, science studies, gender theory, critical race studies, and postmodernism to offer a radical revisioning of kinship and kinship theory. Through a combination of vivid case studies and trenchant theoretical essays, the contributors a group of internationally recognized scholars examine both the history of kinship theory and its future, at once raising questions that have long occupied a central place within the discipline of anthropology and moving beyond them. Ideas about kinship are vital not only to understanding but...
The essays in Relative Values draw on new work in anthropology, science studies, gender theory, critical race studies, and postmodernism to off...
For more than 150 years, theories of social evolution, development, and modernity have been unanimous in their assumption that kinship organizes simpler, "traditional," pre-state societies but not complex, "modern," state societies. And these theories have been unanimous in their presupposition that within modern state-based societies kinship has been relegated to the domestic domain, has lost its economic and political functions, has retained no organizing force in modern political and economic structures and processes, and has become secularized and rationalized. Vital Relations...
For more than 150 years, theories of social evolution, development, and modernity have been unanimous in their assumption that kinship organizes si...
