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Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Janet Carsten, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 215 pp.
Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 519 pp.
Kinship theory is not what it used to be. Kinship studies combine an interest in universal realities, namely sexual difference, the production of offspring, and ideas of genealogical relatedness that refer to these biological circumstances. The seeming universality of the biological, and the obvious diversity of the social and interpretive have provided a tantalizing domain for theoretical speculation and methodological experiment. Two problems are particularly troubling: first, the question of comparison when the meanings and contexts of the instances compared differ; second, the worry that Euro-American ideas of genealogical relatedness permeate the definitions of the questions asked about other societies. This seems to be a moment for reassessment. Both the volumes being reviewed here reflect some of the general revisions that have been developing for decades, basic changes in anthropology that include, but reach far beyond, the domain of kinship studies.
The volume edited by Janet Carsten comes from a panel held in 1996 to celebrate 50 years of social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. It is the smaller and more focused of the two works reviewed here. The larger collection, edited by Sarah Franklin and Susan Mckinnon, originated in a Wenner-Gren symposium held in Palma de Mallorca in 1998 on New Directions in Kinship Study. Both of these collections emphasize that their task is to present "new approaches." The Franklin and McKinnon volume, to which Carsten was also a contributor, asserts in its title that it is "reconfiguring kinship studies."
Those are ambitious objectives, and the editors exert themselves mightily to reach them. Both books achieve two things with considerable success. One is to demonstrate that there is a wide range of new ethnographic content today. The other is to show that many former assumptions, techniques of analysis, and fundamental approaches are not useful for the questions being asked now.
In the past, as today, the question of what kinship organization tells us about a society is in debate. We see this from the 19th century on. Notable examples include the following: First, Lewis...