A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment (Mascia-Lees/A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment) || Kinship

✍ Scribed by Mascia-Lees, Frances E.

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 478 KB
• Edition: 1
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 1405189495
• DOI: 10.1002/9781444340488.ch16

✦ Synopsis

We have then always to be prepared to speak of production and reproduction, rather than of reproduction alone. Even when we have given full weight to all that can be reasonably described as replication, in cultural as in more general social activities, and when we have acknowledged the systematic reproduction of certain deep forms, we have still to insist that social orders and cultural orders must be seen as actively made: actively and continuously, or they may quite quickly break down."

Raymond Williams (1982) Studies of kinship have been central to anthropology since its inception, whether in the work of structural-functionalist anthropologists focused on systems of descent, forms of marriage, and rules of post-marital residence as the building blocks of social structure, structuralists concerned with exchange, reciprocity, and alliances among unilineal descent groups, or interpretive anthropologists focused on symbols and systems of meaning. With the advent of feminist anthropology in the 1970s, studies of kinship were revolutionized: attention turned to understanding kinship as a system of power, which produces and sustains inequalities. Essential to this shift was a denaturalizing of kinship and a decoupling of the biological and the social, which opened understandings of how ethnicity, class, gender and other forms of difference shape KINSHIP