Linda Stone - New Directions in Anthropological Kinship

Cover

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL KINSHIP

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Linda Stone, Editor

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS , INC .

Lanham Boulder New York Oxford

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ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stone, Linda, 1947

New directions in anthropological kinship / Linda Stone.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7425-0107-18 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-7425-0108-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Kinship. I. Title.

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.481992.

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his book attests to a revival of kinship in anthropology. Even Scheider,whose own work contributed to the demise of kinship in the 1970s and (Even Schneider,)1980s, remarked in the 1990s that kinship had risen from its ashes (1995: 193). There are different reasons for this revival, some explored in this volume. In addition to those, it may well be, as Holy (1996: 165) suggested, that too much theoretical effort has been invested in kinship for its abandonment to be realistic, or as Parkin noted, to neglect kinship is to disregard a good deal of what any society explicitly recognizes (1997: ix). In any case, kinship in anthropology has changed significantly since mid-century and it is headed in interesting new directions.

This book grew out of a conference panel, New Directions in Kinship Studies, at the 1997 meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C. Though the conference papers were all by cultural anthropologists, as are most of the chapters in this book, kinship has been also receiving attention from anthropologists in other subdisciplines. I then decided to broaden the book to include contributions from archaeology, primatology, evolutionary anthropology, and sociolinguistics, aiming to approximate an anthropological four field approach to contemporary kinship. Sociolinguistics is the only subfield from which, unfortunately, I did not find contributors.