The genealogical model has a long-standing history in Western thought. The contributors to this volume consider the ways in which assumptions about the genealogical model--in particular, ideas concerning sequence, essence, and transmission--structure other modes of practice and knowledge-making in domains well beyond what is normally labeled "kinship." The detailed ethnographic work and analysis included in this text explores how these assumptions have been built into our understandings of race, personhood, ethnicity, property relations, and the relationship between human beings and non-human species. The authors explore the influences of the genealogical model of kinship in wider social theory and examine anthropology's ability to provide a unique framework capable of bridging the "social" and "natural" sciences. In doing so, this volume brings fresh new perspectives to bear on contemporary theories concerning biotechnology and its effect upon social life.

Beyond Kinship brings together ethnohistorians, archaeologists, and cultural anthropologists for the first time in a common discussion of the social model of house societies proposed by Claude Levi-Strauss. While kinship theory has been central to the study of social organization, an alternative approach has emerged—that of seeing the "house" both as a physical and symbolic structure and a principle of social organization. The house stands as a model social formation that is distinguished by its attention to a number of material domains (land, the dwelling, ritual and nonritual objects). As the essays in this volume make clear, the focus on material culture and on place contributes to the ongoing convergence of anthropology and history and helps erase the artificial distinctions between prehistory and history. Contributions to the volume offer significant new interpretations of primary data as well as reconsidering classic ethnographic material. Beyond Kinship crosses the boundaries within anthropology—not only between cultural anthropology and archaeology but between structural—symbolic and materialist approaches and between American and British schools of anthropology; it is intended to advance the fruitful dialogue now taking place within the field.

Between 1902 and 1934, the United States confined hundreds of adults and children from dozens of Native nations at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, a federal psychiatric hospital in South Dakota. But detention at the Indian Asylum, as families experienced it, was not the beginning or end of the story. For them, Canton Asylum was one of many places of imposed removal and confinement, including reservations, boarding schools, orphanages, and prison-hospitals. Despite the long reach of institutionalization for those forcibly held at the Asylum, the tenacity of relationships extended within and beyond institutional walls. In this accessible and innovative work, Susan Burch tells the story of the Indigenous people—families, communities, and nations, across generations to the present day—who have experienced the impact of this history.

We find our way forward by going back. The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home." Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to "unforget" our history. This remarkable sojourn through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality helps us retrace our steps and pick up what was lost along the way: chances to honor rather than violate treaties, to see the land as a relative rather than a resource, and to unravel the history we have been taught.

The contributors to this volume assert the importance of queer kinship to queer and trans theory and to kinship theory. In a contemporary moment marked by the rising tides of neoliberalism, fascism, xenophobia, and homo- and cis-nationalism, they approach kinship as both a horizon and a source of violence and possibility. The contributors challenge dominant theories of kinship that ignore the devastating impacts of chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and racialized nationalism on the bonds of Black and Indigenous people and people of color. Among other topics, they examine the “blood tie” as the legal marker of kin relations, the everyday experiences and memories of trans mothers and daughters in Istanbul, the outsourcing of reproductive labor in postcolonial India, kinship as a model of governance beyond the liberal state, and the intergenerational effects of the adoption of Indigenous children as a technology of settler colonialism. Queer Kinship pushes the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of queer theory forward while opening up new paths for studying kinship. Contributors. Aqdas Aftab, Leah Claire Allen, Tyler Bradway, Juliana Demartini Brito, Judith Butler, Dilara Çalışkan, Christopher Chamberlin, Aobo Dong, Brigitte Fielder, Elizabeth Freeman, John S. Garrison, Nat Hurley, Joseph M. Pierce, Mark Rifkin, Poulomi Saha, Kath Weston

This is an anthropological exploration of the roots of China's modernity in the country's own tradition, as seen especially in economic and kinship patterns.

Using some of his landmark publications on kinship, along with a new introduction, chapter and conclusion, Robert Parkin discusses here the changes in kinship terminologies and marriage practices, as well as the dialectics between them. The chapters also focus on a suggested trajectory, linking South Asia and Europe and the specific question of the status of Crow-Omaha systems. The collection culminates in the argument that, whereas marriage systems and practices seem infinitely varied when examined from a very close perspective, the terminologies that accompany them are much more restricted.