Dziebel has doctorates in both history and anthropology and is currently both advisor to the Great Russian Encyclopedia and senior anthropologist at Crispin Porter + Bogusky advertising agency. His extremely dense work is actually three books in one. The first is a history of kinship studies from the early 19th century to the present. The second is a comparative study of kinship terminology among non-Indo-European languages, for which he has also prepared a data base published on the internet. The third section, highly controversial, as he admits, uses anthropology, mitochondrial studies and linguistics to suggest that the "out of Africa" model of human origins may be in error and that the first humans actually came from the Americas and spread from there to the rest of the world.

Christology and discipleship have largely remained separate categories in Markan scholarship. This study provides a commentary on the Gospel of Mark that underlines kinship as the nexus between Christology (Jesus and his kinship with God) and discipleship (Jesus and his kinship with disciples). Jesus, designated as the Son of God (1:1), establishes a kinship group of disciples and followers by providing them hospitality, welcoming them into his household, and addressing them in kinship terms as his family. The kinship between Jesus and God and that between Jesus and the disciples are imitative and contestive means for Mark to negotiate the Roman imperial context. In the church today, Christians still refer to their church family and to each other as brothers and sisters because of their relationship to Jesus. In a world that finds people increasingly separated from one another, this study demonstrates Jesus's formation of his own family and its continued impact on Christian identity and community.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1873.

The word “blood” awakens ancient ideas, but we know little about its historical representation in Western cultures. Anthropologists have customarily studied how societies think about the bodily substances that unite them, and the contributors to this volume develop those questions in new directions. Taking a radically historical perspective that complements traditional cultural analyses, they demonstrate how blood and kinship have constantly been reconfigured in European culture. This volume challenges the idea that blood can be understood as a stable entity, and shows how concepts of blood and kinship moved in both parallel and divergent directions over the course of European history.

Southern Anthropology, the history of Fison and Howitt's Kamilaroi and Kurnai is the biography of Kamilaroi and Kurnai (1880) written from both a historical and anthropological perspective. Southern Anthropology investigates the authors' work on Aboriginal and Pacific people and the reception of their book in metropolitan centres.

Exploring Biblical Kinship honors John J. Pilch, a long-time member of the Catholic Biblical Association and a founding member of the Context Group. The festschrift, generated by the Social-Science Taskforce of the CBA explores biological and fictive kinship issues reflected in the lives of biblical persons. The essays in Part One deal with how patronage operates in biblical culture. Part Two analyzes family dynamics, commencing with an essay on violence contributed by the honoree. Part Three delves into kinship, descent, and discipleship. The text reflects the enduring influence of a renowned social-science scholar.