The Owners of Kinship investigates how kinship in Indigenous Amazonia is derived from the asymmetrical relation between an "owner" and his or her dependents. Through a comprehensive ethnography of the Kanamari, Luiz Costa shows how this relationship is centered around the bond created between the feeder and the fed. Building on anthropological studies of the acquisition, distribution, and consumption of food and its role in establishing relations of asymmetrical mutuality and kinship, this book breaks theoretical ground for studies in Amazonia and beyond. By investigating how the feeding relation traverses Kanamari society--from the relation between women and the pets they raise, shaman and familiar spirit, mother and child, chiefs and followers, to those between the Brazilian state and the Kanamari--The Owners of Kinship reveals how the mutuality of kinship is determined by the asymmetry of ownership.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a small Chicago adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption, Contingent Kinship charts the entanglement of institutional structures and ideologies of family, race, and class to argue that adoption is powerfully implicated in the question of who can have a future in the twenty-first-century United States. With a unique focus on the role that social workers and other professionals play in mediating relationships between expectant mothers and prospective adopters, Kathryn A. Mariner develops the concept of “intimate speculation,” a complex assemblage of investment, observation, and anticipation that shapes the adoption process into an elaborate mechanism for creating, dissolving, and exchanging imagined futures. Shifting the emphasis from adoption’s outcome to its conditions of possibility, this insightful ethnography places the practice of domestic adoption within a temporal, economic, and affective framework in order to interrogate the social inequality and power dynamics that render adoption—and the families it produces—possible.

Is there a universal language of love, a "kinship with all life" that can open new horizons of experience? Example after example in this unique classic -- from "Strongheart" the actor-dog to "Freddie" the fly -- resounds with entertaining and inspiring proof that communication with animals is a wonderful, indisputable fact. All that is required is an attitude of openness, friendliness, humility, and a sense of humor to part the curtain and form bonds of real friendship. For anyone who loves animals, for all those who have ever experienced the special devotion only a pet can bring, Kinship With All Life is an unqualified delight. Sample these pages and you will never encounter "just a dog" again, but rather a fellow member of nature's own family.

The first book to address the classic anthropological theme of property through the ethnography of Amazonia, Ownership and Nurture sets new and challenging terms for anthropological debates about the region and about property in general. Property and ownership have special significance and carry specific meanings in Amazonia, which has been portrayed as the antithesis of Western, property-based, civilization. Through carefully constructed studies of land ownership, slavery, shamanism, spirit mastery, aesthetics, and intellectual property, this volume demonstrates that property relations are of central importance in Amazonia, and that the ownership of persons plays an especially significant role in native cosmology.

From the author of The Calligrapher's Daughter comes the riveting story of two sisters, one raised in the United States, the other in South Korea, and the family that bound them together even as the Korean War kept them apart.

"In this timely commentary on the ideas of difference, strangeness, and Western contact, Stasch weaves ethnographic materials together with theoretical framing in an exceptionally clear and compelling way. A highly original, important and, in fact, astonishing piece of scholarship."--Bambi Schieffelin, author of The Give and Take of Everyday Life "In this remarkable ethnography, Rupert Stasch takes us to the lowlands of West Papua and into the lives of people who have built a social world out of their relationships with strange and potentially dangerous others. The Korowai are classic inhabitants of the "savage slot," still dogged by their designation as Stone Age primitives. Instead of flipping the script and arguing that the Korowai are just like everyone else, Stasch draws far-reaching lessons from the particularities of Korowai life. Stasch writes with grace and clarity on the ambivalent ways in which the Korowai confront, evade, and embrace an otherness that resides not just in words, food, places, and human bodies, but also in the pasts and futures brought to mind by these material signs. Analyzing Korowai sign use as a concrete, historical process, he charts the passage between intimacy and alterity that Korowai undergo in their encounters not only with spirits and Indonesian soldiers, but also with children, husbands, and wives. Some of what Stasch describes may seem strange and even disturbing. But in pondering Stasch's findings, one gradually comes to see the making of persons and relationships in an entirely new light. Gone is the old debate between biological determination and cultural freedom; in its place is an approach that affirms the multiple histories that converge in and flow from a life. Erudite, empathetic, and unremittingly smart, Society of Others recasts the very meaning of kinship--and makes a case for the power of what anthropologists do."--Danilyn Rutherford, author of Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier

Inheritance, once the preserve of the propertied upper classes, has become a much more common experience. Many more people now than in the past have something of material value to bequeath when they die, mainly because of the spread of home ownership during the second half of the twentieth century. Passing On examines what these changes can tell us about kinship in England, through a study of how contemporary families handle inheritance. Based on the findings of a major research project into inheritance and kinship, Passing On examines how it is transmitted, 'who gets what' and the meaning this has for individuals and families. The authors argue that we should understand English kinship as a set of relational practices which are flexible and variable, rather than as a rigid structure or system. Inheritance is characterised more by symbolic practices and moral reasoning than by materialism. Of interest to lecturers and students of sociology, anthropology, social policy, law and gender studies, Passing On is also of considerable interest to those seeking to understand changing forms of kinship and ownership, especially researchers, policy makers and legal practitioners.