Reviewer: Eugene N. Anderson, PhD (University of California, Riverside)
Description: This book presents the study and comparison of entire kinship systems, including terminology, rules, and behavior. It is a strong defense of kinship studies, as classically practiced in anthropology. The author expands kinship research by describing suckling infants other than one's own as a way of making kinship in Arabia and the Mediterranean. Children one suckles are considered one's own children and siblings to each other no matter the biological parents. On the other hand, legal adoption of the American sort in these regions is rare.
Purpose: The main purpose is to defend traditional four-field anthropological study of kinship systems from various challenges: David Schneider's dismissal of the whole idea of system, cultural studies' dismissal of biology and field research, biologists' claims that it's all just biology, and other simplistic arguments. The author also expands studies of kinship to include new ideas derived from research on Arabian kinship. Kinship studies are having a renaissance in anthropology today, and this is a very timely book. It meets its stated goals well.
Audience: This is a book for advanced students and professionals. It will be read largely by anthropologists interested in family and kin, but also by people interested in Arab and Arabian society. The author has lived and worked in Egypt, Qatar, and elsewhere. She is a leading anthropologist in Middle East studies, with a long and highly regarded bibliography and research history. She has a long record not only of publishing research but of making thoughtful contributions to social science.
Features: In the mid-19th century, Lewis Henry Morgan first realized that all human societies have highly elaborate, highly structured, and thoroughly systematic kinship systems. He began the comparative study of these systems—terminology, rules, and behavior. He began a tradition that has flourished since, to the point that anthropology has been described as "the science of kinship." Even so, kinship studies fell into neglect in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, largely because of simplistic arguments that tried to reduce them to mere social practice, cultural convention, or biological instincts. Author Fadwa El Guindi points out that kinship systems are real and deserve the old full-scale analysis. She illustrates this with her recent research on suckling in Arabian society (focally Qatar). In Islam, legal adoption American style is rare and untraditional. Instead, one can establish kinship with an unrelated infant by suckling it. However, wet nursing, fostering, and other such suckling-for-hire is not the same as suckling because of, or to create, a social bond; the Arabic words are different (though from the same root). This provides space for much negotiation, nuancing, and flexibility, as compadrazgo (coparenting) does in Latin America. This book is a strong and highly effective argument for kinship; in defending it, the author makes many valuable points that have not been adequately stressed before, such as the sheer variety of these informal or semiformal ways of creating kin where there is no blood or marital relationship. She also uses Ibn Khaldun's insight into kinship, the 14th-century social scientist so far ahead of his time that many of his ideas are still used today. However, the book has several errors, some consequential. El Guindi appropriately contrasts human kinship (systematic, linguistically complex, highly cultural) with primate relationship (largely biological), but dismisses clear evidence that monkeys and apes do recognize blood kin and act differently toward them as opposed to nonrelatives. Several other minor errors occur, but do not detract from the argument.
Assessment: Classical anthropological studies of kinship systems are having a renaissance. Some of the exciting new work is cited by this book while some is not—often because it is only now being published. Defenses of kinship studies are becoming popular, each with their own points to make. For instance, in recent and forthcoming books, David Kronenfeld has a quite different view, focused more on formal logic and less on lived relationships. El Guindi has made an important and serious contribution to the new literature. Other scholars of kinship will find this book challenging and useful. It will stimulate considerable dialogue.
