The Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries

by James Faubion

Overview

What need is there for kinship? What good is it anyway? The questions are as old as anthropology itself, but few answers have been enduringly persuasive. Kinship systems can contribute to our enslavement, but more often they permit, channel, and facilitate our relations with others and our further fashioning of ourselves—as kin but also as subjects of other kinds. When they do, they are among the matrices of our lives as ethical beings. Each contributor to this innovative book treats his or her own alterity as the touchstone of the exploration of an ethnographically and historically specific ethics of kinship. Together, the chapters reveal the irreducible complexity of the entanglement of the subject of kinship with the subject of nation, class, ethnicity, gender, desire. The chapters speak eloquently to the sometimes liberating stories that we cannot help but keep telling about our kin and ourselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780742578890
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	12/13/2001
Series:	Alterations , #1
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	846 KB

About the Author

James Faubion is associate professor of anthropology at Rice University.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction: Toward and Anthropology of Kinship
Chapter 2 Caring and Being Cared For: Displacing Marriage, Kinship, Gender, and Sexuality
Chapter 3 Rainbow Family, Rainbow Nation: Reflections on Relatives and Relational Dynamics in Trinidad
Chapter 4 Personalizing It:Kafala, Kinship, Abandoned Children, and Family
Chapter 5 A Kinship of One's Own
Chapter 6 Kousi Oda Pannu (Kousi's Daughter)
Chapter 7 The Ethics of Affect: The Public Policies of Intimacy in the Bloomsbury Group andSammy and Rosie Get Laid
Chapter 8 This Week the Blue Room: Locating Kinship in a Split-level Home
Chapter 9 What We Bring to the Table: The Means of Imagination in an African-American Family
Chapter 10 Like Family to Me: Families of Origin, Families of Choice, and Class Mobility
Chapter 11 Be/longings
Chapter 12 Family I Imagine

Editorial Reviews

Only a few collections exist to give readers an overview of this expanding subfield, and of these, none meld theory with autoethnography in the way undertaken by this collection. The Ethics of Kinship will make an original and provocative contribution to the growing literature on the new kinship studies.

Kath Weston

The much desired reawakening of interest by anthropologists in the topic of kinship, central to the history of their discipline, has depended on making coherent use of the outpouring of rich culture theories of recent years concerning the concept of the self, gender, issues of subjectivity, and finally, ethics. This compelling and highly readable volume of interwoven narratives and analyses not only sets the terms of this renaissance but also the kinds of debates by which it could be sustained.

George Marcus

The resulting collection is very welcome as it not only constitutes an interesting read in its own right but is also a contribution for the present renewal of debates in the anthropology of kinship.

Anthropological Quarterly - João de Pina-Cabral

The much desired reawakening of interest by anthropologists in the topic of kinship, central to the history of their discipline, has depended on making coherent use of the outpouring of rich culture theories of recent years concerning the concept of the self, gender, issues of subjectivity, and finally, ethics. This compelling and highly readable volume of interwoven narratives and analyses not only sets the terms of this renaissance but also the kinds of debates by which it could be sustained.--George Marcus, author of Anthropology As Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences

Only a few collections exist to give readers an overview of this expanding subfield, and of these, none meld theory with autoethnography in the way undertaken by this collection. The Ethics of Kinship will make an original and provocative contribution to the growing literature on the new kinship studies.--Kath Weston, Harvard University

The resulting collection is very welcome as it not only constitutes an interesting read in its own right but is also a contribution for the present renewal of debates in the anthropology of kinship.--João de Pina-Cabral, University of Lisbon "Anthropological Quarterly "

From the Publisher

The resulting collection is very welcome as it not only constitutes an interesting read in its own right but is also a contribution for the present renewal of debates in the anthropology of kinship.

Anthropological Quarterly - João de Pina-Cabral