Rethinking Kinship and Marriage

Rethinking Kinship and Marriage
Author: Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth
Publisher: London ; New York : Tavistock Publications
Total Pages: 408
Release: 1971
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN:

Contains an introduction by Needham and an article by D. McKnight on Aborigines annotated separately.

Remarks and Inventions

Remarks and Inventions
Author: Rodney Needham
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2013-11-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136536124

This volume scrutinizes the questions of conceptualization, method and history in the fields of kinship, social anthropology and structuralism. It puts forward a radical revision of the conventional approaches and criteria. Exploring analysis and method in the disparity between relative age and kinship categories as means of social classification, the book makes theoretical readjustments, largely inspired by the precepts of Wittgenstein. Originally published in 1971.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa

A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa
Author: Roy Richard Grinker
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 483
Release: 2019-02-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1119251486

An essential collection of scholarly essays on the anthropology of Africa, offering a thorough introduction to the most important topics in this evolving and diverse field of study The study of the cultures of Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of anthropology as a discipline since the late 19th-century. As the anthropology of Africa has emerged as a distinct field of study, anthropologists working in this tradition have strived to build a disciplinary conversation that recognizes the diversity and complexity of modern and ancient African cultures while acknowledging the effects of historical anthropology on the present and future of the field of study. A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa is a collection of insightful essays covering the key questions and subjects in the contemporary anthropology of Africa with a key focus on addressing the topics that define the contemporary discipline. Written and edited by a team of leading cultural anthropologists, it is an ideal introduction to the most important topics in the field, both those that have consistently been a part of the critical dialogue and those that have emerged as the central questions of the discipline’s future. Beginning with essays on the enduring topics in the study of African cultures, A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa provides a foundation in the contemporary critical approach to subjects of longstanding interest. With these subjects as a groundwork, later essays address decolonization, the postcolonial experience, and questions of modern identity and definition, providing representation of the diverse thinking and scholarship in the modern anthropology of Africa.

Courtship and Constraint

Courtship and Constraint
Author: Diana O'Hara
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2002-10-04
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9780719062513

This book is the first major study of courtship in early modern England. Courtship was a vitally important process in early modern England. It was a period of private and public negotiation, often fraught with anxiety. If completed successfully it brought respectability, the privileges of marriage and adulthood, and a stable union between socially, economically, and emotionally compatible couples. Using Kent church court and probate material dating from the 15th to the end of the 16th century, the book blends historical and anthropological perspectives to suggest novel and exciting approaches to the making of marriage.

Ways of Baloma

Ways of Baloma
Author: Mark S. Mosko
Publisher: Hau
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Ethnology
ISBN: 9780997367560

Bronislaw Malinowski's path-breaking research in the Trobriand Islands shaped much of modern anthropology's disciplinary paradigm. Yet many conundrums remain. For example, Malinowski asserted that baloma spirits of the dead were responsible for procreation but had limited influence on their living descendants in magic and other matters, claims largely unchallenged by subsequent field investigators, until now. Based on extended fieldwork at Omarakana village--home of the Tabalu "Paramount Chief"--Mark S. Mosko argues instead that these and virtually all contexts of indigenous sociality are conceived as sacrificial reciprocities between the mirror worlds that baloma and humans inhabit. Informed by a synthesis of Strathern's model of "dividual personhood" and L vy-Bruhl's theory of "participation," Mosko upends a century of discussion and debate extending from Malinowski to anthropology's other leading thinkers. His account of the intimate interdependencies of humans and spirits in the cosmic generation and coordination of "life" (momova) and "death" (kaliga) strikes at the nexus of anthropology's received wisdom, and Ways of Baloma will inevitably lead practitioners and students to reflect anew on the discipline's multifold theories of personhood, ritual agency, and sociality.

Ibss: Anthropology: 1972

Ibss: Anthropology: 1972
Author: International Committee for Social Science Information and Documentation
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 406
Release: 1974-10-24
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 9780422744003

First published in 1974. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Words and Processes in Mambila Kinship

Words and Processes in Mambila Kinship
Author: David Zeitlyn
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2005
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780739108017

Words and Processes in Mambila Kinship presents a set of studies of the way that Mambila speakers in Cameroon talk about themselves and their kin. Author David Zeitlyn employs conversational analytic methods to further the study of kinship terminologies. This book takes an important step toward a new synthesis between the practice of ethnography and the study of language while presenting African natural language data (still rare in mainstream linguistics) in an accessible format.

Invitation to Anthropology

Invitation to Anthropology
Author: Luke Eric Lassiter
Publisher: AltaMira Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2008-12-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1461666848

Lassiter's accessible introduction to anthropology encourages students to evaluate its relevance in our increasingly complex world. Part I focuses on the underlying assumptions and concepts that have driven anthropological theory and practice since its modern inception. Part II explores cross-cultural human issues showing how anthropological studies offer relevant insight into human beings and valuable models for thinking and acting. Invitation to Anthropology is an ideal text for undergraduate students, easily supplemented with case studies in anthropology.

Marriage and Modernity

Marriage and Modernity
Author: Rochona Majumdar
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2009-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822390809

An innovative cultural history of the evolution of modern marriage practices in Bengal, Marriage and Modernity challenges the assumption that arranged marriage is an antiquated practice. Rochona Majumdar demonstrates that in the late colonial period Bengali marriage practices underwent changes that led to a valorization of the larger, intergenerational family as a revered, “ancient” social institution, with arranged marriage as the apotheosis of an “Indian” tradition. She meticulously documents the ways that these newly embraced “traditions”—the extended family and arranged marriage—entered into competition and conversation with other emerging forms of kinship such as the modern unit of the couple, with both models participating promiscuously in the new “marketplace” for marriages, where matrimonial advertisements in the print media and the payment of dowry played central roles. Majumdar argues that together the kinship structures newly asserted as distinctively Indian and the emergence of the marriage market constituted what was and still is modern about marriages in India. Majumdar examines three broad developments related to the modernity of arranged marriage: the growth of a marriage market, concomitant debates about consumption and vulgarity in the conduct of weddings, and the legal regulation of family property and marriages. Drawing on matrimonial advertisements, wedding invitations, poems, photographs, legal debates, and a vast periodical literature, she shows that the modernization of families does not necessarily imply a transition from extended kinship to nuclear family structures, or from matrimonial agreements negotiated between families to marriage contracts between individuals. Colonial Bengal tells a very different story.

The Metamorphoses of Kinship

The Metamorphoses of Kinship
Author: Maurice Godelier
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 657
Release: 2012-03-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1844678954

With marriage in decline, divorce on the rise, the demise of the nuclear family, and the increase in marriages and adoptions among same-sex partners, it is clear that the structures of kinship in the modern West are in a state of flux. In The Metamorphoses of Kinship, the world-renowned anthropologist Maurice Godelier contextualizes these developments, surveying the accumulated experience of humanity with regard to such phenomena as the organization of lines of descent, sexuality and sexual prohibitions. In parallel, Godelier studies the evolution of Western conjugal and familial traditions from their roots in the nineteenth century to the present. The conclusion he draws is that it is never the case that a man and a woman are sufficient on their own to raise a child, and nowhere are relations of kinship or the family the keystone of society. Godelier argues that the changes of the last thirty years do not herald the disappearance or death agony of kinship, but rather its remarkable metamorphosis—one that, ironically, is bringing us closer to the “traditional” societies studied by ethnologists.