BiblioVault - Books about Kinship

Wandering Spirits

Loneliness and Longing in Greenland

Janne Flora

University of Chicago Press, 2019

It is common to think of the Arctic as remote, perched at the farthest reaches of the world—a simple and harmonious, isolated utopia. But the reality, as Janne Flora shows us, is anything but. In Wandering Spirits, Flora reveals how deeply connected the Arctic is to the rest of the world and how it has been affected by the social, political, economic, and environmental shifts that ushered in the modern age.

In this innovative study, Flora focuses on Inuit communities in Greenland and addresses a central puzzle: their alarmingly high suicide rate. She explores the deep connections between loneliness and modernity in the Arctic, tracing the history of Greenland and analyzing the social dynamics that shaped it. Flora’s thorough, sensitive engagement with the families that make up these communities uncovers the complex interplay between loneliness and a host of economic and environmental practices, including the widespread local tradition of hunting. Wandering Spirits offers a vivid portrait of a largely overlooked world, in all its fragility and nuance, while engaging with core anthropological concerns of kinship and the structure of social relations.

[more]

Warring Genealogies

Race, Kinship, and the Korean War

Joo Ok Kim

Temple University Press, 2022

Warring Genealogies examines the elaboration of kinships between Chicano/a and Asian American cultural production, such as the 1954 proxy adoption of a Korean boy by Leavenworth prisoners. Joo Ok Kim considers white supremacist expressions of kinship—in prison magazines, memorials, U.S. military songbooks—as well as critiques of such expressions in Chicana/o and Korean diasporic works to conceptualize racialized formations of kinship emerging from the Korean War.

Warring Genealogies unpacks writings by Rolando Hinojosa (Korean Love Songs, The Useless Servants) and Luis Valdez (I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges, Zoot Suit) to show the counter-representations of the Korean War and the problematic depiction of the United States as a benevolent savior. Kim also analyzes Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student as a novel that proposes alternative temporalities to dominant Korean War narratives. In addition, she examines Chicano military police procedurals, white supremacist women’s organizations, and the politics of funding Korean War archives.

Kim’s comparative study Asian American and Latinx Studies makes insightful connections about race, politics, and citizenship to critique the Cold War conception of the “national family.”

[more]

The Way of Kinship

An Anthology of Native Siberian Literature

Alexander Vaschenko

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

That these treasures are available to us as writing is a miracle. . . . The writings here, while altogether modern in one sense, are based upon a literature, albeit oral, that has existed for thousands of years. They are the reflections of people who have lived long on the earth, on their own terms, in harmony with the powers of nature. They are invaluable to us who have so much to learn from them. These stories, poems, songs give us a way, a sacred way, into a world that we ought to know for its own sake. It is our own world, after all. —N. Scott Momaday, from the Foreword

The first anthology of Native Siberian literature in English, The Way of Kinship represents writers from regions extending from the Ob River in the west to the Chukotka peninsula, the easternmost point of the Siberian Russian Arctic. Drawn from seven distinct ethnic groups, this diverse body of work-prose fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction-chronicles ancient Siberian cultures and traditions threatened with extinction in the contemporary world.

Translated and edited by Alexander Vaschenko and Claude Clayton Smith, leading scholars in Native Siberian literature, The Way of Kinship is an essential collection that will introduce readers to new writers and new worlds.

[more]

Ways of Baloma

Rethinking Magic and Kinship From the Trobriands

Mark S. Mosko

HAU, 2017

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 Lévy-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.

[more]

The Western Illusion of Human Nature

With Reflections on the Long History of Hierarchy, Equality and the Sublimation of Anarchy in the West, and Comparative Notes on Other Conceptions of the Human Condition

Marshall Sahlins

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2008

Reflecting the decline in college courses on Western Civilization, Marshall Sahlins aims to accelerate the trend by reducing "Western Civ" to about two hours. He cites Nietzsche to the effect that deep issues are like cold baths; one should get into and out of them as quickly as possible. The deep issue here is the ancient Western specter of a presocial and antisocial human nature: a supposedly innate self-interest that is represented in our native folklore as the basis or nemesis of cultural order. Yet these Western notions of nature and culture ignore the one truly universal character of human sociality: namely, symbolically constructed kinship relations. Kinsmen are members of one another: they live each other's lives and die each other's deaths. But where the existence of the other is thus incorporated in the being of the self, neither interest, nor agency or even experience is an individual fact, let alone an egoistic disposition. "Sorry, beg your pardon," Sahlins concludes, Western society has been built on a perverse and mistaken idea of human nature.

[more]

What Kinship Is-And Is Not

Marshall Sahlins

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In this pithy two-part essay, Marshall Sahlins reinvigorates the debates on what constitutes kinship, building on some of the best scholarship in the field to produce an original outlook on the deepest bond humans can have. Covering thinkers from Aristotle and Lévy- Bruhl to Émile Durkheim and David Schneider, and communities from the Maori and the English to the Korowai of New Guinea, he draws on a breadth of theory and a range of ethnographic examples to form an acute definition of kinship, what he calls the “mutuality of being.” Kinfolk are persons who are parts of one another to the extent that what happens to one is felt by the other. Meaningfully and emotionally, relatives live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths.

In the second part of his essay, Sahlins shows that mutuality of being is a symbolic notion of belonging, not a biological connection by “blood.” Quite apart from relations of birth, people may become kin in ways ranging from sharing the same name or the same food to helping each other survive the perils of the high seas. In a groundbreaking argument, he demonstrates that even where kinship is reckoned from births, it is because the wider kindred or the clan ancestors are already involved in procreation, so that the notion of birth is meaningfully dependent on kinship rather than kinship on birth. By formulating this reversal, Sahlins identifies what kinship truly is: not nature, but culture.

[more]

Women and the Ancestors

BLACK CARIB KINSHIP AND RITUAL

Virginia Kerns

University of Illinois Press, 1997

     This classic study of Black
        Carib culture and its preservation through ancestral rituals organized
        by older women now includes a foreword by Constance R. Sutton and an afterword
        by the author.
      "One of the outstanding
        studies of this genre. . . . Refreshingly, the book has good photographs,
        as well as strong endnotes and bibliography, and very useful tables, figures,
        maps, and index." -- Choice
      "An outstanding contribution
        to the literature on female-centered bilateral kinship and residence."

        -- Grant D. Jones, American Ethnologist
      "A richly detailed account
        of a contemporary culture in which older women are important, valued,
        and self-respecting."
        -- Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly
      "A combination of competent
        research, interwoven themes, and an easily readable, sometimes beautifully
        evocative, prose style." -- Heather Strange, The Gerontologist

[more]

Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy

Christiane Klapisch-Zuber

University of Chicago Press, 1987

Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, a brilliant historian of the Annales school, skillfully uncovers the lives of ordinary Italians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Tuscans in particular, young and old, rich, middle-class, and poor. From the extraordinarily detailed records kept by Florentine tax collectors and the equally precise ricordanze (household accounts with notations of events great and small), Klapisch-Zuber draws a living picture of the Tuscan household. We learn, for example, how children were named, how wet nurses were engaged, how marriages were negotiated and celebrated. A wealth of other sources are tapped—including city statutes, private letters, philosophical works on marriage, paintings—to determine the social status of women. Klapisch-Zuber reveals how women, in their roles as daughters, wives, sisters, and mothers, were largely subject to a family system that needed them but valued them little.

[more]