Janet Carsten

Our understanding of what makes a person a relative has been transformed by radical changes in marriage arrangements and gender relations, and by new reproductive technologies. We can no longer take it for granted that our most fundamental social relationships are grounded in 'biology' or 'nature'. These developments have prompted anthropologists to take a fresh look at idioms of relatedness in other societies, and to review the ways in which relationships are symbolised and interpreted in our own society. Defamiliarizing some classic cases, challenging the established analytic categories of anthropology, the contributors to this innovative book focus on the boundary between the 'biological' and the 'social', and bring into question the received wisdom at the heart of the study of kinship.

New Approaches to the Study of Kinship

Cultures of Relatedness

Unique in focus and international in scope, this book brings together 10 essays about the material, metaphorical, and symbolic importance of blood. An interdisciplinary study that unites the work of noted historians and anthropologists Incorporates insights from recent work in symbolism, kinship studies, medical anthropology, the anthropology of religion, the sociological study of finance, and textual analysis Covers topics such as Medieval European conceptions of blood; blood and the brain; blood and the cultural study of finance; and blood types, identity, and association in twentieth-century America

Essays on Liquid Transfers and Flows

Blood Will Out

Hsiao-Chiao Chiu

Siobhan Magee i

Eirini Papadaki 

Koreen M. Reece

Marriage globally is undergoing profound change, provoking widespread public comment and concern. Through the close ethnographic examination of case studies drawn from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, Marriage in Past, Present and Future Tense places new and changing forms of marriage in comparative perspective as a transforming and also transformative social institution. In conditions of widespread socio-political inequality and instability, how are the personal, the familial and the political co-produced? How do marriages encapsulate the ways in which memories of past lives, present experience and imaginaries of the future are articulated? Exploring the ways that marriage draws together and distinguishes history and biography, ritual and law, economy and politics in intimate family life, this volume examines how familial and personal relations, and the ethical judgements they enfold, inform and configure social transformation. Contexts that have been partly shaped through civil wars, cold war and colonialism – as well as other forms of violent socio-political rupture – offer especially apt opportunities for tracing the interplay between marriage and politics. But rather than taking intimate family life and gendered practice as simply responsive to wider socio-political forces, this work explores how marriage may also create social change. Contributors consider the ways in which marital practice traverses the domains of politics, economics and religion, while marking a key site where the work of linking and distinguishing those domains is undertaken.

Marriage in Past, Present and Future Tense

Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology Janet Carsten

Stephen Hugh-Jones

Exploring interrelationships, this collection analyzes "house" systems in Southeast Asia and South America. It is inspired by Lévi-Strauss's suggestion that the multi-functional noble houses of Medieval Europe were the best-known examples of a widespread social institution.

Lévi-Strauss and Beyond

About the House

Janet Carsten offers an original and very personal investigation of the nature of kinship in Malaysia, based upon her own experience as a foster daughter in a family on the island of Langkawi. She shows that Malay kinship is a process, not a state: it is determined partly by birth, but also throughout life by living together and sharing food. Carsten gives the reader a fascinating "anthropology of everyday life," including a compelling view of gender relations; she urges reassessment of recent anthropological work on gender, and a new approach to the study of kinship.

Janet Carsten

Books

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