Jeff Hearn

Jeanette Edwards

Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology Jeanette Edwards

Jennie Popay

Men, Gender Divisions and Welfareis a fresh look at the balance of responsibilities and control in care-giving in both the public and private spheres. Using previously unpublished empirical data, the contributors focus on male experiences of welfare services, especially in consideration of how health care providers have traditionally "given" women the role of responsibility for others' welfare. The contributors also present both men's views on their responsibilities as fathers and husbands and the experience of male caregivers.

Men, Gender Divisions and Welfare

Carles Salazar

Interest in the study of kinship, a key area of anthropological enquiry, has recently reemerged. Dubbed 'the new kinship', this interest was stimulated by the 'new genetics' and revived interest in kinship and family patterns. This volume investigates the impact of biotechnology on contemporary understandings of kinship, of family and 'belonging' in a variety of European settings and reveals similarities and differences in how kinship is conceived. What constitutes kinship for different publics? How significant are biogenetic links? What does family resemblance tell us? Why is genetically modified food an issue? Are 'genes' and 'blood' interchangeable? It has been argued that the recent prominence of genetic science and genetic technologies has resulted in a 'geneticization' of social life; the ethnographic examples presented here do show shifts occurring in notions of 'nature' and of what is 'natural'. But, they also illustrate the complexity of contemporary kinship thinking in Europe and the continued interconnectedness of biological and sociological understandings of relatedness and the relationship between nature and nurture.

European Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology

Born and Bred is an ethnography of Bacup in the north-west of England. At the heart of the cotton industry in the nineteenth century, this Lancashire town has undergone deep social and economic change during the twentieth, yet it remains a hive of social activity. The book focuses on the way in which the past continues to figure in people's talk about the place and about each other, but it questions the claim that such a preoccupation is simply due to nostalgia for better times. Narratives about the past, like narratives about the kind of place Bacup is, mobilize cultural understandings of kinship, which are also deployed when people talk about the implications of new reproductive technologies. Jeanette Edwards argues that kinship is resonant in the way in which residents of the town belong to pasts, places and persons. She challenges the idea that kinship is no longer an organizing principle in post-industrial Western society.

Jeanette Edwards

Books

Your next favorite book is out there