This article examines the way bodily substance has been deployed in the anthropology of kinship. Analytically important in linking kinship with understandings of the body and person, substance has ...highlighted processes of change and transferability in kinship. Studies of organ donation and reproductive technologies in the West considered here challenge any simple dichotomy between idioms of a bounded individual body person and immutable kinship relations in Euro-American contexts and more fluid, mutable bodies and relations elsewhere. Focusing on blood as a bodily substance of everyday significance with a peculiarly extensive symbolic repertoire, this article connects material properties of blood to the ways it flows between domains that are often kept apart. The analogies of money and ghosts illuminate blood's capacity to participate in, and move between, multiple symbolic and practical spheres-capacities that carry important implications for ideas and practices of relationality.
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.
This essay considers kinship in the contexts of movement and migration. Delineating two quite different models of kinship (‘doing’ and ‘being’, the performative and the ascriptive), highlights how ...mobility and migration are particularly congruent with models of kinship that emphasise its performative qualities. I use movement and migration as a prism to show how kinship provides a uniquely dynamic reservoir of resources to creatively imagine and put into practice ideas and visions that enable moving to and living in new worlds – both geographically distant and near at hand. Rather than being aberrant or unusual, mobility can be seen to be among the capacities that kinship generates. But kinship also provides a repertoire that may promote settlement – and in the conclusion I suggest that both performative and ascriptive models might contribute to an understanding of kinship in the context of migration.
Blood Will Out Carsten, Janet
2013, 2013-07-29, 2013-07-26
eBook
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
House‐lives as ethnography/biography Carsten, Janet
Social anthropology,
February 2018, 2018-02-00, 20180201, Letnik:
26, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This essay considers the intersection of biography and ethnography through an anthropology of the house. It focuses on the multiple entanglements between houses, lives lived within them and the ...social contexts within which houses are shaped. If ‘good ethnography’ is the outcome, at least in part, of long‐term familiarity with the people and places that are its subject, the sense of being in a proper house rests on a comparable feeling of familiarity. Both of these rely on long‐term engagement, and are in this sense inherently biographical. To unpack the entanglements of personhood, kinship, temporality and the state that houses illuminate, I begin with my own engagement with Malay houses over several decades before discussing houses as ‘biographical objects’ and also as persons. I then examine connections and disconnections between houses and biography through a consideration of some less obviously ‘house‐like’ houses. Pursuing the analogy between ethnography and houses further, in the final part of the article I suggest that, if houses provide a productive opening for ethnography, they might also offer a starting point for a particularly anthropological kind of (auto)biography.
La vie du foyer comme ethnographie / biographie
Cet étude examine l'intersection de la biographie et de l'ethnographie à travers une anthropologie du foyer ; plus particulièrement l’enchevêtrement des relations entre les maisons, les vies qu’on y mène et les contextes sociaux dans lesquels le foyer se construit. Si la «bonne ethnographie» résulte, au moins en partie, d'une fréquentation continuée des personnes et des lieux qui font l’objet de l’enquête, le sentiment d’être dans un vrai foyer repose sur un sentiment comparable de familiarité. Ces deux relations reposent sur un engagement à long terme et en ce sens relèvent intrinsèquement de la biographie. Démêler l’écheveau qui, dans le foyer, noue personnalités, relations familiales, temporalités et situations, je prendrai comme point de départ ma propre expérience, longue de plusieurs décennies, dans les foyers de Malaisie, avant de proposer de décrire le foyer comme « objet biographique » et comme personne en elle‐même. Par la suite j’examinerai les continuités et les ruptures entre foyer et biographie en prenant l’exemple de maisons qui ne constituent pas, ou moins complètement, des foyers. Pour continuer l’analogie entre ethnographie et foyer, je soutiendrai, dans la dernière partie de l’article, la proposition suivante : si le foyer est un objet particulièrement approprié à l’étude ethnographique, il peut également servir de point de départ pour un genre d’(auto)biographie spécifiquement anthropologique.
Introduction: blood will out Carsten, Janet
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute,
20/May , Letnik:
19, Številka:
S1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
What is blood? The many meanings of blood vividly attest to its polyvalent qualities and its unusual capacity for accruing layers of symbolic resonance. Life and death; nurturance and violence; ...connection and exclusion; kinship and sacrifice - the associations multiply, flowing between domains in a quite unattainable manner. Whether expressed in the rhetoric of familial, racial, ethnic, or national exclusion, or in calls to violent action, idioms of blood often have exceptional emotional force. Drawing together the historical and ethnographic case studies presented in this volume - from the literal presence of blood in spaces of blood donation to the metaphorical deployment of sanguinary idioms in depictions of the economy - this introduction examines blood's special qualities as bodily substance, material, and metaphor. In sketching out a 'theory of blood', it suggests why such a comparative undertaking might be of value. Qu'est-ce que le sang ? Les nombreuses acceptions du mot attestent de sa polyvalence et de son exceptionnelle capacité d'accumuler des couches de résonances symboliques. Vie et mort, nourriture et violence, lien et exclusion, parenté et sacrifice ... : les associations foisonnent, circulant sans frein d'un domaine à l'autre. Qu'ils soient employés en rhétorique ou dans les questions familiales, dans les discours ethniques ou l'exclusion nationale ou encore dans les appels à la violence, les vocables liés au sang ont souvent une force émotionnelle rare. L'introduction fait la synthèse des études de cas historiques et ethnographiques présentées ici, qui vont de la présence bien réelle du sang dans les lieux de don du sang au déploiement métaphorique d'un vocabulaire sanguinaire dans les descriptions économiques. Elle examine les qualités particulières du sang en tant que fluide corporel, matière et métaphore et esquisse ainsi une « théorie du sang », mettant en lumière les mérites potentiels de cette entreprise comparative.
Malays on the island of Langkawi become complete persons, that is, kin, through living and consuming together in houses. Identity and substance are mutable and fluid. These perceptions suggest a ...processual view of kinship and personhood. They challenge anthropological definitions of kinship, which focus on procreation and which assume a universal division between the "biological" and the "social." Malay, kinship, personhood, feeding, social, biological
This innovative book takes a look at the anthropology of kinship and the comparative study of relatedness. Kinship has historically been central to the discipline of anthropology but what sort of ...future does it have? What is the impact of recent studies of reproductive technologies, of gender, and of the social construction of science in the West? What significance does public anxiety about the family, or new family forms in the West have for anthropology's analytic strategies? The study of kinship has rested on a distinction between the 'biological' and the 'social'. But recent technological developments have made this distinction no longer self-evident. What does this imply about the comparison of kinship institutions cross-culturally? Janet Carsten gives an approachable view of the past, present, and future of kinship in anthropology, which will be of interest not just to anthropologists but to social scientists generally.
The Owners of Kinship investigates how kinship in Indigenous Amazonia is derived from the asymmetrical relation between an “owner” and his or her dependents. Through a comprehensive ethnography of ...the Kanamari, Luiz Costa shows how this relationship is centered around the bond created between the feeder and the fed. Building on anthropological studies of the acquisition, distribution, and consumption of food and its role in establishing relations of asymmetrical mutuality and kinship, this book breaks theoretical ground for studies in Amazonia and beyond. By investigating how the feeding relation traverses Kanamari society—from the relation between women and the pets they raise, shaman and familiar spirit, mother and child, chiefs and followers, to those between the Brazilian state and the Kanamari—The Owners of Kinship reveals how the mutuality of kinship is determined by the asymmetry of ownership.
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