Title data
Reconnecting state and kinship.
ed.: Thelen, Tatjana ; Alber, Erdmute
Philadelphia
:
University of Pennsylvania Press
,
2017
. -
256 p.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4951-4
| Review: |
Abstract in another language
Within the social sciences, kinship and statehood are often seen as two distinct modes of social organization, sometimes conceived of as following each other in a temporal line and sometimes as operating on different scales. Kinship is traditionally associated with small-scale communities in stateless societies. The state, meanwhile, is viewed as a development away from kinship as political order toward rational, impersonal, and functional forms of rule. In recent decades, theoretical and empirical scholarship has challenged these notions, but the underlying presumption of a deep-rooted opposition between kinship and the (modern) state has remained surprisingly stable.
That this binary is so deeply engrained in Western self-understanding and knowledge production poses a considerable challenge to decoding their coproduction. Reconnecting State and Kinship seeks to trace the historical shifts and boundary work implied in the ongoing reproduction of these supposedly discrete or even opposing units of analysis. Contributors ask whether concepts associated with one sphere —including corruption, patronage, lineage, and incest—surface in the other. Policies and interventions modeled upon the assumed polarity can have lasting consequences for mechanisms of marginalization and exclusion, including decisions about life and death.
Reconnecting State and Kinship not only explores the boundary-related and classificatory practices that reinforce the kinship/statehood binary but also tracks the traveling of these concepts and their underlying norms through time and space ultimately demonstrating the ways that kinship and "the state" are intertwined.
Further data
| Item Type: | Book / Monograph |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | anthropology of kinship; political anthropology; kinship; statehood; corruption; military anthropology; gender |
| Institutions of the University: | Faculties > Faculty of Cultural Studies > Chair Social Anthropology Faculties > Faculty of Cultural Studies > Chair Social Anthropology > Chair Social Anthropology - Univ.-Prof. Dr. Erdmute Alber Faculties Faculties > Faculty of Cultural Studies |
| Result of work at the UBT: | No |
| DDC Subjects: | 300 Social sciences |
| Date Deposited: | 17 Jan 2018 10:50 |
| Last Modified: | 23 Jun 2020 05:45 |
| URI: | https://eref.uni-bayreuth.de/id/eprint/41808 |