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The study of kinship offers a rich opportunity for historians of early America to examine impositions of colonial power, subtle acts of resistance, and cultural adaptations evident in quotidian encounters between indigenous peoples and European American colonists. In Spanish and Mexican Alta California, colonial implementation of compadrazgo (Catholic godparentage) and the use of family metaphors, as well as the presence of Christian Indian auxiliaries from previously colonized regions, reveal colonial social hierarchies and evolving constructions of race, ethnicity, and class. While colonists and indigenous Californians both invested significant meaning in consanguineal and affective bonds, including spiritual kinship, Native peoples struggled to preserve and express precontact family values that included more fluid practices in marriage. Spanish-Mexican settlers and Franciscan missionaries attempted to impose a kinship system that would further goals of conquest and acculturate indigenous peoples by eradicating such fluidity. Spanish Mexican settlers, however, also exhibited an expansive understanding of kinship and family obligations, invoking them to function as a social safety net, as needed, and incorporating newcomers into existing networks. Thus, kinship is a useful measure of social relations and economic conditions and helpful for unraveling the scope and limitations of colonial rule in Alta California.

Based on a reconstruction of Proto-Philippine kinship and social organization terminologies, this article characterizes early Philippine kinship as bilateral with possible quasi-lineages. These features support the reconstruction of the Proto–Malayo-Polynesian system made by George Peter Murdock (1949) rather than that of Robert Blust (1980). In terms of leadership, the early Philippine community is described as dualistic in nature, allowing achieved and ascribed or hereditary chiefdom—thus deviating from the ancestral concept of hereditary leadership in the Proto–Malayo-Polynesian system. Changes in the Philippine kinship system are traced to show innovations in nomenclature and behavior toward certain kin.

Kinship has been an “essentially contested concept” in social and cultural anthropology. Nevertheless, linguistic and anthropological linguistic studies of kinship terminologies, grammar, and pragmatics have developed in parallel with anthropological ones. Lacking, however, is a broad overview of the range of linguistic variation across languages that would build a bridge between the linguistics and anthropology of kinship. Toward that end, this article explores the role of language in the constitution of kinship. It asks, on what linguistic resources do people of different cultures and languages draw in order to constitute kinship as an institution?

Savosavo kinship terminology is remarkable in that it covers fifteen generations, a feature unique in its immediate geographical context, the Solomon Islands, and rare cross-linguistically. The aim of this paper is to present the kinship terminology system of the easternmost Papuan language from both an anthropological and a linguistic perspective, thus providing a comprehensive account of the terms, the system they form, their morphosyntactic and pragmatic features, and how they are used in everyday life. Both consanguineal and affinal kin are considered.

In 1962, I joined the Harvard-Central Brazil Research Project directed by David Maybury-Lewis and the late Brazilian anthropologist Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira. We were a group of graduate students from Brazil and the United States following in the footsteps of the German ethnographic autodidact Curt Nimuendaju (born Curt Unkel 1883-1945), the French structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss (b.1908), and David Maybury- Lewis who had worked extensively with two central Brazilian indigenous groups, the Xerente and Xavante, in the late 1950s. The intended goal of the Central Brazil project was a cross-cultural comparison of a small number of indigenous societies known to speak languages belonging to the Ge linguistic family, including the Bororo which is classified as Macro-Ge. Because these groups spoke cognate languages, they were thought to share a baseline common culture. Analyses of how their social structures were perceived to work, as understood by the individual field researchers, culminated in a joint comparative volume, Dialectical Societies: The Ge and Bororo of Central Brazil (Maybury-Lewis 1979). Maybury-Lewis arranged seminars and periodic discussion groups at Harvard and elsewhere attempting to pull the group together, especially when our interpretations appeared to range far afield. Although at times frustrating, these meetings were useful and no doubt helped to hone our analytical skills. Arguments over the applicability to the Ge of such concepts as patriliny and matriliny, prescriptive marriage, and moiety organization- to mention but a few of the terms that had become problematic for us-helped stimulate a rethinking of the traditional literature on these topics. Little seemed to work out in the field the way it was supposed both from a study of the earlier literature on central Brazilian societies and from a close reading of the classic texts in social anthropology. Members of the Ge project, immersed in the study of kinship, for many years the subject of a popular course offered by Maybury-Lewis at Harvard, began rethinking the relevance of the kind of kinship discourse that had prevailed in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Tracking how kinship was deployed involved a closer scrutiny of all the relationships as they existed between actual persons in daily transactions. If the classic models did not work out in the field as anticipated in the classroom or as predicted in the literature, it was not because the study of kinship had lost its importance, but rather because systems of kin classification among the Ge were discovered to range beyond the expected genealogical and affinal circles to include an array of persons who have been designated by ethnographers variously as " formal friends," or "adoptive," "pseudo-," " false," and "surrogate" kinship relations. The extension of the use of kinship terms to include unrelated persons as classificatory kin, discovered in such small-scale, stateless societies as those of the Ge, serves as a modus vivendi for the community to share its responsibilities. Those appointed to kinship roles assist their kin in a variety of ways, especially important in food getting and child-rearing activities. Kayapo (Me?bengokre) inhabitants of the three villages (Gorotire, Kubenkranken, and Porori) where I did fieldwork in 1962, 1963, and again briefly in 1966, divided into either kin (ombikwa) or non-kin (me?baitebm). Relationships to newly appointed ombikwa are established formally and prominently in public ceremonies in the village plaza. Persons, unrelated by either blood or marriage, but who are recognized in this manner as ombikwa, can be called upon to perform special services for their ritual kin in village-wide celebrations. These commitments and obligations are put into play at the great public ceremonies celebrating birth, the giving of special names, the initiation of boys, and the commemoration of death. At such critical moments in the Kayapo life-cycle, honorary ombikwa make gifts of food, names, or ritual positions and ornaments. …

Kinship has cast such a long shadow over anthropological analysis that students who have never confronted its more technical aspects still profess boredom with the topic and relief that they do not have to deal with it. But deal with it, surprisingly, they do-in a technically less demanding guise, to be sure-through the more fashionable medium of other topics that have become considerably more central to the discipline: nationalism, gender, warfare, bio-ethics, the ethnography of science, transnational mobility, memory and the uses of history. The technical virtuosity of kinship analysis has largely passed from the scene; what remains is a cluster of basic principles-the importance of the nuclear family, the use of nuclear family terms in nationalistic rhetoric, correlations of inheritance rules with kinship structure, and the expectation that kinship should ideally be a major source of affect and cooperation-that barely seem to need analysis and that seem, to a very large extent, immediately comprehensible even to those who are only familiar with West European models of the relationships thus grouped together. But are these principles really so transparent? Kinship-rather than kinship systems-has become a global phenomenon, in which surface homogeneity and an apparent reduction in complexity may nonetheless mask considerable differences in use and interpretation. We can see the implications of this expansion especially well in the subtly contrasted but mutually complementary models of world diplomacy that Eleana Kim and Monica Konrad offer here in their respective essays on international adoption and the negotiation of biomedical knowledge; Konrad offers an especially subtle linkage between ideologies of shared (and exclusive) substance that characterize local kin groups on the one hand and the ethical and "diplomatic" aspects of transporting biomedical knowledge across the borders of nation-states on the other. The papers grouped together in this issue of Anthropological Quarterly indeed collectively illustrate both the persistence of kinship as a strong organizing principle of ramified relationships extending far beyond the face-to-face communities of anthropological yore and beyond the strongly Eurocentric bias, the latter being especially evident in the almost exclusive emphasis on the nuclear family and a rhetoric of parity between matrilateral and patrilateral kin that masks a continuing agnatic emphasis. This Eurocentrism now informs the extended (some would say metaphorical or at least metonymie) elaborations of local "moral communities" (Evans-Pritchard 1940; Campbell 1964) or, more conceptually, "moral worlds" (Kleinman 2006: 219) that we encounter in the rhetoric of most nation-states today. Imperceptibly, it seems, kinship, routed from the scenes of its computational glories, has insidiously slipped back everywhere, and its channels are numerous: from transnational migrations (Ho 2006; Watson 2005) to artificial insemination and the nationstate (Kahn 2000), kinship-in-general has clearly morphed into something still vital and important. Truth to tell, the capacity for such metaphorization (or metonymie extension) was always present; its lack of visibility is a direct consequence of a very unfortunate loss of vision, in which the relevance of older ethnographies to current concerns appears to have largely vanished. Yet we do not have to look far in order to recuperate the loss. The patrilineal idiom of the Bosnian and Kosovo wars builds on earlier models of patrilineal clan identity (see Herzfeld 1997; cf. Hammel 1968), anthropologically foreshadowed in Evans-Pritchard's (1940: 237-238) insistence that patriliny among the Nuer was as much a political idiom as a literal statement of genealogy; he subsequently extended this insight directly to the historical emergence of statehood in Libya, showing how it shaped the response to external pressure and particularly the impact of colonialism (Evans-Pritchard 1949). …

Robert Parkin & Linda Stone (eds.), Kinship and Family: An Anthropological Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004.496 pp. The stated purpose of this collection of readings is to trace "...the development of mainstream kinship theory..." (viii) and to provide "an intellectual genealogy" of its treatment. To accomplish this purpose, two original contributions and 22 previously published materials are provided along with a general introduction, four separate section introductions, a glossary, and an index. The contributions are organized into two major parts: "Kinship as Social Structure: Descent and Alliance" and "Kinship as Culture, Process, and Agency." The first part primarily concerns anthropological kinship from its inception to the 1970s while the latter focuses upon its decline and subsequent resurgence since then. Each part contains two sections. Part One is divided into "Descent and Marriage" and "Terminology and Affinal Alliance." The second part is divided into the sections; "The Demise and Revival of Kinship" and "Contemporary Directions in Kinship." Although loosely organized along historical lines, the readings do not provide the reader with a full historical tracing of influential thoughts and concerns in kinship. The selection of materials is fairly restricted. In the first part, the focus is upon descent and alliance theories. Here, early as well as post1970 materials are included to principally provide a critique of these theories. The second part principally deals with Schneider's critique of kinship and the contemporary focus upon culture as a symbolic system in understanding fundamental social relations. In this part, the editors see culture "...as a better way of understanding indigenous notions of kinship or 'relatedness' than the more analytical schools of the past" (ix). There is little attention paid to recent evolutionary biological explanations of human social behavior. In any collection of readings, one expects that editorial decisions to include or exclude materials will not agree completely with those someone else may choose. However, it was still surprising to me to discover that writings of past luminaries such as Morgan, Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown, were absent. While the editors have included some interesting readings by authors not as well known, the absence of the writings of important contributors to the history of kinship, Morgan's work, for example, seems inexcusable. The editors obviously recognize the importance of his work since there is a detailed discussion of Morgan's contribution to kinship in the general introduction. Approximately 20% of the twenty-page general introduction is directly concerned with Morgan. There are also descriptions of the reactions to his ideas in this introduction. Furthermore, throughout the book there are over three dozen references to Morgan's work and influence. Since Morgan's contribution is clearly significant, why isn't there a sample of his work? Isn't it appropriate for a student to see original material and let it speak for itself? An original document would be preferable to lengthy references to the work by an editor. Isn't the purpose of a Reader to allow the student direct access to the ideas of the original author? The editorial role, it seems to me, should be primarily choosing the readings and providing the necessary background for this material. It should not be to write exegeses of the significant contributions to kinship that have been omitted from the collection of writings. Those should be kept for a separate book. The reason Morgan's and others' writings have been omitted from the collection of readings can be deduced from the editors' choice of readings for the first section. This section, misleadingly titled "Descent and Marriage," begins with a discussion of social groups and a critique of Morgan's evolutionary scheme by Robert Lowie. He, using a range of ethnographic examples, argues that the distribution of matrilineal and patrilineal systems is not due to some simple evolutionary sequence or differences in the intellectual capabilities of people but is the expression of responses to cultural environments. …

James D. Faubion (ed.) The Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. 277 pp. This is a book about the ethics of affect as manifested in kinship relations. James Faubion asked a number of one-time doctoral students of anthropology at Rice University (Texas) and two like-minded colleagues to write essays about their own personal experiences of kinship. The resulting collection is very welcome as it not only constitutes an interesting read in its own right but is also a contribution for the present renewal of debates in the anthropology of kinship. Each of the contributors chose to focus on some aspect of their own kinship history which they somehow problematized. The result is a number of fascinating essays dealing with what one might call the margins of kinship:1 forgotten' relatives, manipulations of the law of kinship, clandestine "adoptions," love and hate, class and kinship, sibling cooperation and rivalry, sexual preference and legal family, etc., all accumulate to bring out a marvellously varied picture of middle-class kinship in the United States. Indeed, although a number of contributors expound interestingly on their family histories in diverse places of origin around the world (Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Trinidad), what they tell us are stories of kinship as "lived in America." As a matter of fact, whilst writing their accounts, most of the contributors not born in the United States were undertaking a move to permanent residence there-to use Nityanand Deckha's words, they were becoming "new citizens of the West" (153). The book resonates with this sense of America as the land of success and liberation which merges with the authors' own pride in their individual success within academia as doctoral students. Karim, for example, tells us of her "diasporic urge to remake myself into a subject who transcended kinship ties and was not bound by local and national habits and prejudices-a cosmopolitan subject." (118) Reddy, Deckha and Youngblood all make similar statements. Nevertheless, their location is decidedly in North America, which belies their "cosmopolitanism." Indeed, not all venues and not all classes can grant the aura of cosmopolitan subjecthood. Cosmopolitanism is a paradoxically local privilege that only some can exercise when they are accepted by certain countries and belong to certain classes. As Susan Ossman puts it elsewhere, "The abstract, far-sighted nature of this cosmopolitan vision can easily lead us to ignore the actual movements of people" (2006: 561). In the essays, the logic of marginality2 is put to work wonderfully to reveal both the relation between kinship and other aspects of social life and the relation between people's discursive practices and those aspects of their lives which they "know and share" but which they "normally" have no means to speak of. Clearly, judging from the emotional depth of the accounts, for every single one of the contributors, the exercise came to have a self-revelatory, exutorial function. Thus, the book is both a good read and a comment on how anthropological examination can breakthrough convention. Denise Youngblood (presently editor at CountryWatch, Houston) writes an essay about her family background in Trinidad, dealing mostly with the issue of marriage across race and its relation to ethnicity, nation, and color. She shows us how "the ideology of cosmopolitanism in Trinidad relates to the production of both the family and the nation" (48). She turns interestingly to Bourdieu's notion of "symbolic capital" to show how marital and extra-marital sexual relations were used to produce family in a context where, due to the "dramatic boom and bust cycles" which characterize Trinidad's economic history, wealth was seen as rather transient. According to her account, "intermarriage"3 is actually encouraged in Trinidad, as it produces a "hybrid" identity which furthers the nation's sense of itself as "cosmopolitan. …

One much-commented upon feature of globalization is an increased access to information. If new kinds of information, and a new speed of access to it, characterize the so-called "global society, " then how do new kinds of kinship information and kinship knowledge affect Western practices of kinship, or a Western "sense of self?" Examining the place of certain kinds of knowledge in Western idioms and practices of relatedness and personhood, this paper explores the effects of new kinds of information upon family ties. The role of information and knowledge in pre-natal testing, in adoptive kinship, in the searches undertaken by adoptees for their birth kin, and in transfers of bodily substance infertility treatment, provide some specific contexts to understand the way that kinship knowledge contributes to people's sense of connectedness to their relatives, and to their own sense of identity. Rather than assuming a clear trajectory from a world of ascribed ties to one in which such ties are achieved, I highlight some of the more complex processes which people put to work when they constitute themselves through their various kinds of relations. A web of intertwinings, separations, and rejoinings between what is apparently inherited from the past, and what is created anew can be discerned as central to Western kinship practices. [Keywords: globalization; kinship; personhood; prenatal testing; adoption] This paper is an exploration of the place of certain kinds of knowledge in Western idioms and practices of relatedness and personhood.1 Drawing extensively on published work by Marilyn Strathern (1992a, 1992b, 1999, 2005), Rayna Rapp (1999), Jeanette Edwards (2000), Monica Konrad (2003; 2005) and others, as well as interviews that I conducted in the late 1990s with adult adoptees in Scotland, I look at the way that kinship knowledge contributes to people's sense of connectedness to their relatives, and to their own sense of identity. One of my themes is the effects of increased access to information-and here what I have to say touches upon the larger theme of globalization and how we think about family ties. If new kinds of information, and a new speed of access to it, are features of the so-called "global society," then how do new kinds of kinship information and kinship knowledge affect the way we "do kinship," or our sense of self? A characterisation of the "global society" as founded on relations that are made rather than given (see, for example, Giddens 1994:106-7) is, I suggest, an oversimplification. Instead, some complex intertwinings, separations, and rejoinings between what is apparently inherited from the past and what seems to be created anew are at the heart of Western kinship practices. But to presume a clear trajectory from a world of ascribed ties to one in which they are achieved, obscures some of the more interesting processes which people put to work when they constitute themselves through their various kinds of relations. Trying to sketch out some of these processes of intertwining and separation between the made and the given involves unpicking the paths between knowing and being in personhood and relatedness. In order to avoid some of the pitfalls of abstraction in this paper, I ground my speculations in some rather particular ethnography of kinship. I look at the role of information and knowledge in prenatal testing, in adoptive kinship and in the searches undertaken by adoptees for their birth kin, and in transfers of bodily substance in fertility treatment. Over a number of years, the work of Marilyn Strathern has been central in illuminating the multiple significance of different levels of kinship knowledge, from the governmental to the individual, and the intricate work that goes into the kinds of separations and recombinations which concern me here. It therefore seems appropriate that I have structured this paper around an essay which I have found particularly thought-provoking, "Refusing Information" (Strathern 1999). …