Critical Kinship Studies

By the mid-1980s, kinship studies in anthropology looked as dated and irrelevant as totemism. But by 2001, they had been reinvented and rejuvenated in such works as Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon's edited collection, Relative Values (CH, Nov'02, 40-1635), and Maurice Godelier's The Metamorphoses of Kinship (CH, Sep'12, 50-0366). Classic topics such as patrilineal clans disappeared, and research on migration, immigrant communities, and transnationalism demonstrated the significance of kinship. New research on gender, adoption, reproductive technology, new family forms, and same-sex marriage burgeoned. These innovations are linked to the turn of anthropologists toward research into their own societies. This collection carries innovation further. It emphasizes interdisciplinary research and what the editors call "mobility": transnational movement of people, reproductive substances, and kinship understandings as well as international communication through new media. The contributions show how global economic and political inequalities are linked to mobility. The 18 essays are organized into four sections: kinship as substance, as consumption, as political economy, and reimagined. They are all based on field research around the globe and cover such topics as surrogacy, transnational adoption, transnational egg and sperm donation, creation of fictive kinship, and cultural notions of animals as kin. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All college and university libraries. * CHOICE *
This interdisciplinary and impressive collection of works represents a refreshing contribution to critical kinship studies, and is in all respects up-to-date with our time’s diverse ways of creating and sustaining kinship on both a national and transnational level and whether it is about various ART techniques, adoption or surrogacy. -- Tobias Hübinette, Associate Professor in Intercultural Studies at Karlstad University
In a series of well-crafted case studies based on empirical research throughout the Eastern hemisphere, this edited collection brilliantly demonstrates that reproductive technologies and adoption are integral to today’s political and economic inequality and the biopolitics of migration.  The volume leaves us in no doubt of the urgent need for the critical kinship studies for which the editors call. -- Charis Thompson, Chancellor's Professor, UC Berkeley