What Kinship Is-And Is Not offers, on its surface, a simple theoretical argument, laid out in the titles of its mere two chapters: kinship is culture, not biology. But along the way to proving his point, Marshall Sahlins engages a dazzling array of thinkers, from Aristotle to Emile Durkheim to Marilyn Strathern, bolstering that conversation with an equally dazzling array of ethnographic examples from around the globe. The result is a thrilling combination of clarity and erudition almed at the heart of human relationships and their meaning.
Marshall Sahlins is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the British Academy, he is the author of many books, including Culture and Practical Reason, How Natives Think, Islands of History, and Apologies to Thucydides, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
Title: What Kinship Is-And Is Not
Author: Sahlins, Marshall
ISBN: 9780226214290
Binding:
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: 2014-09-02
Number of Pages: 120
Weight: 0.2087 kg
What is most striking about Sahlins's discussion is the evocative way in which he captures something immediately recognizable about kinship. Across cultures, eras, and social backgrounds, the sense that kin participate intrinsically in each other's existence,' that they share 'a mutuality of being,' and are 'members of one another' is intuitively graspable-not as an analytic abstraction, as many definitions of kinship seem to be, but in a way that palpably makes sense of the whole range of human experience as described in the ethnographic record, and also our own. (Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory) Sahlins catalogs brilliantly the varied ways in which people construct family ties completely apart from their genetic relationships.... This is cultural anthropology at its best. (Cosmos & Culture, National Public Radio)
