Reconnecting State and Kinship

Kinship and statehood are often seen as distinct modes of social organization, with kinship associated with small-scale communities in stateless societies and the state as a development away from kinship. Recent scholarship has challenged these notions, but the underlying presumption of a deep-rooted opposition between kinship and the state has remained stable. Reconnecting State and Kinship explores the boundary-related and classificatory practices that reinforce the kinship/statehood binary and tracks the traveling of these concepts and their underlying norms through time and space. Contributors include Erdmute Alber, Apostolos Andrikopoulos, Helle Bundgaard, Jeanette Edwards, Karen Fog Olwig, Victoria Goddard, Michael Herzfeld, Eirini Papadaki, Frances Pine, Ivan Rajković, Tatjana Thelen, and Thomas Zitelmann.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 18 December 2017
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Kinship and statehood are often seen as two distinct modes of social organization, with kinship traditionally associated with small-scale communities in stateless societies and the state viewed as a development away from kinship toward rational, impersonal, and functional forms of rule. However, recent decades have seen theoretical and empirical scholarship challenge these notions, but the underlying presumption of a deep-rooted opposition between kinship and the (modern) state has remained surprisingly stable. 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, such as corruption, patronage, lineage, and incest, surface in the other, and policies and interventions modeled upon the assumed polarity can have lasting consequences for mechanisms of marginalization and exclusion. 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. Contributors include Erdmute Alber, Apostolos Andrikopoulos, Helle Bundgaard, Jeanette Edwards, Karen Fog Olwig, Victoria Goddard, and Michael He.

Weight: 562g
Dimension: 162 x 237 x 29 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780812249514