The long tradition of Western political thought included kinship in models of public order, but the social sciences excised it from theories of the state, public sphere, and democratic order. Kinship has, however, neither completely disappeared from the political cultures of the West nor played the determining social and political role ascribed to it elsewhere. Exploring the issues that arise once the divide between kinship and politics is no longer taken for granted, The Politics of Making Kinship demonstrates how political processes have shaped concepts of kinship over time and, conversely, how political projects have been shaped by specific understandings, idioms and uses of kinship. Taking vantage points from the post-Roman era to early modernity, and from colonial imperialism to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond this international set of scholars place kinship centerstage and reintegrate it with political theory.

Politics and Kinship: A Reader offers a unique overview of the entanglement of these two categories in both theoretical debates and everyday practices. The two, despite many challenges, are often thought to have become separated during the process of modernisation. Tracing how this notion of separation becomes idealised and translated into various contexts, this book sheds light on its epistemological limitations. Combining otherwise-distinct lines of discussion within political anthropology and kinship studies, the selection of texts covers a broad range of intersecting topics that range from military strategy, DNA testing, and child fostering, to practices of kinning the state. Beginning with the study of politics, the first part of this volume looks at how its separation from kinship came to be considered a 'modern' phenomenon, with significant consequences. The second part starts from kinship, showing how it was made into a separate and apolitical field - an idea that would soon travel and be translated globally into policies. The third part turns to reproductions through various transmissions and future-making projects. Overall, the volume offers a fundamental critique of the epistemological separation of politics and kinship, and its shortcomings for teaching and research. Featuring contributions from a broad range of regional, temporal and theoretical backgrounds, it allows for critical engagement with knowledge production about the entanglement of politics and kinship. The different traditions and contemporary approaches represented make this book an essential resource for researchers, instructors and students of anthropology.

In the course of last two decades, the notion of care has become prominent in the social and cultural sciences. As a result of this proliferation of care in several disciplinary fields, we are observing not only the expansion of its conceptual meaning, but also an increasing imprecision in its usage. A growing amount of literature focuses on the intersection between work, gender, ethnicity, affect, and mobility regimes. In view of this growing field of literature, Anthropological Perspectives on Care looks at the notion of care from an anthropological perspective. Complementing earlier approaches, Alber and Drotbohm argue that an interpretation of care in relation to three different concepts, namely work, kinship and the life-course, will facilitate empirical and conceptual distinctions between the different activities that are labeled as care.

In our highly interconnected and globalized world, people often pursue their aspirations in multiple places. Yet in public and scholarly debates, aspirations are often seen as the realm of younger, mobile generations, since they are assumed to hold the greatest potential for shaping the future. This volume flips this perspective on its head by exploring how aspirations are constructed from the vantage point of later life, and shows how they are pursued across time, space, and generations. The aspirations of older people are diverse, and relate not only to aging itself but also to planning the next generation’s future, preparing an "ideal" retirement, searching for intimacy and self-realization, and confronting death and afterlives. Aspiring in Later Life brings together rich ethnographic cases from different regions of the world, offering original insights into how aspirations shift over the course of life and how they are pursued in contexts of translocal mobility. This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition.​

In our highly interconnected and globalized world, people often pursue their aspirations in multiple places. Yet in public and scholarly debates, aspirations are often seen as the realm of younger, mobile generations, since they are assumed to hold the greatest potential for shaping the future. This volume flips this perspective on its head by exploring how aspirations are constructed from the vantage point of later life, and shows how they are pursued across time, space, and generations. The aspirations of older people are diverse, and relate not only to aging itself but also to planning the next generation’s future, preparing an "ideal" retirement, searching for intimacy and self-realization, and confronting death and afterlives. Aspiring in Later Life brings together rich ethnographic cases from different regions of the world, offering original insights into how aspirations shift over the course of life and how they are pursued in contexts of translocal mobility. This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition.​

Politics and Kinship: A Reader offers a unique overview of the entanglement of these two categories in both theoretical debates and everyday practices. The two, despite many challenges, are often thought to have become separated during the process of modernisation. Tracing how this notion of separation becomes idealised and translated into various contexts, this book sheds light on its epistemological limitations. Combining otherwise-distinct lines of discussion within political anthropology and kinship studies, the selection of texts covers a broad range of intersecting topics that range from military strategy, DNA testing, and child fostering, to practices of kinning the state. Beginning with the study of politics, the first part of this volume looks at how its separation from kinship came to be considered a 'modern' phenomenon, with significant consequences. The second part starts from kinship, showing how it was made into a separate and apolitical field - an idea that would soon travel and be translated globally into policies. The third part turns to reproductions through various transmissions and future-making projects. Overall, the volume offers a fundamental critique of the epistemological separation of politics and kinship, and its shortcomings for teaching and research. Featuring contributions from a broad range of regional, temporal and theoretical backgrounds, it allows for critical engagement with knowledge production about the entanglement of politics and kinship. The different traditions and contemporary approaches represented make this book an essential resource for researchers, instructors and students of anthropology.

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. Contributors: Erdmute Alber, Apostolos Andrikopoulos, Helle Bundgaard, Jeanette Edwards, Karen Fog Olwig, Victoria Goddard, Michael Herzfeld, Eirini Papadaki, Frances Pine, Ivan Rajkovic, Tatjana Thelen, Thomas Zitelmann.

In Transfers of Belonging, Erdmute Alber traces the history of child fostering in northern Benin from the pre-colonial past to the present by pointing out the embeddedness of child foster practices and norms in a wider political process of change. Child fostering was, for a long time, not just one way of raising children, but seen as the appropriate way of doing so. This changed profoundly with the arrival of European ideas about birth parents being the 'right' parents, but also with the introduction of schooling and the differentiation of life chances. Besides providing deep historical and ethnographical insights, Transfers of Belonging offers a new theoretical frame for conceptualizing parenting.