The essays in "Relative Values" draw on new work in anthropology, science studies, gender theory, critical race studies, and postmodernism to offer a radical revisioning of kinship and kinship theory. Through a combination of vivid case studies and trenchant theoretical essays, the contributors--a group of internationally recognized scholars--examine both the history of kinship theory and its future, at once raising questions that have long occupied a central place within the discipline of anthropology and moving beyond them.
Ideas about kinship are vital not only to understanding but also to forming many of the practices and innovations of contemporary society. How do the cultural logics of contemporary biopolitics, commodification, and globalization intersect with kinship practices and theories? In what ways do kinship analogies inform scientific and clinical practices; and what happens to kinship when it is created in such unfamiliar sites as biogenetic labs, new reproductive technology clinics, and the computers of artificial life scientists? How does kinship constitute--and get constituted by--the relations of power that draw lines of hierarchy and equality, exclusion and inclusion, ambivalence and violence? The contributors assess the implications for kinship of such phenomena as blood transfusions, adoption across national borders, genetic support groups, photography, and the new reproductive technologies while ranging from rural China to mid-century Africa to contemporary Norway and the United States. Addressing these and other timely issues, "Relative Values" injects new life into one of anthropology's most important disciplinary traditions.
Posing these and other timely questions, "Relative Values" injects an important interdisciplinary curiosity into one of anthropology's most important disciplinary traditions.

"Contributors." Mary Bouquet, Janet Carsten, Charis Thompson Cussins, Carol Delaney, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Sarah Franklin, Deborah Heath, Stefan Helmreich, Signe Howell, Jonathan Marks, Susan McKinnon, Michael G. Peletz, Rayna Rapp, Martine Segalen, Pauline Turner Strong, Melbourne Tapper, Karen-Sue Taussig, Kath Weston, Yunxiang Yan

Among a growing number of ethnographies of Eastern Indonesia that deal with cosmology, exchange and kinship, this book confronts issues originally broached by Edmund Leach and Claude Levi-Strauss, concerning the relation between hierarchy and equality in asymmetric systems of marriage. Based on fieldwork in the Tanimbar Islands, this book analyzes the simultaneous presence of both closed, asymmetric cycles and open, asymmetric pathways of alliance - or both egalitarian and hierarchical configurations. The book demonstrates that Tanimbarese society is shaped by the existence of multiple, differentially valued forms of marriage, affiliation and residence. Rather than seeing these various forms as analytically separable types, this book demonstrates that it is only by viewing them as integrally related - in terms of culturally specific understandings of ""houses"", gender and exchange - that one can perceive the process through which hierarchy and equality are created.

Recent years have seen a growing impetus to explain social life almost exclusively in biological and mechanistic terms, and to dismiss cultural meaning and difference. Daily we read assertions that everything from disease to morality-not to mention the presumed characteristics of race, gender, and sexuality-can be explained by reference primarily to genetics and our evolutionary past.
"Complexities" mobilizes experts from several fields of anthropology--cultural, archaeological, linguistic, and biological--to offer a compelling challenge to the resurgence of reductive theories of human biological and social life. This book presents evidence to contest such theories and to provide a multifaceted account of the complexity and variability of the human condition. Charting a course that moves beyond any simple opposition between nature and nurture, "Complexities" argues that a nonreductive perspective has important implications for how we understand and foster human potential.

In Kali in Bengali Lives, Suchitra Samanta examines Bengalis' personal narratives of Kali devotion in the Bhakti tradition. These personal experiences, including miraculous encounters, reflect on broader understandings of divine power. Where the revelatory experience has long been validated in Indian epistemology, the devotees' own interpretive framework provides continuity within a paradigm of devotion and of the miraculous experience as intuitive insight (anubhuti) into a larger truth. Through these unique insights, the miraculous experience is felt in its emotional power, remembered, and reflected upon. The narratives speak to how the meaning of a religious figure, Kali, becomes personally significant and ultimately transformative of the devotee's self.

In Kali in Bengali Lives, Suchitra Samanta examines Bengalis' personal narratives of Kali devotion in the Bhakti tradition. These personal experiences, including miraculous encounters, reflect on broader understandings of divine power. Where the revelatory experience has long been validated in Indian epistemology, the devotees' own interpretive framework provides continuity within a paradigm of devotion and of the miraculous experience as intuitive insight (anubhuti) into a larger truth. Through these unique insights, the miraculous experience is felt in its emotional power, remembered, and reflected upon. The narratives speak to how the meaning of a religious figure, Kali, becomes personally significant and ultimately transformative of the devotee's self.

What difference does kinship make to our conception of the conditions of ""modernity""? Why should kinship matter in an analysis of the ways Italian textile and clothing manufacturers outsource the production of their fashion lines to China? How might attention to kinship illuminate our understanding of the Argentine nation-state and its oil industry? What does it mean that even high-tech, scientific workplaces - like blood banks and pathology labs in Penang, Malaysia - are thoroughly domesticated by relations of kinship and marriage? Can Indian shipyard workers' ideas about kinship, reproduction, and the divine tell us something unexpected about the presumed secular nature of productive labour in the global economy? How do Mormon understandings of kinship and adoption help us reflect on mainstream Protestant and even ostensibly secular ideas of kinship? What can kinship perspectives add to current discussions on ""secular ethics"" and claims that we are living in a modern ""secular age""? For more than 150 years, theories of social evolution, development, and modernity have been unanimous in their assumption that kinship organises simpler, ""traditional,"" pre-state societies but not complex, ""modern,"" state societies. And they have been unanimous in their presupposition that within modern state-based societies kinship has been relegated to the domestic domain, has lost its economic and political functions, has retained no organising force in modern political and economic structures and processes, and has become secularised and rationalised. Vital Relations challenges these presuppositions. It will be of interest to anyone who wishes to gain a different perspective on the concept of modernity itself, and on the place of kinship and ""family"" in modern life.