Description: What is the impact on anthropology of recent studies of reproductive technologies, gender, and the social construction of science in the West? What is the significance of public anxiety about the family to anthropology's analytic approach? Janet Carsten presents an original view of the past, present, and future of kinship in anthropology which will be of interest to anthropologists as well as to other social scientists.
Review Quotes: "In this creative book, Janet Carsten unsettles and reorients our traditional ideas about kinship. Through her deep understanding of kinship theory and comparative eye, we see kinship as it is made in shared experience, and interwoven with concepts of the house, person, gender, nationality, and new technologies. Kinship studies may once again become the heart of anthropology. After Carsten, they will never be the same." Stephen Gudeman, co-author of Conversations in Colombia: The Domestic Economy in Life and Text