Kinship, Law and the Unexpected Relatives are Always a Surprise [Hardcover]

Examines Euro-American kinship as the kinship of a specifically knowledge-based society.Anthropologists use relations to study relations. This book explores the power, challenge and limitations of this approach to social life. In doing so it covers areas rarely brought together so compellingly. Here are debates in science and technology, new studies of kinship, and the effects of legal interventions. Each is concerned with the way in which relationships are taken into account , and there is much to learn here from what is made visible and what is overlooked. Through several accessible case histories, it draws equally from European / American materials and from societies in developing countries (especially Papua New Guinea).Anthropologists use relations to study relations. This book explores the power, challenge and limitations of this approach to social life. In doing so it covers areas rarely brought together so compellingly. Here are debates in science and technology, new studies of kinship, and the effects of legal interventions. Each is concerned with the way in which relationships are taken into account , and there is much to learn here from what is made visible and what is overlooked. Through several accessible case histories, it draws equally from European / American materials and from societies in developing countries (especially Papua New Guinea).Marilyn Strathern takes up an issue at the heart of studies of society--anthropologists using relationships to uncover relationships. The role of relations in western (Euro-American) knowledge practices, from the scientific revolution onwards, raises a question about the extent to which Euro-American kinship is the kinship of a knowledge-based society. This argument takes the reader through current issues in biotechnology, new family formations and legal interventions, as well as intellectual property debates, to matters of personhood and ownership afforded by material from Melanesia and elsewhere.Preface; Pl#•