Customer Reviews

Kinship and Gender: An Introduction

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Perhaps because we have lessened its daily importance, the topic of kinship, as Stone quickly notes, strikes many of us as boring and painful. How then to minimize the pain, if not create some enjoyment, in reading about it, whether for a course (as this book was designed for) or for other reasons? Stone's answer is to join it to gender, and this certainly helps, tying into subjects that have greater daily importance to many of us (sex differences, cross-cultural marriage patterns, male/female status, etc.). Also earning "thumbs up" are the author's sensible positions on many topics, eschewing some of the cruder sociobiological interpretations and tempering extreme feminist views. By being a recent book, it helps fill a gap, too, by bringing the study of kinship up-to-date, including a nice chapter on the evolution of kinship and gender. Where the book falls short, however, is its unbalanced presentation of kinship and gender material. It mixes theory with case studies (e.g. the Nayar of India); though the case studies are rich in detail, for a book of this sort they seemed to carry on too long and form too much of the emphasis. The effect is to transform chapters on matrilineages, double descent and marriage into brief background discussions and then shift focus to a few case studies on each topic. More thorough cross-cultural comparisons would have helped balance these discussions. A more systematic cross-cultural perspective would have also shown that examples that seemed specific sometimes have broad applicability, such as Stone's "double sexual standard" (p. 226) that Daly and Wilson (see The Adapted Mind) have shown extends well beyond Eurasian traditions. Overall, the book does cause less pain than one could have supposed for a book on kinship.

I agree almost completely with Gray's review. I have used Stone's book in a course on kinship and while the conversational fodder is plentiful due to inclusion of interesting case studies, theoretical issues are largely glossed over. This would make a nice supplement to Parkin, however, who covers the fundamentals of kinship (as dryly as possible) and the major associated anthropological theories.

The tone of the book is uneven; though she dispenses with extreme "biological" and feminist viewpoints, Stone often exposes her own ideology in discussions of previous male biases in kinship research. Moreover, the text would benefit from general reorganization; the author's colloquial style often leaves ends untied or tied too quickly. In particular, case studies might be kept apart from the theoretical text while other theoretical issues (e.g., Levi-Strauss's contributions) should be kept together.

Finally, while the fundamental structural elements of kinship are well covered (marriage, descent, residence, etc.), some things are glaringly absent. It seems a shame not to include at least a chapter on the history of anthropological thought on kinship, even if the formalism of the past is best abandoned for the sake of teaching introductory courses. The chapter on evolution is also too broadly construed (considering both origins and current adaptations, primates, paleoevolution and contemporary groups), yet very little attention is paid to evolutionary ecological models of human kinship (which have largely replaced the sociobiological viewpoint).

In sum: this is a decent book for teaching (it even has suggestions for movies and discussion questions) -if- used in conjunction with a more rigorous text on kinship, per se. As one of the only contemporary textbooks addressing 150 years of anthropological kinship study, it has its work cut out for it.

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