Kinship: An Introduction to the Basic Concepts [Paperback]

David Parkin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0631203591 | ISBN-13: 978-0631203599 | Publication Date: June 4, 1997 | Edition: 1

This book is an introduction to the social anthropology of kinship - to the ways in which the peoples of different cultures marry and relate to each other within and outside the family.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

This book is an introduction to the social anthropology of kinship - to the ways in which the peoples of different cultures marry and relate to each other within and outside the family, and to the means by which one generation relates to those that come before and after it. It is addressed in particular to students of anthropology, but is also intended as a one-volume guide to those, such as social historians, demographers and geographers, who find it necessary to understand patterns of kinship in different places and at different times.

The book is divided into two parts. Part I opens with a discussion of what kinship means to the social anthropologist as distinct from the biologist, and considers the different possible approaches to the subject within social anthropology itself. The following chapters cover topics such as descent, inheritance, succession, the family, residence, marriage, kinship terminology, systems of affinal alliance, the new reproductive technologies, and symbolic approaches to kinship.

In Part II the first four chapters provide an overview of theoretical debates concerning different aspects of kinship. The final chapter provides ethnographic examples, together with an annotated guide to further reading, divided by chapter.

The book applies and illustrates these concepts and topics to a number of contrasting case studies. These illustrate the insights that can be achieved from the study of kinship, and also show that the complexity of even the most familar kinship patterns rarely lends itself to simple description. The author also includes annotated guides to further reading.

About the Author

Robert Parkin trained at the University of Oxford, where he took his doctorate for a thesis on kinship in tribal India, which was later published by Oxford University Press as The Munda of Central India. He has written extensively on kinship, both theoretically and ethnographically. He is the author of a study of the life and work of the early French sociologist of religion, Robert Hertz, The Dark Side of Humanity (1996), and of A Guide to Austroasiatic Speakers and their Languages (1991). He is currently teaching at the Universities of Oxford and Oxford Brookes, having previously taught at the Free University of Berlin and the Jagiellonian University, Cracow.

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (June 4, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0631203591
• ISBN-13: 978-0631203599
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,043,250 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Novices to anthropology beware, January 10, 2006

By 

T. Lemos (New England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Kinship: An Introduction to the Basic Concepts (Paperback)

I picked up this book in order to gain a better knowledge of anthropological theories regarding kinship. From the title, I surmised the book would be at the introductory level, thus assuming little or no previous knowledge, clearly written, and with many examples. While the first of these assumptions was in fact the case, unfortunately the latter two were not. On the contrary, although I do have background in anthropologyy, I found this book to be at times extremely confusing. This was often precisely because Parkin provided very few examples, and the examples he did provide were so briefly described as to be generally unhelpful. In addition, Parkin's writing style in general was quite technical, a fact which obscured rather than illuminated the concepts treated by the book. Though it is true that kinship in anthropology has traditionally been a very technical and even opaque area of study to the non-initiated, I find it hard to believe that its concepts and main theories could not be more simply presented. Something which I think would have made the book clearer and more enjoyable to read would have been for the material in part II, which discusses the history of scholarship on kinship and anthropology and gives some (though still not enough) ethnographic material, to be incorporated into part I. This would have broken the monotony of intimidating charts and technical language, given the reader a far greater sense of how and by whom the theories described were developed, and illustrated where different kinship phenomena occur. This book isn't all bad--chapter 1 is helpful, as is much of part II--but as a whole might be characterized an an introductory textbook for specialists.