Customer Reviews

Kinship: An Introduction to the Basic Concepts

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.