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The genealogical model has a long-standing history in Western thought. The contributors to this volume consider the ways in which assumptions about the genealogical model—in particular, ideas concerning sequence, essence, and transmission—structure other modes of practice and knowledge-making in domains well beyond what is normally labeled “kinship.” The detailed ethnographic work and analysis included in this text explores how these assumptions have been built into our understandings of race, personhood, ethnicity, property relations, and the relationship between human beings and non-human species. The authors explore the influences of the genealogical model of kinship in wider social theory and examine anthropology’s ability to provide a unique framework capable of bridging the “social” and “natural” sciences. In doing so, this volume brings fresh new perspectives to bear on contemporary theories concerning biotechnology and its effect upon social life.
“This collection of ten essays is the latest major work to call for renewed attention to the topic [of kinship], especially with respect to contemporary questions of how cultures relate to nature…[It] is a welcome addition to the ongoing revival of kinship, and will stimulate further debate among its many participants.” • Ethnobiology Letters
Sandra Bamford is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on Papua New Guinea and the West, with an emphasis on kinship, gender, landscape, environmentalism, globalization, and biotechnology. In addition to having authored several journal articles and book chapters, her most recent publications include: Biology Unmoored: Melanesian Reflections on Life and Biotechnology (University of California Press, 2006) and Embodying Modernity and Postmodernity: Ritual, Praxis and Social Change in Melanesia (Carolina Academic Press, 2007).
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Pedigrees of Knowledge: Anthropology and the Genealogical Method
Sandra Bamford and James Leach
Chapter 2. Aborescent Culture: Writing and Not Writing Race Horse Pedigrees
Rebecca Cassidy
Chapter 3. When Blood Matters: Making Kinship in Colonial Kenya
Teresa Holmes
Chapter 4. The Web of Kin: An Online Genealogical Machine
Gisli Pálsson
Chapter 5. Genes, Mobilities and the Enclosures of Capital: Contesting Ancestry and its Applications in Iceland
Hilary Cunningham
Chapter 6. Skipping a Generation and Assisted Kinship
Jeanette Edwards
Chapter 7. ‘Family Trees’ among the Kamea of Papua New Guinea: A Non-Genealogical Approach to Imagining Relatedness
Sandra Bamford
Chapter 8. Knowledge as Kinship: Mutable Essence and the Significance of Transmission on the Rai Coast of PNG
James Leach
Chapter 9. Stories Against Classification: Transport, Wayfaring and the Integration of Knowledge
Tim Ingold
Chapter 10. Revealing and Obscuring Rivers’s Pedigrees: Biological Inheritance and Kinship in Madagascar
Rita Astuti
Chapter 11. The Gift and the Given: Three Nano-Essays on Kinship and Magic
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Notes on contributors
Bibliography
Index