The politics of making kinship: historical and anthropological perspectives

Abstract

A long tradition of Western political thought included the concepts of a household, the family, and kinship in models of public order, but during the nineteenth century the newly constructed social sciences developed a conceptualization of "the West and the Rest" and excised family and kinship from theories of the state, public sphere, and democratic order. Kinship has, however, neither completely disappeared from the political cultures of the West nor played the determining social and political role elsewhere that has been ascribed t Show more