Overview

Arguably all humans invent or accept forms of family beyond those that are close biological kin. These fictive forms of kinship may vary across diverse cultures and serve different purposes. This book explores a wide variety of such kinship-forming, from expedient daylong marriages to notions of deities as everlasting parents for humankind and life on earth. These range from the purely abstract to the bricks and mortar of college fraternities and sororities. Family Beyond Family observes and examines the principles and purposes of such fabricated connections.

Full Product Details

Author:   Parker Shipton ,  James P. Ito-Adler
Publisher:   Berghahn Books
Imprint:   Berghahn Books
ISBN:  

9781805397984

ISBN 10:   1805397982
Pages:   302
Publication Date:   01 December 2024
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Parker Shipton Part I: Perceiving, Projecting, and Re-imagining Kinship Chapter 1. Kinship in Shifting Perspectives (or: Brother, Can You Paradigm?) Parker Shipton Chapter 2. Genealogy and other Essential Fictions: The Family in Essence and Consensus James W. Fernandez Chapter 3. Only Connect: The Challenge of Being Born Human John Edward Terrell Part II: Close Family and Roles Delegated Inside and Out Chapter 4. Fictive Fatherhood Nicholas Townsend Chapter 5. Sponsoring Careers: A Person-Centered View of Fictive Kinship Pragmatics Robert A. LeVine Part III: Ritual Kinship and Some of Its Variants Chapter 6. “Iron Brothers” and “Dear Customers”: Fictive Kinship and Social Change in China Chun-Yi Sum and Jason Jiansheng Li Chapter 7. Masquerading Rites of Passage: Fictive Marriage in Iran Shahla Haeri Chapter 8. Patrilineality and Its Alternatives in the Islamic Middle East: Milk, Umma, Sect, and Tariqa Charles Lindholm Part IV: Further Forms of Familyhood Chapter 9. Meta-Kinship: Nominal Relatives as Fact, Fiction, and Factual Fiction Parker Shipton Chapter 10. Mechanical Automata and Performative Kinship: Repair and Relatedness through “As If” Illusions Ellen Schattschneider Chapter 11. Old Worlds from Fragments: Holocaust Family Memory in the Age of Ancestral DNA Mark Auslander Conclusion: Coda James P. Ito-Adler and Parker Shipton Index

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Author Information

Parker Shipton is Professor of Anthropology and African Studies, Boston University. He has served as president of the Association for Africanist Anthropology. Some of his publications include The Nature of Entrustment (Yale University Press, 2007), which won the Herskovits Prize; Mortgaging the Ancestors (Yale University Press, 2009), and Credit Between Cultures (Yale University Press, 2010).

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