Acknowledgements

Introduction: Politics of Making Kinship
Erdmute Alber, David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, Tatjana Thelen

Part I: Epistemologies

Chapter 1 . Quantifying Generations. Peter Damian Develops a New System of Kinship Calculation
Simon Teuscher

Chapter 2. Kinship Matters: Genealogical and Historiographical Practices between 1750 and 1850
Michaela Hohkamp

Chapter 3. Race and Kinship: Anthropology and the “Genealogical Method”
Staffan Müller-Wille

Chapter 4. Kinship Meets Corporation: Perspectives on Kinship and Politics in the Formative Moment of Social Anthropology
Thomas Zitelmann

Chapter 5. German Kinship: Forming a Political Unit and Epistemic Void
Tatjana Thelen

Part II: Projects

Chapter 6. Making Family and Kinship: Reflections on Hegel and Parsons
David Warren Sabean

Chapter 7. Conceptualizing Kinship in Sixteenth-Century Political Theories. Bodin’s and Hotman’s Ideas of Monarchy
Julia Heinemann

Chapter 8. Commonwealths of Affection: Kinship, Marriage, and Polity in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America
Susan McKinnon

Chapter 9. Towards a Political Economy of the Maternal Body. Claiming Maternal Filiation in Nineteenth-Century French Feminism
Caroline Arni

Part III: Deployments
Outline and summaries

Chapter 10. Inventing the Extended Family in Colonial Dahomey/Benin
Erdmute Alber

Chapter 11. “As If Begotten and Born of Feeborn Parents” – Indicators and Considerations on Parentalization of Emancipated Slaves in the Post-Roman Occident
Ludolf Kuchenbuch

Chapter 12. From Natural Difference to Equal Value: The Case of Egg Donation in Norway
Merit Melhuus

Chapter 13. Family and Kinship in Early Modern Contractarian State Theories
Jon Mathieu

Chapter 14. Translating the Family
Claudia Derichs

Index

The Politics of Making Kinship

Historical and Anthropological Perspectives

Edited by Erdmute Alber, David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Tatjana Thelen

448 pages, 6 figures, bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80073-800-3 Hb Published (December 2022)

eISBN 978-1-80073-785-3 eBook

Details

“This is a powerful volume that argues for kinship and politics to be studied and analyzed in conjunction and not separately, as is still common within the social and political sciences. …What makes the volume particularly strong is that it combines discussions of semantic shifts, political contestations, and philosophy and theory of house(hold), kin, and family relations.”  • Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

The long tradition of Western political thought included kinship in models of public order, but the social sciences excised it 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 ascribed to it elsewhere. Exploring the issues that arise once the divide between kinship and politics is no longer taken for granted, The Politics of Making Kinship demonstrates how political processes have shaped concepts of kinship over time and, conversely, how political projects have been shaped by specific understandings, idioms and uses of kinship. Taking vantage points from the post-Roman era to early modernity, and from colonial imperialism to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond this international set of scholars place kinship centerstage and reintegrate it with political theory.

Erdmute Alber is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth. She co-led the research group on Kinship and Politics at ZIF in Bielefeld. Her books include Transfers of Belonging (Brill 2018) and (with Tatjana Thelen) Re-connecting State and Kinship (2017).

David Warren Sabean is Henry J. Bruman Endowed Professor of German history Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor of European History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He co-led the research group on Kinship and Politics at ZIF in Bielefeld. His books include Kinship in Neckarhausen (1998).

Simon Teuscher is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Zurich. He co-led the group on Kinship and Politics at ZIF in Bielefeld. His books include Lords’ Rights and Peasants’ Answers (2012) and (with David Sabean and Jon Mathieu) Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Developments (1300-1900) (2007).

Tatjana Thelen is Professor at the department for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna. She co-led the group on Kinship and Politics at ZIF in Bielefeld. She co-edited Reconnecting State and Kinship (2017) and Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State (2017).

Subject: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

Area: Europe

LC: GN492 .P664 2023

BISAC: POL010000 POLITICAL SCIENCE/History & Theory; SOC026010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/Marriage & Family; SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social

berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

The Politics of Making Kinship

Historical and Anthropological Perspectives

Edited by Erdmute Alber, David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Tatjana Thelen

Subject: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

Area: Europe

Home -> Title

Contents

The Politics of Making Kinship

Historical and Anthropological Perspectives

Edited by Erdmute Alber, David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Tatjana Thelen

Subject: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

Area: Europe