berghahn New York · Oxford

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

Family Beyond Family

The Varieties of Kinship Experience

Edited by Parker Shipton and James P. Ito-Adler

302 pages, 4 ills., bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80539-798-4 Hb Published (December 2024)

eISBN 978-1-80539-799-1 eBook

Details

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.

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).

James P. Ito-Adler has served as a member of the faculty at Florida International University and Harvard University. He is Co-Founder and President of the Cambridge Institute for Brazilian Studies, an independent nonprofit educational organization. He is a member of the Board and serves as the Executive Officer of the Association for Central Civilizations and Silk Road Studies (ACANSRS), and as General Editor of the Cambridge Institutes Press. He is the author of The Portuguese of Cambridge and Somerville (Cambridge Dept. of Community Development, 1980).

Subject: Anthropology (General) Sociology

Area:

LC: GN487 .F36 2025

BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC026040 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/Social Theory; SOC026010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/Marriage & Family