After Kinship

Citation

Carsten, J. (2004). After Kinship. Cambridge University Press.

Chapter Summary

After Kinship is a short book in the series New Departures in Anthropology. It has eight numbered parts, with the introduction as the first and the conclusion as the last, and runs to about 190 pages of text before the bibliography. The publisher describes it as an approachable view of the past, present and future of kinship in anthropology and of the comparative study of relatedness. Its starting question is what future kinship has once the distinction between the "biological" and the "social", on which its study rested, is no longer self-evident. Each chapter opens a new line of analysis, and several begin from an ethnographic or contemporary case.

Chapter 1: Introduction: After Kinship?

The introduction opens with a case from Britain in the 1990s: a widow, Diane Blood, challenged a regulatory refusal to let her use her dead husband's sperm for insemination. It uses this story, with two others that the conclusion recalls (a Scottish woman's search for her birth mother and rabbinical debates in Israel over the use of non-Jewish sperm), to ask what recent technologies and public anxieties about the family mean for anthropology's analytic strategies.

Chapter 2: Houses of Memory and Kinship

The chapter starts from the evocative power of houses remembered from childhood and the author's own memories of a family kitchen table. It treats the house as a setting where feeding, close kin relations and repeated bodily practice come together, and uses it to open kinship to analysis through relatedness.

Chapter 3: Gender, Bodies, and Kinship

The chapter compares how different societies think about men's and women's bodies and how that shapes kinship. Examples include Hungarian Vlach Gypsies, the Malay Muslims of Langkawi among whom the author did fieldwork, and a reanalysis of Dravidian kinship in southern India in terms of gendered similarity and difference.

Chapter 4: The Person

The chapter returns to the book's opening cases. It argues that close kin ties are intrinsic to how persons are socially constituted, in Western contexts as well as in non-Western ones, and that the contrast between an individualised Western person and a "joined-up" non-Western person is oversimplified.

Chapter 5: Uses and Abuses of Substance

Substance was a key term for David Schneider in American Kinship and was taken up by anthropologists working in India and Papua New Guinea. It is a catch-all for the bodily transformation of food into blood, sexual fluids and other matter that passes between people. The chapter asks why anthropologists have used the term and where it has taken the study of kinship, tying together the house, personhood, bodies and gender.

Chapter 6: Families into Nation: The Power of Metaphor and the Transformation of Kinship

The chapter examines the substance and code distinction in Schneider's analysis and the wider oppositions between nature and culture, biological and social. It then looks at relationships that have no basis in substance but are expressed in a "natural" idiom, such as adoption, "fictive" kinship and gay kinship, and at what that idiom does. The title points to the use of family metaphors in national life.

Chapter 7: Assisted Reproduction

The chapter looks at naturalisation from the angle of reproductive technology: sperm and egg donation, surrogacy, in vitro fertilisation and cloning. It asks what such technologies mean for academic knowledge practices and for everyday ideas of kinship as a domain in which relations are given.

Chapter 8: Conclusion

The conclusion recalls the opening cases and asks why they matter. It reflects on newspaper coverage of family and kinship at the turn of the century, including birth fathers whose children were adopted and the use of cells from early embryos for research.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–3

• Relatedness: the comparative term the book uses alongside kinship, to cover ties made through shared living and feeding as well as birth and marriage.
• The biological and the social: the distinction on which kinship study rested and which new technologies unsettle.
• The house: a setting for feeding, intimacy and bodily practice, used as a way into kinship.

Chapters 4–6

• Personhood: how persons are constituted through relations with others.
• Substance: bodily matter exchanged between people, a key term in Schneider's work and later studies.
• Naturalisation: casting relations that lack a biological basis in the language of natural ties.

Chapters 7–8

• Assisted reproduction: technologies that make conception a matter of technical intervention.
• Kinship in public debate: the conclusion's use of news cases to show the topic's wider salience.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Clear intellectual stake. The publisher frames the book around a single question about whether kinship has a future for anthropology, which gives the chapters a common direction.
• Cases that tie theory to contemporary life. Chapters 1, 4 and 7 draw on British court cases, personal searches for birth parents and reproductive technologies, which make abstract debates concrete.
• Cross-cultural comparison. Examples run from the Malay Muslims of Langkawi to Hungarian Gypsies, southern India and Papua New Guinea, and compare them with Western ideas of the person and American kinship.
• Welcomed as accessible. Reviewers quoted on Cambridge Core praise it: Stephen Gudeman describes a book that unsettles and reorients traditional ideas of kinship, and a review in Social Anthropology says it gives students good examples of the variable, local meanings of kinship.

Limitations

• Assumes the older debates. The book works by reworking descent, alliance, Schneider's critique and the distinction between nature and culture, so readers without a grounding in classic kinship theory will miss much of what is at stake.
• Short, so selective. At about 190 pages the book focuses on a few lines of argument, notably the house, gender and the body, the person, substance, naturalisation and reproductive technology, and the contents show no chapters on topics such as marriage systems or descent groups.
• A Euro-American starting point. Several cases come from Britain and North America, and the author argues from them toward a comparative approach. Readers wanting extended case studies from a single region will need monographs.
• Dated at the technological edge. The reproductive technologies and public debates discussed belong to the late 1990s and early 2000s, so later developments are not covered.

Where It Fits in the Course

In this kinship, religion and ritual course, Carsten's book is the one most squarely about kinship. Lancy's The Anthropology of Childhood offers a cross-cultural account of childhood and family life that fits well with the chapters on the person and the house. The ritual and religion titles, Turner's The Ritual Process, Bell's Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, Stephenson's Ritual: A Very Short Introduction, Bielo's Anthropology of Religion: The Basics and Stein and colleagues' The Anthropology of Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft, deal with other themes of the course, so Carsten is best read in the kinship unit.

Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger is the closest companion in subject, as it analyses pollution, taboo and social boundaries through symbolic classification, themes that resonate with Carsten's discussion of substance and the body. Carsten is a later, more advanced text than introductions such as Bielo or Stephenson.

How to Use This Book

It suits advanced undergraduates and graduate students who have had an introductory social anthropology course covering classic kinship theory, such as descent and alliance. It is also useful for sociologists and others interested in family, reproduction and science studies.

A practical plan:

• Core: the Introduction and Chapters 2–5, which build the shift from kinship to relatedness through the house, gender, the person and substance.
• Applications: Chapters 6–7 on adoption, "fictive" and gay kinship, and assisted reproduction, for students working on contemporary families.
• Close: the Conclusion, which returns to the cases and signals directions for study.

Pair it with a classic text on kinship to see what is being revised, keep a list of the key terms, and look at the bibliography for the studies the chapters draw on.