Kinship in Action: Self and Group

In This Section:

I. Author Bio

II. Author Letter

I. Author Bio

Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern are a wife and husband research team with a long history of joint publications and research.

They are based in the Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh and are also Visiting Research Fellow and Visiting Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Durham; Visiting Research Fellows in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen; and have been Visiting Research Fellows, at the Institute of Ethnology, Academic Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan over many years.

They have published many books and articles on their research in the Pacific region, especially in Papua New Guinea; and in Europe (primarily Scotland and Ireland); and in Asia (mainly in Taiwan and China).

They are the editors of the Ritual Studies Book Series, and the Medical Anthropology Book Series with Carolina Academic Press and the Anthropology and Cultural History in Asia and the Indo-Pacific with Ashgate Publishing.

They are also the long-standing Co-Editors of the Journal of Ritual Studies. Their coauthored books include: Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip (Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Empowering the Past, Confronting the Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Their co-edited books include: Asian Ritual Systems: Syncretisms and Ruptures (Carolina Academic Press, 2007); Exchange and Sacrifice (Carolina Academic Press, 2008); Religious and Ritual Change (Carolina Academic Press, 2009); and Ritual (Ashgate Publishing, forthcoming, 2010).

A list of their recent writings can be found at (http://www.pitt.edu/~strather/sandspublicat.htm).

II. Author Letter

Dear Colleague,

Kinship has made a startling come-back into the field of anthropological studies. Kinship, like many other social phenomena, is studied nowadays as a process of conducting one's life as much as a structure that regulates people's lives. The definitional questions about kinship that engrossed many scholars in the past with debates about genealogical versus other bases for the recognition of kinship ties, have been superseded by discussions about the continuing significance of kin relations in contexts labelled by analysts as modern - although we prefer the more neutral term contemporary .

Our book on kinship is based on an action-oriented approach. If we discuss formal structures, it is in order to show how these affect, and are affected by, the vicissitudes of experience and the forces of change and continuity. We have striven to avoid the labyrinths of kinship charts while fully representing the complexity and creativity of different ways of organizing kinship in the world.

We have also, through our ethnographic examples and our analyses of these, continuously sought to show the complex interplays between senses of self and senses of group affiliation, which we think are human universals. We stress neither the individual as such nor the group as such, but always their relationship in action.

We draw our examples from around the world, in accordance with strategically chosen classic and new case studies. Many of our examples are drawn directly from our own field areas in Papua New Guinea (as we did also in our book Curing and Healing: Medical Anthropology in Global Perspective, 2nd ed., Carolina Academic Press 2010), because we can deal with these in the most direct way.

We have written the book out of a strong conviction that both ethnography and theory are vital for anthropology, and that they must be convincingly inter-related in analysis. Our theoretical approaches are informed equally by long-term fieldwork and by a strong awareness of changing scenes, both in the world of kinship itself and in anthropologists' accounts of that world.

The book is based also on extensive teaching over the years in different parts of the world, the UK, the USA, Australia, and Papua New Guinea, and it blends together different styles of debate and discussion about kinship.

We would be delighted to hear from teaching practitioners and theorists alike about their responses to the book and ways in which it could be developed further in future editions. Our webpage is http://www.pitt.edu/~strather.

Good wishes,

Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart (Strathern)

University of Pittsburgh

strather@pitt.edu & PAMJAN@pitt.edu