Politics and Kinship

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the partitions as well as the investment in and challenging of their boundaries from the point of view of politics. It presents the emergence of Eurocentric classifications of polities, such as the contrast between ‘small-scale’ or ‘kin-based’ societies and ‘state-based’ societies purified of kinship. The book defines the trope of kin-based societies as a “mythological origin point” in the narrative of modernisation, tracing its naturalisation in the mid to late nineteenth-century United States (US). It shows how US military advisers and manuals use the concepts of Evans-Pritchard, Gluckman and other anthropologists. The book describes how kinship was established as a separate domain of human action, which went hand-in-hand with the development of classifications setting it in opposition to politics

Genealogy · Kinship · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies