Kinship

Why is so little attention paid to inheritance in both empirical studies and theo-ries of family and kinship in modern capitalist society? Ever since I encountered the fraught entanglements of love, money, and property surrounding inheritance in my dissertation research on Japanese American kinship, I have puzzled over why inheritance is so marginal to scholarship on kinship in the United States and other “advanced ” capitalist societies. In light of the mass media’s fascination with inheritance disputes among the rich and famous, it is surprising that social sci-ence has little to say about inheritance when compared with the attention paid to marriage, divorce, and childrearing. There are, of course, notable exceptions (e.g., Beckert 2007). Yet, revelations and reservations about “helicopter parents ” and “tiger moms ” draw far more attention from both scholars and the popular media than do inheritance and its social consequences. Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the twenty-first century (2014) presents find-ings that offer illuminating insight into the scant attention paid to inheritance in dominant models of family and kinship in “modern ” capitalist societies. The first insight is that this absence cannot be explained by the unimportance of inheri-tance. Most reviews of Piketty’s book have tended to focus on his findings about the extent of wealth inequality in these societies. There are indeed striking rev-elations about wealth inequality in the book, including that in the United States the top decile now own 72 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom half own just 2 percent. Yet, more important than Piketty’s findings about the exten