Transformations of Kinship.

International audienceThis volume's fifteen contributors argue that kinship analysis should remain fundamental to the development of anthropological theory and to the understanding of past and contemporary societies. This volume's fifteen contributors argue that kinship analysis should remain fundamental to the development of anthropological theory and to the understanding of past and contemporary societies. They contend that both aspects of kinship analysis, the "hot" (issues of body, gender, and power) and the "cool" (categories and terminologies) need to be pursued. They seek the meaning of the central discovery that the thousands of kinship systems documented during the past century are but variants of a limited number of classic types -- among them Dravidian, Iroquois, Australian, and Crow-Omaha -- that recur in distant parts of the world, including North and South America, India and China, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. The individual chapters discuss the transformations linking these and other types, culminating in attempts to answer the question of whether such transformations are reversible or whether they have taken a particular direction over the very long term of history.Exploring a classic topic, this bold new work demonstrates anew the centrality of kinship analysis to the anthropological endeavor. 'Dravidian, ' 'Iroquois, ' and 'Crow-Omaha' in North American perspective / Thomas R. Trautmann and R.H. Barnes --On the formal analysis of 'Dravidian, ' 'Iroquois, ' and 'generational' varieties as nearly associative combinations / Franklin E. Tjon Sie Fat --Developmental processes in the pre-contact history of Athapaskan, Algonquian, and Numic kin systems / John W. Ives --Kinship and Dravidianate logic: some implications for understanding power, politics, and social life in a northern Dene community / Michael Asch --Dravidian nomenclature as an expression of ego-centered dualism / Emmanuel Désveaux and Marion Selz --Serial redundancy in Amazonian social structure: is there a method for poststructuralist comparison? / Alf Hornborg --Jivaro kinship: 'simple' and 'complex' formulas: a Dravidian transformation group / Anne-Christine Taylor --Taking sides: marriage networks and Dravidian kinship in lowland South America / Michael Houseman and Douglas R. White --On double language and the relativity of incest: the Campa sociology of a Dravidian-type terminology / France-Marie Renard-Casevitz --Dravidian and Iroquois in South Asia / Robert Parkin --Transformations of kinship systems in eastern Indonesia / Jean-François Guermonprez --The synchro-diachronic method and the multidirectionality of kinship transformations / M.V. Kryukov --The prehistory of Dravidian-type terminologies / N.J. Allen --Dravidian and related kinship systems / Eduardo Viveiros de Castro --Afterword: transformations and lines of evolution / Maurice Godelier