Download or read book The Metamorphoses of Kinship written by Maurice Godelier and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2012-03-03 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With marriage in decline, divorce on the rise, the demise of the nuclear family, and the increase in marriages and adoptions among same-sex partners, it is clear that the structures of kinship in the modern West are in a state of flux. In The Metamorphoses of Kinship, the world-renowned anthropologist Maurice Godelier contextualizes these developments, surveying the accumulated experience of humanity with regard to such phenomena as the organization of lines of descent, sexuality and sexual prohibitions. In parallel, Godelier studies the evolution of Western conjugal and familial traditions from their roots in the nineteenth century to the present. The conclusion he draws is that it is never the case that a man and a woman are sufficient on their own to raise a child, and nowhere are relations of kinship or the family the keystone of society. Godelier argues that the changes of the last thirty years do not herald the disappearance or death agony of kinship, but rather its remarkable metamorphosis—one that, ironically, is bringing us closer to the “traditional” societies studied by ethnologists.

Download or read book The Metamorphoses of Kinship written by Maurice Godelier and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2012-03-03 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With marriage in decline, divorce on the rise, the demise of the nuclear family, and the increase in marriages and adoptions among same-sex partners, it is clear that the structures of kinship in the modern West are in a state of flux. In The Metamorphoses of Kinship, the world-renowned anthropologist Maurice Godelier contextualizes these developments, surveying the accumulated experience of humanity with regard to such phenomena as the organization of lines of descent, sexuality and sexual prohibitions. In parallel, Godelier studies the evolution of Western conjugal and familial traditions from their roots in the nineteenth century to the present. The conclusion he draws is that it is never the case that a man and a woman are sufficient on their own to raise a child, and nowhere are relations of kinship or the family the keystone of society. Godelier argues that the changes of the last thirty years do not herald the disappearance or death agony of kinship, but rather its remarkable metamorphosis—one that, ironically, is bringing us closer to the “traditional” societies studied by ethnologists.

Download or read book TRANSFORMATIONS OF KINSHIP written by GODELIER MAURICE and published by Smithsonian Books (DC). This book was released on 1998-05-17 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Claude L vi Strauss written by Maurice Godelier and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the world’s leading anthropologists assesses the work of the founder of structural anthropology As a young man, Maurice Godelier was Claude Lévi-Strauss’s assistant. Since then, Godelier has drawn on this experience to develop a profound and intimate grasp on the writings of his former teacher, one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Meticulously researched, Lévi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought will prove indispensable to students of Lévi-Strauss and to structural anthropologists more generally. It is a compelling and comprehensive study destined to become the definitive work on the evolution of Lévi-Strauss’s ideas, at the heart of which lies his analysis of kinship and myth.

Download or read book Chinese Kinship written by Susanne Brandtstädter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents contemporary anthropological perspectives on Chinese kinship, and documents in rich ethnographic detail its historical complexity and regional diversity. The collection's analytical emphasis is on the modern 'metamorphoses' of kinship in the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, but the essays also offer ample historical documentation and comparison.

Download or read book Metamorphoses of the City written by Pierre Manent and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-23 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the best way to govern ourselves? The history of the West has been shaped by the struggle to answer this question, according to Pierre Manent. A major achievement by one of Europe's most influential political philosophers, Metamorphoses of the City is a sweeping interpretation of Europe's ambition since ancient times to generate ever better forms of collective self-government, and a reflection on what it means to be modern. Manent's genealogy of the nation-state begins with the Greek city-state, the polis. With its creation, humans ceased to organize themselves solely by family and kinship systems and instead began to live politically. Eventually, as the polis exhausted its possibilities in warfare and civil strife, cities evolved into empires, epitomized by Rome, and empires in turn gave way to the universal Catholic Church and finally the nation-state. Through readings of Aristotle, Augustine, Montaigne, and others, Manent charts an intellectual history of these political forms, allowing us to see that the dynamic of competition among them is a central force in the evolution of Western civilization. Scarred by the legacy of world wars, submerged in an increasingly technical transnational bureaucracy, indecisive in the face of proliferating crises of representative democracy, the European nation-state, Manent says, is nearing the end of its line. What new metamorphosis of the city will supplant it remains to be seen.

Download or read book Kinship and the Social Order written by Meyer Fortes and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the world's most eminent social anthropologists draws upon his many years of study and research in the field of kinship and social organization to review the development of anthropological theory and method from Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) to anthropologists of the 1960s. It is the central argument of this book that the structuralist theory and method developed by British and American anthropologists in the study of kinship and social organization is the direct descendant of Morgan's researches. The volume starts with a re-examination of Morgan's work. Professor Fortes demonstrates how a tradition of misinterpretation has disguised the true import of Morgan's discoveries. He follows with a detailed analysis of the work of Rivers and Radcliffe-Brown and the generation of anthropologists inspired by them. The author states his own point of view as it has developed in the framework of modern structuralist theory, with ethnographic examples examined in depth. He shows that the social relations and institutions conventionally grouped under the rubric of kinship and social organization belong simultaneously to two complementary domains of social structure, the familial and the political. Meyer Fortes' contribution to the field of anthropology can best be understood in the context of balance of forces between these domains of the personal and public. In the latter part of the book, he gives detailed attention to the principal conceptual issues that have confronted research and theory in the study of kinship and social organizations since Morgan's time. He shows that kinship institutions are autonomous, not mere by-products of economic requirements, and demonstrates the moral base of kinship in the rule of amity.

Download or read book The Imagined the Imaginary and the Symbolic written by Maurice Godelier and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the close relationship between the real and the symbolic and imaginary What you imagined is not always imaginary, but everything that is imaginary is imagined. It is by imagining that people make the impossible become possible. In mythology or religion, however, those things that are imagined are never experienced as being imaginary by believers. The realm of the imagined is even more real than the real; it is super-real, surreal. Lévi-Strauss held that "the real, the symbolic and the imaginary" are three separate orders. Maurice Godelier demonstrates the contrary: that the real is not separate from the symbolic and the imaginary. For instance, for a portion of humanity, rituals and sacred objects and places attest to the reality and therefore the truth that God, gods or spirits exist. The symbolic enables people to signify what they think and do, encompassing thought, spilling over into the whole body, but also pervading temples, palaces, tools, foods, mountains, the sea, the sky and the earth. It is real. Godelier's book goes to the strategic heart of the social sciences, for to examine the nature and role of the imaginary and the symbolic is also to attempt to account for the basic components of all societies and ultimately of human existence. And these aspects in turn shape our social and personal identity.

Download or read book The Scope of Anthropology written by Laurent Dousset and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of the most prominent social and cultural anthropologists have come together in this volume to discuss Maurice Godelier's work. They explore and revisit some of the highly complex practices and structures social scientists encounter in their fieldwork. From the nature-culture debate to the fabrication of hereditary political systems, from transforming gender relations to the problems of the Christianization of indigenous peoples, these chapters demonstrate both the diversity of anthropological topics and the opportunity for constructive dialogue around shared methodological and theoretical models.

Download or read book A Delicate Choreography written by David Warren Sabean and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-08-30 with total page 1215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe written by Hans Hummer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What meaning did human kinship possess in a world regulated by Biblical time, committed to the primacy of spiritual relationships, and bound by the sinews of divine love? In the process of exploring this question, Hans Hummer offers a searching re-examination of kinship in Europe between late Roman times and the high middle ages, the period bridging Europe's primitive past and its modern future. Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe critiques the modernist and Western bio-genealogical and functionalist assumptions that have shaped kinship studies since their inception in the nineteenth century, when Biblical time collapsed and kinship became a signifier of the essential secularity of history and a method for conceptualizing a deep prehistory guided by autogenous human impulses. Hummer argues that this understanding of kinship is fundamentally antagonistic to medieval sentiments and is responsible for the frustrations researchers have encountered as they have tried to identify the famously elusive kin groups of medieval Europe. He delineates an alternative ethnographic approach inspired by recent anthropological work that privileges indigenous expressions of kinship and the interpretive potential of native ontologies. This study reveals that kinship in the middle ages was not biological, primitive, or a regulator of social mechanisms; nor was it traceable by bio-genealogical connections. In the Middle Ages, kinship signified a sociality that flowed from convictions about the divine source of all things and which wove together families, institutions, and divinities into an expansive eschatological vision animated by 'the most righteous principle of love'.

Download or read book The Politics of Making Kinship written by Erdmute Alber and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-12-09 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long tradition of Western political thought included kinship in models of public order, but the social sciences excised it from theories of the state, public sphere, and democratic order. Kinship has, however, neither completely disappeared from the political cultures of the West nor played the determining social and political role ascribed to it elsewhere. Exploring the issues that arise once the divide between kinship and politics is no longer taken for granted, The Politics of Making Kinship demonstrates how political processes have shaped concepts of kinship over time and, conversely, how political projects have been shaped by specific understandings, idioms and uses of kinship. Taking vantage points from the post-Roman era to early modernity, and from colonial imperialism to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond this international set of scholars place kinship centerstage and reintegrate it with political theory.

Download or read book The Family and Christian Ethics written by Petruschka Schaafsma and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-10 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores family not as a problem but as a mystery in order to understand its current controversial character.

Download or read book Signs of the Americas written by Edgar Garcia and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indigenous sign-systems, such as pictographs, petroglyphs, hieroglyphs, and khipu, are usually understood as relics from an inaccessible past. That is far from the truth, however, as Edgar Garcia makes clear in Signs of the Americas. Rather than being dead languages, these sign-systems have always been living, evolving signifiers, responsive to their circumstances and able to continuously redefine themselves and the nature of the world. Garcia tells the story of the present life of these sign-systems, examining the contemporary impact they have had on poetry, prose, visual art, legal philosophy, political activism, and environmental thinking. In doing so, he brings together a wide range of indigenous and non-indigenous authors and artists of the Americas, from Aztec priests and Amazonian shamans to Simon Ortiz, Gerald Vizenor, Jaime de Angulo, Charles Olson, Cy Twombly, Gloria Anzaldúa, William Burroughs, Louise Erdrich, Cecilia Vicuña, and many others. From these sources, Garcia depicts the culture of a modern, interconnected hemisphere, revealing that while these “signs of the Americas” have suffered expropriation, misuse, and mistranslation, they have also created their own systems of knowing and being. These indigenous systems help us to rethink categories of race, gender, nationalism, and history. Producing a new way of thinking about our interconnected hemisphere, this ambitious, energizing book redefines what constitutes a “world” in world literature.

Download or read book The Making of Great Men written by Maurice Godelier and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1986-03-31 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a detailed account of the lives of the Baruya, a tribal society in highlands of Papua New Guinea and will interest scholars and students of anthropology.

Download or read book The Enigma of the Gift written by Maurice Godelier and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-02-03 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we think of giving gifts, we think of exchanging objects that carry with them economic or symbolic value. But is every valuable thing a potentially exchangeable item, whose value can be transferred? In The Enigma of the Gift, the distinguished French anthropologist Maurice Godelier reassesses the significance of gifts in social life by focusing on sacred objects, which are never exchanged despite the value they possess. Beginning with an analysis of the seminal work of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strass, and drawing on his own fieldwork in Melanesia, Godelier argues that traditional theories are flawed because they consider only exchangeable gifts. By explaining gift-giving in terms of sacred objects and the authoritative conferral of power associated with them, Godelier challenges both recent and traditional theories of gift-giving, provocatively refreshing a traditional debate. Elegantly translated by Nora Scott, The Enigma of the Gift is at once a major theoretical contribution and an essential guide to the history of the theory of the gift.

Download or read book Texts and Violence in the Roman World written by Monica R. Gale and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-05 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bites and scratches of lovers and the threat of flogging that hangs over the comic slave, to murder, rape, dismemberment, and crucifixion, violence is everywhere in Latin literature. The contributors to this volume explore the manifold ways in which violence is constructed and represented in Latin poetry and prose from Plautus to Prudentius, examining the interrelations between violence, language, power, and gender, and the narrative, rhetorical, and ideological functions of such depictions across the generic spectrum. How does violence contribute to the pleasure of the text? Do depictions of violence always reinforce status-hierarchies, or can they provoke a reassessment of normative value-systems? Is the reader necessarily complicit with authorial constructions of violence? These are pressing questions both for ancient literature and for film and other modern media, and this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of cultural studies as well as of the ancient world.