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Early Human Kinship brings together original studies from leading figures in the biological sciences, social anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics to provide a major breakthrough in the debate over human evolution and the nature of society. A major new collaboration between specialists across the range of the human sciences including evolutionary biology and psychology; social/cultural anthropology; archaeology and linguistics Provides a ground-breaking set of original studies offering a new perspective on early human history Debates fundamental questions about early human society: Was there a connection between the beginnings of language and the beginnings of organized 'kinship and marriage'? How far did evolutionary selection favor gender and generation as principles for regulating social relations? Sponsored by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in conjunction with the British Academy

The analysis of kinship plays a major role in social anthropology. However, the intellectual triumph of structuralism has transformed this analysis into an ivory tower and the methodological hegemony of functionalism inhibits any historical authority. Kinship, Ecology and History informs the reader of these old, yet long-lasting issues. By presenting new, original perspectives, this book reinvents the manner in which we can study kinship. It also examines ecology and history as a conjectural reflection, which make up the foundations on which human kinship can be reflected upon. Whether human kinship is understood in the form of systematics models or as articulated practices, it has to be conceived as a strategic means for modes of action and of transformation of life in society. The three case studies presented in this book give body to new issues. They deconstruct the existing models in order to re-establish kinship as a condition and consequence of social evolution.

Within the social sciences, kinship and statehood are often seen as two distinct modes of social organization, sometimes conceived of as following each other in a temporal line and sometimes as operating on different scales. Kinship is traditionally associated with small-scale communities in stateless societies. The state, meanwhile, is viewed as a development away from kinship as political order toward rational, impersonal, and functional forms of rule. In recent decades, theoretical and empirical scholarship has challenged these notions, but the underlying presumption of a deep-rooted opposition between kinship and the (modern) state has remained surprisingly stable. That this binary is so deeply engrained in Western self-understanding and knowledge production poses a considerable challenge to decoding their coproduction. Reconnecting State and Kinship seeks to trace the historical shifts and boundary work implied in the ongoing reproduction of these supposedly discrete or even opposing units of analysis. Contributors ask whether concepts associated with one sphere —including corruption, patronage, lineage, and incest—surface in the other. Policies and interventions modeled upon the assumed polarity can have lasting consequences for mechanisms of marginalization and exclusion, including decisions about life and death. Reconnecting State and Kinship not only explores the boundary-related and classificatory practices that reinforce the kinship/statehood binary but also tracks the traveling of these concepts and their underlying norms through time and space ultimately demonstrating the ways that kinship and «the state» are intertwined. Contributors : Erdmute Alber, Apostolos Andrikopoulos, Helle Bundgaard, Jeanette Edwards, Karen Fog Olwig, Victoria Goddard, Michael Herzfeld, Eirini Papadaki, Frances Pine, Ivan Rajković, Tatjana Thelen, Thomas Zitelmann.