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Knowing adoption and adopting knowledge
- Author(s):
- Ilana Gershon (see profile)
- Date:
- 2017
- Group(s):
- Anthropology
- Subject(s):
- Families--Sociological aspects
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- knowledge dissemination, kinship, adoption, Sociology of the family
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M63Z47
- Abstract:
- In the 1960s, the descent versus alliance debate dominated kinship studies-anthropologists wanted to determine what relationship offered the best analytic lens for understanding how social groups were formed. Those who favored descent felt that the most relevant question to ask was how groups constituted and reconstituted themselves across generations. From the perspective of descent theorists, existential facts—death and generational shifts—ensured that all social groups had to resolve the problem of maintaining themselves as continuous units. Alliance theorists took issue with this emphasis, believing that constructing group boundaries was an equally important task and one that required a focus on marriage as the beginning point for analysis. This debate was more than an argument about which type of relationship was more important. Those involved were questioning how best to understand the ways groups were constituted through kinship. In this review article, I ask a "what if question: What would have happened in kinship studies if kinship theorists had taken a third relationship—adoption—as a starting point? Had anthropologists followed Jack Goody's (1969) initiative in focusing on adoption, would this have led to a new perspective on relatedness?
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Book review
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 6 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
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gershon.knowing.adoption.pdf