Kinship and Beyond

Sandra Bamford is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on Papua New Guinea and the West, with an emphasis on kinship, gender, landscape, environmentalism, globalization, and biotechnology. In addition to having authored several journal articles and book chapters, her most recent publications include: Biology Unmoored: Melanesian Reflections on Life and Biotechnology (University of California Press, 2006) and Embodying Modernity and Postmodernity: Ritual, Praxis and Social Change in Melanesia (Carolina Academic Press, 2007).

James Leach is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. Published works include Creative Land: Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea (2003), Reite Plants: An Ethnobotanical Study in Tok Pisin and English (2010, with Porer Nombo), and Recognising and Translating Knowledge, 2012 Anthropological Forum Special Issue, ed with R. Davis).

The genealogical model has a long-standing history in Western thought. The contributors to this volume consider the ways in which assumptions about the genealogical model-in particular, ideas concerning sequence, essence, and transmission-structure other modes of practice and knowledge-making in domains well beyond what is normally labeled "kinship." The detailed ethnographic work and analysis included in this text explores how these assumptions have been built into our understandings of race, personhood, ethnicity, property relations, and the relationship between human beings and non-human species. The authors explore the influences of the genealogical model of kinship in wider social theory and examine anthropology's ability to provide a unique framework capable of bridging the "social" and "natural" sciences. In doing so, this volume brings fresh new perspectives to bear on contemporary theories concerning biotechnology and its effect upon social life.

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1. Pedigrees of Knowledge: Anthropology and the Genealogical Method

Sandra Bamford and James Leach

Chapter 2. Aborescent Culture: Writing and Not Writing Race Horse Pedigrees

Rebecca Cassidy

Chapter 3. When Blood Matters: Making Kinship in Colonial Kenya

Teresa Holmes

Chapter 4. The Web of Kin: An Online Genealogical Machine

Gisli Pálsson

Chapter 5. Genes, Mobilities and the Enclosures of Capital: Contesting Ancestry and its Applications in Iceland

Hilary Cunningham

Chapter 6. Skipping a Generation and Assisted Kinship

Jeanette Edwards

Chapter 7. 'Family Trees' among the Kamea of Papua New Guinea: A Non-Genealogical Approach to Imagining Relatedness

Sandra Bamford

Chapter 8. Knowledge as Kinship: Mutable Essence and the Significance of Transmission on the Rai Coast of PNG

James Leach

Chapter 9. Stories Against Classification: Transport, Wayfaring and the Integration of Knowledge

Tim Ingold

Chapter 10. Revealing and Obscuring Rivers's Pedigrees: Biological Inheritance and Kinship in Madagascar

Rita Astuti

Chapter 11. The Gift and the Given: Three Nano-Essays on Kinship and Magic

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Notes on contributors

Bibliography

Index