The Politics of Making Kinship

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.

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.

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Politics of Making Kinship
Erdmute Alber, David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, Tatjana Thelen

Part I: Epistemologies

Chapter 1
. Quantifying Generations. Peter Damian Develops a New System of Kinship Calculation
Simon Teuscher

Chapter 2. Kinship Matters: Genealogical and Historiographical Practices between 1750 and 1850
Michaela Hohkamp

Chapter 3. Race and Kinship: Anthropology and the “Genealogical Method”
Staffan Müller-Wille

Chapter 4. Kinship Meets Corporation: Perspectives on Kinship and Politics in the Formative Moment of Social Anthropology
Thomas Zitelmann

Chapter 5. German Kinship: Forming a Political Unit and Epistemic Void
Tatjana Thelen

Part II: Projects

Chapter 6. Making Family and Kinship: Reflections on Hegel and Parsons
David Warren Sabean

Chapter 7. Conceptualizing Kinship in Sixteenth-Century Political Theories. Bodin’s and Hotman’s Ideas of Monarchy
Julia Heinemann

Chapter 8. Commonwealths of Affection: Kinship, Marriage, and Polity in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America
Susan McKinnon

Chapter 9. Towards a Political Economy of the Maternal Body. Claiming Maternal Filiation in Nineteenth-Century French Feminism
Caroline Arni

Part III: Deployments
Outline and summaries

Chapter 10. Inventing the Extended Family in Colonial Dahomey/Benin
Erdmute Alber

Chapter 11. “As If Begotten and Born of Feeborn Parents” – Indicators and Considerations on Parentalization of Emancipated Slaves in the Post-Roman Occident
Ludolf Kuchenbuch

Chapter 12. From Natural Difference to Equal Value: The Case of Egg Donation in Norway
Merit Melhuus

Chapter 13. Family and Kinship in Early Modern Contractarian State Theories
Jon Mathieu

Chapter 14. Translating the Family
Claudia Derichs

Index