Tashi thought they were his kids. They were his kids. He was the only father they had ever known. He had been their father since the day each of his four children was born. After being recognized as a Convention Refugee in Canada, he applied for permanent residence and listed his wife and children as his “overseas dependents” on his …
Tag Archives: Kinship
Bianca Brijnath’s “Unforgotten: Love and the Culture of Dementia Care in India”
Unforgotten: Love and the Culture of Dementia Care in India
by Bianca Brijnath
Berghahn Books, 2014, 240 pages
Bianca Brijnath’s book, Unforgotten: Love and the Culture of Dementia Care in India, offers a long-awaited, fresh insight into the lives and experiences of people with dementia and their caregivers in middle-class, middle-aged, educated Delhi-based families. Using the lens of critical …
Sarah Pinto’s Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India
Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, 283 pages.
Sarah Pinto’s extraordinary ethnography, Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India, begins with three epigraphs that have to do with the ethics of writing, representation, and narration. Pinto has much to say about all these things, but the axis on which …
Elizabeth Roberts’ God’s Laboratory
God’s Laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the Andes
University of California Press, 2012, 273 pp.
In God’s Laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the Andes, Elizabeth Roberts examines how science and spirituality are connected in the practice of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in Ecuador. This alone is a significant contribution to the anthropology of assisted reproduction, …
Top of the heap: Angela Garcia
For the first “Top of the Heap” of the new year, we spoke to Angela Garcia, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Here is her list:
Angela Garcia
Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil (M Boyars, 1973 [1957]).
…My daughters are suddenly passionate about vampires. They read books and watch movies about vampires. They delight at the
Universes of Kinship
Translated by Nora Scott. London: Verso. 615pp. + index. US$49.95 / £30.00 (hardcover)
Maurice Godelier opens his magisterial tour of the “universe of kinship” with the observation that formal anthropological kinship theory has long been left for dead. What follows is a dazzling analysis that revisits ethnographic data on marriage, descent, siblinghood, …