Kinship, Law and the Unexpected
Relatives are Always a Surprise

Examines Euro-American kinship as the kinship of a specifically knowledge-based society.

Marilyn Strathern (Author)

9780521849920, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 October 2005

240 pages
23.7 x 15.5 x 1.9 cm, 0.53 kg

'Strathern's work has been devoted to the creative redeployment of the discipline's 'conventions' and aesthetic 'constraints', including such contrasts as nature and culture, gifts and commodities, and 'Melanesian' and 'Euro-American' forms of knowledge. At a time when it is fashionable to collapse these dichotomies, the exercise has demanded a considerable degree of analytical care and control on her part. It is Strathern's extraordinary capacity to control these contrasts that has enabled her to show how an anthropological analysis could flow radically differently within its own aesthetic constraints.' Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

How can we hold in the same view both cultural or historical constructs and generalities about social existence? Kinship, Law and the Unexpected takes up an issue at the heart of studies of society - the way we use relationships to uncover relationships. Relationality is a phenomenon at once contingent (on certain ways of knowing) and ubiquitous (to social life). The role of relations in western (Euro-American) knowledge practices, from the scientific revolution onwards, raises a question about the extent to which Euro-American kinship is the kinship of a knowledge-based society. The argument takes the reader through current issues in biotechnology, new family formations and legal interventions, and intellectual property debates, to matters of personhood and ownership afforded by material from Melanesia and elsewhere. If we are often surprised by what our relatives do, we may also be surprised by what relations tells us about the world we live in.

Preface
Part I. Divided Origins: Introduction: divided origins
1. Relatives are always a surprise: biotechnology in an age of individualism
2. Embedded science
3. Emergent properties
Part II. The Arithmetic of Ownership: Introduction: the arithmetic of ownership
4. The patent and the Malanggan
5. Losing (out on) intellectual resources
6. Divided origins and the arithmetic of ownership
Notes
References
Author index
Subject index.

Subject Areas: Law & society [LAQ], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Sociology & anthropology [JH], Cultural studies [JFC]