Critical Kinship Studies

By the mid-1980s, kinship studies in anthropology looked as dated and irrelevant as totemism. But by 2001, they had been reinvented and rejuvenated in such works as Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon's edited collection, Relative Values (CH, Nov'02, 40-1635), and Maurice Godelier's The Metamorphoses of Kinship (CH, Sep'12, 50-0366). Classic topics such as patrilineal clans disappeared, and research on migration, immigrant communities, and transnationalism demonstrated the significance of kinship. New research on gender, adoption, reproductive technology, new family forms, and same-sex marriage burgeoned. These innovations are linked to the turn of anthropologists toward research into their own societies. This collection carries innovation further. It emphasizes interdisciplinary research and what the editors call "mobility": transnational movement of people, reproductive substances, and kinship understandings as well as international communication through new media. The contributions show how global economic and political inequalities are linked to mobility. The 18 essays are organized into four sections: kinship as substance, as consumption, as political economy, and reimagined. They are all based on field research around the globe and cover such topics as surrogacy, transnational adoption, transnational egg and sperm donation, creation of fictive kinship, and cultural notions of animals as kin. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All college and university libraries. * CHOICE * This interdisciplinary and impressive collection of works represents a refreshing contribution to critical kinship studies, and is in all respects up-to-date with our times diverse ways of creating and sustaining kinship on both a national and transnational level and whether it is about various ART techniques, adoption or surrogacy. -- Tobias Hbinette, Associate Professor in Intercultural Studies at Karlstad University In a series of well-crafted case studies based on empirical research throughout the Eastern hemisphere, this edited collection brilliantly demonstrates that reproductive technologies and adoption are integral to todays political and economic inequality and the biopolitics of migration. The volume leaves us in no doubt of the urgent need for the critical kinship studies for which the editors call. -- Charis Thompson, Chancellor's Professor, UC Berkeley

Charlotte Krolkke is Professor in the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. Lene Myong is Associate Professor at The Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. Stine Willum Adrian is an Associate Professor at the Department of Learning and Philosophy at Aalborg University. Tine Tjrnhj-Thomsen is a Professor of Anthropology at the Danish National Institute of Public Health (NIPH) in the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Southern Denmark.

Acknowledgements / Introduction: Critical Kinship Studies: Kinship (Trans)Formed , Charlotte Krolkke, Lene Myong, Stine W. Adrian, and Tine Tjrnhj-Thomsen / Part I: Kinship as Substance / 1. The Milk of Human Kinship: Donated Breast Milk in Neonatal Intensive Care, Katherine Carroll / 2. Mattering Kinship: Inheritance, Biology and Egg Donation, Between Genetics and Epigenetics, Jenny Gunnarsson Payne / 3. Keeping up Appearances: Resemblance Talk amongst Permanent and Foster Carers in Australia, Damien W. Riggs / 4.Its Not My Eggs, It Is Not My Husbands Sperm, It Is Not My Child: Surrogacy and Not Doing Kinship in Ghana, Trudie Gerrits / Part II: Kinship as Consumption / 5. Migrant Care and the Production of Fictive Kin, Anta Prez-Carams and Raquel Martnez-Bujn / 6. Feminist Global Motherhood: Representations of Single Mother Adoption in Swedish Media, Johanna Gondouin / 7. Documentaries on Transnational Surrogacy in India: Questions of Privilege, Respectability and Kinship, Karen Hvidtfeldt / 8. Family Re-imagined: Assisted Reproduction and Parenthood in Mozambique, Ins Faria / 9. ART in the Sun. Assembling Fertility Tourism in the Caribbean, Charlotte Krolkke / Part III: Kinship as Political Economy / 10. Towards a Political Economy of Egg Cell Donations: Doing it the Israeli Way, Sigrid Vertommen / 11. Subversive Practices of Sperm Donation: Globalising Danish Sperm, Stine Willum Adrian / 12. The Risk of Relatedness: Governing Kinship in Swedish Transnational Adoption Policy, Malinda Andersson / 13. Real Versus Fictive Kinship: Legitimating the Adoptive Family, Kimberly McKee / Part IV: Kinship (Re)Imagined / 14. Re-imag(in)ing Life-Making, or Queering the Somatechnics of Reproductive Futurity, Nikki Sullivan and Sara Davidmann / 15. When Medicalisation is (Not) Needed. Single Women and Lesbian Couples Choices of Transnational Donor Conception, Giulia Zanini / 16. I Never Knew: Adoptee Remigration to South Korea, Lene Myong / 17. Kinning Animals. Animals as Kin, Tine Tjrnhj-Thomsen / Index