Parker Shipton is Professor of Anthropology and African Studies, Boston University. He has served as president of the Association for Africanist Anthropology. Some of his publications include The Nature of Entrustment (Yale University Press, 2007), which won the Herskovits Prize; Mortgaging the Ancestors (Yale University Press, 2009), and Credit Between Cultures (Yale University Press, 2010).

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionParker ShiptonPart I: Perceiving, Projecting, and Re-imagining KinshipChapter 1. Kinship in Shifting Perspectives (or: Brother, Can You Paradigm?)Parker ShiptonChapter 2. Genealogy and other Essential Fictions: The Family in Essence and ConsensusJames W. FernandezChapter 3. Only Connect: The Challenge of Being Born HumanJohn Edward TerrellPart II: Close Family and Roles Delegated Inside and OutChapter 4. Fictive FatherhoodNicholas TownsendChapter 5. Sponsoring Careers: A Person-Centered View of Fictive Kinship PragmaticsRobert A. LeVinePart III: Ritual Kinship and Some of Its VariantsChapter 6. “Iron Brothers” and “Dear Customers”: Fictive Kinship and Social Change in ChinaChun-Yi Sum and Jason Jiansheng LiChapter 7. Masquerading Rites of Passage: Fictive Marriage in IranShahla HaeriChapter 8. Patrilineality and Its Alternatives in the Islamic Middle East: Milk, Umma, Sect, and TariqaCharles LindholmPart IV: Further Forms of FamilyhoodChapter 9. Meta-Kinship: Nominal Relatives as Fact, Fiction, and Factual FictionParker ShiptonChapter 10. Mechanical Automata and Performative Kinship: Repair and Relatedness through “As If” IllusionsEllen SchattschneiderChapter 11. Old Worlds from Fragments: Holocaust Family Memory in the Age of Ancestral DNAMark AuslanderConclusion: CodaJames P. Ito-Adler and Parker ShiptonIndex