Carsten - Böcker

Janet Carsten offers a vivid and original investigation of the nature of kinship in Malaysia, based upon her own experience of life as a foster daughter in a family on the island of Langkawi. Kinship relations are crucial to personal and social identity, and in Malay culture identity is mutable and fluid: it is given at birth through ties of procreation, but it is also acquired throughout life by living together and sharing food. The author shows that the heat of the hearth is not only necessary for cooking and sharing food, but central to domestic life, including childbirth and reproduction. Kinship is a process not a state; people become kin largely through the everyday actions of women in and between households. The incorporation and assimilation of newcomers--`making kinship'--is central to the social reproduction of the village communities; domestic life is thus central to the political process. Janet Carsten gives the reader a fascinating `anthropology of everyday life', including a compelling view of gender relations; she urges reassessment of recent anthropological work on gender, and a new approach to the study of kinship.

Ghosts of Memory provides an overview of literature on relatedness and memory and then moves beyond traditional approaches to the subject, exploring the subtle and complex intersections between everyday forms of relatedness in the present and memories of the past. Explores how various subjects are located in personal and familial histories that connect to the wider political formations of which they are a partClosely examines diverse and intriguing case studies, e.g. Catholic residents of a decayed railway colony in Bengal, and sex workers in LondonBrings together original essays authored by contemporary experts in the fieldDraws on anthropology, literature, memory studies, and social history