- ISBN: 9781845455736 | 1845455738
- Cover: Hardcover
- Copyright: 2/1/2009
Interest in the study of kinship, once a key area of anthropological enquiry, has been waning for quite some time. However, recently it has been re-emerging, dubbed the new kinship, stimulated by the new genetics that has revived interest in kinship and family patterns. This volume investigates the impact of biotechnology on contemporary understandings of kinship, of family and belonging in a variety of European settings and reveals similarities and differences across Europe in how kinship is conceived. What constitutes kinship for different European publics? How significant are biogenetic links? What does family resemblance tell us? Why is genetically modified food an issue? Are genes and blood interchangeable? It has been argued that the prominence of genetic science and genetic technologies in recent years has resulted in a geneticization of social life, and the ethnographic examples presented here do show shifts occurring in notions of nature and of what is natural. But they also illustrate the complexity of contemporary kinship thinking in Europe and the continued interconnectedness of biological and sociological understandings of relatedness (of, e.g., nature and nurture).