The Politics of Making Kinship: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives

Leading us beyond current narratives on the decline of kinship which assume kinship’s existence since the dawn of civilization, The Politics of Making Kinship interrogates kinship’s geneses, constructions, elaborations, implementations, and enforcing agents across a long view of European history, and demonstrates how kinship is woven through modern societies.

The long tradition of Western political thought included kinship in models of public order, but the social sciences excised it from theories of the state, public sphere, and democratic order. Kinship has, however, neither completely disappeared from the political cultures of the West nor played the determining social and political role ascribed to it elsewhere. Exploring the issues that arise once the divide between kinship and politics is no longer taken for granted, The Politics of Making Kinship demonstrates how political processes have shaped concepts of kinship over time and, conversely, how political projects have been shaped by specific understandings, idioms and uses of kinship. Taking vantage points from the post-Roman era to early modernity, and from colonial imperialism to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond this international set of scholars place kinship centerstage and reintegrate it with political theory.

• | Author: David Warren Sabean, Tatjana Thelen, Simon Teuscher, Erdmute Alber
• | Publisher: Berghahn Books
• | Publication Date: Oct 01, 2025
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9781836950769
• | ISBN-10: 1836950764