kinship and economy: constitutive orders of a provisional kind

Abstract

The contexts in which kinship seems theoretically distinguishable or indistinguishable from economic relations can be subjected to empirical sorting of a kind. Drawing on a debate over the nature of sexual inequality, this paper addresses the manner in which items produced by or transacted between people stand or do not stand for aspects of social relations. Traditional anthropological interest in “rights” or “roles” was perhaps developed in the ethnographic context of certain cultural equations between “things” and “persons.” In other contexts things fail to carry such reference to persons; western commodity logic, on the other hand, abstracts labor as simultaneously a part of the person and a thing. We run the danger of preempting our subject matter to assume we know what is transactable between persons. [anthropological models, bridewealth, gift systems, roles, sexual inequality]

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