Gender and Kinship

Laurent Dousset (1)

1 CREDO - Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l'Océanie

The relationship between the anthropological study of gender and that of kinship has undergone complex transformations over time. While the comparative analysis of kinship systems was at the core of the discipline, it generally neglected the sociocultural and historical dimensions of social categories as they are defined from an emic perspective. The demise of the classic approaches to kinship in the 1970s was contemporaneous with the controversies about new forms and kinds of families in the West, as well as with the emergence of feminist anthropology and gender studies. The important shift that came with the strengthening of gender studies would refocus attention on the historical conditions and sociocultural contexts that produce social values. The renewed forms of kinship studies that emerged in the 1990s have aligned themselves with these paradigmatic changes to produce conceptual frameworks and methodologies in which kinship and gender are now generally considered to be intermingled in shared social processes and values.

Domaines: Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie

Laurent Dousset. Gender and Kinship. The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2018, ⟨10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2312⟩. ⟨hal-02332343⟩