BACK TO KINSHIP III: A GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Back to Kinship III is the third Special Issue of the e-journal, Structure and Dynamics sponsored by the group, Kinship Circle. Each issue is dedicated to current kinship research.There are 5 articles in this Special Issue, covering a wide range of kinship research questions and topics The first two articles, by William Young and Warren Shapiro, respectively, employ ethnographic evidence as the reason for revising previous kinship ideas. The next two articles, by Robert Parkin and Dwight Read, respectively, focus on kinship terminology and revisit theoretical issues. The last article, by Alain Matthey de l’Etang, discusses theorizing by Dwight Read challenging the “received view” of kin terms being derived through a genealogical framework and proposing, in its place, that kin terms are structurally organized through a generative logic for the terminolog

Globalization Weaponized, Dominance Fragmented, World Stability Ruptured

The current Russia-Ukraine military conflict reveals how the laws established by the United Nations to guide “war behavior” need to be realistically reconsidered in light of the changes since WWII that now characterize military conflicts. Today dominant nations circumvent rules of engagement by resorting to new tactics. It also unmasks a prevalent “global dominance by the West” favoring marketplaces for military weapons disguised in humanitarian rhetoric which reveals hypocrisy and double standards. This is reminiscent of how the COVID-19 pandemic has unmasked existing racial and economic inequalities especially in the prosperous West. But whereas the Pandemic was well managed by the United Nations, filtering down to local populations, demonstrating the strength of a globalized, inter-connected world, the current Russia-Ukraine conflict weaponized globalization when it dismantled economic linkages. Also the Pandemic has led to the creation of a vaccine against the virus, whereas the Russia-Ukraine war is yet to lead to a “vaccine”, as it were, against the use of military warfare as a solution to global issues of insecurity. This article suggests possibilities that might lead to a better path for humankind

Book Review: Visual interventions: applied visual anthropology--Edited by Sarah Pink

Wiley Online librar

Beyond Fitness and Nurture: The Kinship Paradox

This paper builds on earlier analyses of primary data on kinship in Qatar. Its conceptualization centers kinship as a highly structured universal human phenomenon in the study of humankind.  As lived practices, kinship forms a bounded, identifiable domain that is distinguishable from other societal relations. Going beyond reducing kinship to fitness (biology) or nurture (culture study), analysis of primary ethnographic data gathered as part of a grant-funded field research project on kinship practices in Qatar, including suckling practices along with kinship by birth and by marriage, is presented to demonstrate how complex anomalies emerging at the level of kinship experience reveal in analysis properties of kinship as a transformational triadic structure, here proposed as a universal feature of kinship and a dynamic aspect of its structure