Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2010
Summary
I had two aims in editing this volume. The first was to produce a series of essays by those who have worked with Meyer Fortes, on the occasion of his retirement from the William Wyse Chair in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. The second was to produce a volume of general essays on kinship which would attempt to reconsider some general problems.
Editing a volume of this kind is sometimes like putting one's hand in a barrel of straw dust and pulling out a series of gift-wrapped packages. Some of the contributions may have been lying around in attics for a long time, others may have been hurriedly got together to meet a looming deadline. It was partly to try to avoid such an outcome that I asked contributors to confine themselves to a specific field, namely kinship. But also because in reviewing recently the latest work on kinship I was struck by its rather narrow focus, its neglect of many problems. So within that field I asked for essays dealing with more general themes rather than ethnographic conundrums or descriptive minutiae, in the hope that we would get some reconsideration of certain central problem areas, including those examined by an earlier generation of anthropologists and still raised by scholars outside the discipline itself. For in recent years we have largely abandoned that whole middle-ground that exists between the detailed analysis of single societies and the generalised discussion of concepts, such as filiation and descent, alliance and affinity.
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- The Character of Kinship , pp. ix - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1974