Kinship and Gender: An Introduction

Rating:
Summary: a kindrid spirit
Review: Perhaps because we have lessened its daily importance, the topic of kinship, as Stone quickly notes, strikes many of us as boring and painful. How then to minimize the pain, if not create some enjoyment, in reading about it, whether for a course (as this book was designed for) or for other reasons? Stone's answer is to join it to gender, and this certainly helps, tying into subjects that have greater daily importance to many of us (sex differences, cross-cultural marriage patterns, male/female status, etc.). Also earning "thumbs up" are the author's sensible positions on many topics, eschewing some of the cruder sociobiological interpretations and tempering extreme feminist views. By being a recent book, it helps fill a gap, too, by bringing the study of kinship up-to-date, including a nice chapter on the evolution of kinship and gender. Where the book falls short, however, is its unbalanced presentation of kinship and gender material. It mixes theory with case studies (e.g. the Nayar of India); though the case studies are rich in detail, for a book of this sort they seemed to carry on too long and form too much of the emphasis. The effect is to transform chapters on matrilineages, double descent and marriage into brief background discussions and then shift focus to a few case studies on each topic. More thorough cross-cultural comparisons would have helped balance these discussions. A more systematic cross-cultural perspective would have also shown that examples that seemed specific sometimes have broad applicability, such as Stone's "double sexual standard" (p. 226) that Daly and Wilson (see The Adapted Mind) have shown extends well beyond Eurasian traditions. Overall, the book does cause less pain than one could have supposed for a book on kinship.