Introduction

At the end of the twentieth century, the complex career path of one of anthropology’s most famous domains of inquiry-kinship-is about to take another unexpected turn. Just sixteen years ago, when David Schneider proclaimed his final verdict in A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Schneider 1984), the once cherished ‘basic discipline of the subject’ (Fox 1983:10) seemed more like an endangered species. By the late 1990s, however, monographs (e.g. Carsten 1997; Sabean 1998; Weston 1997), edited volumes (e.g. Franklin and Ragoné 1998; Godelier et al. 1998; Gullestad and Segalen 1997), textbooks (e.g. Holy 1996; Parkin 1997; Stone 1997) and review articles (e.g. Faubion 1996; Gingrich 1995; Peletz 1995) carrying ‘kinship’ or ‘marriage’ in their titles abound.1