ABSTRACT
Critics may reasonably ask if anthropologists of Britain have always made good use of the possibilities and the unsurprising answer would be that some have not done so. Marilyn Strathern offered a brilliant and seminal analysis of kinship as a cultural form and medium: and in doing so, engaged directly with the ways in which anthropologists understood kinship and used it as a tool of social analysis, rather than as its object. The distinctive contribution which anthropologists can make to these kinds of data is to qualify them in terms of the social experience of individuals and groups, persons who compose fields of a size amenable to ethnographic study. Anthropologists, like angels, dance on the heads of pins, notwithstanding the fact that the dance may have become postmodern, post-structural, post-colonial, post-feminist, post-everything, and it may risk becoming posthumous if it does not attend adequately to the failings of its own expression.
