ABSTRACT
This postface suggests that the entire volume is an invitation to think about complexity and ambivalence, since the various situations analysed in the chapters are always sociologically and historically hybrid. It stresses the intellectual challenge of conceptualizing family and violence while avoiding both relativism and ethnocentrism. It argues that the Western family studied by sociologists has undergone deep transformations and has started to become a slightly obsolete category, whereas the classic dichotomy between family and kinship, which has been so important to anthropologists, is no longer relevant in contexts like the Pacific Islands where hybridization and the mixing of models are the rule rather than the exception. The postface also reflects on the dual nature of violence, which is both subjective and objective, and ends by discussing the question of whether the project of conceptualizing violence can be saved.
