Kinship In The Age Of Mobility And Technology

This volume aims to address kinship in the context of global mobility, while studying the effects of technological developments throughout the 20th century on how individuals and communities engage in real or imagined relationships. Using literary representations as a spectrum to examine kinship practices, Lamia Tayeb explores how transnational mobility, bi-culturalism and cosmopolitanism honed, to some extent, the relevant authors' concerns with the family and wider kinship relations: in these literatures, kinship and the family lose their familiar, taken-for-granted aspect, and yet are still conceived as 'essential' spheres of relatedness for uprooted individuals and communities. Tayeb here studies writings by Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri, Khaled Housseini and Nadia Hashimi, working to understand how transnational kinship dynamics operate when moved beyond the traditional notions of the blood relationship, relationship to place and identification with community. Lamia Tayeb is Assistant Professor of English at the Higher Institute of Human Sciences of Tunis, Tunisia. She is the author of The Transformation of Political Identity from Commonwealth through Postcolonial Literature: The Cases of Nadine Gordimer, Michael Ondaatje and David Malouf (2006).

This volume aims to address kinship in the context of global mobility, while studying the effects of technological developments throughout the 20th century on how individuals and communities engage in real or imagined relationships. Using literary representations as a spectrum to examine kinship practices, Lamia Tayeb explores how transnational mobility, bi-culturalism and cosmopolitanism honed, to some extent, the relevant authors’ concerns with the family and wider kinship relations: in these literatures, kinship and the family lose their familiar, taken-for-granted aspect, and yet are still conceived as ‘essential’ spheres of relatedness for uprooted individuals and communities. Tayeb here studies writings by Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri, Khaled Housseini and Nadia Hashimi, working to understand how transnational kinship dynamics operate when moved beyond the traditional notions of the blood relationship, relationship to place and identification with community.

An anthropology research team drawn from four British universities explores how assisted conception techniques create the potential for a redefinition of relationships, because it is now possible to create life on behalf of another person. They draw data and ideas from ethnographic studies, household interviews, and debates in Parliament and among clinicians. Distributed by St. Martin's Press. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, there was a dramatic reversal of women's rights, and the state revived many premodern social conventions through modern means and institutions. Customs such as the enforced veiling of women, easy divorce for men, child marriage, and polygamy were robustly reintroduced and those who did not conform to societal strictures were severely punished. At the same time, new social and economic programs benefited the urban and rural poor, especially women, which had a direct impact on gender relations and the institution of marriage. Edited by Janet Afary and Jesilyn Faust, this interdisciplinary volume responds to the growing interest and need for literature on gender, marriage and family relations in the Islamic context. The book examines how the institution of marriage transformed in Iran, paying close attention to the country's culture and politics. Part One examines changes in urban marriages to new forms of cohabitation. In Part Two contributors, such as Soraya Tremayne, explore the way technology and social media has impacted and altered the institution of family. Part Three turns its eye to look at marital changes in the rural and tribal sectors of society through the works of anthropologists including Erika Friedl and Mary Hegland. Based on the work of both new and established scholars, the book provides an up-to-date study of an important and intensely politicized subject.

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Pedagogy - Theory of Science, Anthropology, grade: 2:1, University of Cambridge, language: English, abstract: The two Boleyn girls struggled to keep up with King Henry VIII’s demands in the fifteenth Century. Mary having been the King’s mistress for assumingly two years, her sister Anne takes over to enchant the Henry and become Queen. Her fertility was, however, not exactly appropriate in the eyes of the King – no son was ever to be born from her womb. Henry had to find ways to get rid of her and her unbearable ‘inability’. So at least runs the story that Justin Chadwick tells about the ‘two Boleyn girls’. In their case, new reproductive technologies and genetic prediction would have ‘made’ kinship indeed. Would it only have been possible to help a little bit with the pregnancy, would it have been possible to predict (and change) the gender of the heir, the Boleyn family could have had a glorious future. NRTs had ‘made kinship’, had sustained it and potentially given Anne the chance to live on. Strathern (2002:1) describes this synthesising character, the ‘making of kinship’ on the first page of ‘Reproducing the Future’; she proposes a “contrast between traditional biology that could only get a handle on what life is through analysis – taking things apart to observe the composition of characteristics – and the possibilities afforded by computer simulation. Here one can synthesise various characteristics to observe the effect of combining them”. Traditional biology as a discipline can only analyse, take apart, while new technologies help to synthesis and produce.