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In the first decades of the twentieth century, American researchers at the Eugenics Record Office utilized a theoretical framework that combined humoral and Mendelian principles of inheritance to measure, trace, and predict the intergenerational transmission of an expansive net of morally charged heritable traits. Their reductive understanding of Mendelian principles—guided by class- and race-based prejudices—allowed them to paint a portrait of a nation that was bifurcated by 'good' and 'bad' strains of the population and threatened by the presence of 'degenerate families'. This article examines the theoretical and methodological strategies and the technologies of display and 'scientific' legitimization that brought into being the category of 'degenerate families' and provided the justification for social policies that controlled marriage, limited immigration, and sterilized tens of thousands of Americans.

Introduction / Susan McKinnon and Sydel Silverman -- Epigenesis, brain plasticity, and behavioral versatility : alternatives to standard evolutionary psychology models / Kathleen R. Gibson -- Do humans have innate mental structures? : some arguments from linguistics / William A. Foley -- The eye of the beholder : how linguistic categorization affects "natural" experience / Eve Danziger -- Reassessing male aggression and dominance : the evidence from primatology / Katherine C. MacKinnon and Agustín Fuentes -- On kinship and marriage : a critique of the genetic and gender calculus of evolutionary psychology / Susan McKinnon -- Surveying a cultural "waistland" : some biological poetics and politics of the female body / Mary Orgel, Jacqueline Urla, and Alan Swedlund -- Denaturalizing gender in prehistory / Lynn Meskell -- Context and complexity in human biological research / Thomas Leatherman and Alan Goodman -- Alzheimer's disease : a tangled concept / Margaret Lock -- The molecular revolution in medicine : promise, reality, and social organization / Karen-Sue Taussig -- Barbarism, old and new : denaturalizing the rhetoric of warfare / Mary H. Moran -- Language standardization and the complexities of communicative practice / John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz -- Blood and belonging : long-distance nationalism and the world beyond / Nina Glick Schiller

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies -- PART I Substantial-Codings: From Blood to Hypertext -- 1. Substantivism, Antisubstantivism, and Anti-antisubstantivism -- 2. The Ethnography of Creation: Lewis Henry Morgan and the American Beaver -- 3. Making Kinship, with an Old Reproductive Technology -- 4. Kinship in Hypertext: Transubstantiating Fatherhood and Information Flow in Artificial Life -- PART II Kinship Negotiations: What's Biology Not/Got to Do with It -- 5. Kinship, Controversy, and the Sharing of Substance: The Race/ Class Politics of Blood Transfusion -- 6. Strategic Naturalizing: Kinship in an Infertility Clinic -- 7. Self-Conscious Kinship: Some Contested Values in Norwegian Transnational Adoption -- 8. Practicing Kinship in Rural North China -- 9. The Shift in Kinship Studies in France: The Case of Grandparenting -- PART III Nature, Culture, and the Properties of Kinship -- 10. The Economies in Kinship and the Paternity of Culture: Origin Stories in Kinship Theory -- 11. Biologization Revisited: Kinship Theory in the Context of the New Biologies -- PART IV 'R' Genes Us? The Uses of Gene/alogies -- 12. Blood/Kinship, Governmentality, and Cultures of Order in Colonial Africa -- 13. ''We're Going to Tell These People Who They Really Are'': Science and Relatedness -- 14. Genealogical Dis-Ease: Where Hereditary Abnormality, Biomedical Explanation, and Family Responsibility Meet -- PART V Ambivalence and Violence at the Heart of Kinship -- 15. Ambivalence in Kinship since the 1940s -- 16. Cutting the Ties That Bind: The Sacrifice of Abraham and Patriarchal Kinship -- 17. To Forget Their Tongue, Their Name, and Their Whole Relation: Captivity, Extra-Tribal Adoption, and the Indian Child Welfare Act -- Contributors -- Index

A long tradition of Western political thought included the concepts of a household, the family, and kinship in models of public order, but during the nineteenth century the newly constructed social sciences developed a conceptualization of "the West and the Rest" and excised family and kinship from theories of the state, public sphere, and democratic order. Kinship has, however, neither completely disappeared from the political cultures of the West nor played the determining social and political role elsewhere that has been ascribed to it. Exploring the issues that arise once the sharp divide between kinship and politics is no longer taken for granted, The Politic of Making Kinship, demonstrates how political processes have shaped concepts of kinship over time and, conversely, how political projects have been shaped by specific understandings, idioms and uses of kinship. Taking vantage points from the post-Roman era to early modernity, from colonial imperialism to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond this international set of scholars expertly place kinship centerstage and reintegrating it with political theory