kinship, system of social organization based on real or putative family ties. The modern study of kinship can be traced back to mid-19th-century interests in comparative legal institutions and philology. In the late 19th century, however, the cross-cultural comparison of kinship institutions became the particular province of anthropology. If the study of kinship was defined largely by anthropologists, it is equally true that anthropology as an academic discipline was itself defined by kinship. Until the last decades of the 20th century, for example, kinship was regarded as the core of British social anthropology, and no thorough ethnographic study could overlook
Our Declaration of Principles forms the basis of membership of the World Socialist Movement. Only those who accept and conform in political practice become and…
This article will be released in full online February 7, 2022. Eleanor Burke Leacock taught that transhistorical, universal male dominance is a myth, not a fact.
In recent years, there has been little discussion of Marx's writings on gender and the family, but in the 1970s and '80s, these writings were subject to a great…
John Bellamy Foster is editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Brett Clark is associate editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Utah. Hannah Holleman is a director of the Monthly Review Foundation and an associate professor of sociology at Amherst College.
The “turn toward the indigenous” in social theory over the last couple of decades, associated with the critique of white settler colonialism, has reintroduced themes long present in Marxian theory, but in ways that are often surprisingly divorced from Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.