While the editors' grouping of the following papers into five parts seems somewhat arbitrary, the papers might - simplistically, but effectively - be assigned to either one type focussing on the history of kinship studies as a special branch within anthropology in order to identify the Areocentric character of the concept of kinship as it is underlying traditional kinship studies, or a second type that investigates into the distortions or limitations of the concept of kinship as one being based on 'natural facts' or 'biology', when confronted with phenomenon such as transnational adoptions, reproductive technologies or gay/lesbian families. To the first type of papers belong - among others - Gillian Feeler-Harnik's chapter on The Ethnography of Creation: Lewis Henry Morgan and the American Beaver', Carol Delany's 'Cutting the Ties That Bind: The Sacrifice of Abraham and Patriarchal Kinship' and Sarah McKinnon's The Economics in Kinship and the Paternity of Culture: Origin Stories in Kinship Theories'. Examples for the second type of papers are Charis Thompson's 'Strategic Naturalizing: Kinship in an Infertility Clinic', Signe Howell's 'Self-Conscious Kinship: Some Contested Values in Norwegian Transnational Adoption' or Pauline Turner Strong's To Forget Their Tongue, Their Name, and Their Whole Relation: Captivity, Extra-Tribal Adaptation, and the Indian Child Welfare Act'.

Diefenbach reviews RELATIVE VALUES: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies by Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon.

Families & family life