Family Beyond Family: The Varieties of Kinship Experience

Arguably all humans invent or accept forms of family beyond those that are close biological kin. These fictive forms of kinship may vary across diverse cultures and serve different purposes. This book explores a wide variety of such kinship-forming, from expedient daylong pseudo-marriages to notions of deities as everlasting parents for humankind and life on earth. These range from the purely abstract to the bricks and mortar of college fraternities and sororities. Family Beyond Family observes and examines the principles and purposes of such fabricated connections.

Parker Shipton is Professor of Anthropology and African Studies, Boston University. He has served as president of the Association for Africanist Anthropology. Some of his publications include Bitter Money (American Anthropological Association,1989), The Nature of Entrustment (Yale University Press, 2007) which won the Herskovits Prize, and Mortgaging the Ancestors: Credit between Cultures (Yale University Press, 2009).