Reclaiming English Kinship

Book excerpt: Mary Bouquet argues that, while writing-off the idea of kinship in English culture, anthropologists of the British school absorbed the notion of pedigree into their analysis; it runs through the genealogical method which they used to conceptualise the organisation of other societies. She shows how British anthropological ideas about other cultures thus have their own cultural specificity. A brief comparison with the French ethnological approach to kinship indicates some differences of emphasis.