Politics and Kinship: A Reader offers a unique overview of the entanglement of these two categories in both theoretical debates and everyday practices. It features contributions from a broad range of regional, temporal and theoretical backgrounds.

Erdmute Alber is Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth, Germany.

Tatjana Thelen is Full Professor in the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, Austria.

Politics and Kinship: An Introduction Part I. Starting from Politics: Partitions and boundaries 1. Introduction to African Political Systems 2. Kinship within and beyond the 'Movement of Progressive Societies' 3. Kinship Weaponized: Representations of Kinship and Binary Othering in U.S. Military Anthropology 4. Father State, Motherland, and the Birth of Modern Turkey 5. The Village Headman in British Central Africa: Introduction 6. State Kinning and Kinning the State in Serbian Elder Care Programs Part II. Starting from Kinship: Technologies and travels 7. General Results 8. Doubt is the Mother of All Invention: DNA and Paternity in a Brazilian Setting 9. The Algebra of Genocide 10. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Gender and Morality in the Making of Race 11. Genomics en Route: Ancestry, Heritage and the Politics of Identity across the Black Atlantic12. Making Merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Social Life of Caste Part III. Reproductions: Transmissions and future making 13. The Origins of the Family, Property, and the State 14. Including Our Own 15. Parenthood and Social Reproduction 16. No School without Foster Families in Northern Benin: A Social Historical Approach 17. Defining Parents, Making Citizens: Nationality and Citizenship in Transnational Surrogacy