The Comparative Women's History
Workshop
The Value of Comparison
Kinship
The essays collected in Gender,
Kinship, Power: A Comparative Inderdisciplinary History demonstrate
historical as well as cross-cultural varations in the organization of kinship
systems. By focusing on the historical evolution of kinship in different
cultures, the collection underscores how kinship categories are socially
constructed and illuminates how kinship systems respond to social, economic
and political change. The editors include essays dealing with historical
change over time in one region as well as cross-regional comparisons into
each section of the book to "encourage more careful and precise construction
of analytic categories" and to "resist employing conceptual language based
on one region or time as the unexamined norm from which other patterns
are seen as deviant" (3). Thus the collection constructs categoreis of
kinship that are sensitive to both historical change and cultural variability.
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