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• Brings together for the first time both classic works from Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss, Leach, and Schneider, as well as articles on such electrifying contemporary debates as surrogate motherhood, and gay and lesbian kinship.
  
• Draws on the editors’ complementary areas of expertise to offer readers a single-volume survey of the most important and critical work on kinship.
  
• Includes extensive discussion and analysis of the selections that contextualizes them within theoretical debates.

"One looks to a Reader to be authoritative: this is also a highly imaginative collection. Nuanced as well as balanced, the editors’ compilations bring out the best not just in the study of kinship but in anthropology. A tonic for old hands and new hands alike." Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge

Robert Parkin is a Lecturer at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. His books include Kinship: An Introduction to Basic Concepts (Blackwell, 1997), Perilous Transactions and other Papers in Indian and General Anthropology (2001), and Louis Dumont and Hierarchical Opposition (2002).

Linda Stone is Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University. Her publications include Illness Beliefs and Feeding the Dead in Hindu Nepal (1989) and Kinship and Gender: An Introduction (2nd edition, 2000). She is also editor of New Directions in Anthropological Kinship (2001) and co-author of Gender and Culture in America (2nd edition, 2001).