Kinship Studies: New Book

Kinship Studies

A new book entitled The Genius of Kinship: The Phenomenon of Human Kinship and the Global Diversity of Kinship Terminologies by German V. Dziebel; From Cambria Press, published on January 28, 2008.
You can purchase it on Amazon.com
(Uunfortunately, the price is $139.95! )
What’s new about this book?
+It is a new theory of human kinship
+It contains a new historiography of kinship studies that takes into account related disciplines
+It offers a new look at American Indian kinship systems
+It attempts to synthesize anthropology, linguistics and population genetics
+It critisizes the Out-of-Africa theory and outlines a new model of human origins and dispersals
+It is built on a new database and a new bibliography
+It exemplifies a new methodology of social sciences as applied to human origins
+It is a new step in the critique of anthropology
+It overcomes post-modernism
+It is not nostalgic
+It leads to a new vision of anthropology and reconciles it with its roots
+It is creative and optimistic

NOTE by CEB: I have not yet read this book. This information is from the author's site.
Another site has information about the author's theories and explains the book in more detail. Frankly, it sounds a little wacky to me, so, at this point, I'm going to wait to see if it gains any momentum in the anthropology world and what kind of reviews it gets.

Ariela Gross | "Of Portuguese Origin": Litigating Identity and Citizenship among the "Little Races" in Nineteenth-Century America

Ariela Gross "Of Portuguese Origin": Litigating Identity and Citizenship among the "Little Races" in Nineteenth-Century America Law and History Review, 25.3 The History Cooperative


ABSTRACT: The history of race in the nineteenth-century United States is often told as a story of black and white in the South, and white and Indian in the West, with little attention to the intersection between black and Indian. This article explores the history of nineteenth-century America's "little races"—racially ambiguous communities of African, Indian, and European origin up and down the eastern seaboard. These communities came under increasing pressure in the years leading up to the Civil War and in its aftermath to fall on one side or the other of a black-white color line. Drawing on trial records of cases litigating the racial identity of the Melungeons of Tennessee, the Croatans/Lumbee of North Carolina, and the Narragansett of Rhode Island, this article looks at the differing paths these three groups took in the face of Jim Crow: the Melungeons claiming whiteness; the Croatans/Lumbee asserting Indian identity and rejecting association with blacks; the Narragansett asserting Indian identity without rejecting their African origins. Members of these communities found that they could achieve full citizenship in the U.S. polity only to the extent that they abandoned their self-governance and distanced themselves from people of African descent.