Category: English

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We are proud to present the fifth volume of Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research. This time we have some important news to share. First, the journal’s scholarly success has been financially rewarded, in that Culture Unbound has receive…

The vampire is still primarily a literary figure. The vampires we have seen on TV and cinema in recent years are all based on literary models. The vampire is at the same time a popular cultural icon and a figure that, especially women writers, use to p…

In this article, I address the current state of cultural studies in Northern Europe and more specifically in the Nordic countries, especially in Denmark. I take my point of departure in offering an answer to the question, what is cultural studies anyho…

“Intersectionality” has become a highly influential concept in gender research over the last 25 years. Debates have focused on differences and power asymmetries between women, in terms of race but also addressing class, age, sexuality, ability and nati…

This paper examines the effectiveness of partition in ceasing violence during ethnic conflict. Wigmore-Shepherd’s 2012 study argued that ethnic conflict is often due to the congruence between ethnic and political identity, allowing political conflicts …

L.H. Morgan’s kinship work began and ended with the Iroquois longhouse, and the Iroquois kinship system that it shaped and by which it was shaped.  Kinship became a house for anthropology, shaping and being shaped by the emerging discipline.  Much of t…

In 1973, Julian Pitt-Rivers published a chapter in Goody’s The Character of Kinship that, although rather infrequently used and quoted, suggested a work-around to the major criticisms that were expressed towards kinship studies in the 1970s.  Reintrodu…

I review A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s approach to the classification of Australian Aboriginal kinship terminologies and marriage systems, including revisions by A. P. Elkin. I contrast Radcliffe-Brown’s approach to typology with those of Lévi-Strauss and Sc…

Building on data systematically gathered during a field study in Qatar, it is found that kinship structure is characterized by a property combining transformationality and dynamicality, certainly in Qatari kinship, and proposed here as a feature of the…

We now know what kinship terminologies are and what their function is in kinship systems, even though this knowledge is not yet widespread.  Every social system consists of a set of organizations built up interactively by the use of specific idea syste…

Kinship terminology is a human universal, a kind of cultural knowledge circulated through language. In this paper I explore the possibility that the need for social rules prompted the development of fully syntactic language via kinship terminologies. I…

Raymond Firth’s We, The Tikopia, first published in 1936, still sets the standard for detailed, nuanced, sensitive ethnography.  As Malinowski’s student, Firth—who died in 2002 at the age of 100—was a hard-headed functionalist, whose forte was careful …

Morgan had two extraordinary disciples in Lorimer Fison and Alfred Howitt in Australia.  They were inspired by Morgan’s kinship schedule and were profoundly engaged in the method and theory of the collection of kinship data and its interpretation.  Fis…

This papers examines the recent controversy as to whether there is any universally defined domain of kinship in sociocultural systems from the point of view of the philosophy of science, in particular, the classical positivism (e.g., of Radcliffe-Brown…

In this collection, we retrace some of the historical development of the anthropological study of kinship and go back to the concepts and ideas that we, as anthropologists, had previously been circulating about kinship knowledge.  We address issues tha…

During the 1960s and 1970s, students of kinship became increasingly uneasy about the gap between formal terminology-and-genealogy-based models and data on actual behaviour. This gap–sometimes described as the problem of relating ‘prescriptive’ and ‘sta…

This paper addresses typological relationships among kinship terminologies determined from structural differences in the way kin terms are organized as systems of concepts.  Viewing a terminology as a system of concepts makes evident the generative log…

Tradeoffs between time allocated to sleeping versus waking result from variations in local ecologies and should correlate to alterations in behavioral life history strategies.  It was predicted that firefighters who sleep less, with lower overall sleep…

This article is based on a research project that explores the proliferation of information and communication technology (ICT) in public services. Furthermore, the research explores how the enhanced presence of ICT relates to efforts to increas-ingly in…

Departing from a discussion of transformations in the premises of managerial rationality and “managementality” as a pacemaker of the (post)modern social order, as it is steeped in economic crisis, the paper critiques and extends Baudrillard’s construct…

The article treats the issue of generality. How may one conceive of the relationship between the uniqueness of individuality and the commonality of the human (species and society) without reduction? Can generalization be made moral – es-chewing stereot…

This paper is based on studies of how standardized entities work as elements in a regime to control risk and hazardous work. Drawing on empirical examples from the petroleum industry and infrastructure sectors, we illustrate not only the mechanisms by …