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In this essay I examine the en-gendering of cultural memory in Honoré de Balzac´s story Adieu (1830), which proceeds from a repressed trauma originating in historical events. Balzac wrote the story in the spring of 1830, i. e. at a time when the French…

While hotly debated in political contexts, abortion has seldom figured in explicit terms in either literature or film in the United States. An exception is John Irving’s 1985 novel The Cider House Rules, which treats abortion insistently and explicitly…

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 …

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 …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The struggle over cure rate measures in nineteenth-century asylums provides an exemplary instance of how, when used for official assessments of institutions, these numbers become sites of contestation. The evasion of goals and corruption of measures te…

In this chapter I develop the psychological underpinnings of environmental music towards an understanding of how the goals of cognitive and behavioral psychologists contributed to a new kind of listening at the beginning of the twentieth century. I beg…

In the 1980s, the EC engaged in trying actively to construct a European identity, primarily through a ’manufacturing of symbols’, such as a common flag, hymn and day of celebration. A lesser-known element of this symbolic construction was the elevation…

This article discusses the implications of working through globally integrated computer systems in transnational firms and addresses in particular employees’ possibility to give feedback on how these systems are working. The aim is to contribute to the…

The articles in this issue of Culture Unbound were presented at a multidisciplinary conference entitled “Objectification, Measurement and Standardization” held at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, in Januar…

Private standards and certification schemes in agrifood networks tend to be de-scribed as neoliberal, suggesting that they share a common understanding of that which they seek to govern and the tools to be used. Although such certification systems do h…

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 …