Economy.: Substance, Production, and Accumulation

In <i>After Kinship</i> (2004), Janet Carsten employs “substance” to delineate important dimensions of classical understandings of kinship and personhood. She does so by reinterpreting Schneider’s (1980) studies on American kinship and revisiting Marilyn Strathern’s (1988) analyses of Trobriand kinship and in/dividuality. Based on these reinterpretations and, more generally, extensive comparisons between Indian, Melanesian, British, and American cases, Carsten specifically recontextualizes and questions the components of kinship as <i>code</i> and <i>substance</i> as argued by Schneider. Concentrating on substance, she argues that the term has a range of different connotations but is used in diverse ways, ranging from the stuff of relations

DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv8bt1ff.17