Abstract

The study and analysis of kinship was central to the development of anthropology as a discipline and that of family to sociology. In the 1970s, scholars were pointing out that much of this work was done on the basis of men’s experiences and voices. Irawati Karve was among the early Indian anthropologists in whose work, even before these explicit critiques, one heard women’s voices and read of their experiences. Leela Dube focused specifically on the intertwining of ideas and practices of gender and kinship. A range of feminist critiques came to highlight that the underlying conceptual and theoretical frameworks in the disciplines and certainly in kinship studies was naturalization of both kinship and gender relations. The need to for a unified analysis of kinship and gender that factored in historical processes and crossings of the public and private to understand kinship, marriage, and family has been variously emphasized. A few themes in the kinship and gender will be discussed for the new light that has been thrown on not just those themes, but on the very concepts and frameworks through which we do sociology and anthropology.

About the speaker

Rajni Palriwala is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Delhi. She has served as Head, Department of Sociology and Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences. She has been an NWO Visiting Professor and a visiting fellow at Leiden University, a fellow at the IIAS, Leiden, and held the ICCR Chair in Contemporary India at Sciences PO, Paris.

Her research falls within the broad area of gender relations, covering care and emotion, citizenship and the welfare state, kinship and marriage, dowry, women and work, women’s movements and feminist politics, cross-cultural and comparative studies, and methodology. She has done fieldwork on a range of topics and fields, including a village in Rajasthan (gender, work and family), in Leh, Ladakh, (on the theme of urban forms and social organization), in slums in Delhi (women’s collective action), and in Leiden, The Netherlands (single parents and the welfare state).

Other than journal articles and book chapters, she has authored Changing kinship, family, and gender relations in South Asia: Processes, trends and issues (1994) and jointly authored Care, culture and citizenship: Revisiting the politics of welfare in the Netherlands (2005) and Planning Families, Planning Gender: The adverse child sex ratio in selected districts (2008). She has jointly edited Marrying in South Asia: Shifting concepts, Changing Practices in a Globalised World (2013), Marriage, Migration, and Gender (2008), Shifting Circles of Support: Contextualising kinship and gender relations in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (1996), and Struc­tures and Strategies: Women, Work and Family in Asia (1990) with Leela Dube.