"The studies in this volume trace cases where ideas of belonging were reflected, contended, or modified through legal changes or exegetical accounts, by intellectual endeavors, polemics, or seismic shifts in worldviews. Each section of the book addresses a discrete context in which belonging is a pivotal component-the familial, the legal, and the political-and focuses on important an moment of grappling with ideas and expressions of belonging. Among these are moments of change from substance to structure, from materialism to mentalism, from personal to spatial, from theosophy to legality, and from collectivity to individuality. The cases range across different historical periods, cultural contexts, and religious traditions, from eleventh-century Mediterranean theological legal debates to twentiethcentury statist liberalism in Western societies. They address independent discursive contexts (or in Foucaultian terminology, ways of speaking) that are in no way continuous or intertwined, and no pretense is made of a link between them. Each case is an independent demonstration of a distinct effort to contend with the theme of belonging in a different setting, driven by that setting's particular concerns and challenges"--

An introduction to how belonging and identity have been reflected, modified, and rearticulated in crucial moments throughout history.

In France as elsewhere in recent years, legislative debates over single-parent households, same-sex unions, new reproductive technologies, transsexuality, and other challenges to long-held assumptions about the structure of family and kinship relations have been deeply divisive. What strikes many as uniquely French, however, is the extent to which many of these discussions—whether in legislative chambers, courtrooms, or the mass media—have been conducted in the frequently abstract vocabularies of anthropology and psychoanalysis. In this highly original book, Camille Robcis seeks to explain why and how academic discourses on kinship have intersected and overlapped with political debates on the family—and on the nature of French republicanism itself. She focuses on the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, both of whom highlighted the interdependence of the sexual and the social by positing a direct correlation between kinship and socialization. Robcis traces how their ideas gained recognition not only from French social scientists but also from legislators and politicians who relied on some of the most obscure and difficult concepts of structuralism to enact a series of laws concerning the family. Lévi-Strauss and Lacan constructed the heterosexual family as a universal trope for social and psychic integration, and this understanding of the family at the root of intersubjectivity coincided with the role that the family has played in modern French law and public policy. The Law of Kinship contributes to larger conversations about the particularities of French political culture, the nature of sexual difference, and the problem of reading and interpretation in intellectual history.

Why are we so concerned with belonging? In what ways does our belonging constitute our identity? Is belonging a universal concept or a culturally dependent value? How does belonging situate and motivate us? Joseph E. David grapples with these questions through a genealogical analysis of ideas and concepts of belonging. His book transports readers to crucial historical moments in which perceptions of belonging have been formed, transformed, or dismantled. The cases presented here focus on the pivotal role played by belonging in kinship, law, and political order, stretching across cultural and religious contexts from eleventh-century Mediterranean religious legal debates to twentieth-century statist liberalism in Western societies. With his thorough inquiry into diverse discourses of belonging, David pushes past the politics of belonging and forces us to acknowledge just how wide-ranging and fluid notions of belonging can be.

Examines Euro-American kinship as the kinship of a specifically knowledge-based society.

Kurtz posits that these kinship connections form part of a national pattern characteristic of most political leaders. In general, children of politicians have more governmental knowledge, which produces a stronger sense of political efficacy, which in turn increases the probability of partisan involvement at an earlier age with greater success.

Since the Korean War began, Western families have adopted more than 200,000 Korean children. Two-thirds of these adoptees found homes in the United States. The majority joined white families and in the process forged a new kind of transnational and transracial kinship. Kimberly D. McKee examines the growth of the neocolonial, multi-million-dollar global industry that shaped these families—a system she identifies as the transnational adoption industrial complex. As she shows, an alliance of the South Korean welfare state, orphanages, adoption agencies, and American immigration laws powered transnational adoption between the two countries. Adoption became a tool to supplement an inadequate social safety net for South Korea's unwed mothers and low-income families. At the same time, it commodified children, building a market that allowed Americans to create families at the expense of loving, biological ties between Koreans. McKee also looks at how Christian Americanism, South Korean welfare policy, and other facets of adoption interact with and disrupt American perceptions of nation, citizenship, belonging, family, and ethnic identity.