Cousin marriage, hierarchy, and heredity
Thu 4 Oct 2018, 18:30 - 19:45
- Venue
- The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH
Event ended
Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology
Cousin marriage, hierarchy, and heredity: Contestations over the domestic and national body politic in nineteenth-century America
How did cousin marriage—an institution that had been not only common, but also emotionally resonant, culturally validated, and economically productive in America—come to be recast as emotionally repugnant, medically dangerous, and politically backward? Anthropologist Susan McKinnon explores this radical transformation in American ideas about marriage through an examination of two intertwined debates—one political and one medical—that unfolded over the course of the nineteenth century. These political and medical deliberations addressed problems relating to hierarchy and heredity in a political union conceived as a democratic republic; and they helped shape American ideas about what it means to be a modern, progressive nation.
Speaker: Professor Susan McKinnon, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia
Professor McKinnon's writings have focused on systems of kinship and marriage, on the history and contemporary transformations of kinship studies, and on the symbolic use of kinship and marriage in scientific narratives of social evolution and modernization.
Chair: Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern FBA, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University
FREE, booking required
This event will be repeated at The University of Edinburgh on the 11 October 2018. For further information click here.
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Image: Current laws regarding first-cousin marriage in the United States. Dark blue shows states in which first-cousin marriage is legal. Creative Commons: Khin2718