Studying Kinship

I have to first help with a question that I didn’t get a chance to address in class — what’s the difference between parallel and cross cousins? Parallel cousins are, from an ego’s perspective, ego’s father’s brother’s children and mother’s sister’s children. Cross cousins are ego’s father’s sister’s children and mother’s brother’s children. The key difference is the switch of gender at the parental level — gender matters very much because of its importance in structuring kinship processes in unilineal descent systems (the way people relate to each other in patrilineal or matrilineal descent systems matters depending upon the particular gender).
Now for those who are not in my introductory anthropology class, you may be wondering why I bother to teach stuff like parallel vs. cross cousins, or even kinship in his introductory anthropology class. Am I trying to scare away potential majors? Is it worth reading Radcliffe-Brown or Levi-Strauss (I wonder how many of you anthropologists out there try to teach Elementary Structures of Kinship; I’m guessing that Levi-Strauss is primarily taught to overview structuralist theory, myth instead of kinship). I admit they are not reading Elementary Structures right now; my intro class is reading another kinship classic Marjory Wolf’s Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan, supplemented with articles from Murphy, Stack, and many others. Isn’t kinship less relevant in contemporary anthropological thinking? I of course think that these rhetorical questions should all be answered by keeping in mind the ever-increasing importance of kinship in contemporary culture and political discourse. Kinship, or matters of kinship, are in the forefront of political conflicts — such as in the definition of marriage in America (see a 2004 Anthropology News issue that featured this issue). I have a student who wants to go to graduate school precisely to study kinship, narratives, and politics (she is doing her undergraduate thesis on birthing narratives as critiques of Western biomedicine). This student pointed out to me that she found that a popular woman’s magazine published an article on the issue of “adopting embryos” — where a couple undergoing successful fertilization treatments would invite other couples to “adopt” their embryos instead of giving the embryos to science or the trash bin. I have another colleague (OK, she’s a sociologist, but c’mon!) who is looking at issues of fatherhood during her sabbatical research.
Kinship is way to important for anthropologists to let go. As in our past experience with “culture,” where we ceded what had been a strength of the discipline to everyone else, we shouldn’t neglect kinship so that others (like political scientists, sociologists) gain the high ground and command the discourse. Kinship is relevant in popular discourse and contemporary politics. We should find a way to make it relevant again to anthropology, otherwise we ourselves may become irrelevant.