Humphreys S.C. Kinship in Ancient Athens: An Anthropological Analysis (2 vol. set)

Oxford University Press, 2019. — 1476 p.The book covers Athenian kinship from Drakon and Solon to Menander (with some references to later developments). It uses a wide range of sources: epigraphic, literary/forensic, and archaeological. It provides an ethnographic ‘thick description’ of Athenians’ interaction with their kin in all contexts: legal relations (adoption, guardianship, marriage, inheritance, disputes in and out of court); economic interaction (property, economic independence/dependence of sons in relation to fathers); training in specialist skills (doctors, actors, artists), loans, guarantees, etc.; rituals (naming, rites de passage, funerals and commemoration, dedications, cultic associations); war (military commands, organization of land and sea forces); and political contexts, both informal (hetaireiai) and formal (Assembly, Council). Volume II deals with corporate groups recruited by patrifiliation: tribes and trittyes (both pre-Kleisthenic and Kleisthenic), phratries, genê, and demes. The section on the demes stresses variety rather than common features, and provides up-to-date information on location and prosopography.S.C. Humphreys read Greats at Oxford and her first research was on ancient merchant shipping and trade. This led to interest in economic anthropology and a joint appointment at University College London in the History and Anthropology departments, where she founded a Combined Studies BA programme in Ancient History and Social Anthropology. In 1985 she moved to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as full Professor in history, with honorary appointments in anthropology and Greek; here she was much involved in the Interdepartmental PhD in Anthropology and History. She retired in 2000 and continues to conduct research.