Firth Raymond, Hubert Jane, Forge Anthony. Families and their Relatives: Kinship in a Middle-Class Sector of London: An Anthropological Study

Published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. ISBN : 0-203-00178-8 (Master e-book ISBN). (396 pages). Series : The International Library of Sociology : The Sociology of Gender and the
Family.
Kinship and Class in Metropolitan Society - Methodology of this Study - Social Character of the Areas and Samples Studied - Kinship Ideology - Factors in Kin Knowledge - Structure of the Kin Universe - Contact with Kin: The Effective Kin Set - Kin Gatherings - Kin Terms and Status Relations - Kinship Situations and Concepts - The Quality of Kin Relations - General Aspects.The project which is the subject of this book is a continuation of studies of kinship in urban conditions begun as early as 1947.But in its present form this project was conceived in discussions between David Schneider and Raymond Firth at Palo Alto in 1959. Both of us had been interested for some time in studying the structure and meaning of kinship in modern Western society. Schneider and I then considered the possibility of undertaking an exploratory study of a novel, comparative kind. Most studies in the Western kinship field so far had been done either in rural communities or, in Britain at least, among urban working-class people. We proposed, one working in Chicago and the other in London, to examine kinship ties outside the elementary, nuclear family in urban conditions in a middle-class sector of the society. We hoped, by maintaining close contact between the British and the American teams in the course of the investigation, to contribute not only towards a further understanding of the theory of social relations in modern industrial society, but also to examine some problems of methodology of field study. In particular, the experiment of trans-Atlantic co-operation in an anthropological investigation seemed to us to be both new and worth trying. Our proposal in this form seemed imaginative enough to attract the interest of the National Science Foundation of the United States, to whose generous support the British side of the investigation in particular must be regarded as being most indebted.