В поисках родства: к постановке проблемы изучения родственных отношений в современных западных исследованиях

The article analyzes Modern Western kinship studies in sociology and social anthropology. This field is formed in the middle of the 20th century when Western societies were included in the research area of social anthropology. At the same time Western scholars discussed the possibility to apply methodology, which was initially developed for research of traditional societies, to a modern society. The notion of kinship has traditionally been concerned with the study of the “other”, i.e. societies that culturally and geographically differ from the researcher’s society. The article emphasizes kinship studies where the focus is on Western societies. Thus, it demonstrates how the notion of kinship was reconfigured in thesestudies. The first part of the article describes main directions of kinship studies in which Western societies are an object of research. The author focuses on kinship studies in the context of new reproductive technologies and homosexual relations, on kinship studies of certain ethnic or local groups and on studies where kinship is not the main focus and is analyzed in the context of other social relations. The second part of the article discusses several factors affecting European kinship studies in modern society. Firstly, it is a long tradition to use “kinship” category to analyze the “other”, i.e. societies that differ from the researcher’s society. As the result of using the notion of kinship in studies of modern societies, the categories “we” and “other” were merged into single concept of kinship. New logic of searching unusual and varied practices of kinship relations in researcher’s own society was formed. Secondly, it is applying classical anthropological approach to kinship in traditional societies where group is considered as small and relatively closed community to a new object which is not geographically distant but is a part of researcher’s society. Thirdly, it is lack of continuity between kinship studies before the 70s-80s of the 20th century and after that. It is caused by differences in methodology and emergence of new sources for the study of kinship.