American Kinship: A Cultural Account (Anthropology of Modern Societies)

It is a good book on American kinship.

Although I am entering this review to balance the five star non-review, the book really should be taken to task for diverting kinship studies. Schneider appears to have had trouble keeping his personal biases (in broad brush terms, agin the guverment) out of the study. In a memoir published shortly before his death (Schneider on Schneider) he admits that he did not use the data he collected and wrote what he believed anyway. This appears not to have caused any ripples, as his followers (stereotypically postmodernists) don't believe in science anyway. There is a pretty good collection of essays on Schneider's approach - The Cultural Analysis of Kinship: The Legacy of David M. Schneider, and a no-holds-barred critique in Adam Kuper's Culture: The Anthropologist's Account.