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Article: Spiritual Kinship as Social Practice: Godparenthood and Adoption in the Early Middle Ages.
- Article from:
- Church History
- Article date:
- June 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 American Society of Church History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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By Bernhard Jussen. Translated by Pamela Selwyn. The Family in Interdisciplinary Perspective 3. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. 362 pp. $55.00 cloth.
The old saying that the fates choose our relatives for us, while we pick our friends by ourselves, like so many cliches is only half true. The adage assumes that biology alone dictates kinship. According to Bernhard Jussen, that common assumption is fallacious. Jussen, a member of the Max-Planck-Institute for History at Gottingen, maintains in the opening section of this stimulating monograph that a functional definition of kinship fits the evidence better than a biological one. Culture, not blood, ...