Prof. Robert Parkin from University of Oxford to Hold Lecture at VMU

On Wednesday 23 October, 3 p.m., at Vytautas Magnus University (52 K. Donelaičio g., Room 514), a public lecture will be held by Dr. Robert Parkin, Emeritus Fellow of the Institute of Social & Cultural Anthropology of the University of Oxford. The event is organised by the VMU Dept. of Cultural Studies.

The title of the lecture is “From honour and shame to cognatic kinship: what anthropology has had to say about kinship and gender in Europe?”. The lecture will be held in English.

Dr. Robert Parkin will provide an overview of how anthropology has treated the topics of kinship and gender in Europe, asking what is distinctive about the continent in these respects, especially given the traditional concentration of kinship studies on other parts of the world. It will cover, inter alia, the honour and shame debate, family forms and whether the nuclear family really is a European phenomenon as it is often depicted, the impact of different forms of inheritance on class formation, and marriage practices, especially in respect of whether they are free or arranged. The overall argument is that Europe is not uniform in these respects, nor particularly distinctive compared to other parts of the world.