BOOK REVIEW 91 three important lines of analysis: Dumont's attempt to reinterpret Indian kinship in structuralist terms, the cultural approach represented by Schneider and the recasting of questions from within feminist theory. While the first is representative of a whole genre of marriage and kinship studies (looseloy termed alliance theory), the same cannot be said of either the cultural or gender perspectives. The culturalist analysis of kinship attempted by David Schneider was distinctive in its assertion that the concept of 'kinship' itself needed to be 'denaturalized1 and subjected to critical scrutiny. Refusing to begin with a universally valid map of genealogical relations, Schneider drew attention to the different modes in which cultures construct conceptions of kinship. He argued, much more vigorously than his predecessors, that kinship is not a pre-existing, natural domain, but a social fact constituted through native/folk ideas of 'relatedness'. Barring a couple of exceptions (Das, Madan) which reflect this cultural shift in the field, a majority of the articles in the collection seem to work wholly within structuralist or structural-functional assumptions. In like manner, while a few articles (Nongbri, Sharma) do raise issues of gender asymmetry with reference to family, marriage and kinship, they do not go far enough. For, as will be suggested, extending a gender framework to kinship cannot be a simple task of grafting, challenging as it does the very foundations of the kinship domain. In addition to the desire to offer a gender perspective on kinship, the anthology has been guided by certain other considerations. As the editor notes, besides incorporating recent developments in the field, it also intends to provide easy access to classic and contemporary writings on Indian kinship. It seeks to offer an insight into trends to transformation as well, especially in the Indian family. So then, how do the selections approximate to these organizing principles? In posing this question, the stress is not on the appropriateness or otherwise of particular articles, i.e., not on the issue of 'representativeness' of the anthology (a consideration which necessarily underlies every edited work), but on its 'representational' thrust, i.e., its imaging of the themes of family and kinship studies. Section I addresses an important question—whether we can speak of an Indian kinship system? Or, are there systems of marriage and kinship that are structurally distinct? Though the editor makes an attempt to link these questions to a 'modern' pluralist context (see p. 33 especially), it is clear that the articles in this section, speaking in the light of their distinct ethnographic data, are concerned primarily with regional variations and similarities in marriage and kinship structures, and only secondarily with questions of the 'whole'. Recognizing this differential emphasis is crucial, for, while the issue of variations and homogeneity in kinship practices is indeed important, a more complete understanding would require a reference outside of kinship, especially to how the Indian totality itself is to be