New Books In Anthropology

Women’s rights activists around the world have commonly understood gendered violence as the product of so-called traditional family structures, from which women must be liberated. Counseling Women: Kinship Against Violence in India (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) contends that this perspective overlooks the social and cultural contexts in which women understand and navigate their relationships with kin. This book follows frontline workers in India, called family counselors, as they support women who have experienced violence at home in the context of complex shifting legal and familial systems. Drawing on ethnographic research at counseling centers in Jaipur, Rajasthan, Julia Kowalski shows how an individualistic notion of women’s rights places already vulnerable women into even more precarious positions by ignoring the reality of the social relations that shape lives within and beyond the family. Thus, rather than focusing on attaining independence from kin, family counselors in India instead strive to help wom