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This book is at once a cultural history of Japanese American kinship and a contribution to the study of the contemporary kinship system of the United States. It brings to the analysis of American kinship a theoretical perspective that attends to the historically situated, symbolic processes through which people interpret and thereby transform their kinship relations. By examining kinship change among Japanese Americans, I elucidate a particular case of a general process I take as having been central to the development of contemporary American kinship. For, while Japanese Americans have a unique and rich cultural heritage and a distinctive and troubled social history, the process of kinship change they have undergone since the turn of the century has been shared by many other Americans. I begin with the premise that kinship relations are structured by symbolic relations and serve symbolic functions as well as social ones. It follows from this that kinship change involves symbolic processes, and that a study of it must attend to the manner in which relations among symbols, meanings, and actions have shaped relations among people. My second premise is that we can comprehend the system

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