"A welcome addition offering rich ethnographic cross-cultural accounts and successfully demonstrates how the work of memory plays out in intimate, informal, non-ritualistic, everyday forms and practices of kinship." (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, March 2009)

"This volume is full of insights into the manifold ways that people negotiate disruption in family relations, compensate for the absence of close kin, and work through loss. A fascinating and nuanced account of the play of continuity and discontinuity at the heart of human cultures."
Olivia Harris, London School of Economics

"This superb collection of papers inaugurates a new direction in the study of kinship and politics grounded in the complexities of memory. Carsten and her colleagues link everyday processes of relating with larger webs of power and authority through the ghosts - those whose existence is contested - they have in common. Thus they show that the sociality of remembering and forgetting lies above all in the creation and destruction of persons."
Gillian Feeley-Harnik, University of Michigan