presents
LADISLAV HOLY LECTURE 2026
by
Bob Simpson
Durham University, UK
REFLECTIONS ON THE TEACHING OF KINSHIP IN THE 21ST CENTURY
30 January 2026 from 5 pm
The lecture will be held in the seminar room of the Lusatian seminary
(U Lužického semináře 90/13, Prague)
You can attend the lecture via MS Teams.
Abstract
It is thirty years since Ladislav Holy’s Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship was first published. In this lecture I reflect on the development of kinship over this time and how changes in focus, contexts and definitions have impacted upon the way in which this most important ingredient in the anthropological mix is delivered to our students.
I reflect on anthropological pedagogy in general and three major challenges in the teaching of kinship. These are: the vocabulary of kinship, diagrammatic representation and the nature and limits of reflexive sensibility when it comes to understanding the relational worlds of others. I discuss an exercise used to elicit each student’s experience of their own kinship, that is, of family, parentage, care, ritual, and so forth. The exercise is borrowed from family therapy and entails the construction of a genogram as a starting point for the exploration of perceptions, ideas, and assumptions about others’ relational worlds: the essential transaction of kinship teaching.
I conclude the lecture with some speculative thoughts on the relationship between recognition and empathy, not only in the teaching of kinship, but as capacities that, in more general terms, seem to be deficient in the world in which we live today.
Bio
Bob Simpson is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Durham University, UK. He has carried out a wide range of research in both the UK and South Asia. Sri Lanka has been the main focus of his research since 1978. He has also worked on numerous projects in the UK. Most significant in this respect was his work on divorce and family. From 2000 onwards he worked on a range of topics concerning the cultural assimilation of new reproductive and genetic technologies into Sri Lanka exploring the encounter between challenging technological developments and local systems of values and beliefs concerning bodies, gametes, blood, organs and tissues.