Robert Parkin is a Lecturer at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. His books include Kinship: An Introduction to Basic Concepts (Blackwell, 1997), Perilous Transactions and other Papers in Indian and General Anthropology (2001), and Louis Dumont and Hierarchical Opposition (2002).

Linda Stone is Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University. Her publications include Illness Beliefs and Feeding the Dead in Hindu Nepal (1989) and Kinship and Gender: An Introduction (2nd edition, 2000). She is also editor of New Directions in Anthropological Kinship (2001) and co-author of Gender and Culture in America (2nd edition, 2001).