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This section states that articles published in this issue are based on papers delivered at the workshop The Dividends of Kinship held at the fourth European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) conference in Barcelona, Spain in July 1996. The theme of the conference is Culture and Economy: Conflicting Interests, Dividend Loyalties. While kinship-related workshops were notably absent at the first two EASA meetings, in Coimbra (1990) and Prague (1992), the third conference, in Oslo (1994), featured three workshops under the umbrella topic of A New Agenda for Kinship Studies. However, none of the workshops resulted in an edited volume in the EASA Routledge series. In 1993, in a first call for papers for the Oslo kinship workshops, the conveners Adam Kuper and Gerd Baumann countered the decline of kinship studies during the 1970s and 1980s with a defensive but in the field we are still confronted with kinship - or kinship. Indeed our informants talk endlessly about marriage and marriage strategies, inheritance and succession, parents and children, siblings, cousins, and family history (A. Kuper and G. Baumann, 1993). The Barcelona workshop on which this volume is based was convened to go beyond approaches to kinship that seemed too narrowly cultural relativist, but without retreating to earlier biological or genealogical models of kinship. The abstract called for a renewed comparative approach to material and symbolic gains that can be secured through cultural constructs of relatedness, and urged potential applicants to explore the plurality of (culturally defined) interests pursued through different notions of kinship.