In sum, who is behaved towards as a‘son’ or who is called a ‘father’ in one or another con- versational context, or what attributes (both absolute and relative to some reference person) will be presumed for a‘father’ in one or another conversational context depend on the attributes of prototypic referents. The detail of each of these relations varies widely but far from randomly across cultures. Communities with their cultures do not necessarily have even a single kinship terminology, let alone a single kinship system taken more broadly. To describe kinterm systems, with the variation that exists within a culture, and with the regularities that enable effective communication and interaction across that variation, anthropologists have had to develop several formal approaches. The further comparison of these kinterm systems and their variability across different cultures has depended on further formal developments.
Kinship terminologies have proved a useful laboratory for exploring and understanding the semantics and pragmatics of language. Kinterms are, after all, words in a language– and thus subject to any rules or shaping constraints which govern words in general. This special usefulness stems both from their 150-year history of careful description and analysis within anthropology (on top of earlier studies elsewhere), and from special features of the domain – including its biological rootedness, the formal algebraically tight nature of kinterm systems, and the external analytic framework offered by genealogies. At the same time, kinterms are atypical of vocabulary in general in some ways that make generalization from them tricky. Relevant atypical features include their biological roots and derived genealogical framework, their algebraic precision, their binary nature, and the relative product calculus by which native speakers calculate them.
Some areas of potential generalization (or hypotheses) about word meanings from ‘kinlab’ maybe include
(1) The usefulness and importance of formal treatments.
(2) The complexities of what we mean by‘definitions’ of terms in a folk system – that is, the distinction between the semantic ways in which we tell terms apart and identify distinctive features and the pragmatic ways in which we assign terms in practice and understand their relevance to the important things in our lives– including the possibility that different uses or different contexts may produce different pragmatic structures within the same domain, and the possibility that different domains may exhibit very different structures.
(3) The need for a separate (from intra-cultural, intra-language definitions) set of definitions for cross-language and cross-cultural comparison.
Language and culture are both collective social entities, which individuals move in and out of. They both in some sense are shared distillations of the expressed thoughts of the individuals who make up the societies within which they exist. As communal entities they are passively received by individuals, and thus cannot be equivalent to active dynamic individual thought, including the thought that applies them in social interactions.
But language and culture are not– cannot be – equivalent. The one is used to talk about the other, but the contrast between a limited vocabulary and the potential infinity of referents one
uses that vocabulary to talk about necessitates that common words be used to refer to a variety of referents– that is, flexibility of usage, but a flexibility based on a clear enough understanding about the conditions of usage to ensure communicative effectiveness.
Language, given the preceding, then cannot provide the underlying medium of thought. But what language does, through the process by which it is learned and relearned, is to provide a compendium of commonly referred to thoughts. This compendium also provides a set of pre- coded thoughts that thus are easy to form and easily used in the assessment of some situation. Language does, thus, certainly bias thought.
Related topics
language, culture, and prototypicality; culture and translation; language and culture in sociocultural anthropology; language and culture in cognitive anthropology; cultural linguistics
Further reading
Gould, Sydney H. (2000) A New System for the Formal Analysis of Kinship. Edited, annotated, and with an introduction by David B. Kronenfeld. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. (A mathematician’s clear and innovative contribution to the etic algebraic analysis of kinship terminologies is applied wide and full range of examples; this is a major contribution.)
Jones, Doug and Bojka Milicic (eds) (2011) Kinship, Language, and Prehistory: Per Hage and the Renaissance in Kinship Studies. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. (This historically oriented collection of articles by anthropologists and linguists covers a broader range of approaches and topics than most.)
Kronenfeld, David B. (2009) Fanti Kinship and the Analysis of Kinship Terminologies. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. (This is a collection of a 35-year range of contributions to the study of kinship terminologies, kinship behavior, kinship groups, and the communicative use of kinship terms re both kin and non-kin.)
Kronenfeld, David B., Giovanni Bennardo, Victor C. de Munck, and Michael Fischer (eds) (2011) A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology. Malden, MA: Blackwell. (This is a recent handbook that contains several treatments of kinship in the general context of cognitive anthropology.)
McConvell, Pat, Ian Keen, and Rachel Hendery (eds) (2013) Kinship Systems: Change and Reconstruction. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. (This is a major collection from a variety of anthropological, linguistic, and historical perspectives.)
Trautmann, Thomas and Peter Whiteley (eds) (2012) Crow-Omaha: New Light on a Classic Problem of Kinship Analysis. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. (This is a collection of contributions by major scholars from across the range of theoretical approaches considering examples from around the world.)
Notes
1 Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Nick Allen, E. N. Anderson, Brent Berlin, Roy G. D’Andrade, Marti Doyle, Theodor Gordon, Norman Johnson, Ian Keen, F. K. Lehman, Bojka Milicic, Robert Moore, Martin Orans, Douglas Raybeck, A. K. Romney, Lynn Thomas, and Stephen Tyler for their generous comments, suggestions, or criticism. And, of course, none of them are responsible for what use I have made of their suggestions or criticisms. I also want to thank the Academic Senate of the University of California at Riverside for Intramural Grant support.
2 Kin groups are corporate– at least in the traditional anthropological sense that the group controls some property and can act as a unit without the necessary presence or acquiescence of all of its members. In kinship, corporate groups typically control some property which they (via the decision reached by a designated set of elders) can allocate. By contrast a kinship category references a set of people who share some kinship-relevant property. People bearing the surname‘Smith’ (sometimes loosely spoken of as‘the Smith Family’) would be one such category. In Fanti, ebusuas proper are matrilineal descent groups, but an extended sense of ebusua refers to the category of lineages across the Akan region that share the same lineage-clan name (referred to in common anthropological usage as a‘clan’).
3 Some scholars, starting with Kroeber (1909), have taken‘descriptive’ to refer to systems in which each lexeme referred to only one genealogical position and‘classificatory’ to refer to systems in which some lexemes referred a class of genealogical positions. But by this definition there exist no descriptive systems; the example given as descriptive was English, but the English‘cousin’ term covers a vast range of genealogical positions.
4 There exist one or two cases in which members of a culture deny the father’s role, but these seem on closer examination to be more by way of politics within a matrilineage context than about biology itself. The peoples involved are well involved in animal husbandry, including breeding. And there may exist another one or two that recognize biological fatherhood but deny it any social role or recognition.
5 ‘Emic’ and ‘etic’ are terms coined by Kenneth Pike in 1954 (see Pike 1967) on the model of
‘phonemic’ and ‘phonetic’ in linguistics. As used here they refer, respectively, to analytic categories and operations based directly on native speaker categories and operations vs. categories and operations based on the application of some sort of external machinery to the analysis of native speaker categories and operations.
The distinction is important because any analysis has to be based on some set of categories and operations. The emic set that best captures the detail of some particular system will include at least some parts that are specific to (and, maybe, peculiar to) that system, and thus such a set will prove less felicitous in capturing the regularities of other systems– i.e. less useful for comparative purposes. For comparison one needs some sort of externally derived etic set of categories and operations. Such an external set can be based on one of two approaches. One approach– based on the model of the IPA in phonology– is to draw them from an open set built out of all the categories and operations that have been found in any system, where‘open’ means that new items can be added to the set if they show up in new empirical cases. The other approach is to derive the categories and operations from some particular theoretical framework or approach. See Kronenfeld (1992) for a fuller discussion of these issues.
6 The distinction comes from Trubetzkoy’s Principles of Phonology published in 1939 (see Trubetzkoy 1969), where he distinguished an unmarked base form from a marked form (distinguished by some added phonological attribute or‘mark’) derived from it. Greenberg (1966) generalized the opposition to morphology, syntax, and semantics as an unmarked form (representing a conceptual base– or default or generic option) – vs. a conceptually marked derivative specific option. See Kronenfeld (1996:ch. 7) for more on marking and its relationship to semantics.
References
Brown, Roger (1964) Discussion of the conference. In Romney, A. K. and R. G. D’Andrade (eds), Transcultural Studies in Cognition, Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association, pp. 243–53. Bruner, Jerome, J. J. Goodnow, and G. Austin (1956) A Study of Thinking (with an appendix on language
by Roger W. Brown), New York: John Wiley.
Davis, Kingsley and W. Lloyd Warner (1937) Structural analysis of kinship. American Anthropologist 39:291–313. Dorsey, J. O. (1884) Omaha Sociology. Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the
Smithsonian Institution, 1881–1882. 3: 205–307.
Goodenough, Ward H. (1956) Componential analysis and the study of meaning. Language 32:195–216. Gould, Sydney H. (2000) A New System for the Formal Analysis of Kinship. Edited, annotated, and with an
introduction by David B. Kronenfeld. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Greenberg, Joseph H. (1949) Logical analysis of kinship. Philosophy of Science 16:58–64.
——(1966) Language Universals with Special Reference to Feature Hierarchies. The Hague: Mouton (Janua Linguarum No. 59).
——(1968) Anthropological Linguistics: An Introduction. New York: Random House.
Hage, Per (1997) Unthinkable Categories and the Fundamental Laws of Kinship. American Ethnologist 24:652–67.
——(1998) Proto-Polynesian Kin Terms and Descent Groups. Oceanic Linguistics 37:189–192.
——(1999) Marking Universals and the Structure and Evolution of Kinship Terminologies. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5:423–441.
——(2001) Marking theory and kinship analysis: Cross-cultural and historical applications. Anthropological Theory, 1, 197–211.
Keen, Ian (1985) Definitions of Kin. Journal of Anthropological Research 41:62–90. Kroeber, A. L. (1909) Classificatory Systems of Relationship. JRAI 39:77-84.
Kronenfeld, David B. (1973) Fanti Kinship: The Structure of Terminology and Behavior. American Anthropologist 75:1577–95.
——(1974) Sibling Typology: Beyond Nerlove and Romney. American Ethnologist (AE) 1:489–506. ——(1975) Kroeber vs. Radcliffe-Brown on Kinship Behavior: The Fanti Test Case. Man 10:257–84. ——(1976) Computer Analysis of Skewed Kinship Terminologies. Language 52:891–918.
——(1980a) A Formal Analysis of Fanti Kinship Terminology. Anthropos, 75:586–608.
——(1980b) Particularistic or Universalistic Analysis of Fanti Kinterminology: The Alternative Goals of Terminological Analysis. Man, 15:1:151–69.
——(1991) Fanti Kinship: Language, Inheritance, and Kingroups. Anthropos 86:19–31.
——(1992) Goodenough vs. Fischer on Residence: A Generation Later. Journal of Quantitative Anthropology 4:1–21.
——(1996) Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers. New York: Oxford University Press.
——(2000) Language and Thought: Collective Tools for Individual Use. In Explorations in Linguistic Relativity, edited by Martin Pütz and Marjolijn H. Verspoor, pp. 197–223. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
——(2001a) Introduction: The Uses of Formal Analysis re Cognitive and Social Issues. Anthropological Theory, 1:147–72.
——(2001b) Using Sydney H. Gould’s Formalization of Kin Terminologies: Social Information, Skewing, and Structural Types. Anthropological Theory, 1:173–96.
——(2009) Fanti Kinship and the Analysis of Kinship Terminologies. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
——(2011) Types of Collective Representations: Cognition, Mental Architecture, and Cultural Knowledge, by Giovanni Bennardo and David B. Kronenfeld. In A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology, edited by David B. Kronenfeld et al., pp. 82–101.
——(2013) Kinship Terms: Typology and History. In Kinship Systems: Change and Reconstruction, edited by Pat McConvell, Ian Keen, and Rachel Hendery. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Leach, Edmund (1945) Jinghpaw kinship terminology. JRAI 75:59–72. Reprinted in Rethinking Anthropology, pp. 28–53.
——(1958) Concerning Trobriand Class and Kinship Category Tabu. In The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups, edited by Jack Goody, pp. 120–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——(1961) Rethinking Anthropology. LSE Monographs in Social Anthropology No. 22. London: Athlone. Lehman, F. K. (2001) Aspects of a Formalist Theory of Kinship: The Functional Basis of Its Genealogical
Roots and Some Extensions in Generalized Alliance Theory. Anthropological Theory, 1:212–38. ——(2011) Kinship Theory and Cognitive Theory in Anthropology. A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology.
Edited by David B. Kronenfeld, Giovanni Bennardo, Victor C. de Munck, and Michael Fischer. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 254–69.
Lounsbury, Floyd G. (1956) A Semantic Analysis of the Pawnee Kinship Usage. Language 32(1):158–94. ——(1964a) The Structural Analysis of Kinship Semantics. Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of
Linguists, The Hague, Mouton. Reprinted in Stephen A. Tyler, ed., Cognitive Anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pp. 193–212.
——(1964b) A Formal Account of the Crow- and Omaha-Type Kinship Terminologies. In Ward H. Goodenough, ed., Explorations in Cultural Anthropology. Reprinted in Stephen A. Tyler, ed., Cognitive Anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pp. 212–55.
——(1965) Another View of Trobriand Kinship Categories. In Formal Semantic Analysis (American Anthropologist special publication). E. A. Hammel, ed. pp. 142–85. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association.
——(1969) Language and Culture. In Sidney Hook, ed., Language and Philosophy. New York: New York University Press, pp. 3–29.
Morgan, Lewis Henry (1871) Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, No. 218. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Murdock, George Peter (1949) Social Structure. New York: Free Press.
Nerlove, Sara B. and A. Kimball Romney (1967) Sibling Terminology and Cross-sex Behavior. American Anthropologist 69:179–87.
Pike, Kenneth L. (1967) Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behavior (2nd edn). The Hague: Mouton.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1924) The Mother’s Brother in South Africa. South African Journal of Science 21:542– 55. Reprinted in Structure and Function in Primitive Society, ed. by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. pp. 15–31.
——(1941) The Study of Kinship Systems. JRAI. Reprinted in Structure and Function in Primitive Society, ed. by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. pp. 49–89.
——(1952) Structure and Function in Primitive Society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Read, Dwight W. (2001a) Formal Analysis of Kinship Terminologies and Its Relationship to What Constitutes Kinship. Anthropological Theory, 1, 239–267.
——(2001b) ‘What Is Kinship?’ in R. Feinberg and M. Ottenheimer (eds) The Cultural Analysis of Kinship: The Legacy of David Schneider and Its Implications for Anthropological Relativism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
——(2011) Mathematical Representation of Cultural Constructs. A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology. Edited by David B. Kronenfeld, Giovanni Bennardo, Victor C. de Munck, and Michael Fischer. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 229–53.
Romney, A. Kimball (1965) Kalmuk Mongol and the Classification of Lineal Kinship Terminologies. In Formal Semantic Analysis (American Anthropologist special publication). E. A. Hammel, ed., pp. 146–70. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association.
Romney, A. Kimball and Roy G. D’Andrade (1964) Cognitive Aspects of English Kinship. In Romney, A. K. and R. G. D’Andrade, eds., Transcultural Studies in Cognition. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association.
Romney, A. Kimball and Philip J. Epling (1958) A Simplified Model of Kariera Kinship. American Anthropologist 60:59–74.
Schneider, David (1980) American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ——(1984). A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Tax, Sol (1955a) Some Problems of Social Organization. In: Social Anthropology of the North American Tribes (ed.) F. Eggan (enlarged edn). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 3–34.
——(1955b) The social organization of the Fox Indians. In: Social Anthropology of the North American Tribes (ed.) F. Eggan (enlarged edn). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 243–84.
Trubetzkoy, Nikolai S. (1969) Principles of Phonology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Translated from Grundzüge der Phonologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958; 3rd edn, 1962; originally published in Prague, 1939).
Wallace, Anthony F. C. and Atkins, J. (1960)‘The meaning of kinship terms’. American Anthropologist 62: 57–80.
Wierzbicka, Anna (1992) Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.