David B. Kronenfeld
Introduction
Kinship provides one particularly useful domain for the examination of language and thought relations. There are several advantages it offers, as well as at least one drawback. First, and maybe most importantly, anthropologists and linguists have much clearer analytic control of denotative meaning, connotative associations, andfigurative extension than for almost any other domain.
This control includes both terminological contrast (i.e.‘an uncleas opposed to, for instance, a father’) and reference (i.e., ‘how do you tell if someone actually is anuncle’), Second, we have extensive presentations and analyses of the social and cultural structures and forms (including groups, legal rights, behavioural obligations, and so forth) with which different kinds of kinship terminologies are associated. Third, there now exists some collection of systematic data patterns of actual behavior among kinsfolk that can be directly compared with patterns of terminological usage. Fourth, both kinship terminologies and patterned (and socially enjoined) relations among kin are universal and universally important– all cultures have them. Fifth, anthropologists and others have been collecting and publishing systematic data on kinship terminologies, groups, and rights for over 150 years. The one clear drawback is that denotative reference–almost uniquely– is defined by relative products (such as ‘uncle’ is a ‘parent’s brother’) rather than directly by features (a ‘table’ is a flat surface on which one places things that typically rests on legs and typically falls within a certain size range, depending on what kind of a table it is) and that, thus, kinterms are binary (one is‘someone’s uncle’vs. simply‘an uncle’) whereas most other terms are unary (it is simply‘a table’). Connotative associations andfigurative extension for kinship terms seem more like what is common for other domains.
This overview will consist of seven sections. The first will lay out the traditional theoretic language and analytic presuppositions. Section II provides a brief overview of the history of kinship studies in anthropology.Section IIIdescribes the various ways in which kinship termi- nological systems have been analysed, with the advantages and disadvantages offered by each.
Section IVconsiders the much thinner history of the formal analysis of behavior between and among kinfolk. A brief section IV (a) uses a comparison of the terminological and behavior analyses to address the relationship between language and thought.Section Vtreats variability, including within formal denotative systems, between denotative and connotative systems, and in informal figurative usage. Section VI describes the major formal approaches to the analysis of
kinship terminologies, including notational systems and their role in analysis. The importance of formal analysis and the assertions that each approach implies regarding language and culture are discussed. Finally,Section VIIconcludes the chapter with a brief overview and a discussion of potential generalizations from the well- and richly studied world of kinship to other domains.
I Definitions and issues
Kinship in anthropology traditionally includes kinship terminological systems and kin groups– and relations among these. In linguistic anthropology the kinship focus has been on the formal semantic analysis of kinship terminologies, and more recently has a socio-linguistic concern with the conditions of kinterm use. In both cases, there is both a descriptive (ethnographic) concern and a comparative (ethnological) concern with the social or cultural (including economic, historical, and regional) conditions and networks which account for the differences between one system and another. Detailed and careful systematic attention to semantics and usage has forced, in turn, a concern with the cultural pragmatics of kinterms (including cultural presuppositions about attitudes and behavior among kin, about contexts of kinterm use and kin-relevance, and about the relevance of kin groups to kinterm usage). This chapter will address both the sets of kinterms (kinship terminology) that people use to identify classes of kin and the behavior that applies to those kinfolk. The relevance of kin groups and relations among these to kinterms and kin behavior will be included, but kin groups themselves and systematic relations among these will remain outside our purview.2
By‘culture’I refer to the collective systems of differentially distributed pragmatic knowledge that underlie and enable collective social life (see Kronenfeld 2011 for a presentation and explanation of this view of culture).
Kinship offers a useful laboratory for studying the relationship between language and culture.
Anthropologists have studied kinship terminologies for over 150 years. Kinfolk are important in all cultures, and all languages have kinship terminologies. Kinship terminologies all share significant definitional and structural properties while varying enough from one to another–in rigorously patterned ways–to make interesting their relationship to the wider cultures of their speakers.
Kinterms proper are the set of words for parents, children, and spouses, such as, in English,
‘mother’,‘father’,‘son’,‘daughter’,‘husband’, and‘wife’ –and words such as‘sister’,‘aunt’,‘cousin’, etc., defined in terms of them (‘aunt’is‘mother’s’or‘father’s’ ‘sister’,‘cousin’is,inter alia,‘aunt’s son’, etc.) Kinterms are part of the lexicon of a language, and so any general theory of the lexicon must apply to them. At the same time the domain has some special characteristics that make it decidedly atypical–such as its universal parental anchor and its rigorous relative product folk definitions. The relevance and/or status of informal variants –e.g., terms such as‘mama’,
‘mom’,‘mommy’, ‘ma’, etc. – seems to depend on one’s descriptive and analytic goals; such variants are often synonyms for less than the whole range of the basic formal terms, and often signal attitudinal colourings.
Conventionally,‘ego’(or, sometimes‘propositus’) is used to refer to the person whose relative is being spoken of and ‘alter’ for that relative. ‘Kintype’ refers to a particular genealogically defined alter of ego’s (such as mother’s father’s sister’s son). The relationship is a binary one (i.e.
Joe is someone’s‘uncle’vs.‘uncle’simply labelling a referent the way that‘chair’does), which can be seen as a string of (0, 1, or more) linking relatives connecting ego to alter (e.g., Joe is Frank’s mother’s brother); the single relationship can be examined from either perspective by reversing ego and alter (Frank is Joe’s sister’s son, and hence‘nephew’), and the terms for alter in the two directions (e.g. ‘uncle’ and ‘nephew’) are spoken of as ‘reciprocals’ or reciprocal
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terms. One term such as‘uncle’in our English example can have several reciprocals–such as, here,‘niece’and ‘nephew’. A collateral consanguineal string runs up from ego to the lowest ancestor shared by ego and alter and then down to alter; the shared ancestor is spoken of as the
‘apical ancestor’, and the sibling pair immediately below the apical ancestor in the string are spoken of as the‘apical sibling pair’. A lineal string runs directly down from either ego or alter to alter or ego; here, though the expression is not much used in this situation, the apical ancestor would be the senior of the two. Affinal strings go down (from ego or a consanguine of ego) to a marriage link and then up to alter or a consanguine of alter; the minimal case is a direct marriage link between ego and alter.
Early on (see, for example, Morgan) it was noted that kin terminological systems around the world fell into a small number of patterns (or‘types’). Morgan, already in 1871, distinguished
‘classificatory’(in which some collateral relatives were classed with lineal ones) from‘descriptive’ in which lineals were clearly separated from collaterals.3 Classificatory systems were further divided by Morgan into categories which, with some renaming and with some subsequent additions, have become today’s major types (named, alas, after languages which supposedly exhibited them), which include Hawaiian, Cheyenne, Iroquois, Dravidian, Crow, and Omaha types. Descriptive systems are now referred to as Eskimo type.
In brief, in Hawaiian-type systems relatives are categorized by generation and sex. In the remaining types generation and sex remain basic, but with added distinctions. In Cheyenne-type systems, ascending and descending first generation relatives are further classified as ‘parallel’ (linked through same-sex sibling ancestors) or ‘cross’ (linked through opposite-sex sibling ancestors). Iroquois and Dravidian both classify relatives in generations zero and one as cross or parallel, and agree on the classification of ego’s closest kin–but they differ significantly in their classification of one’s more distant kin. In Dravidian-type systems the parallel vs. cross distinction maps closely onto dichotomous social entities (e.g. own vs. opposed‘moieties’), while Iroquois- type systems do not at all match any social entities. Crow- and Omaha-type systems are like Dravidian type, but with the addition of a rule for overriding generation distinctions for cross relatives in certain contexts. Crow-type wipes out the generational distinction between a woman and her child while Omaha-type wipes out the generational distinction between a man and his child. Crow-type systems thus relate to matrilineal succession while Omaha-type ones related to patrilineal succession. Rights of succession (including inheritance) often structure kin groups, and so unilineal succession often results in corporate descent groups–thus (see Kronenfeld 1991 [2009]: ch. 13]), Crow-type terminologies are often (but not always) associated with matrilineages and Omaha type with patrilineages. See Gould (2000:ch. 9) for full definitions of these types with illustrations.
II History
Morgan’s work (discussed above) marked the beginning of systematic theoretical treatment of kinship terminologies in anthropology– though earlier records of terminological systems such as the important one of Dorsey (1884) antedate Morgan’s compendium. Morgan defined most of the basic types, and saw an evolutionary progression among them. His particular theory of primitive promiscuity evolving towards Victorian monogamy as parents became aware of their own biological children is naive, does not work, and is best left without further discussion. Kroeber (1909) noted the limited number of features which (across all systems) served to distinguish terminological categories from one another–but without specifying the precise application of these to any specific system. Kroeber emphasized the lexical (as opposed to sociological) nature of kinterms. Subsequent scholars, especially Murdock (1949) further refined the set of types, and
explored the correlation of the types with various other social and economic features of the communities using them.
Radcliffe-Brown (1924, 1941), in a more social structural orientation deriving in part from Durkheim, saw kinterms as kinds of role terms which represented particular structural positions and the behavioural concomitants of these. His analytic approach was based on such roles, but, being only semi-formal, allowed him to miss two serious kinds of problems with the role view.
First, the range of denotative reference of the terms is not coterminous with their supposed roles. One of his summary rules for relevant terminologies is ‘unity of the [same sex] sibling group’. In a great many unilineal systems to which his rule supposedly applies, (whether patrilineal or matrilineal) any‘father’s’ ‘brother’falls into the‘father’kinterm; close ones will mostly be in father’s lineage (and have the relevant rights and privileges), but many more distant ones will not.
Similarly he accounts for generational skewing (in Crow- and Omaha-type systems) with a‘unity of the lineage’rule–which effectively for matrilineal systems such as Fanti amounts to delineating
‘men of my father’s matrilineage’. The problem is that a great many of the generationally skewed male relatives in all Crow-type systems do not fall in father’s matrilineage, and Omaha has the same problem with patrilineal systems.
Second, there exist no consistent behavioural correlates of any kinterms in any system– that is, behaviours which apply to all and only members of the given terminological category. The problem occurs as well in work of Tax, Leach, and Schneider (see below).
Tax (1955a, 1955b) developed a more formal and terminologically focused version of Radcliffe- Brown’s approach that worked much better at explicating which kind of relative fell in which terminological category. But it was cumbersome and it foundered on problems involving reciprocals of some terms.
Radcliffe-Brown’s position was classically opposed to that of Kroeber (1909), who said that kinterms were just words in a language and had no intrinsic sociological importance or relevance.
What Kroeber missed was the fact that prototypic (or kernel) members of categories have definite and specific sociological associations – which associations are what enable native speakers to use kinterms to refer to behavioural patterns–as in the Fanti use of their‘father’term (egya) to speak of father-like non-relatives in their courtesy pattern of extension. See Kronenfeld 1975 [2009]:ch. 8] for the Kroeber vs. Radcliffe-Brown controversy.
An interesting variant (or application) of Radcliffe-Brown’s approach is seen in Leach’s early (1945) discussion of Jinghpaw kinship groups, residence, and kinterms. In it he shows how a combination of kin group membership and residence norms can isolate the classes of relatives labelled by the kinterms used by Jinghpaw speakers. The problem is that it only dependably works for a combination of close referents and canonical residence decisions. Still, it is an impressivetour de forceand it gets at something basic about which categories of relatives come to be terminologically recognized.
In a separate dispute, Schneider in a series of articles (1980, 1984) claimed kinship terms were a cultural phenomenon that had nothing to do with biological reproduction, as opposed to the common view before and since that kinship was particularly where biology and culture came together. He seemed to dismiss apparent genealogical regularities as epiphenomenal by-products of how anthropologists studied kinship. But he never explained how such consistently genealogical patterning which we universally find could be the by-product of something unrelated, and, beyond that, never explained what made kinship systems across all cultures so clearly recognizable and isolatable as a single type of system (which anthropologists typically call a kinship system).
Sometimes, and to some degree, he confounded the preceding view with a claim that kinship was notabout genealogy. This latter version seems more reasonable since for people in many cultures genealogical links merely serve to provide a frame on which important economic,
Culture and kinship language
religious, and social relations can to varying degrees be based. The universality of kinship systems seems to come from people everywhere recognizing that children always have a biological mother and father.4 Since parentage is almost all that is known about a newborn, it seems reasonable that basic social (economic, religious, etc.) ascriptions would be based on that parentage.
Genealogies themselves are not directly involved, but are, as an analytic tool, simply the result of combining into a single diagram the concatenations of parent–child relations reaching out from an ego to a surrounding range of kin. These concatenations are the same kinds of chains that we see as defining basic kinterm categories. Members of some cultures do explicitly make use of genealogies, but many do not.
A variant of Schneider’s view was independently put forward by Edmund Leach (1958) for Trobriand Islanders, in which he claimed that terms which referred to kin were to be understood by the common elements among all their referents (kin and otherwise) rather than through any sort of privileging of traditional kinterm referents–especially given the loose versions of kinterm semantics then abroad. But Lounsbury in 1965 demonstrated a logically tight and exact, and quite parsimonious, account of Trobriand kinterms based directly on genealogical definitions– much tighter and more parsimonious than Leach’s account. Leach’s account, in retrospect, seems nicely to summarize the connotations of some key Trobriand kinterms– connotations which are involved in their non-kin extensions– but without offering anything close to clear denotative definitions.
III Terminological analysis
Kinterms in all systems are susceptible to several alternative formal analytic definitional systems.
Of the major two, one can be seen as semantic and the other pragmatic.
Thefirst approach, a semantic one, is concerned with the distinctions among terminological categories in the set, such as the difference between a‘table’and a‘chair’. In this approach to kinterm analysis, the contrasts among terms and their referents can be rigorously defined by a combination of paradigmatic contrasts (defined by the intersection of a set of distinctive features) among their focal or prototypic referents and rules for the extension of these terms to ranges of extended referents.
In kinship this distinctive features approach (usually spoken of as ‘componential analysis’) is based on the features (‘components’) such as relative generation, sex of relative, relative sex, lineal vs. collateral, mother’s vs. father’s side, etc. Some of these features such as relative generation are binary (that is, categorize ego relative to alter) while others such as sex of relative are unary (categorizing alter in absolute terms). In this analytic approach kinterm categories are defined by the intersection of distinctive (defining) features.
(1) In one variant the feature definitions are taken as applying to the full range of referents of relevant kinterms; e.g., in English, the ‘cousin’ category includes a wide range of collateral relatives. At the same time, the responses to requests to ‘describe your cousin’ or answers to questions such as‘what is a cousin’clearly focus on a‘first cousin’ –that is, a parent’s sibling’s child. One can speak of semantic extension here, but the extension is accomplished directly through the application of the defining features of the category, and distinguishes its prototype from the prototypes of contrasting categories. The classic articles of Goodenough (1956) and Lounsbury (1956, 1964a), as well as the important papers of Wallace and Atkins (1960) and Romney and D’Andrade (1964) employed this form of analysis. The approach was used by Romney and Epling (1958) in an early (and too much ignored) analysis of an Australian system.
However, in some systems such as Fanti, the above approach to semantic extension has problems. In Fanti, ego’s father’s brother, father’s mother’s sister’s son, and father’s sister’s son,
among many other kinds of kin, fall in theegyacategory which includes ego’s actual father. The distinction is emically5and ethnographically clear: one’s actual father is spoken of by Fanti as the
‘real’egya, as opposed to those other referents who are described as‘really’egyas(even though not one’s ‘real’egya). The problem is that the‘generational skewing’represented by the presence in the category of father’s sister’s son (ego’s 0 generation relative in a basically +1 generation term) cannot be reasonably handled by such a direct application of the category’s defining features.
And we further note that the preceding genealogically based usage ofegyais opposed, in turn, to its use for a respected (in some sense father-like) senior friend who can be addressed, or spoken of, asegya, but who is‘not really’one–a respect usage not unlike our use in English of
‘uncle’for relatively senior family friends. This‘courtesy’usage, similarly, is not amenable to the category’s distinguishing features.
Within the preceding distinctive features frame more focused hypotheses based on work in psychology and linguistics have sometimes been explored. For instance, Nerlove and Romney’s (1967) sibling typology study was based on Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin’s (1956) work on concept formation and Greenberg’s (1966 and see 1968) work on marked vs. unmarked categories.6 It focused on true full siblings, and was followed up on with improvements by Kronenfeld (1974). The study showed that out of 4,140 logical possibilities the 12 types that occurred empirically in a sample of 245 terminologies were all conjunctively defined and 240fit additional constraints related to marking and other specific measures of cognitive ease.
Per Hage (2001, 1999, 1998, 1997) used marking relations in the context of comparable terms from a set of genetically related languages to reconstruct the historical development of kinship terminological systems in the language families to which the languages belong.
(2) The skewing problem led Lounsbury (1964b–and for the general case, beyond kinship, see Lounsbury 1969) to the other major variant of the distinctive features approach, in which the feature definitions of kinterm categories are taken only as applying to the prototypic referents (often spoken of in the literature as‘kernel’or‘core’referents); other (more distant) referents are linked to the category by some form of equivalence (or extension) rule (such as ‘a mother’s brother’s son is terminologically equivalent to a mother’s own son’). These equivalences were created by the analyst in the analyst’s analytical language, and were not necessarily directly equivalent to native speaker statements. Their justification was that they worked– and in parti- cular that a very small set of very simple ones worked powerfully across a great many different systems. Lounsbury used three basic rules for consanguines: a‘merging rule’(making same-sex- siblings terminologically equivalent when appearing in a string as linking relatives) of which the immediately preceding example is a partial version, a ‘half-sibling rule’(in which half-siblings are made terminologically equivalent to full siblings) and a‘skewing rule’which moves specific relatives up or down a generation. The half-sibling rule seems general in its application; the merging rule applies to the large set of systems defined as ‘classificatory’; the skewing rule applies to a subset of those in which some central terminological categories include relatives from several generations. This approach was developed by Lounsbury (1964b, 1965), and further elaborated in various ways by others including Scheffler, Kronenfeld, and Trautmann. In this approach the courtesy usage can be included via extension from the prototype based on features of apparent generation, sex, and a kinship-like attitude towards the courtesy alter.
Within the kin domain, in the context of the above approach, I have looked at the functional and communicative bases and uses of the different kinds of extension (Kronenfeld 1996:172–6, and see 2009:137–40 and in press). For kinship terminologies denotative extension is based on formal extension rules, while connotative extension is based directly on the functional relations implied by the term;figurative extension applies the kin contrasts to another domain.‘Essential properties’seem to apply necessarily only to prototypic referents.
Culture and kinship language