Kinship Theory: A Paradigm Shift

 

Dwight Read

Department of Anthropology & Department of Statistics

University of California - Los Angeles
 

Abstract:

Despite the centrality of kinship in anthropological theorizing about human social systems, a satisfactory account for the conceptual basis of kin relations expressed in the form of kinship terminologies has only recently been worked out.  The prior, long-standing assumption has been that the kin terms making up a kinship terminology have primary meaning as semantic labels for a classification of positions in an ego-centric, genealogical space and secondary meaning arising through metaphorical extensions.  This assumption, however, runs counter to ethnographic observations regarding the way kin relations are calculated and leaves unexplained precisely what needs to be explained, namely the particular kin relations identified in a kinship terminology and the reasons underlying differences in the way the domain of kin relations is constituted when one compares one kinship terminology with another terminology.  The received view of kinship terminologies as being derived from a genealogical domain has erred by not recognizing that a kinship terminology is a culturally constructed system of concepts with an underlying generative structure that determines the genealogical distinctions associated with kin terms and not the reverse.  Analysis of the logic underlying the generative structure of kinship terminologies makes evident commonality across terminologies regarding the way the domain of kin relations is constituted and allows us to account for differences in properties of kinship terminologies by referring to this logical basis for the generation of a particular terminology.  More broadly, the paradigm shift introduced by the discovery that kinship terminologies have an underlying generative structure leads to a far richer and more encompassing understanding of what is entailed by considering kinship in human societies to be based on a system of culturally constructed kin relations.