6 - Kinship Terms: Structure and Function

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the social structure and function, kinship terminologies, and their meaning and explanation. Emile Durkheim promoted an attitude that was to have a profound effect on the later studies of kinship in France and Great Britain. Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown, who had the greatest influence on later studies of social structure and kinship terminology, allied Rivers' kind of positivism in social organization with Durkheim's antireductionism. Radcliffe-Brown directly confronted A. L. Kroeber on the question of kinship nomenclatures as language and whether they are a different kind of reality from social institutions such as marriage customs, clans and lineages, and social practices. Using many ethnographic instances from widely separated geographic and language areas, Radcliffe-Brown showed the relationship between general structural principles and general kinds of terminologies. Bronislaw Malinowski, a near-contemporary of Radcliffe-Brown's in Great Britain who too had been influenced by Rivers and Durkheim, with the same resulting ambivalence, stands in stark contrast to Radcliffe-Brown in seeing kinship from the inside out. From the inner human procreative need arise outside cultural institutions such as marriage and the family. Malinowski insisted that everything begins in the sentiments of peoples' participation in their own individual family with its need-serving functions. Radcliffe-Brown, on the other hand, was inclined to look more from the outside in, with institutions such as marriage, family, and terminological systems seen as parts of a total organization or structure that holds the whole society together.