COMMENT ON GERMAN DZIEBEL

Abstract

German Dziebel’s critique of our Crow-Omaha volume of nine years ago rests on his book of fourteen years ago. He acknowledges that crossness and skewing may in some instances covary but denies the covariance has any causal significance. Instead, he argues, Crow-Omaha systems derive from kin-terminologies marked by intergenerational self-reciprocals, which are purely linguistic in nature and uninfluenced by social organization; that sibling terminologies emphasizing relative age evolve into Omaha systems, and those emphasizing relative sex into Crow systems; and that in kinship-system evolution it is sibling terminologies—rather than crossness that predicates marriage alliances—which are the driving force.We show in reply that systems with skewing are intimately and dynamically associated with crossness, even more robustly than previously thought, both empirically and, through reinterpretation of Lounsbury’s work, analytically. The interaction of crossness and skewing through linguistic or geographic contiguity is the best and most promising way forward in the study of Crow-Omaha, and work since the appearance of our book bears this out. We show too that works of Popov, Hornborg and Barnard, that our critic cites in his favor, support our position and not his. And we suggest that the argument of his 2007 book, for all its strengths, hitches his evolutionary model to a belief that Homo sapiens arose and spread “out of America” rather than “out of Africa”, an entailment of his kinship analysis that readers will likely find off-putting. We affirm the deep embedding of skewed systems within systems having crossness, controvert his (Kroeber-like) insistence that kinship is purely linguistic and not social-organizational, and dispute that the many who find the “out of Africa” thesis well-grounded are all wet.