No universals in the cultural evolution of kinship terminology.

Sam Passmore,Fiona M Jordan

doi:10.1017/ehs.2020.41

Abstract

Kinship terminologies are the semantic systems of language that express kinship relations between individuals: in English, 'aunt' denotes a parent's sister. Theoretical models of kinship terminology diversity reduce over 10 billion possible organisations to six key types, each of which are hypothesised to be aligned with particular cultural norms of descent, marriage or residence patterns (Murdock, 1949). Often, terminological type is used to infer social patterns in past societies based on these putative relationships between kinship terminologies and social structure, and these associations are staples of 'Anthropology 101'. However, these relationships have not been scrutinised using modern comparative methods. Here we show that kinship terminologies vertically track language phylogeny in Austronesian, Bantu, and Uto-Aztecan, three languages families of different time-depths and environments. We find no unidirectional or universal models of evolution in kinship terminology. Of 18 existing anthropological coevolutionary theories regarding kinship terminology and cultural practices across 176 societies, we find only patchy support, and no evidence for putative universal drivers of evolution in kinship terminologies.

Highlights

All human societies recognise categories of kin with language that specifies how people are related
Tests for phylogenetic signal and spatial autocorrelation demonstrate that the diversity of kinship terminologies in all language families is structured by shared ancestry (Table S4 in the Supporting Information)
We find only some of these specific social norms to co-evolve with kinship terminology, largely specific to a single language family

Summary

Introduction

All human societies recognise categories of kin with language that specifies how people are related. These categories are expressed linguistically in kinship terminology, a system of words for relatives. Together with community norms of behaviour towards kin, kinship terminologies are fundamental aspects of human social diversity (Godelier, 2012). The universe of terminological systems for labelling siblings, cousins, parents and parent’s siblings is 10,480,142,147 theoretically possible varieties (Nerlove & Romney, 1967). Cross-cultural diversity in kinship terminology has been considered sufficiently represented by only a handful of major types, for example, the six-piece typology of cousin-organisation by Murdock (1949) (Figure 1)

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Conclusion