Abstract
Kinship is understood dynamically and processually but kinship terminologies are remarkably stable idea systems. They provide cultural continuity over time and are more resistant to modification than many types of cultural instantiations. Miskitu speakers in Nicaragua, however, have adopted new kin terms that appear to have fundamentally changed the idea system used to generate their kin terms historically. The shape of the changes that have occurred in Miskitu kin terminologies over time are the result of powerful economic, political and social forces introduced, in part, as a consequence of the geography of Mosquito Coast economies, migrations and political processes. We argue that the current use of kin terms is atypically hybrid and is not the result of a single, algebraically derivable idea system. Rather than negating the validity of mathematical approaches to kinship terminologies, the case of Miskitu kinship terminology suggests that core idea systems, although subject to change over time, move between informationally economical forms adapted to socioeconomic changes.
Highlights
Miskitu kinship terminologies provide a useful entry into several distinct anthropological questions
We rather suggest that the Kakabila System, like the Asang System, represents a transformation of the First Time System to meet new requirements, as described in Jamieson. These transformations of Miskitu kin terms in the Pearl Lagoon basin have been far more reaching and dramatic than those experienced in Asang and other Miskitu communities, owing to the rather exceptional history of this particular district described by Jamieson, but both the Asang and Kakabila Systems are we can confidently assert, ‘descendants’ of an ‘ancestral’ First Time System
Effecting these ‘captures’ has been made arguably easier by Pearl Lagoon Miskitus offering this affinal prey a readily intelligible conceptual framework that mirrors their own. Just as these English-‐speakers have presented the Miskitu with an ethnonym, Waika, which represents the Miskitu’s own understanding of kinship, the Pearl Lagoon basin Miskitu have reciprocally offered these Anglophone affines a terminology that, as a set of calques from English, represents the English-‐speaker’s classificatory understanding of how kin terms work. It may seem inconsistent with the apparent messiness of contemporary kinship systems in the Pearl Lagoon of Nicaragua, we suggest that this case constitutes considerable evidence for the power of persistence in core idea systems
Summary
Miskitu kinship terminologies provide a useful entry into several distinct anthropological questions. In light of earlier arguments about core foundational systems such evidence might support a more ad hoc, emergent explanation for the production of culture This would be a radical finding and one that would no doubt be adopted were it not for the problematic of how a set of conceptual relationships between kin terms whose productions correspond precisely to a specific algebra, with all the constraints that entails, might change over time. Focussing on underlying kinship algebras in such cases, as analyzed here, suggests that under strong pressures core cultural systems are subject to fragmentation and collapse, supporting a strong emergent rather than rigid basis for culture Such collapse is characterized by instability in the systemic underpinnings of knowledge representations and we predict is not sustainable over time. It is not unimaginable that dual kinship algebras might be persistent and even sustainable, but they would require considerably higher informational investment by the societies that employ them
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