The Ontogeny of Kinship Categorization

Alice Mitchell,Fiona M Jordan

doi:10.1163/15685373-12340101

Alice Mitchell, Fiona M Jordan

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12340101

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Abstract

Abstract Human kinship systems play a central role in social organization, as anthropologists have long demonstrated. Much less is known about how cultural schemas of relatedness are transmitted across generations. How do children learn kinship concepts? To what extent is learning affected by known cross-cultural variation in how humans classify kin? This review draws on research in developmental psychology, linguistics, and anthropology to present our current understanding of the social and cognitive foundations of kinship categorization. Amid growing interest in kinship in the cognitive sciences, the paper aims to stimulate new research on the ontogeny of kinship categorization, a rich domain for studying the nexus of language, culture, and cognition. We introduce an interdisciplinary research toolkit to help streamline future research in this area.

Highlights

Defining the ProblemHow do children learn kinship concepts? How does an English-speaking child learn to categorize their mother’s sister and their father’s sister as aunt, while a Hindi-speaking child learns to categorize them differently – as mausī or buā, via free access respectively? Kinship is a central organizing principle of human societies and its conceptual structures must be transmitted across generations
To what extent does the acquisition of these concepts depend on the linguistic and cultural particularities of the kinship system being learned, the sociocultural environment of learning, or general patterns of cognitive development? Here we review existing work on the ontogeny of kinship categorization – a rich domain for investigating the relation between language, culture, and cognition
While research on the development of kinship concepts has not exhausted the potential for domain-general processes acting in the rich social milieu of human childhood, we should take seriously the biological inheritance that may make kinship cognition special – a topic we address in 2.3

Summary

Introduction

Defining the ProblemHow do children learn kinship concepts? How does an English-speaking child learn to categorize their mother’s sister and their father’s sister as aunt, while a Hindi-speaking child learns to categorize them differently – as mausī or buā, via free access respectively? Kinship is a central organizing principle of human societies and its conceptual structures must be transmitted across generations. How do cultural differences in kinship organization affect children’s acquisition of concepts relating to family?

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