Abstract
Cross-cultural research involves explanatory arguments framed at the meta-level of a cohort of societies, each with its own historical development as an internally structured and organized system. Historically, cross-cultural research on hunter-gatherer groups initially was in accord with the general anthropological interest in determining the ideational basis for differences in systems of social organization, but more recent work has shifted emphasis to the phenomenal level of factors affecting the mode of adaptation to an external environment. This has left a major lacuna in our understanding of the reasons for cross-cultural differences among ideational systems such as kinship terminologies in hunter-gatherer societies. I address this lacuna in this article through cross-cultural comparison of hunter-gatherer kinship terminologies at an ideational, qualitative level. The means for so doing is first worked out using the kinship terminology of the Hadza, an East African hunter-gather group. Next, comparison of the Hadza and their kinship terminology with two other hunter-gatherer groups prominent in the anthropological literature, along with their kinship terminologies, makes evident a major disjunction between, on the one hand, the similarity of hunter-gatherer societies at the phenomenal level of activities such as food procurement and, on the other hand, striking differences among the same groups at the ideational level of the structural organization of their kinship terminologies. The reason for the striking differences between the ideational and the phenomenal levels is not immediately evident and remains a topic to be addressed in future cross-cultural research.
Highlights
Part 1: Ascending StructureThe generative logic begins by generating an ascending structure through kin term products that can be thought of as a subspace of the Kin Term Space that is already in place at time of birth and provides the kin term position into which the newborn is (ritually) located
Cross-cultural research is aimed at developing explanatory arguments for patterning discerned at the meta-level of a cohort of societies, each of which had its own, largely independent development as an internally structured and organized system (Narroll 1970), The rationale for this approach from an evolutionary perspective can be seen in the deep history of Homo sapiens, including the historical division of our species into quasi-species; that is, a division into groups with boundaries at the intraspecies level analogous to boundaries at the interspecies level for other organisms, and where group differentiation has a cultural, rather than a biological, basis
As Tonkinson (1991[1978]) notes for the Mardu Aborigines of Australia, the domain of moral individuals and the domain of kin are one and the same; that is, it is one’s kin whose behavior is restricted by moral values, pre-conditioned for social interaction by knowing that individuals are kin to one another according to their understanding of what constitutes the kinship connections expressed through the kin terms making up a kinship terminology
Summary
The generative logic begins by generating an ascending structure through kin term products that can be thought of as a subspace of the Kin Term Space that is already in place at time of birth and provides the kin term position into which the newborn is (ritually) located. In the case of the Hadza, this means that a Hadza newborn is recognized as having a bawa (‘father’) and an ayako (‘mother’)
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