Use Of Kinship Terms Research Articles

The problem of peers in Vietnamese interaction

In Vietnamese, address (second‐person reference) is typically accomplished by the use of a kin term regardless of whether the talk's recipient is a genealogical relative or not. All Vietnamese kin terms encode a specification of either relative age or relative generation of participants, and there are no reciprocal terms akin to English ‘brother’ or ‘sister’; rather, a speaker must select between terms such as ‘older brother’ (anh) or ‘younger sibling’ (em). Since generation is normatively associated with a difference in age, the result is a ubiquitous indexing of age and status hierarchies in all acts of address. This results in a problem for peers. How, in such a system, should they address one another (and also self‐refer)? In this article, we describe the various practices that speakers use to subvert the system and thus avoid indexing differences of age or station. Specifically, we describe four practices: (1) the use of true pronouns in address and self‐reference; (2) the use of proper names in address and self‐reference; (3) the use of kin terms in address and pronouns in self‐reference; and (4) the ironic use of kin terms in address. We conclude that the Vietnamese system well illustrates what is likely a universal tension between hierarchy and equality in acts of address and self‐reference, by showing how speakers deconstruct the vector of age and indicate that they consider one another peers. We further suggest that although the literature in this area has focused on the ways in which languages convey differences of status and rank, social order is built as much upon relations of parity and sameness – on identification of the other as neither higher nor lower than me – as it is upon relations of hierarchy.

How young adults address their parents reflects their perception of parenting

A speaker's use of a title for the listener shows the speaker's deference to the listener. Previous studies suggested that the use of kinship terms in the family also shows deference to the listener. The present study focused on young adults' use of kinship terms for their parents to investigate whether their use of kinship terms reflects their perception of their parenting. The participants were 329 Japanese college students, who answered a questionnaire about their forms of address for their parents, perceived parental emotional accessibility, and perceived parental control. They also reported their satisfaction with their parent–child relationships and the frequency of parent–child communication. The results suggest that young adults who use kinship terms for their parents perceive their parents to be more emotionally accessible and communicate with their parents more than those who do not. Young adults who use kinship terms for their father are also more satisfied with their father–child relationships than those who do not. Young adults' use of kinship terms might signal not only their deference to their parents, but also their acceptance of their parent–child relationships.

Semantic and Pragmatic Analyses of Terms of Address in Taiwanese Southern Min

According to Chao (1956:230) terms of address in Chinese fall into three categories: vocative terms, designative terms and learned terms. Vocative terms are terms of direct address. Designative terms are used to refer to third parties. Learned terms are often used in epistolary style and scientific description. The main concern of this paper is vocative terms and designative terms. This paper will also examine self-addressing terms that Chao does not deal with. These three types of terms of address are referred to collectively as colloquial terms of address. The theoretical framework of the present paper for the study of the use of terms of addresses in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM for short) is based on theoretical approaches of previous studies on terms of address in modern Mandarin (Gu 1990:248-252) as well as principles of sociolinguistics (Holmes 1992:372-376). Building on earlier studies, this paper aims at fleshing out the semantic features of different types of terms of address and their characteristics in TSM. The pivotal consideration is the speech event that takes place between speaker and hearer. I will then compare the differences in the use of terms of address between TSM and Mandarin, and explore the intriguing phenomena concerning the conflict between the use of kinship terms of address and self-denigration. The extended use of kinship terms bears on issues of solidarity / social distance and status / power.

All men become brothers – The use of kinship terms for non-related persons as a sign of respect or disrespect

In many different languages, kinship terms can be used in order to address or refer to non-kin. These terms can be very polite, and in many languages this is the only meaning and function they have. However, in some languages terms with the same meaning can be very impolite. This article shows how these differences can be explained by the nature of the underlying cultural concepts. In addition, it explores the question why kinship terms are used at all, be it in a polite or impolite way, in order to talk to or about non-related people.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Kinship

In 1962, I joined the Harvard-Central Brazil Research Project directed by David Maybury-Lewis and the late Brazilian anthropologist Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira. We were a group of graduate students from Brazil and the United States following in the footsteps of the German ethnographic autodidact Curt Nimuendaju (born Curt Unkel 1883-1945), the French structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss (b.1908), and David Maybury- Lewis who had worked extensively with two central Brazilian indigenous groups, the Xerente and Xavante, in the late 1950s. The intended goal of the Central Brazil project was a cross-cultural comparison of a small number of indigenous societies known to speak languages belonging to the Ge linguistic family, including the Bororo which is classified as Macro-Ge. Because these groups spoke cognate languages, they were thought to share a baseline common culture. Analyses of how their social structures were perceived to work, as understood by the individual field researchers, culminated in a joint comparative volume, Dialectical Societies: The Ge and Bororo of Central Brazil (Maybury-Lewis 1979). Maybury-Lewis arranged seminars and periodic discussion groups at Harvard and elsewhere attempting to pull the group together, especially when our interpretations appeared to range far afield. Although at times frustrating, these meetings were useful and no doubt helped to hone our analytical skills. Arguments over the applicability to the Ge of such concepts as patriliny and matriliny, prescriptive marriage, and moiety organization- to mention but a few of the terms that had become problematic for us-helped stimulate a rethinking of the traditional literature on these topics. Little seemed to work out in the field the way it was supposed both from a study of the earlier literature on central Brazilian societies and from a close reading of the classic texts in social anthropology. Members of the Ge project, immersed in the study of kinship, for many years the subject of a popular course offered by Maybury-Lewis at Harvard, began rethinking the relevance of the kind of kinship discourse that had prevailed in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Tracking how kinship was deployed involved a closer scrutiny of all the relationships as they existed between actual persons in daily transactions. If the classic models did not work out in the field as anticipated in the classroom or as predicted in the literature, it was not because the study of kinship had lost its importance, but rather because systems of kin classification among the Ge were discovered to range beyond the expected genealogical and affinal circles to include an array of persons who have been designated by ethnographers variously as formal friends, or adoptive, pseudo-, false, and surrogate kinship relations. The extension of the use of kinship terms to include unrelated persons as classificatory kin, discovered in such small-scale, stateless societies as those of the Ge, serves as a modus vivendi for the community to share its responsibilities. Those appointed to kinship roles assist their kin in a variety of ways, especially important in food getting and child-rearing activities. Kayapo (Me?bengokre) inhabitants of the three villages (Gorotire, Kubenkranken, and Porori) where I did fieldwork in 1962, 1963, and again briefly in 1966, divided into either kin (ombikwa) or non-kin (me?baitebm). Relationships to newly appointed ombikwa are established formally and prominently in public ceremonies in the village plaza. Persons, unrelated by either blood or marriage, but who are recognized in this manner as ombikwa, can be called upon to perform special services for their ritual kin in village-wide celebrations. These commitments and obligations are put into play at the great public ceremonies celebrating birth, the giving of special names, the initiation of boys, and the commemoration of death. At such critical moments in the Kayapo life-cycle, honorary ombikwa make gifts of food, names, or ritual positions and ornaments. …

Language socialization: The naming of non-kin adults by African children and preadolescents in intercultural encounters

Naming (i.e., addressing or referring to) non-kin adults by African children and preadolescents in first-time encounters may, at first sight, seem simple. On close inspection, however, it requires tact because the choice of forms of address is determined by several factors (age, level of solidarity, cultural background). Given that forms of address intertwine with cultural values, African parents spare no effort to transmit appropriate use of forms as an expression of African-ness. Indeed, ways of speaking constitute a behavioral manifestation of a tacit system of cultural rules, or “scripts”. The use of address forms at a given period may provide insights into the evolution of naming norms among Africans over generations. The main linguistic devices found in the data are: teknonymy, fictive use of kinship terms, and accommodation. In addition, upgrading, i.e., a move up the scale of naming due to solidarity, was also attested in the data. The study draws from insights in sociolinguistics and speech act studies, and takes inspiration from the ethnography of speaking and discourse analysis to highlight the interest of looking at forms of address as social indexing, an indicator of the user's cultural ecology.

Vietnamese immigrants’ shifting patterns of status display at work

This study compared language choices made by Vietnamese speakers in a circuit-board manufacturing company in California with utterances constructed for similar situations by Vietnamese speakers in Hanoi, Vietnam. Particular attention was paid to how both groups of speakers signaled social relationships during talk at work, primarily through their selection or omission of Vietnamese address forms and other honorific markers. The California supervisor and assistant, during high-pressure problem-solving events, bypassed the use of kinship terms and, instead, chose non-honorific terms and other markers of informality, thus invoking a normative frame of teamwork and open debate about courses of action that pervade the contemporary American workplace. Excerpts of videotaped interactions between these California workers were shown to the Hanoi participants, after which they were asked to imagine a context in Hanoi similar to the one that they observed. Their constructed utterances were found to contain a variety of address forms — mostly personal names and kinship terms — along with other honorific and politeness forms. The Hanoi participants tended to incorporate these forms even within the economy of talk found in high-pressure moments. In including these forms, they highlighted the hierarchical relationship between the interlocutors as elder and younger, superior and subordinate. Their inclusion of these expressions reflects a cultural norm: the salience of maintaining interpersonal relationships in the workplace, which are managed elegantly through the Vietnamese person-reference system. The findings in this study suggest evidence of a shift in the norms of language use by Vietnamese immigrants living and working in the United States.

Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building (review)

Laura A. Ring, Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, October, 2006, 224 pp. Louis Wirth famously described urban social relations as anonymous. view that city dwellers are largely strangers one another has been widely challenged by sociologists, anthropologists, and historians since 1950s. Nonetheless, while stranger is no longer a problem for ethnographer who arrives find groups and networks flourishing, living among strangers remains an existential problem for many urban residents. In Karachi, a city riven by ethnic and sectarian violence since 1980s, such problems take on added significance. In her gracefully written and incisively argued book, Laura Ring contends that everyday efforts of women in Karachi transform neighbors into-if not quite kin-something other than strangers, are labors of peace. problems of what Ring calls have received less attention than they deserve, largely because ethnographic studies of cities have tended be oriented around ethnic and/or economically marginal neighborhoods whose residents are often tied one another by more than locality. book's setting is a multi-story, lower-middle class apartment building, pseudonymously called The Shipyard, sheltering nearly fifty families with members of most major ethnic groups of Pakistan (Pattans, Baluchis, Punjabis, Sindhis) pursuing a variety of livelihoods (government doctors and engineers, teachers, shopkeepers). Such multistory apartment buildings have risen only in last three decades, but have quickly become common in this expanding city. Most of their residents have moved from old neighborhoods in city center or from peripheral one- or two-story colonies that are rather homogeneous (at least at scale of lane), settled by kin, caste, ethnic, and sectarian groups. Ring shows how residents, with partial success, attempt to draw familiar social forms into new space of apartment (15). One man is desperate rent apartment next his for his brother in order reconstitute a joint family household (the rental agent refuses, Two brothers, side by side, they'd never leave! [15]). As in other sorts of neighborhoods, residents make fictive kin of their neighbors through use of kin terms (bhai [brother], baji [sister], bhabi [brother's wife]). focus of study is on women's neighboring practices (4) in zenana. Zenana literally means women's space, but in Ring's account it is not a fixed physical space but a realm of women's sociality existing at sufferance of men, expanding with their absence and contracting with their presence. Unlike most participant observers, who are more observers than participants, author was fully involved in this world. She moved into apartment building with her three-year-old son and husband, a Karachi Shia with Sindhi and Muhajir parents. As she notes, I did not simply 'act' of interested, active neighbor...! (often unselfconsciously) lived part (30). Like most ethnographers, she uses her own ignorance and reactions as a foil for residents' understandings and emotions, but not as an outsider. She is of flow of activity-gossiping, exchanging foods, visiting, fixing a leaky water tank, advising a couple on character of a boy whom they are considering marrying their daughter, rushing out one door during an electrical fire while men go out another. Ring argues both Western liberal ideology (figuring home as a private, feminine realm, cut off from world of [2]) and post-colonial studies (concentrating on Indian reformist views of domestic as sites of cultural authenticity untouched by colonial power) have missed broader political significance of what takes place within zenana. These approaches have failed explore the spaces and social relations of dwelling-of household, apartment building, neighborhood, backyard, balcony-as sites of political processes, not just of gendered and generational conflict but of class, ethnic, racial, and national struggles (3). …

Altruistic Celibacy, Kin‐Cue Manipulation, and The Development of Religious Institutions

Abstract. Building on a model first proposed by Gary Johnson, it is hypothesized that religious institutions demanding celibacy and other forms of altruism from members take advantage of human predispositions to favor genetic relatives in order to maintain and reinforce these desired behaviors in non‐kin settings. This is accomplished through the institutionalization of practices to manipulate cues through which such relatives are regularly identified. These cues are association, phenotypic similarity, and the use of kin terms. In addition, the age of recruits and their contact with actual kin are factors that relate to kinship recognition and that are similarly manipulated by institutions in order to reinforce altruistic behavior directed toward non‐kin. Support for this set of predictions is presented from historical and ethnographic sources on monastic life in Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism, as well as Islamic dervish groups, the Essenes, Shakers, and others. Potential implications of the model for understanding the development of religious institutions are preliminarily explored by reviewing Joachim Wach's model of religious developmental stages as well as some of the literature on the relationship between individualism and communalism in incipient religious organizations, in light of the kin‐cue manipulation model.

A sociolinguistic interpretation of the social meanings of kinship terms in Shona urban interactions

This article provides an interpretive analysis of Shona native speakers' use of kinship terms of address as forms of communicative resources to invoke social meanings in non-kin relations. Two types of data were used for the analysis of social meanings: (a) field notes from participant observations taken of naturally occurring interactions in public and private spheres over an eight month period (from September 2001 to May 2002) in and around the city of Harare, Zimbabwe and (b) transcriptions of semi-structured, in-depth interviews conducted with 40 Shona native speakers of varying ages, gender, educational status, occupation and religious affiliation. I demonstrate that the current explanatory address system models are apparently inadequate in their representation of both the complexity and distinctiveness of social meanings. Hence, I advocate the use of more interpretive, ethnographic approaches for the discovery of social meaning.

Literal and Extended use of Kinship Terms in Documentary Papyri

AbstractKinship terms in papyrus letters do not always refer to actual relatives and so pose many problems for modern readers. But by examining all the kinship terms in six centuries of letters it is possible to discover some rules governing the use of kinship terms: in some situations they appear to be always literal, and in others they appear to be almost always extended, though a third group of contexts remains ambiguous. The rules are complex and depend on the particular kinship term involved, the date of writing, the use of names, the position of the kinship term in the letter, and the person to whom it connects the referent.

Identity and Healing in Three Navajo Religious Traditions: Sa'ah Naagháí Bik'eh Hózho

In this article, we elucidate how the Navajo synthetic principle sa'ah naagháí bik'eh hózh [symbol: see text] (SNBH) is understood, demonstrated, and elaborated in three different Navajo healing traditions. We conducted interviews with Navajo healers and their patients affiliated with Traditional Navajo religion, the Native American Church, and Pentecostal Christianity. Their narratives provide access to cultural themes of identity and healing that invoke elements of SNBH. SNBH specifies that the conditions for health and well-being are harmony within and connection to the physical/spiritual world. Specifically, each religious healing tradition encourages affective engagement, proper family relations, an understanding of one's cultural and spiritual histories, and the use of kinship terms to establish affective bonds with one's family and with the spiritual world. People's relationships within this common behavioral environment are integral to their self-orientations, to their identities as Navajos, and to the therapeutic process. The disruption and restoration of these relationships constitute an important affective dimension in Navajo distress and healing.

Birds: Metaphor and metonymy in translating children’s books

An attempt is made to study (i) the differences in the way BIRD metaphoric and metonymic models are employed in the Bulgarian and Anglo-American language and culture communities, and more specifically in children's books, and (ii) the role the translation of the latter may play in the migration of such models across boundaries.For the purpose, the internal structure of the BIRD category is elaborated on the basis of our perception of, and interaction with, its members (outer appearance – shape, body parts, size, colour; habitat in terms of space and time, and activities). Asymmetries across the two languages and cultures mainly occur on the subordinate level, while with basic level metaphors a higher degree of correspondence is observed.The cross-cultural asymmetries associatied with differences in the various layers of myth, legend, oral and written tradition in the two cultures, may further multiply and create additional difficulties for the translator due to some major differences between the English and Bulgarian languages, mainly in relation to gender, diminutives, proper names formation mechanisms, compounding and the use of kinship terms in structuring the animal domain, which are particularly important in the rendering of Bird characters.

The Evocative Nature of Kin Terminology in Political Rhetoric

Kin terms such as “brothers,” “sisters,” and “motherland” are frequently used in both political and patriotic speech. Johnson (1986, 1987) has argued that this use of kin terms in patriotic or rhetorical speech can be predicted on the basis of evolutionary psychology. He has suggested that the human inclination toward nepotistic behavior can be called forth by the successful manipulation of kin terminology. In this study, two hypotheses were examined concerning the evocativeness of kin terminology in political speech and the influence of birth order on the effectiveness of such terminology. The first hypothesis was that kin terms would be more effective than more distant relationship terms (like “friend”) in evoking a positive response. Kin terms elevated agreement with the views expressed in the speech that the subjects heard. The second hypothesis, that middleborns would be less likely to respond to such kin term usage than first or lastborns, was based on previous work on birth order and family relations (Salmon and Daly, in press). And in fact, middleborns were less likely to be influenced by the use of kin terms than first or lastborns in this study.

Naming practices and the power of words in China

ABSTRACTThis article examines use of kinship terms, pronouns, and proper names in China, in an overall framework termed “naming” that demonstrates the performative power of uttering relational terms, especially by the junior in the relationship. It also describes the prototypical routine of introductions, which consist of three participants, in contrast to the more typical conversation in Western analysis which posits two participants. In this three-party exchange, the animator is not the author of the words, but rather the willing and necessary namer of the relationship. Finally, it situates this performative function of naming within a general discussion of language ideology in Chinese society, in which signifiers and their homophones are seen as somehow inseparable from the signifieds. (Naming, speech act theory, ideology, kinship, China)

Kin Term Usage in The Federalist: Evolutionary Foundations of Publius's Rhetoric

Theorists have recently argued that use of kin terms in patriotic speech appeals to genetically based predispositions and coefficients of relatedness, thereby moving one-time strangers to do things they might not otherwise do. This study has been designed to investigate the significance of kinship language in The Federalist, a project whose end was to persuade the people of New York to ratify the American Constitution. Three hypotheses were tested and supported. First, a wider variety and larger quantity of kinship language surfaced in patriotic than in nonpatriotic discourse on ratification. Second, kinship terms appear more often in papers that address the blessings one could expect from bonding in a potential union (a new family) and in papers that criticize the Articles of Confederation (the old family) than in the remaining papers that entail mundane descriptions of constitutional particulars. And third, kinship language appears significantly more frequently in the earlier papers of The Federalist than in the later ones, presumably to steal the audience's attention straightaway and thus form a bond among the people, the states, and the new Constitution.

Reconstructing Kinship, or, the Pragmatics of Kin Talk

This article argues that kinship terminologies are best studied in their full linguistic context; the data should be collected from naturally occurring conversation rather than elicited with frames, and recognition must be given to the fact that people choose which expressions to use. Other means are available for talking to or about kin: in any language there are many ways of referring to people. These include the use of kin terms, names, nicknames, titles and pronouns. These 'social deictic' terms are used in different social contexts. Analysis of the context shows the inadequacy of the address/reference distinction. However, the connexions between the choice of linguistic means and the social context are central to social anthropology, so new approaches must be sought. A Mambila transcript is examined, and some suggestions are made as to how a large body of conversational data could be approached in order to analyse the social deictic terms employed. The central problem for the student is to see his kinship terminology as a definite part of the dynamism of kinship relations, to determine how far the separation and combination of relatives under linguistic labels can be correlated with other sociological phenomena (Firth 1936: 226).

Het Tweetalige Lexicon

The present paper reports on a study of the continued word associa-tions to eight stimulus words in Dutch and Turkish by Turkish migrant children living in the Netherlands. For three out of the eight stimulus words the meanings in the two languages were not complete-ly overlapping. Two written association tasks were administered with an interval of five months. Seventeen Turkish children (about 12 years old) participated in the study. It was found that: - Interlingual responses hardly occurred (only a few instances of Dutch or Dutch-like words in the Turkish task). - The children gave more responses (number of tokens) in the Tur-kish than in the Dutch version (difference not significant at 5% level; significant at 10% level), suggesting a larger vocabulary in Turkish. - The diversity of the responses was slightly higher in the Dutch version of the task than in the Turkish version. - The level of linguistic-cognitive development as indicated by the proportion of paradigmatic and categorical responses was about the same in the two languages with a slight bias in favour of Turkish. - The number of equivalent responses in the two tasks was 36,8%. - For five of the eight stimulus words ('happiness' and 'city') the responses in the two languages differed strikingly. Probably the response behaviour was influenced by social-cultural factors related to each language. - For one of the three semantically not completely overlapping words (Dutch: dochter, and Turkish kiz, 'daughter'/'girr) the Dutch res-ponses (frequent use of kinship terms) differed strongly from the Turkish responses (few kinship term)

Terms of endearment: Karo Batak lovers as siblings

Through the metaphoric use of kin terms, Karo Batak lovers cast each other as siblings. The metaphoric usage calls attention to the kind of “love” that both lovers and siblings share, although actual brothers and sisters must virtually avoid each other. Cross‐cousins, too, are likened to siblings; despite a high value placed on cross‐cousin marriage, cross‐cousins are neither the objects of sexual attraction nor of courtship. Arranged marriages between cross‐cousins are the antithesis of romances, some of which culminate in theatrical elopements. Lovers' terms of address make sense against a background of conceptual oppositions between siblings and cross‐cousins, arranged marriages and elopements, incest and exogamy. The anomalous lover relationship and its conventions of address mediate the contradiction that cross‐cousins, who are like siblings, may become spouses.

Kinship and the management of personal relations: kin terminologies and the “ axiom of amity”

This paper eschews the fashionable study of the taxonomic structures of kinship terminologies to consider the social contexts in which kin terms are used and the reasons why. The Thai and Malay material amply confirms what is sometimes ignored, that the principles of genealogical classification are but one component in the analysis of kin term usage which is in turn part of the total field of conventions ordering everyday interaction. This fact prompts once more the question of what it is about kinship ?or more precisely, kinship terminology ? that accounts for both its very prevalent and non genealogical use in the societies examined. The ethnographic record for the central region of Thailand is replete with examples of a degree of variation in the behaviour of individuals occupying specified kin statuses which makes generali zation, or even the perception of order, problematic. The total lack of corporate groups based on either descent, or kinship in conjunction with some other principle, can be linked to a lack of effective kinship based authority structures and consequent freedom in interpretation of social roles. Thus the conclusion might well be drawn that in this amorphous situation kinship institutions are relatively unimportant, certainly in the sense that they afford no effectively sanctioned means for the control of scarce resources. Yet the very pervasiveness of kinship in rural life suggests otherwise. Furthermore, the manner in which Thai extend their use of kin terms suggests that there is some thing distinctly positive about kinship which those schooled in either the significance of jurai norms and corporate groups, or in the total primacy of genealogy, have overlooked.