Introduction to the Science of Kinship 2020947219, 9781793632371, 9781793632388

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Introduction to the Science of Kinship

Leaf, Murray J., and Dwight Read. Introduction to the Science of Kinship, Lexington Books, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Anthropology of Kinship and the Family Series Editors: Murray J. Leaf (University of Texas at Dallas) and Dwight W. Read (University of California, Los Angeles) Mission Statement Kinship relations create the foundation of human systems of social organization. In order to understand kinship as a system of social relations, it is necessary to examine the structural organization of terms. The Anthropology of Kinship and the Family series is based on the notion that the underlying ideas of kinship can have more immediate importance than the linguistic symbols, as these ideas are evident in all behaviors involved in kin relationships. This series encourages contributors to highlight the social and conceptual power of kinship terminologies. Scholarly monographs and edited collections that focus on old topics associated with kinship, such as family organization and rules of marriage, and new approaches to the study of kinship systems are welcome.

Books in Series

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Introduction to the Science of Kinship by Murray J. Leaf and Dwight W. Read Voluntarily Childfree: Identity and Kinship in the United States by Shelly Volsche Political Kinship in Pakistan: Descent, Marriage, and Government Stability by Stephen M. Lyon Ethnic and National Identity in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Kinship and Solidarity in a Polyethnic Society by Keith Doubt and Adnan Tufekčić

Leaf, Murray J., and Dwight Read. Introduction to the Science of Kinship, Lexington Books, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Introduction to the Science of Kinship

Copyright © 2020. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

Murray J. Leaf and Dwight W. Read

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Leaf, Murray J., and Dwight Read. Introduction to the Science of Kinship, Lexington Books, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com

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6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020947219 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Leaf, Murray J., and Dwight Read. Introduction to the Science of Kinship, Lexington Books, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Contents

List of Figures

vii

List of Tables

ix

Acknowledgments and Who Did What

xi

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1 Introduction 1 2 The Path to the Kinship Apocalypse

17

3 Theory of Organizations

47

4 Kinship and Biology

71

5 Kinship Maps

105

6 Ideas Attached to Kinship Maps

123

7 Domestic Group Organizations

143

8 The Hopi

163

9 The Purum

193

10 The Dravidian Problem Transformed

223

11 Kinship, Logic, and Mathematics

239

12 Conclusion 289

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Contents

Glossary 301 References 305 Index 315

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About the Authors

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List of Figures

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Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Figure 2.4

Lowie’s Terminology Classification Radcliffe-Brown’s Table 1, Kariera, Male Speaker Radcliffe-Brown’s Table 2, Kariera, Female Speaker Mother’s Brother’s Daughter Marriage with Patrilineal Descent Figure 2.5 Father’s Sister’s Daughter Marriage Figure 3.1 Shannon and Weaver’s Original Diagram of the Communication Process Figure 3.2 The Communication Cycle Figure 3.3 Punjabi Kinship Map Figure 4.1 The Venus of Willendorf Figure 5.1 Core Positions Labelled with Both Punjabi and English Kin Terms Figure 5.2 Kin Term Product Relation Figure 5.3 English Kinship Map Figure 5.4 Eliciting the Czech Kinship Map Figure 5.5 English Compared to Czech Figure 8.1 Oraibi Village and Fields Figure 8.2 Moencopi Wash from Moencopi Village Figure 8.3 Hopi Kinship Map, Male Speaker Figure 8.4 Hopi Kinship Map, Female Speaker Figure 9.1 Purum Kinship Map, Female Speaker Figure 9.2 Purum Kinship Map, Male Speaker Figure 9.3 Das’s House Diagram Figure 10.1 Tamil Kinship Map, Male Speaker Figure 10.2 Tamil Kinship Map, Female Speaker

vii

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25 31 32 37 38 48 50 58 90 106 107 110 111 112 171 172 176 177 201 202 212 225 228

viii

List of Figures

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Figure 10.3   Seneca Kinship Map, Female Speaker 232 Figure 10.4   Seneca Kinship Map, Male Speaker 232 Figure 11.1A,B  Tamil Kin Term Maps: (A) Male Speaker and (B) Female Speaker 246 Figure 11.2A  Kin Term Map for Iroquois Terminology (Male Speaker)257 Figure 11.2B  Kin Term Map for Iroquois Terminology (Female Speaker)258 Figure 11.3A  Kin Term Map for Kariera Structure (Male Speaker) Derived from Iroquois 261 Figure 11.3B  Kin Term Map for Kariera Structure (Female Speaker) Derived from Iroquois 262 Figure 11.4A   Deriving Crow Structure (Male Speaker) from Iroquois 265 Figure 11.4B  Deriving Crow Structure (Female Speaker) from Iroquois266 Figure 11.5A   Crow Structure (Figure 11.4B) with Hopi Kin Terms 267 Figure 11.5B  Consolidating Transformation of Crow Structure to Hopi268 Figure 11.6A   Hopi Lineage Generation 269 Figure 11.6B   Purum Asymmetric Lineage Generation 270 Figure 11.7   Purum Wife Exchange 271 Figure 11.8   KAES Front Page 274 Figure 11.9   KAES Tamil, Male Speaker, Ready to Simplify 274 Figure 11.10   Tamil Generative Core for Figure 11.9 278 Figure 11.11   Read’s Kinship Typology 282

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List of Tables

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Table 2.1 Morgan’s Glosses for Seneca and Tamil Table 2.2 Wallace and Atkins’s English “Components” Table 7.1 American Domestic Groups, 2010 Census

ix

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21 29 150

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Acknowledgments and Who Did What

As with Human Thought and Social Organization (Leaf and Read, 2012), we should acknowledge contributions that may not be clear in the text and address questions that always arise from joint authorship. First, the most important point is that this is a genuine collaboration, not simply an assemblage. We have both gone over all of the arguments and agree on them. There have been many tensions and disagreements along the way, which we have worked out and from which we have both learned. And we agree absolutely that this is what the process should have been. This is truly a new science and developing it has to be a process of discovery. With this said, however, we can also say that Leaf set the overall plan of the work and drafted the initial manuscript. We then went over all of it several times. As the argument has fnally turned out, Leaf can be regarded as the lead author for chapters 1, 2, 4–9, and 12. For chapter 3, Read should be regarded as the lead author regarding the paleoanthropology and archaeology; Leaf can be regarded as the lead author for the half dealing with interpretation. Read is the lead author on all matters pertaining to the kin term map, especially chapter 11, and the Kinship Analysis Expert System. For chapter 10, Leaf can be regarded as the lead author in a literary sense, but since it is primarily aimed at explaining part of Read’s earlier work, Read has to be regarded as the authority on content. For our understanding of Tamil and other Dravidian kinship systems that goes beyond what is in the cited literature, we thank Sai Loganathan and his family, Professor Lakshman Tamil, and Professor Ramaswamy Chandrasekaran. In addition, we are happy to acknowledge the contributions of Cliff Behrens and Mike Fisher for their help in developing the Kinship Analysis Expert System computer program, and the very helpful suggestions of Robert xi

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Acknowledgments and Who Did What

McKinley on Human Thought and Social Organization, which we have carried over to here. We also wish to acknowledge the contribution of our late colleague Kris Lehman (U Chit Hlaing). Nothing is direct. Professor Lehman never saw this manuscript, but his supporting perspective and his unfagging recognition of the importance of the topic made up a large part of the environment it has grown out of.

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Murray J. Leaf and Dwight W. Read Texas and California June 2020

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Chapter 1

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Introduction

Kinship is a human universal. Every known human society has a system of named relationships that anthropologists recognize as the counterparts of their own ideas of parents and their children. Through them, each person becomes part of a wider network of kinship relations that provides the main part of their initial protection, food, shelter, and introduction to human culture and social organization. Until 1987, anthropologists agreed that every society had a kinship system of some kind, meaning that this parental relationship and the network it was part of were socially instituted in a shared and well-ordered way. They agreed that such systems embody and refect facts of biology but cannot simply be reduced to facts of biology. They agreed that kinship systems provide the initial acculturation and socialization without which the biological person cannot become a functioning member of their society. They agreed that all kinship systems are similar to one another in some respects but differ in others. One of the important ways they were the same was that they all involved a distinct vocabulary of terms that were used for one’s relatives and by one’s relations to them in return. But one of the important ways they differed was that these terms often did not translate readily into the anthropologists’ own languages. And they recognized that differences between these terminological meanings were connected to differences between the larger social organizations of these communities and our own—not just the surface facts of such organizations but also deeper underlying conceptions of what organization itself is, what society is, and what humanity is. Anthropologists disagreed on how to explain this universality and apparent importance, what the relation to biology is, what the systemic quality actually consists in, what made a term a kinship term, what a meaning is, and what 1

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kinship itself is. But there was no question that kinship was a fundamental topic, a required subject that anthropology had to deal with in order to understand what any individual human community is and what humans in general are, and therefore a required topic that all programs to train anthropologists had to include. In 1987, the disagreements overpowered the agreements. The tipping point was David M. Schneider’s A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Capping a line of criticism of two very prominent contemporary arguments that he had begun over twenty years before, Schneider concluded that a “quartet” of types of organizations that social scientists had been focused on for over a century— “kinship, economics, politics, and religion” (1987:181)—were “metacultural categories imbedded in European culture which have been incorporated into the analytic schemes of European social scientists” (Schneider, 1987:184). In plain words, they are nothing more than our own, Western, cultural impositions. They have no general scientifc validity. Kinship is not universal; it is not objective; it may not even be real. And the same applies to economics, politics, and religion. It seemed to be a classic insider exposé. Schneider was widely recognized as a leading kinship scholar. The topic was central to his career. He was now declaring that there was no such thing. What could be more authoritative? In fact, however, Schneider’s conclusions were mistaken. They had nothing to do with kinship itself and everything to do with a specifc set of assumptions about it that he shared with those whose arguments he criticized. The two debates he focused on were the componential analysis of kinship terminologies and the alliance–descent debate focused on marriage systems. These were easily the most prominent at the time, in good part because they made the most sweeping claims for their own importance and in part because the way they justifed those claims had initially seemed to be such obvious truths to so many. Both debates depended on theoretical and methodological assumptions derived from philosophical Positivism. Both were above all intended to validate those assumptions in order to make the case that positivistic methods and assumptions should apply to all the rest of anthropology as well. Then, at last, anthropology would truly be a science. Both debates had begun in the 1950s, as specifc instances of a much wider positivist reaction to the less pretentious, more careful, and genuinely empirical methods associated especially with Franz Boas in the United States and Bronislaw Malinowski in Britain. Schneider’s criticism in 1987 was not different in substance from what it had been in 1965 (Schneider, 1965a,b). But in 1965, he was arguing against promises of big gains from small efforts. By 1987 he was explaining why there had been so little gained from so much effort. He also provided a way out: reject the topic.

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Introduction

3

For the arguments they applied to, Schneider’s criticisms were correct. The arguments were indeed logically circular. They did impose arbitrary “analytic” defnitions on their subject matter, so in the end the only things the results represented were the assumptions that the defnitions embodied. And these assumptions were indeed ethnocentric “metacultural categories imbedded in European culture.” He was also right to say:

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There are other ways of constituting the units out of which a society or culture is fabricated. One of the simplest analytic devices, and the one I personally favor, is to frst establish the units which the particular culture itself marks off. (1987:184)

But he was absolutely wrong to suggest that to look for the way the “particular culture marks itself off” is to reject the recognition that kinship is a human universal. He was equally wrong to imply that no one was already doing kinship analyses this way. In fact, by 1987, the alternative theoretical and methodological approach described here was well developed and published and Schneider knew about it. It was clearly focused on the way culture was “fabricated” by its members and through its own processes, which were in fact universal, as we again describe here. But we were not using an idea of “units” in the sense Schneider assumed and we were not just talking vaguely about “analytic devices.” We had defnite empirical methods and analytical procedures for showing what this “marking off” involved, how it was done, and why it was done this way and not another way. Our approach to kinship draws upon the alternative methods and assumptions of the empirical tradition of Boas and Malinowski that Schneider and his positivist colleagues repudiated. But Boas, Malinowski, and their immediate students who continued to use their assumptions did not apply them to the problem of kinship terminology—to saying what it is and why every community seems to have one. This is the problem we take up. The componential analysts were right about its importance. It is a key starting point. But the componential analysts’ methods were wrong—for the reasons Schneider laid out. We now know what terminologies are and why the efforts to analyze them have been so confused. There are distinct sets of terms, as anthropologists recognized, but that is not what is most important. What is most important are the ideas that make up the defnitions of the terms. These are systematically interrelated and have a defnite logical structure. We represent this by what we call a kinship map. Our method for eliciting it is an adaptation of frame analysis that has long been used in linguistics and other felds. This is an experimental method, in exactly the same sense the methods of biology or chemistry are experimental.

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Second, we have a method for analyzing this logical structure, showing precisely what it is for any kinship map, and to a large extent also why it is this and not something else. We represent this logical structure by the kin term map, in contrast to the kinship map. The method for eliciting the kinship map was developed by Murray J. Leaf. The method for exposing and analyzing the kin term map was developed by Dwight W. Read. Taking the analyses of the kinship map and kin term map together can also explain the alliance theorists’ sense that kinship somehow refects—and in a way establishes—“fundamental proclivities of the human mind.” Their intuition was right but, again, their assumptions were wrong. Our analysis is nothing like what the alliance theorists proposed, but it is much more basic and far-reaching. Leaf’s frst publication describing kinship maps and the method for eliciting them was an article describing the Punjabi kinship map in the American Anthropologist in 1971. Information and Behavior in a Sikh Village, published the following year, laid out the full theory for all of the types of social organization in the same village (Leaf, 1971). By the time it was published, Leaf was on the faculty of the UCLA Department of Anthropology. Read was a colleague. Read was a mathematician by training and recognized that the diagrammatic and logical self-consistency of kinship maps that was shown by Leaf’s elicitation method ought to have an underlying mathematical logic. His frst publication setting this out, for English, was “An algebraic account of the American kinship terminology,” published in 1984. So by the time Schneider declared that kinship could not be found objectively and might consist only of indigenous concepts, Leaf and Read had shown that it could be found objectively precisely because it did consist of such concepts—of a specifc kind which could be elicited and analyzed by specifc objective methods. Unfortunately, Schneider’s criticism has continued to be infuential and destructive, as have the positivistic philosophical and epistemological assumptions that it embodied. POSITIVISM IS NOT SCIENCE Positivism is commonly described as the view that the only authentic knowledge is provided by science, in contrast to metaphysics or theology. This is both true and false. It is true that this is a claim that Positivists make, and it is true that in saying this Positivists are telling the reader to equate science with Positivism. It is false as a factual statement about the relationship between Positivism, real science, real metaphysics, and real theology. The name, “Positivism,” was coined by Auguste Comte as the name of what he was advocating, and this is indeed what he said it was. But Comte was not a scientist and did not speak for science. He was a political ideologue. He was

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Introduction

5

expelled from the École Polytechnique and spent several years as a research assistant for Henri St. Simon, inventor of “socialism.” St. Simon offered this as The New Christianity, the title of his main manifesto. Positivism was Comte’s version of the same type of scheme. St. Simon’s Socialism was an application of Hegel’s authoritarian idealism. So was Comte’s Positivism. Comte argued that Positivism grew out of theology and metaphysics but superseded them by casting their basic insight into a new form. The basic insight is that all knowledge is “subjective.” Positivism does indeed rest on this claim, and Comte did indeed draw it from religion and metaphysics as he understood them. The succession was elaborated in Comte’s often-cited “law of three stages.” It is precisely what we mean when we say he was an ideologue. But as a factual statement about the history of ideas, it is dead wrong. Historically, as bodies of actual scholarship rather than Comte’s views of them, metaphysics did not grow out of religion. Nor did science grow out of metaphysics. They are parallel developments and very different from one another. Comte described his Positivism as a unifed and comprehensive system of knowledge. He recognized that the real sciences were not unifed in this way, but this was what Positivism would remedy. It would bring the sciences together as a single hierarchy of deterministic “laws” with physics at the base and “sociology” (also his term—the science of society) at the top. And it had to be authoritarian because science was the imposition of order and an all-unifying order could only be created by the imposition of a single mind. Sociology was the key, the cap that holds it all together. Religion and metaphysics had failed because they lacked it. Positivism would succeed because it had it. According to Comte, his invention of sociology created “the fnal preponderance of Subjectivity in its regenerated form,” which is social rather than individual, that would bring about this integration (Comte, 1875:471–72. Capitalization in original). This, then, is the core idea of positivism: my idea, in my head, determines their society, which controls their behavior. If it were true, social science would be very much easier than it is. But it is isn’t. Comte’s own idea of society was laid out at great length in his System of Positive Polity (1851–1876), supplemented by his Religion of Humanity with him as its pope. The state would impose his logical order on the science. Others who joined him provided alternative versions. In Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865) J. S. Mill assimilated Comte’s theory of the state and state religion to his own On Liberty and Utilitarianism. Mill’s scheme for unifying the sciences was his Aristotelian System of Logic (1843). For Spencer, both were involved in his social Darwinism. Neither Mill nor Spencer were scientists. They were autodidacts, the L Ron Hubbards and Ayn Rands of their time. Soon, however, Positivism acquired academic forms and increasing academic respectability, perhaps partly because of its association with

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Chapter 1

authoritarian politics but also because it was just what Comte said it was: (dogmatic) religion and (dogmatic) metaphysics in a new form. It reached the height of its infuence in Europe in the years just before World War II, and in the United States in the years just after. The Harvard Department of Social Relations, where Schneider and many that he criticized had been graduate students, was an interdisciplinary program specifcally designed in the immediate postwar years to bring together positivistic theory from the various social sciences and to exclude nonpositivistic theory. The curriculum included Vienna Circle Positivism; French sociology of Durkheim, Maus, and others; the German sociology of Weber, Simmel, and others; Mill’s theory and method; stimulus–response psychology; and Freudian psychoanalysis. The latter is not Positivistic in origin but is parallel in method. It embodies the same underlying conception of theory as a logically closed system of defnitions that cannot be refuted by evidence, and that somehow determines individual behavior. Evidently, by coming together in this way and excluding all opposition, the faculty sought to create the kind of total integration that Comte envisioned. It worked as a system of indoctrination, obviously, but it failed as science. The department began in 1946. It disintegrated in 1972. The kinship apocalypse was an extension of this dissolution. The “quartet” of supposedly universal types of institutions that Schneider rejected was a prominent dogma of the program, a central part of Talcott Parsons’s “general theory of action.” The Columbia University Anthropology Department, which had been founded by Boas, made a similar Positivist turn at about the same time. Marvin Harris’ tendentiously positivistic The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968) speaks for it. Harris famously demeaned Boas’s perspective as not science, which was concerned with general laws, but as “historical particularism.” Other major enclaves were in the anthropology departments at Berkeley, Stanford, Chicago, Yale, and Pittsburg. We will return to this line of development and the positivist apocalypse in kinship studies shortly. But before this gets too depressing we should say more about the experimental alternative. SCIENCE REQUIRES EXPERIMENT The most generic term for the branch of anthropology that focuses on the study of living human communities is “ethnology.” The phrases “cultural anthropology” and “social anthropology” are sometimes used as synonyms for ethnology, but are also often used to designate competing theoretical approaches to it. Malinowski’s approach to ethnology focused on social organization. Boas’s focused more on the broad question of what humans obtain through

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Introduction

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culture—in the sense of invention and learning—and what we obtain through nature—in the sense of our own physiology and our interaction with the physical world. They both began in the physical sciences: Boas in comparative anatomy and human geography and Malinowski in physics. They both recognized that the feldwork site has to be the ethnological counterpart of the experimental laboratory. An experiment is a situation constructed to decide between several possible answers to an empirical question by means of an unambiguous observation. In ethnology, such situations have to be designed and constructed by the ethnologist in the feld. This is usually done by asking carefully framed questions in carefully chosen contexts, although it can also involve engaging in specifc activities, collecting specifc types of material objects, and conducting surveys and censuses. Accordingly, accounts of the societies being described must also include accounts of how the feldwork was conducted that led to the description. These descriptions may seem informal, but they have to be there and it is important for readers to pay attention to the way they allow the ethnologist to decide that one description is correct and another wrong. From the second century CE to Copernicus and Galileo, the most important work that explained the assumptions of experimental science was the encyclopedic Contra Dogmaticus of the medical skeptic Sextus Empiricus. This established the central tenet: that postulating things beyond experience explains nothing in experience. We explain things in experience by relating them to other things in experience (Leaf, 1976:31–59; Goold, 1976; Burnyeat, 1983). This is what experiments do, and they do so in a way that others can also experience. The main empirical theories that support the present analysis of social organizations that we present here are described in the introduction to chapter 3. At the end of the eighteenth century, the critical works of Immanuel Kant decisively shifted the balance of credibility and authority between dogmatic philosophy and the skeptical tradition to the side of empiricism (then also called natural philosophy). Kant says that his starting point was the skeptical conclusion of David Hume regarding the source of our idea of cause and effect. Hume argued that it was neither innate in the mind and imposed on matter as idealists argued nor imposed on our minds by sense impressions that repeatedly follow one another as materialists claimed. He showed this with a thought experiment, which you can easily also do as an actual experiment. It is stunningly simple. If we hold up and release a book or some other object many times, it will always fall. Do this many times. Then hold it up again. You will see that you can still imagine that it will not. You can imagine it will stay suspended, or fy off in some direction. That’s it. This, by itself, proves that there is no compulsion. Repetition has therefore not caused you to believe that it will fall.

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So, if we do not have the idea of cause and effect because nature causes us to do so, where does it come from? Hume’s answer was “custom and habit.” We learn it from each other. It may seem obvious once it is said, but in the previous two thousand years of debate between idealism and materialism in the dogmatic tradition, no one had done so. Kant said that his purpose was to put Hume’s analysis in general terms, in order to create a “formal science” (Kant, 1783:262–63). That is, his aim was to explain how people create customs and habits and, conversely, how custom and habit provide fundamental organizing concepts such as cause and effect. A “formal science” meant something like Newton’s physics. The present analysis of kinship is also a formal science in Kant’s sense. The Kantian roots of the ethnology of Boas and Malinowski have been widely recognized (Stocking, 1968:143; Leaf, 1979:180ff, 186; Lewis, 2001; Fabian, 2012). Kant pursued this project with extraordinary intensity. His argument was a long series of analyses of common actions, thoughts, and interactions accompanied by constant invitations to his readers to test his claims on their own actions, thoughts, and interactions. His results stimulated an enormous expansion of empirical social and behavioral science in the early nineteenth century. These included new ways to think of ancient topics such as law and politics, as well as the new sciences of human geography, experimental psychology, social psychology, linguistics, and anthropology. This scholarly explosion was intimately connected to the establishment and spread of research universities, beginning with the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin in 1810. Kant argued that objective knowledge is built upon subjective knowledge by construing subjective knowledge under certain shared categories. Kant characterized these as “synthetic a priori.” This means that they appeared to be true by defnition (a priori) but also at the same time appeared to be factual (synthetic). In formal logic, every statement has a subject and a predicate. The predicate modifes the subject; it is normally taken as describing the subject. In a purely analytic statement, the predicate either simply is the defnition of the subject, as in “The human species is ‘homo sapiens.’” Or it restates something implicit in that defnition, as in “man is mortal.” Synthetic a priori statements, by contrast, are true by defnition but the predicate of the sentence does not merely repeat an idea or quality that was already present in the defnition of the subject of the sentence. It also “expands” it, as in “The angles of a right triangle sum to 180 degrees.” So it is not true only by defnition. It is also true in fact. And to prove that something is true in fact, you cannot merely reassert the defnition. You have to demonstrate it. Kant’s analyses were important in several of the political streams that fed into the Revolution of 1848. This was a widespread outbreak of efforts

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Introduction

9

to replace monarchial and authoritarian European governments with more democratic forms. But the liberal-democratic movements were joined by a variety of ideological socialist-authoritarian movements that often worked at cross-purposes, and dissolved into pockets of local disorder. These were then suppressed piecemeal by an alliance of resurgent monarchists and new industrial capitalists who retained control of most military forces. Positivism, Social Darwinism, Utilitarianism, and neo-Kantian idealism gained ground in popular and academic discussions as justifcations for this suppression. In the United States, the reaffrmation of Kantian, empirical, and democratic values seems to have been more clearly marked than in Europe. Beginning in 1872, an interdisciplinary group of professionals and scientists at Harvard formulated American Pragmatism to update and reinvigorate skepticism and experimentalism in the light of the new empirical studies that Kant’s formulations had accelerated in law, linguistics, psychology, ethnology, and the physical sciences. The founding pragmatists included Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce. The name “pragmatism” was adapted by Peirce from the German pragmatisch, as used in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Critik der praktischen Vernunft). It is cognate with the English word “practical.” For Kant, it refers to the relationship between means and ends in human social behavior. In the pragmatic view, the purpose of thought is to make decisions. Decisions are about what to do. To understand what someone is communicating is to be able to demonstrate practical agreement or disagreement on what to do. Meanings are not simply “referents,” as positivists consistently argued. The meanings of some words include the idea that they designate specifc objects or types of objects, like labels, but other words have meanings of different kinds. For example, what is the object designated by “of,” or “is,” or “referent?” For pragmatists, as for Kant, the best-developed model of what knowledge is and how it is used is experimental science. Pragmatists see science as a body of experiments in a community of experimenters, with knowledge embedded in social processes. Knowledge in ordinary society develops the same way. The only difference is that the methods are less formal and rigorous. James described pragmatism as “radical empiricism.” His intent was to contrast it with the David Hume’s ordinary empiricism. His description applies here: To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as “real” as anything else in the system. (1904:534)

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All theory connects some facts to other facts. In radical empiricism, we connect fact A to fact C by fnding fact B which is connected to fact A and fact C. Everything is facts. All should be observable. All should be subject to verifcation or falsifcation. In nonempirical theory there may still be a concern with fact A and fact C, but the connection will be by one or more dogmatic defnitions, postulates, hypotheses, suppositions, logical errors, or excuses. It has been more diffcult to develop empirical theory in the social sciences than in the physical sciences for three main reasons. One is because, for humans, many times fact A, fact B, or fact C are ideas. Observing other people’s ideas is not a simple process. In the short run, when we hear somebody speak or when we interpret some action, the idea that we associate with what we hear or see has to come from us. We impute it. So, if we do not think of the communicative process as extending beyond this, it is easy to leap to the conclusion that the only ideas we can observe are those in our own minds; we cannot observe ideas in the minds of others. But, in fact, communication is not a momentary process. We check and correct these imputations. This involves building on a remembered past and projecting toward a conceived future, and it involves action as well as thought. We know from the past that the ideas we impute have agreed-upon implications, and we know who is party to this agreement. We can check in the future to see if the present implications hold up. And then we can adjust our thinking or action according to whether it does or does not. What we impute at any point in time is subject to adjustment by constant and complex feedback over many periods of time with many different durations, and all of this is done in interaction with others (Leaf, 2005). People normally carry out this process of building and adjusting understandings intuitively, relying on cultural ideas that are so deeply ingrained that they do not need to be mentioned. Indeed, being too explicit about them may create confusion. A man does not normally begin a conversation with his wife by saying “I am your husband and you are my wife and I am speaking to you in that capacity.” But with elicitation methods such as the cultural frame analysis that is described here, ideas that are usually so deeply ingrained that they do not need to be mentioned can be brought out into the open and made as precisely observable as any phenomena of nature (Leaf, 2006). The second main reason that it has been especially diffcult to develop empirical social theory is that in order to be truly comprehensive it should apply to itself. It should apply to social analysis and the creation of social theory just it applies to every other human activity. Everything we say of others should also apply to ourselves and everything we see in ourselves must be recognized in our descriptions of others. In the nineteenth century this assumption was characterized as the “hypothesis of the psychic unity of

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Introduction

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man.” Only this can be self-consistent as well as consistent with actual experience. It is anthropology inside and out; it is science inside and out. The third reason is that growing up in a human community we have learned to use our cultural idea systems ideas normatively, to impute them to behavior as what others ought to agree to, rather than simply to observe what others agree to in fact. As a member, such behavior is necessary. As observers, however, this is ethnocentrism and is what we should avoid. All anthropologists know this in principle, but it can be diffcult to know how to apply the principle in practice. The American pragmatists rarely cite Kant directly but they were very clear about their debts to the nineteenth-century legal scholars, linguists, psychologists, and ethnologists who built on his foundation. The primary difference between the pragmatists and Kant is that the pragmatists say little or nothing about the synthetic a priori. They were less concerned with the epistemology of experiment and more concerned with its uses. These applications included education, social work, newspaper writing, law, linguistics, human geography, psychology, government, and anthropology. Pragmatic social and behavioral scientists recognize that people think, that thinking involves ideas, that ideas guide action, and that demonstrating the understanding of ideas has a future reference. The signifcance of scientifc experiment as a general model of thought is not just that it involves prediction. It is also that it is social in the sense of obtaining a public consensus, and that when a specifc prediction is tested the test applies to all the assumptions upon which it was based. Predicting that Mercury will be at a given point in the sky at a given time is not just a way to validate the astronomer’s understanding of Mercury. It is a way to validate all of the mathematical and physical assumptions that the prediction was based on. If Mercury is not where it was expected to be, as was the case with observations made in the early part of the twentieth century, there must be something about the reasoning that is wrong, and this discrepancy became one of the facts upon which Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was grounded. Boas and Malinowski consistently focused on ideas held in consensus. They ask what the ideas are and how the consensus is formed. Second, they conduct feldwork itself as a series of experiments, describing both how they arrived at the ideas they are testing for and how they interpret their tests. Third, the ideas they test for always include the unity of culture and the idea of cultural determinism. Do the people they are describing have one set of organizations, values, and ideas or many? Are the people they describe controlled by their ideas, beliefs, and values, like cultural puppets or do they use them in making choices among options as we do? For Boas, the main result of these tests was to establish the separateness of the three different topics that dominate most of his work: race, language, and culture. For Malinowski, the

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main result was to establish two main points. The frst was organizational pluralism: societies have multiple institutions. The second was that while these institutions often perform the same functions as Western institutions, they can be very unlike them in the way they are conceptualized and organized. In his terms, the theory presented here shows how basic ideas of kinship in any society are used to construct and maintain its various kinship institutions. Malinowski’s idea of an institution was much less precisely operationalized than the present theory, but he was defnitely not offering some supposedly universal list of organizational types like Schneider’s “quartet.” We say more about this in chapter 3. The key ideas of kinship systems described here, beginning with the kinship maps, are systems of indigenous synthetic a priori knowledge in Kant’s sense. So are the other idea systems used to form nonkinship organizations. Building on the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, we have described the formal properties that make them so (Leaf, 2009; Leaf and Read, 2012) and will summarize those fndings again here. We provide specifc and detailed descriptions of the logical/mathematical properties of these ideas that allow them to be at once a priori and synthetic, in Kant’s terms, and to be used to create coherent, complex, and compelling systems of reciprocal social relations that their users recognize as subjectively meaningful and objectively actionable and enforceable, as real as love, hate, life, and death.

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ORGANIZATIONAL IDEAS AND PERFORMANCES Once we acknowledge that we are describing ideas, we can go on to acknowledge a very important point about the ideas specifcally used to describe and create organizations. They use spatial imagery. People everywhere describe organizations as big or small, related as whole to part, loosely or tightly run, as being subordinate or superior to one another, as being separate from one another, and as being in this or that city, state, or region. We give them shapes, such as hierarchical, horizontal, compact, spread out, far-reaching, clearly bounded, or not clearly bounded. We describe people as being in them or out of them, joining them or leaving them. We draw or diagram them, and so on. This imagery varies by culture and by specifc types of organizations. In the United States, for example, we would speak of “flling a vacant job position,” but we do not use this kind of imagery for a kinship position; we speak of hierarchies in administrations but describe all citizens as equal. In India, people are not described as being “in” factions but as “supporting” them. People are “of” families and castes, but “in university” and “in service” (government employment). Such differences in imagery matter. Our purpose is to

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Introduction

13

understand them, not overcome or override them. They have implications for what else is said and what is done. The imaginary space in social ideas is related to the way they are enacted by physical individuals in physical space. It is a kind of built-in stage instruction. But it can rarely be enacted directly. A person at the “top” of an organization as it is imagined cannot normally be at the top of it in a physical sense. So, the idea of “on top” has to be transposed to something that can be enacted in a physical space and physical time. This usually involves symbols that represent the idea of “on top,” subordinate, and so on. These are performances of the organization. Calling them such does not mean that they are in any way unreal or mere pretense. When a judge declares a judgment from a judicial bench wearing judicial robes, this does not mean he or she is merely pretending to be a judge. It is how he or she does the work of a judge. The theory of organizations laid out in chapter 3 describes the elements that go into performing organizations and institutions of all kinds, although the discussion is weighted toward the issues specifc to kinship organizations and institutions. OUR LARGER THEORETICAL CONTEXT

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The most comprehensive description of the present approach to kinship is given in Human Thought and Social Organization: Anthropology on a New Plane (Leaf and Read, 2012). The description here presupposes less background in previous arguments and formal methods. We also concentrate more on the kinship map and its uses and do not go nearly as far into the mathematical analysis of its underlying structure through the kin term map. A still wider theoretical and experimental context for Human Thought and Social Organization in turn is provided in Social Organizations and Social Theory (Leaf, 2009). THE CHAPTERS Chapter 2 traces the path of developments that led to the kinship apocalypse. This is to establish three things: (1) what mistakes were made in the past, (2) how to avoid them, and (3) how earlier scholarship can still, often, be constructively (and empirically) reinterpreted. Chapter 3 provides the general theory of social organization that the present theory of kinship organization is part of. Chapter 4 relates kinship organization to the evolution of human reproductive biology. It is divided into two parts. The frst describes the evolution of the human biosocial family and organization, which has been largely constant

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for all species of the genus Homo. The second part describes the emergence in the Upper Paleolithic of the idea-based social organization of our own species as the way we manage ourselves. Chapter 5 focuses on the elicitation of kinship maps, their logical structure, and the ways they vary from one to another. Chapter 6 describes the kinds of ideas that are added to the kinship maps in order to enable people to create effective organizational charters of prominent types of kinship organizations in the fve main types of traditional and modern societies. Chapter 7 describes the multiple organizations of the domestic group (household) and the more encompassing types of kinship organizations that they or their members take part in. Domestic group organization is more complex than the way it has normally been described, but the mechanisms devised for sustaining social complexity without disorder are more elegant than the usual descriptions. After this, we describe specifc cases. Chapter 8 describes the kinship system of the Hopi, in Northern Arizona. There are six main reasons for this choice. First, kinship is a very prominent part of Hopi life, as it is with almost all small-scale societies. Second, Hopi society and Hopi kinship have been exceptionally well documented. Third, Hopi cultural assumptions are very different from the American European cultural assumptions of most analysts. Fourth, they survive as an agricultural community under conditions where mainstream American agriculture is not viable. Kinship is integral to this survival. Fifth, the theoretical disputes among those who have analyzed Hopi kinship illustrate very nicely the larger theoretical divisions that concern us here. And sixth, the Hopi can also speak for themselves regarding the adequacy or usefulness of these alternative approaches, and they do so. Chapter 9 describes the Purum, a “hill tribe” in Northeast India that was the subject of Needham’s Structure and Sentiment (1962). Needham offered this as a decisive “test case” for alliance theory. Schneider’s reply was Some Muddles in the Models. Leaf was Schneider’s student while Schneider was working on it and originally prepared the analysis here as a Master’s paper in the context of their discussions. This included the frst form of the idea of a kinship map that Leaf subsequently tested in his dissertation feldwork. Schneider’s published conclusion was that Needham’s reanalysis ftted the facts only “loosely” (1965:481, 487). Although he cited Leaf’s paper, he did not explain its argument. Chapter 10 addresses the long-standing problem of explaining what Morgan described as the “Dravidian” kinship system that he claims was once worldwide. It compares Tamil with Seneca, considered by Morgan to be like a Dravidian terminology, from the present theoretical perspective and in the

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Introduction

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light of modern ethnography. This underlines the importance of being able to understand each feature of each kinship system in its own context. Chapter 11 pulls together a number of points in the previous chapters that pertain to the way the kinship ideas and organizations refect internal requirements of thought itself, and therefore of human imagination itself. The focus of the previous chapters has been on seeing how different ideas are brought together as a coherent idea system whose dimensions can be displayed through a kinship map and analyzed through a kin term map. Exactly how and in what way there can be a coherent idea system for the kinship relations expressed through the kin terms making up a kinship terminology has been in the background in these chapters. This chapter, based on the extensive work of Read (especially 1984, 2007, 2010; Read and Behrens, 1990; Giovanni and Read, 2003; Leaf and Read, 2012; Read, Fischer and Lehman, 2013) on the generative logic of kinship terminology systems, foregrounds the computational basis that both defnes kin term relations and organizes them into a coherent and consistent system of relations that provides the conceptual basis for the interaction of group members as kin. Exposing the computational basis for kin term relations establishes a paradigm shift (Read, 2007). It defnitively shows there is a generative logic to the system of kin terms expressed through a kinship terminology that does not depend upon prior reference to genealogical relations as the basis for providing the meaning of kin terms (Read, 2007; Read, Fischer, and Lehman, 2013). In so doing, Schneider’s perception that kinship systems are not frst and foremost based on genealogical relations can now be implemented rigorously, not by falsely rejecting kinship as if it were simply a Western construct imposed on others, but by making evident the conceptual basis through which a kinship terminology is a computational system for the construction of a space of kinship relations expressed through the kin terms making up a kinship terminology. The kin term map makes evident that the terminology is a system of kin terms in which there is a core set of kin terms from which other kin term relations can be expressed. This chapter shows precisely how this is realized. Since anthropologists normally do not have the mathematical background that such analysis requires, the next question, raised by his graduate student, Clifford Behrens, was whether it would be possible to develop a computer program to embody and make accessible the mathematical part of the analysis for a researcher without a mathematical background. Read and Behrens then developed the Kinship Analysis Expert System (KAES), a computer program Read developed further with Michael Fischer. The program allows a user to enter kin terms individually, arrange them in the form of a kin term map and reduce it to a structural core by choosing from a menu of programmed steps. The program can test such reduced maps for simplicity—meaning that they

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cannot be reduced further. And once the maps are simplifed it can determine if it is possible to regenerate them algebraically. This process confrms beyond any reasonable doubt that the logical order and generative power that we argue is expressed in kin term maps is indeed within them, and not imposed by us upon them since this hypothesis is falsifable, a criterion that is not applicable to formal methods such as componential analysis and rewrite rules. This chapter describes both the conceptual basis for the mathematical analysis and its implementation in the KAES computer program. Chapter 12 is the conclusion. It includes discussion of two new ways to classify kinship systems based on the present theory. These set a wide range of important empirical problems, some of which have long been recognized and some of which are new. Finally, it summarizes what kinship can help us explain and how kinship itself can be explained.

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Chapter 2

The Path to the Kinship Apocalypse

It is important to understand how anthropologists got into the errors and confusions that Schneider pointed out, for two main reasons. The frst is that in order to avoid repeating past errors we should know what they were. The second is that our predecessors were dealing with real phenomena; they just misdescribed them. The story begins with Lewis Henry Morgan. It proceeds step by step through an increasing reliance on the idea that the universality of kinship refected universal facts of human reproductive biology, increasing diffculty supporting this view of kinship empirically, and increasing reliance on ideas drawn from positivistic philosophy to justify it in the absence of such empirical support.

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LEWIS HENRY MORGAN Morgan was a lawyer in Rochester, New York. Anthropological recognition of the central importance of kinship terminology starts with him. Morgan’s legal and scientifc career extended from 1841 to his death in 1881. The area in which Rochester is located had been formerly controlled by the League of the Iroquois, fve tribes speaking closely related languages. By common agreement, all used the same kinship system and the same related system of government. One of the fve tribes was the Seneca. By Morgan’s time, their power and independence were fading memories. Their territory in the United States had been reduced to a few small reservations. Morgan felt that they were on the edge of disappearing entirely. With a few friends, he formed an avocational association, on the model of the Masons or the Elks, dedicated to reenacting 17

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their culture. He also provided legal representation to support their struggle to protect their reservation land from illegal acquisition by the Ogden Land Company (Hauptman, 2010). In the course of this association, he learned that their rules of inheritance were matrilineal (through the mother) and that the women of the lineages appointed the men who made up the governing council. These rules of succession were of course phrased using their names for kinship relations. Morgan called these names “terms of relationship.” The phrase “kinship terminology” was not used until the 1920s. But he recognized that the terms had defnite conceptual properties, as did the English terms that translated them: they were egocentric, they were reciprocal, and it was clear to the users which terms were terms of this type and which were not. Morgan connected his experience with the Iroquois to a contemporary debate in legal history and theory. This had its roots in Kant’s social–psychological analyses of morality and law. For morality, Kant had shown how individuals in a community, interacting in accordance with the principle of reciprocity, would be rationally compelled to generate what they all would have to regard as universally binding principles. They would have to recognize a logical necessity for principles of action to be accepted universally. His analysis of law found the same rational drive for universality in the tradition of democratic law descending from the Roman Republic. Building on this, in 1815, Friedrich Von Savigny had supported Kant’s recognition of this fundamental continuity by showing empirically that while the Roman Empire had died, the Roman law that began in the Republic had not. It had continued to evolve by the same fundamentally social and rational communicative processes. Savigny’s often-quoted conclusion was that “law grows out of the life of the people.” Savigny’s study was at the frontier of science in its day. His conclusions were closely bound to his evidence. They still stand, although the frontiers have moved on to other topics. His data consisted of several caches of legal records of actual transactions in different European cities. They dated between the second century, when the Roman Imperial bureaucracy collapsed, and the ffteenth. To analyze them, he developed what he called the “comparative method.” With it, he could systematically establish which usages were older and which were more recent. This was the frst form of our own cultural frame analysis. It let him see the evolution of legal customs, including the evolution of the legal offces themselves. The results showed that modern European law grew “organically” out of Roman law as the original Roman populations of Roman colonies in Europe merged with the various non-Roman populations among whom they had settled or who had migrated into the Roman area subsequently. Since Savigny described the evolution of Roman law and European society after Rome, this naturally posed the question of what came before Rome.

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The legal theorists of ancient Rome itself had always held that the original principle of Roman law was the patria potestas, the power of the father. The anthropological lawyers accepted this as fact. So, the question for them was where the patria potestas came from in turn. Several argued that this “patriarchal” system could not have been the original form of law because it required too many complex assumptions and social conventions to connect men to their male offspring. Something much simpler and more obvious must have preceded it. This must have been based on descent through the mother, hence “matriarchy.” Morgan agreed with this view. But how could this be proved? His answer was to develop a version of Savigny’s comparative method focused on the forms of the family. He considered these forms to have been refected in terms of relations. So, by collecting and analyzing these terms, he could determine the various forms of the family and arrange them in a logical evolutionary sequence. His conclusions were presented in Systems of Consanguinity and Affnity in the Human Family (1871). This was 661 pages long and published by the Smithsonian Institute, putting a great strain on their budget. It was followed by the much shorter Ancient Society (1877), published privately leaving out many tables that had presented his terminological results in different ways. But the most interpretable tables were still there. In Morgan’s argument, “consanguinity” and “affnity” are technical terms, to be used in the precise sense Morgan gives them. Here is Morgan’s description:

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Relationships are of two kinds: First, by consanguinity, or blood: second, by affnity, or marriage. Consanguinity, which is the relation of persons descended from the same ancestor, is also of two kinds, lineal and collateral. Lineal consanguinity is the connection which subsists among persons of whom one is descended from the other. Collateral consanguinity is the connection which exists among persons who are descended from a common ancestor, but not from each other. Marriage relationships exist by custom. (1871:17)

He then explains how systems of consanguinity can be compared: In every supposable plan of consanguinity, where marriage between single pairs exists, there must be a lineal and several collateral lines. Each person, also, in constructing his own table becomes the central point, or Ego, from whom outward is reckoned the degree of relationship of each kinsman, and to whom the relationship returns. His position is necessarily in the lineal line. In a chart of relationships this line is vertical. Upon it may be inscribed, above and below any given person, his several ancestors and descendants in a direct series from father to son, and these persons together will constitute his right lineal male line, which is also called the trunk, or common stock of descent. Out of this trunk

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line emerge the several collateral lines, male and female, which are numbered outwardly. It will be suffcient for a perfect knowledge of the system to limit the explanation to the main lineal line, and to a single male and female branch of each of the collateral lines, including those on the father’s side and on the mother’s side, and proceeding in each from the parent to one only of his or her children, although it will include but a small portion of the kindred of Ego either in the ascending or descending series. An attempt to follow all the divisions and branches of the several collateral lines, which increase in number in the ascending series in a geometrical ratio, would embarrass the reader without rendering the system itself more intelligible. (Ibid.)

That is, Morgan is imagining a single main descent line for each person, with that person as “Ego” at its center. These are Ego’s direct ancestors and direct descendants—in lawyerly terms, his relations of the “whole blood.” Then, at each point above ego, there is a single line of “collateral” relations, who share one of the ancestors at that level but not both: frst collaterals, second collaterals, and so on. On the basis of this idea of consanguinity, Morgan made up a questionnaire that asked for the indigenous terms for a list of 219 characterizations of a “type of person” that the speaker was related to. He did not use the term “collateral” in the characterizations, but he used the same imagery. Table 2.1 is the beginning of his table comparing Seneca and Tamil, which we will return to several times as we proceed. The numbers and characterizations are from his standard list in his standard order. As can be readily seen, the frst sixteen are the positions in ego’s “lineal line,” from great grandfather’s father to great grandson’s daughter. All the rest are collaterals, beginning with elder brother. Morgan obtained and compared returns from 200 societies. Some were other American Indian groups that he visited frsthand. Most came from American diplomats, missionaries, resident traders, and the like around the world. It was an enormous effort. Morgan argued that the patterns he found refect the systems of marriage and descent in use at the time that they were created, which persisted long after the original conditions had disappeared. So, he could use these terms as evidence of what the earlier systems had been. His unit of study was “nations.” He assumes that nations with the same system of consanguinity have the same type of families. On the basis of this analysis, Morgan argued that all systems of relationship divided into two main classes: descriptive and classifcatory. The former distinguished lineals from collaterals properly. The latter did not. The former would be associated with “monogamian” families and “civilization.” The latter with various forms of group marriage and the stages of society before civilization, from savagery to barbarism. Each of these divisions in

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Hoc’- sate Oc’-sote Hoc’-sote Oc’-sote Hoc’-sote Oc’-sote Ha’-nih No-yeh’ Ha-ah’-wuk Ka-ah’-wuk Ha-ya’-da Ka-ya’-da Ka-ya’-da Ka-ya’-da Ha-ya’-da Ka-ya’-da Ha’-je

My G grandfather’s father My G grandfather’s mother My G grandfather My G grandmother My grandfather My grandmother My father My mother My son My daughter My grandson My grand-daughter My G grandson My G grand-daughter My G grandson’s son My G grandson’s daughter My elder brother

My elder sister

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18

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Translation

My elder sister

My grandfather My grandmother My grandfather My grandmother My grandfather My grandmother My father My mother My son My daughter My grandson My grand-daughter My grandson My grand-daughter My grandson My grand-daughter My elder brother

Source: http:​/​/www​​.marx​​ists.​​org​/r​​efere​​nce​/a​​rchiv​​e​/mor​​gan​-l​​ewis/​​ancie​​nt​-so​​​ciety​​/ch23​​.htm.​

Ah’-je

Relationship in SenecaIroquois

Description of Persons

Table 2.1  Morgan’s Glosses for Seneca and Tamil

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Relationship in Tamil En muppaddan En muppaddi En puddan En puddi En paddan En paddi En takkappan En tay En makan En makal En peran En pertti En irandam peran En irandam pertti En mundam peran En mundam pertti En tamalyah, b annan En akkari, b tamakay

Translation

My elder sister

My 3rd grandfather My 3rd grandmother My 2nd grandfather My 2nd grandmother My grandfather My grandmother My father My mother My son My daughter My grandson My grand-daughter My 2nd grandson My 2nd grand-daughter My 3rd grandson My 3rd grand-daughter My elder brother

The Path to the Kinship Apocalypse 21

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turn was divided into families. The overall arrangement was from highest to lowest, meaning most advanced and fully developed intellectually to least advanced and least developed intellectually. There were three groups of nations in the descriptive system: Aryan, Semitic, and Uralic. There were fve groups among the classifcatory systems, again in order of declining level of evolutionary development: Ganowanian, Eskimo, Turanian, and Malayan, plus a group of “unclassifed Asiatic Nations.” The Ganowanian group contains the American Indian nations; the Turanian contains Asian nations from South India to China, and Malayan is a small group of island peoples in Micronesia and Polynesia. While Morgan included all the glosses for all 200 groups in his detailed tables, he did not draw upon this detail in making these groupings. Rather, his argument was frst to infer a type of family structure, mainly meaning a type of marriage, and then to group the nations according to this. He recognized that these groupings often differed from existing scholarly groupings based on language. There is, for example, no question that the three main language groups in Morgan’s Turanian—Dravidian languages of South India, the IndoAryan languages of North India, and Chinese—are completely unrelated to one another. There is no connection between them as far back as any kind of linguistic comparison lets us see. This was known in Morgan’s time. But he considered his own groupings equally authoritative. On the basis of these comparisons, Morgan argued that the frst form of the family was “group marriage,” meaning that groups of brothers married groups of their own sisters. Each person in one group was spouse to all of those in the other without distinction. The children of each were the children of all. (Later writers defne group marriage to be the marriage of all males in one group, however determined, with the females of a second group.) Gradually, distinctions were added between lineal descendants and collaterals, and between consanguines and affnes, thereby progressing through the stages of “Savagery” and “Barbarism” to the “Monogamian” form of marriage associated with descriptive terminologies and civilized society. The highest form of barbarism was represented by what Morgan called the Dravidian kinship system. This was characterized by matrilineal descent and cross-cousin marriage. For a male, this means he marries a woman he refers to by the same kin term he would use to refer to his mother’s brother’s daughter or to his father’s sister’s daughter. In kinship terminologies, this is refected in the use of the same terms for cross-cousins and for one’s own and one’s sibling’s spouses, among other persons. Anthropologists defne a cross-cousin as a cousin whose parent linking them to you is the opposite sex of the parent that links you to them: mother’s brother’s child or father’s sister’s child. Dravidian is a group of languages spoken mainly in South India.

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Dravidian languages do have such terminologies and such marriage rules. According to Morgan, so did the Seneca. Morgan’s survey left no reasonable doubt that an ego-centered system of terms of relation exists in every human community. This alone has been enough to credit him with “the discovery of kinship” (Trautman, 2008). But a second contribution is the clear fact that that no one responded with 218 distinct indigenous terms. The usual number is between twenty and thirtyfve. So, actual kinship terminologies always designate classes, and in these classes what Morgan considered to be different types of persons are grouped in different ways. This set the basic question that anthropologists have been working on until now: what are the principles of classifcation? Table 2.1 gives the frst eighteen glosses for Tamil and Seneca from Morgan’s table representing the “Punaluan” family system, subsequently more usually called Dravidian. If Tamil did exactly correspond to Seneca, then every unique term in the table representing a Tamil term would correspond to one and only one Seneca term. The Tamil and Seneca terms would then be exact translation equivalents of one another. Even from this small sample, we can see that this is not the case. But we will leave a detailed comparison for chapter 10. Here, it is important to point out several other features that eventually led to the problems pointed out by Schneider. The most obvious is the use of English terms for glosses. Morgan did not naïvely assume that all English terms should be equally meaningful to non-English speakers in making his enquiries. The description column does not use the more obviously ambiguous English terms cousin, uncle, aunt, nephew, or niece. These only occur in the “translation” column, presumably meaning that they occur as local translations established by local convention. He also understood the need for qualifers that English kinship does not recognize—elder brother versus younger, for example, and sex of speaker. But he does use “grandfather,” “great grandfather,” and “great greatgrandfather,” and their feminine counterparts and reciprocals. They are, as noted, crucial to his defnition of “consanguinity.” But they are also every bit as ethnocentric and culturally specifc as “uncle” and “cousin.” Morgan’s consanguineal diagrams are not facts of nature, but they are artifacts of his own cultural background. In addition, Morgan’s listwise method was fundamentally defective in itself. Lists cannot show if the terms elicited form a system and provide no way to close the possible gaps. Note that while his list included “grandfather” and the like it did not include “father of father,” “mother of father,” and so on, although they are less ambiguous. It is easy to imagine others. If the method does not show whether the results are complete, it also cannot show whether they are coherent, with no inconsistencies. Nor is there any way to know if

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we have reached any boundaries. A list is not a system, and the shorter the list is the larger the gaps are bound to be. Further, it is also not at all clear how the terms are learned. If we cannot see how they are learned, and thereby perpetuated through time and spread through a culture, we can never be sure that we are describing a cultural reality in the community we are trying to understand rather than an arbitrary construction of our own we are simply imposing.

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THE GENEALOGICAL METHOD By the end of the nineteenth century, numerous advances in the physical sciences and paleontology showed that the lawyers’ evolutionary methods were misconceived. It was not possible to infer anything about the earliest human social organization from the comparative study of living and historic communities. The simplest reason was that the time scale over which the human species had evolved after the division from our ape cousins had been found to be far longer than any of the comparative lawyers imagined. It was millions of years. The lawyers had assumed that it was from fve to twenty thousand. So the two thousand or so years of human history the lawyers actually knew about was no longer a major portion. In addition, anthropology was taking hold as an academic discipline and much more knowledgeable and selfcritical scholars were joining the discussion. One of the most prominent early academic anthropologists who focused on kinship was Edvard Westermarck, a philosopher in the Kantian tradition by training and ethnologist by choice. In 1891, he published his 644-page History of Human Marriage. In 1907, he was appointed the frst Professor of Sociology at the University of London. Westermarck showed that the core of substantially all forms of the human family was a man, a woman, and their children. It did not matter whether rules of descent were patrilineal or matrilineal, or whether the society seemed patriarchal or matriarchal. There was no group marriage, in Morgan’s sense or in any other sense. So “Monogamian” marriage was not confned to civilization or to descriptive terminologies. This conclusion still stands. Recognizing that the longer geological time scale put the original form of society well out of the reach of comparative evidence they had access to, anthropologists shifted instead to the problem of fnding the most “primitive” or basic form that they could fnd evidence for. But this new quest was based on the same unjustifed assumptions about this most primitive society that Morgan had made about the frst society. It would still be a society in which absolutely all relationships were kinship relationships. To facilitate this search, W. H. R. Rivers proposed the “genealogical method.” Its purpose was to establish every person’s genealogical relation to

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every other person. To do this, the initial problem was to fnd the genealogical meanings of their own kinship terms. And to do this, Rivers provided a list of sixty-one out of Morgan’s original 218 descriptions of persons, arranged in reciprocal pairs: father–son, father’s father–son’s child, elder–younger, and so on. The terms derived with this list would, he thought, allow the analyst to determine what he described as everyone’s “pedigree.” All the various roles, relations, and obligations of each individual could then be laid out on the resulting common framework. Rivers’ recommendations were included as a chapter in what became the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Notes and Queries in Anthropology. It is still the nearest thing anthropologists have to an offcial manual for feld research. Unfortunately, since the list extends only to the + 1 and −1 generations, any terminology obtained with it would be substantially less complete than Morgan’s. So it would also be substantially more diffcult, or impossible, to fnd out how or if it were coherent. Nonetheless, after 1910, academic anthropologists regularly published lists of kin terms that appear to refect Rivers’ method. CLASSIFYING TERMINOLOGIES

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Given lists of kintype glosses, how do we make sense of them? How do we imagine them as coherent wholes for comparative purposes? One way is by diagramming them. In 1928, Robert Lowie offered a four-way classifcation building on Rivers’ genealogical method: bifurcate merging, bifurcate

Figure 2.1  Lowie’s Terminology Classification. Source: Lowie, 1915.

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collateral, generational, and lineal. Lowie understood his defnitions as somehow genealogical. But we can diagram them and when we do we can see that they are in fact poorly realized kinship maps, although Lowie’s Positivistic conceptions of science and referential conception of meaning prevented him from recognizing them as such. In each diagram, the solid gray triangle represents the “self” position, for a male speaker. Although representing the possibilities diagrammatically this way is much more comprehensible and system-like than a list of terms with genealogical glosses, none of these precisely corresponds to the central part of any known terminology, and none reaches out to the boundaries of any known terminology. Compared to kinship maps as we now understand them, they are strikingly incomplete. There is also nothing about the differences between male and female terminologies. But given the prevailing lack of clarity about what they represented, they seemed to make sense. Building on this in turn, by the 1940s American anthropologists had widely agreed on Crow and Omaha a matrilineal and patrilineal variants of Lowie’s bifurcate merging, hence of Morgan’s Classifcatory or Dravidian. From here, the positivist path to the kinship apocalypse splits. One branch goes through the work of G. P. Murdock and his students to componential analysis and ethnoscience. The other goes through Claude Lévi-Strauss to the alliance–descent controversy.

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G. P. MURDOCK G. P. Murdock was a follower of the Social Darwinist A. G. Keller at Yale. He frmly identifed himself with the positivist streams that Keller advocated. Although he noted that he might have received “a technically more exacting training with Boas in anthropology” (1949: xii), he described Boas as “extravagantly overrated by his disciples” and “the most unsystematic of theorists” (1949: xiv). We do not need to review all the ways this failure to understand Boas’s careful empiricism appears in his body of work. The most important is that Murdock codifed a way of writing translation glosses for indigenous kinship terms that incorporated River’s genealogical assumptions and left no room for meanings of any other kind. It was based on the notion that all kinship relations could be restated in terms of a basic list of direct genealogical relations, which were universal because they were natural. The direct relations were Mo for mother, Fa for father, Br for brother, Si for sister, So for son, and Da for daughter, with some additional qualifcations including y and e for elder and younger. So, the gloss for “aunt” in English would be “MoSi, FaSi.” He and his students called these glosses “kintypes.” Combining this notation with Lowie’s scheme, Murdock proposed six basic types in place of Lowie’s four, based on the ways they grouped siblings,

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“cousins,” and children. The categories therefore had no more generational depth than Lowie’s scheme or Rivers’ method. The types were Hawaiian, Eskimo, Iroquois, Crow, Omaha, and Sudanese. (English is classed with Eskimo. In fact, they are very dissimilar.) These were used to characterize societies in Yale’s Human Relations Area Files. Murdock then used the Area Files to fnd statistical associations between terminologies thus categorized and other features of kinship systems. This was described in Social Structure (Murdock, 1949). The statistical analyses suffered from serious circularity. He found nonrandom associations, but they followed only from the way he classifed the relations to test for associations (Leaf, 1979:218). Apparently, this was widely recognized. The statistical analyses have not been repeated. But the practice of translating terms with kintypes and Murdock’s categories was widely adopted.

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COMPONENTIAL ANALYSIS One of Murdock’s students was Ward Goodenough. As an undergraduate at Yale, he took Malinowski’s seminar on anthropology during the 1940–1941 academic year, and another year-long course from George Trager where he would have learned the linguistic version of frame analysis. So he began in a solidly Kantian tradition. But during military service in World War II, he worked in a unit doing statistical surveys headed by the sociologist Samuel Stauffer. After his discharge, he returned to Yale, enrolled the graduate program in Anthropology, did feldwork with Murdock on Truk Island in 1947, and completed his PhD in 1949. Goodenough introduced componential analysis in an article describing the Truk kinship terminology in 1956. The method involves writing the meanings of the terms as strings of kintypes and then comparing the strings to fnd distinguishing contrasts. Goodenough justifed this with an explicitly positivistic referential theory of meaning. He does not say where he gets it, but the obvious sources are Mill’s A System of Logic (1843) and the Vienna Circle Positivists. Mill distinguished two types of meaning, denotation and connotation. Denotation is the material thing a word referred to. Connotation is its emotional associations for the speaker. Denotation is objective. Connotation is subjective. So, denotation is the only type of meaning that could be recognized in the statement of scientifc laws. For Goodenough, Murdock’s kintypes were denotations. He could, thereby, construe the kinship “term” as a unit of sound and its meaning as the physical thing it was linked to. Thus: The problem of determining what a linguistic form signifes is very well illustrated by kinship terms. In essence it is this: what do I have to know about A

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and B in order to say that A is B’s cousin? Clearly, people have certain criteria in mind by which they make the judgment that A is or is not B’s cousin. What the expression his cousin signifes is the particular set of criteria by which this judgment is made. (p. 195)

Componential analysis would show what one “had to know.” It consisted in frst taking each term and replacing it with the kintypes that it designated. Then the problem was only to arrange them in such a way that one could see what minimal set of contrasts distinguished each set of kintypes from the others. This was to be done by arranging them in a two-dimensional taxonomic grid, so that all the sets of denotata made neat contrasts with one another and there were no gaps. This assumes that one already has all the terms, all of their “designata,” and nothing else mixed in with the terms. It does not provide a way to get such terms and their designata if one does not already have them. Goodenough did not provide a way to assure this, and neither did anyone else who subsequently joined the effort. In the 1960s, this program was advocated by a substantial and assertive group of fresh PhDs from Yale and the Harvard Department of Social Relations. Prominent advocates of componential analysis (and the institutions where they got their PhDs) included A. K Romney (Harvard), Roy D’Andrade (Harvard), Floyd Lounsbury (Yale), Harold Conklin (Yale), Charles O. Frake (Yale), Duane Metzger (Harvard), and Anthony F. C. Wallace (Penn). Excitement was high. Romney, among others, said plainly that once they developed the method for kinship terminologies, they expected to apply it to the rest of culture. Anthropologists would fnally have the comprehensive science they sought. They would know what controlled all behavior. Diffculties multiplied as they tried to go from sketchy programmatic examples to full-scale analyses. Variations of the method and its rationale multiplied in response. Some of the variations were distinguished by different names. Some were applied to topics other than kinship. Componential analysis thus became part of the larger group of studies described as ethnoscience. But all the variations still followed Goodenough in what they took as data: terms as physical sounds in some sense and the supposedly objective physical features they referred to, not terms and the ideas they conveyed. In an especially clear example, Anthony Wallace and John Atkins reduced the components of English kinship terminology to distinctions on three dimensions that formed what they referred to as a paradigm: sex of relative (A) male (al), female (a2); generation (B): two generations above ego (b1), one generation above ego (b2), ego’s own generation (b3), one generation below ego (b4), two generations below ego (b5); lineality (C): lineal (cl), colineal (c2), ablineal (c3) (1960:61). The resulting paradigm is shown in table 2.2.

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The Path to the Kinship Apocalypse Table 2.2  Wallace and Atkins’s English “Components” c2 a2 b1

grandfather

grandmother

b2

father

mother

b3

ego

b4

son

daughter

b5

grandson

granddaughter

c3

a1

a2

uncle

aunt

brother

sister

nephew

niece

a1

a2

cousin

Source: Wallace and Atkins, 1960.​

It is neat and clear, but any English speaker can see that it is not anywhere near complete. Many terms are left out. There is no description of which positions are reciprocals of each other. We do not know its generative principles. And we do not know how it is learned. So Wallace and Atkins are no nearer than Morgan to explaining why we fnd such terms in every community and why they are important.

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ALLIANCE–DESCENT The contrast between alliance theory and descent theory was frst offered by Louis Dumont in 1961 to characterize an argument that had been going on for four years between E. R. Leach (alliance), and Meyer Fortes and others (descent). Dumont described alliance as the structural theory of kinship; descent was the theory of lineage or political systems. In a 1971 monograph, Dumont described descent theory more fully as the English theory of groups by fliation that had developed from Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard through Fortes and Jack Goody, as against the theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss oriented toward marriage alliance, as the latter was accepted, critiqued, and stated more generally by Leach and Rodney Needham. Dumont recognized that the two theories did not exclude one another logically and differed in part because they drew on different ethnographic areas. Alliance theory was a better ft for South Asian ethnography; descent theory better described African social organization. So, he described them as “mid-abstract.” In fact, neither was a single theory in a strict sense at all, in the way relativity theory is a theory, or Darwin’s theory of natural selection is. They were clusters of claims and preferred images. Some of these claims were mutually complementary while others were mutually opposed. Topics at issue ran from the interpretation of the rule that one should marry one’s mother’s brother’s daughter to the general goal of social theory and the nature of objectivity.

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Descent Theory Descent theory as represented by Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, Fortes, and Goody combined a conception of the goal of social analysis drawn from French social positivism with a conception of objectivity drawn from logical positivism. The goal was to describe each as society as a “total system” of corporate groups that determined individual behavior. The idea of objectivity was that it had to be “concrete” in some defnite, material, sense. Thought was not objective. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown was especially important, in part because a large part of his career had been devoted to traveling from university to university to advocate it. With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, he was involved in founding or shaping numerous important anthropology departments, including the University of Cape Town, the University of Sydney, the University of Chicago, and Oxford. He began his anthropological career as A. R. Brown, studying psychology under W. H. R Rivers and Alfred Haddon at Cambridge. With Haddon’s guidance and help, he traveled to the Andaman Islands (1906–1908) and Western Australia (1910–1912). Rivers and Haddon were not Positivists. They identifed themselves with the experimental psychology of Wilhelm Wundt. Radcliffe-Brown’s publication on the Andaman Islanders, published in 1932, was also his only substantial monograph. It reassessed an earlier study by E. H. Man. Refecting the perspective of Haddon and Rivers, it is focused entirely on beliefs and ceremonies, not social organization. But the Preface is different. It was written long after the research, when the thesis was fnally published as The Andaman Islanders. Here, he calls what he does “social anthropology,” defnes it as “comparative sociology” and explicitly identifes it with Durkheim and Henri Hubert. This refects an entirely different theoretical perspective. He did not rewrite the description in the body of the work to ft this new framework, but subsequently sought to illustrate it in numerous articles on a wide range of topics that ultimately fgured in the alliance–descent arguments, including the mother’s brother’s relation, joking relationships, and kinship terminologies. Unlike the French sociologists, however, Radcliffe-Brown did feldwork. In Australia, following up on the signifcance assigned to Australian kinship by Durkheim, he provided important descriptions of Australian kinship terms of relationship that appeared to embody a Dravidian marriage system in the form of what anthropologists call a “section system.” It was characterized as consisting of a system of two patrilineal lineages who permanently exchange wives back and forth. He presented his description as diagrams. He called them “genealogical tables,” but to elicit them, he could not possibly have used Rivers’ genealogical lists. They showed precisely the kind of clear and learnable pattern that listwise elicitation obscured. Figure 2.2 is a copy of his Table 1.1, from Three

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Figure 2.2  Radcliffe-Brown’s Table 1, Kariera, Male Speaker. Source: Radcliffe-Brown, 1913.

Tribes of Western Australia, representing the KarieraKariera system, male speaking (Radcliffe-Brown 1913: 152). His Table 2, for a female speaker, is fgure 2.3. The Kariera kinship terminology is associated with a type of social organization that anthropologists call a section system. In the diagram, each column represents a patrilineal lineage. Each lineage can be divided into two sections, each represented by alternate generations: even generations (including the 0 generation) would be a section and odd generations would be a section. The Kariera have four named sections: Karimuru, Burung, Palyeri, and Banaka.

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Figure 2.3  Radcliffe-Brown’s Table 2, Kariera, Female Speaker. Source: RadcliffeBrown, 1913.

Other Australian groups have reported eight and possibly sixteen sections. Marriage and descent rules can be specifed equally through sections or through the kinship terminology. Using sections, marriage is either between individuals in the Karimuru section and the Palyeri section or between individuals in the Burung and the Banaka sections. For a man in the Karimuru section, the section rule specifes that his “children” will be in the Burung section (and vice versa), while for a man in the Palyeri section his “children” will be in the Banaka section (and vice versa). Radcliffe-Brown provides no list of genealogical defnitions to gloss the Kariera terms. Evidently, he did not use one. The only glosses (like mother’s

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brother’s daughter) are genealogical relations referred to by the kin term above the gloss, although these do not show all of the genealogical relations that a kin term refers to. The article provides more detail. The lines show that each indigenous term is defned in relation to every other. Horizontal lines represent a “brother”—“sister” relation and vertical lines represent “parent”—“child” relations. So, if it is correct, it is complete and coherent. So it seems from his description as well as from the diagram itself, that he constructed it in conversation with local informants in a manner much like our own kinship maps, although his positivist conceptions of science did not allow him to see this as fnding and describing other people’s ideas. The main difference is that a kinship map has an explicit “self” position. These diagrams do not, but this is minor because a self is implied even though it is not drawn. Radcliffe-Brown’s diagram is sociocentric, but the same relations can also be represented in a kinship map that includes a central self—or rather two kinship maps, one for a male self and one for a female self. The self position is in the middle row. For the man-speaking kinship map, the male self is between the kaja/margara (“ascending/descending brother”). For the female-speaking kinship map, the female self between turdu/mari (“ascending/descending sister”) terms. Failure to recognize that the terminology can be represented both sociocentrically and egocentrically cost Radcliffe-Brown an important insight. If he had included such a self position, it would have been more obvious that he was describing a system of reciprocal classifcations that the Kariera use to build their social relations rather than a system of “objective” groups that somehow perpetuated itself among them on its own. In Africa, Evans-Pritchard, Fortes, and Goody applied the same philosophical assumptions to what they described as “segmentary” societies. These involved a hierarchy of social units from tribe through clan, lineage, and household. So they were more readily seen as total system descriptions. Relations between individuals were seen as determined by the corporate groups they were members of. Marital relations were important but did not determine social structure directly. Rather, what was most important was the defnition and juridical character of whatever groups held land or the material artifacts that were involved in de facto control of land, such as houses, cattle, and tools, and whatever rules assigned people to such groups. Since these were descent groups, it was reasonable to call it descent theory. Anthropologists have used the same approach in describing indigenous societies in North America. One important example is the initial anthropological literature on the Hopi, reviewed in chapter 8. Without explicitly invoking Radcliffe-Brown or the Africanists, but with their example in mind, all the frst descriptions said they had the same kind of kinship hierarchy: phratries consisting of clans related by descent, clans consisting of lineages related by

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descent, and lineages consisting of households related by descent. The Hopi were willing to say they had clans and households, but they denied the rest. But the alternative to imposing such a descent hierarchy is not imposing an equally alien alliance theory. It is paying close attention to the rest of what the Hopi say, trying as hard as we can to recognize and remove our own cultural assumptions that do not ft, and letting the Hopi ideas of kinship emerge from that.

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Alliance Theory Alliance theory starts with Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship, frst published in 1949. The focus was on marriage rules, and his purpose was to present an alternative to Radcliffe-Brown’s version of French sociological positivism. Unlike Radcliffe-Brown, Lévi-Strauss’s did no feldwork and showed no concern with what sort of observations would be required to confrm or falsify his claims. His interpretations were based entirely on his selective reading of the earlier literature, primarily Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912). Durkheim also did no feldwork. The previous work his analysis drew on most obviously was Josef Köhler’s Zur Urgeschichte der Ehe; Totemismus, Gruppenehe, Mutterrecht, published originally in 1887 and translated into English by J. Barnes in 1979 as The Prehistory of Marriage. Köhler dedicated it to Tylor. Tylor defned culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (1889:1). Such a whole had nothing to do with views of those supposedly within it. It was constructed by Tylor alone, in following only methods that he argued were objective. Following Comte and Mill in arguing that scientifc laws were only about correlations, these were based on his method of fnding “adhesions” between one custom and another. This whole, and only this, is what provided the “motive” for all their behavior. In Tylor’s view, the “popular notion of human free will” is comparable to “the simile of a balance sometime acting in the usual way, but also possessed of the power of turning by itself without or against its weights” (1889: 1:3). A scientifc explanation could not recognize it (1889: 1:13). Tylor’s authority for all of this is Comte, who he cites without anything resembling an empirical justifcation (see Leaf, 1979:122–23). Köhler was a professor of law in the universities of Würzburg and Berlin. He started out as a self-described Hegelian and later declared himself to be a Positivist. He was also a rabid German nationalist and totalitarian. He, too, did no feldwork, explaining that he was extraordinarily able to see in other people’s descriptions what they could not see themselves. Although he

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claimed to be describing kinship everywhere, his actual examples were drawn mainly from Morgan’s Native American information and a seven-volume compilation of Australian accounts of aboriginal communities edited by Edward M. Curr, titled The Australian race: its Origin, Languages, Customs, Place of Landing in Australia, and the Routes by Which It Spread Itself Over that Continent (1886). Curr included small vocabularies to assist in relating the groups linguistically to one another, but did not provide kinship terminologies in Morgan’s sense. Curr includes descriptions of about a dozen Australian marriage systems, in which a “tribe is divided into several classes, each called after some animal, as emu, snake, possum, etc.” He then summarizes: In or out of the tribe (for the neighbouring tribes had similar organizations) a male of the snake class, for instance, could only marry a female of the emu class, and so on. (1896:37)

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Curr’s sources had explicitly tested Morgan’s argument for group marriage in their feld interviews and rejected it. They repeatedly described the marriage rules as saying that the only way a man of a given group could get a wife from the required wife-giving group was by exchanging a sister for her. Köhler saw this. He even quoted Curr as saying “Amongst the Australians there is no community of women!” (Köhler, 1899:154). But he dismisses it as being inconsistent with his conclusions. His main argument was that the Australian aborigines represented the original condition of society. Since Morgan shows that the original condition of society must have involved group marriage, the Australian aborigines must have had a community of women. Hence Curr must be wrong. The rest of his argument proceeds in the same way. His conclusion was: That the American Indians, the Dravidians, and the Australians originally had group marriage may now be considered certain. That all peoples of the earth originally had group marriage appears irrefutable if we consider the following points: (1) the connection between group marriage and totemism, and how one derived from the other; (2) how these not at all closely connected peoples developed matching group–marriage systems with only individual variations . . . ; (3) that these are peoples whose totemism indicates a special originality for their culture, . . .; and (4) that totemism presents itself to us in nearly all human activities, institutions, legends, idioms, as an ancient and later abandoned system. (1897:233)

Hegel had argued for total subordination of the individual to the state on the grounds that everything in the individual shares with others must come

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from the state, including morality and reason. The individual, being only particular, cannot be the source of general ideas. The state, by contrast, was reason “forcing itself in history.” It is the embodiment of general ideas; it is the source of general ideas; it is “the” general idea. Köhler is claiming to describe the start of the process: total social determinism refected in total individual obedience. Its natural and necessary end, in his view, would be a worldwide empire with Germany as its dominating center. Academic anthropologists and nearly all British and American legal scholars regarded Köhler’s arguments as nationalistic raving with no scientifc value. But Durkheim liked him. Before writing the Elementary Forms, he twice reviewed The Prehistory of Marriage favorably in his important journal, L’Annee Sociologique. The Elementary Forms then replicated Köhler’s argument point for point. But in Elementary Forms itself, Durkheim barely acknowledges the link. Unless a reader was independently aware of Durkheim’s earlier reviews, they would not know that Köhler was his source. It is easy to guess why. The Anglo-German naval arms race had begun and the alliances were forming that would play out in World War I. French and German Imperialism were in confict. Germany in general was increasingly unpopular in France, and Köhler in particular was prominently identifed with German ultranationalism. But while retaining Köhler’s sequence of argument, Durkheim shifted emphasis from the marriage rules described by Curr and Köhler to totemic rituals as described by W. B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen. This is yet another source of Tylor’s infuence. Gillen was an Australian civil servant. Spencer had been drawn into anthropology as an assistant to Tylor at Oxford (Allen, Pickering and Miller, 1998:16). Durkheim’s ultimate conclusion was the same as Köhler’s. He argued that “the clan” is “the social group,” and totemic rituals are “the means by which the social group reaffrms itself” (1917:387). The clan was a “reality sui generis” (ibid.: 16, 418), an “active being,” “outside and above” the individual (ibid.: 444) and literally shaped them physically and mentally, which was why they were all alike. Elementary Forms was explicitly about the origin of religion, rather than kinship. But since Durkheim argued that they were the same thing, contemporary critiques of theories of the evolution of the family still applied to it. So in fact, in terms of the best science of the time, Durkheim’s argument was obsolete before it was published. For scholars who wanted to cite it anyway, this posed a problem. Their solution was a pretense. Instead of recognizing that Durkheim’s claims were about social origins and social evolution, which implied a chronology that could be verifed, they were construed as being only about what was most basic or primitive, which implied an impressionistic judgment that could not be verifed.

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Lévi-Strauss’s Elementary Structures of Kinship reaffrms Durkheim’s conclusions but shifts the emphasis back to marriage patterns. The “elementary structures” are the marriage relationships between descent groups structured according to the rule that a man marries his “cross-cousin.” They are said to be “elementary” because there is nothing simpler and everything else can, supposedly, be made from them. Like Köhler and Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss argued that marriage choice was absolutely determined by society: each person in each clan could marry a person in one and only one other clan. This is what he meant by describing it as a system of “prescriptive marriage alliances.” He also described this as men exchanging women as wives, although he avoided saying that they were “brothers” exchanging “sisters.” Figure 2.4 represents the logic of the MBD prescription. A triangle indicates a male, a circle a female, a line a connection by descent, and an equal mark a connection by marriage. The lettered columns represent lineal descent groups. It does not matter whether succession is through males or females. Either way, every male marries his MBD. With MBD marriage, there can be regular cycles of “marriage in a circle” for all the lineal groups or any subset, and the system will be self-replicating. The logic is not the same for patrilateral cross-cousin marriage, meaning marriage in which a male chooses a wife from among his father’s sister’s daughters (FSD). If a set of lineal groups like the above had a FSD marriage rule, the women would go one way in one generation and the opposite way in the next. Figure 2.5 represents the contrasting model for FSD cross-cousin marriage. To understand it, start with any male (triangle) and trace out the descent links to his father, father’s sister, and then her daughter who is also his wife. As can be seen, in this case the position of male and female siblings reverses each generation. This means that each lineage is a wife-receiver

Figure 2.4  Mother’s Brother’s Daughter Marriage with Patrilineal Descent. Source: Murray J. Leaf.

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Figure 2.5  Father’s Sister’s Daughter Marriage. Source: Murray J. Leaf.

and a wife-giver on alternate generations. There is no other way to make the diagram represent the rule. So, in FSD cross-cousin marriage, there cannot be stable relations such that lineage A is always wife-giver to B, B is wife-giver to C, and so on. So if there were a community whose marriage relations were organized with this rule, all the generations in all the lineal groups would have to be permanently aligned, down through time, so wives could fow in a consistent direction on each level. This would be extraordinarily diffcult to bring about or to keep track of. No such problem attends the MBD marriage rule. Unilateral mother’s brother’s daughter marriage occurs in a wide variety of historically unrelated societies. Unilateral FSD marriage is rare or nonexistent, depending on how tightly one defnes it. Lévi-Strauss argued that the reason for this is that MBD marriage produces an “organic” social structure, integrated and stable. FSD marriage, by contrast, would produce a structure that is inherently unstable or fragmented. A major problem with applying this idea of marriage in a circle to actual societies is that actual MBD marriage systems often associate wife-giving status with a difference in social rank. Logically, this should create anomalies at the ends of the cycles. If wife-givers are different in rank from wife-takers and A takes wives from B who in turn takes wives from C, then C should not take wives from A. But C has to have wives, and often does take wives from A. While many societies have such marriage rules and associate the wife-giver/wife-receiver relation with differences in status, few report this as a problem. Why not? Lévi-Strauss’s explanation was that while the cycle is triadic or circular, the relationship that it is based on is dyadic. Wife-givers are separate from wife-takers for any one group, and that is what matters. Such societies, he

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argued, always involve an exchange of women and other female goods in one direction in exchange for an opposed fow of male “prestations” in another, in a single, total, social system that shapes all action and all thought. This dyadic opposition refects a “fundamental proclivity of the human mind.” This is “dualism” and it is the combination of the MBD logic and dyadic thought that makes it a total social analysis.

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THE EXPANDED ARGUMENT: FROM FORTES TO HOMANS AND SCHNEIDER Some parts of alliance theory were readily accepted by other anthropologists and some were not. The main controversies concerned the characterization of marriage patterns in terms of exchanges of wives by men, the association with dyadic ideational systems, and the claim that such systems refected a fundamental proclivity of the human mind. In 1951, Leach argued for structural analysis in Lévi-Strauss’s sense in the “The Structural Implications of Matrilateral Cross-Cousin Marriage.” This compared Kariera (Australia), Kachin (Burma), and Trobriand (South Pacifc) social organization as variations on the logic of mothers’ brother’s marriage, but did not claim to provide a “total” analysis. Leach repeated the structural analysis in Political Systems of Highland Burma, in 1954. The analysis of the marriage system was straightforward, but he had a great deal of trouble with the larger society it should have structured. People in the region did not report being in or belonging to just one such system but three, which were very different from one another: Kachin Gumsa, Kachin Gumlao, and Shan. So, the systems could not possibly have been concrete wholes that people were “in” in the way one is “in” a physical space. They could only have been cultural models that people used. Yet Leach did not conclude that the positivist goal of total system analysis should be rejected. He concluded only that theory was necessarily different from description, and that there should be more recognition of change. The most explicit attack on alliance theory came from George Homans and David Schneider’s 1955 Marriage, Authority, and Final Cause. Rodney Needham responded to this on behalf of alliance theory in Structure and Sentiment: a Test Case in Social Anthropology (Needham, 1962), described in chapter 9. Although the alliance–descent argument continued to attract attention until the kinship apocalypse, most anthropologists concerned with kinship and social organization continued to consider themselves more as spectators than participants.

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THE KINSHIP APOCALYPSE Schneider had enrolled in the Harvard Department of Social Relations after military service in the Pacifc in World War II. He had been stationed on Truk. His PhD was in Anthropology; his dissertation was on Truk kinship. He describes the meanings of the Truk kin terms with kintypes. At Harvard, Schneider was most closely associated with George Homans, a psychoanalytically inclined sociologist. His criticism of the alliance–descent argument that began with Marriage, Authority, and Final Cause continued in Some Muddles in the Models (1965a). In the latter, especially, Schneider showed that neither alliance theory nor descent theory had a decisive case that could be interpreted only in its terms and not the opposed terms. Although both claimed to provide “total system models,” no such model had yet been shown to be empirically verifable (1965a:487). In their place, therefore, he urged “partial system models.” He was not at all clear about what such partial systems would be. His criticism of componential analysis and related methods began in “A Critique of Goodenough’s Componential Analysis” (1965b) and became more comprehensive in subsequent works (Schneider 1965c, 1967, 1969). He argued that the componential analysis/ethnoscience method of analyzing kin terms by arranging the kintypes that were their supposed denotata to expose their components was circular. “If the input is restricted to kin types, and only some of them, it is inevitable that the output is a series of dimensions implicit in those kintypes” (Schneider, 1969:3). Schneider characterized this as, “You are what you eat.” In computer terms, we would now say “garbage in, garbage out.” Schneider presented his own alternative in American Kinship (1968). This used feldwork by teams of University of Chicago anthropology graduate students interviewing families in the Chicago area about their kinship relationships and behaviors. Its purpose was to fnd out what kinship itself was. If it could not be reduced to biology, what was it instead? His explanation for looking for the answer in Chicago rather than the kind of small-scale society anthropologists usually studied was based on the view that in such traditional societies, kinship was the basis for practically all activities and that it had been progressively replaced by more specialized systems of relationships in more modern societies. If so, then kinship in the United States ought to be reduced to its absolute essential minimum. This was what he wanted to fnd. The research utilized snowball sampling. An initial core sample of families was identifed and interviewed. The interview included asking who they considered to be their relatives. Some of these were included in the sample for further interviews, and so on. The interviewers asked about their mutual relationships and behaviors. Their aim was to get at what held them together

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as kin. Their conclusion was nothing defnite. As Schneider put it, Americans recognized relations of “diffuse enduring solidarity.” They understand their relationships as persisting through time, seemingly unchanged in an enormous but unspecifable range of different circumstances. His explanation of what held these different circumstances together harked back to his early interest in Freudian psychology when he had been a graduate student. It was that they were all “refracted” out of the “central symbol” of sexual intercourse. For example:

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One of our informants, a twelve-year old girl, was asked, “What’s your defnition of a relative?” and replied “Someone who you generally love, a daughter or something.” There is really nothing more that can be added to her statement. It sums the matter up perfectly. All of the signifcant symbols of American kinship are constrained with the fgure of sexual intercourse, itself a symbol of course. The fgure is formulated in American culture as a biological entity and a natural act. Yet throughout, each element which is culturally defned as natural is at the same time augmented and elaborated, built upon and informed by the rule of human reason, embodied in law and morality. (1968:40)

Consider what this shows about Schneider’s thinking. The research assistant asks a girl for a defnition. She responds with a defnition, which is an idea. Schneider says this idea “sums up the matter perfectly.” But he does not actually accept it as the answer. Instead he leaps to “symbols,” which she did not say anything about. Why does he do this? The explanation is positivism. He absorbed it and cannot shed it. He believes that ideas are subjective, so science cannot be about them. But symbols are things and things can be objective. It is the analyst, not the informant, who has to say what is objective. So his conclusion has to be about symbols. Schneider knew that his imagery of culture as a system of symbols was similar to that of Clifford Geertz, his colleague at the University of Chicago and former fellow student in the Department of Social Relations. He knew that Geertz considered symbols to have meanings. Geertz’s view of how they got these meanings was very odd, but this is the view that Schneider adopted. The standard view in linguistics and philosophy contrasts symbols with signs. Signs are physical things that stand for other things because of a natural connection with them, as smoke is a sign of fre. Symbols are physical things that stand for other things as a matter of convention, as the word “fre” is a symbol of fre. In The Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz explicitly rejected what he called this “provincial” distinction (1973:14). He argued instead that a symbol was “any object, act, event, quality, or relation which serves as a vehicle for a

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conception—this conception is the symbol’s ‘meaning’” (1973:91). So Geertz is agreeing with us that the meaning of a symbol is an idea. But notice that he dropped the idea that the relation is established by convention. If convention does not make the connection, what does? Geertz’s answer is right out of Vienna Circle Positivism and ultimately Comte. It is Geertz himself. The meaning is Geertz’s own “subjective” interpretation. So Geertz, like Schneider, is clinging to the positivist dichotomy between subjective and objective as equivalent to the differences between internal and external, mental and material. So if meaning is not one, it must be the other. And on this basis Geertz, like Schneider, is also reaffrming Comte’s original claim that science consists in imposing subjectivity on nature: an idea in his mind controls their behavior. This is his “interpretivism.” On this basis he argued that anthropology cannot be a science. Instead, it is like the humanities, like literary criticism. Schneider, in the end, is agreeing. Citing Schneider, a substantial body of anthropologists leapt to “postmodernism,” Geertz’s interpretivism and subjectivism, and the idea of anthropology as “cultural critique” (Marcus and Fisher, 1986). In doing so, they reaffrmed Geertz’s persistent use of Tylor’s unitary imagery despite Schneider’s rejection of “total system models.” They called this “cultural anthropology” and sought to make the label exclusively their own. They quickly dominated the American Ethnological Association and its journal, The American Ethnologist. The unitary descriptions of culture or society that Emile Durkheim, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, and so many others had offered with the supposed authority of science had now been shown to lack the rigor and replicability that science is expected to have. But instead of being abandoned, they became the next big thing. Geertz described his position as “antipositivism.” This was disingenuous. As Paul Friedrich explained but few understood, it was actually “cryptopositivism,” positivism in disguise (Freidrich, 1992). Schneider’s last major statement was Schneider on Schneider (1995), an autobiography consisting of Schneider responding to questions posed by Richard Handler. In it, Handler characterized Schneider’s position as postmodernist. Schneider accepted the characterization and reaffrmed his earlier conclusions. POSTAPOCALYPTIC ETHNOLOGY OF KINSHIP Most of anthropology outside of ethnology was unaffected by the kinship apocalypse and continues to produce solid empirical advances: linguistics, physical anthropology, and archaeology including paleoanthropology. Within

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ethnology, the postmodernist view of science is no longer the next big thing and the strident antiscience rhetoric has been muted. But the damage persists in three major forms. The frst and most dramatic effect of the apocalypse is that ethnologists have stopped regarding kinship, and especially kinship terminology, as a core subject that had to be included in undergraduate and graduate anthropology programs. From a survey of major anthropology programs in the United States, it appears that courses with titles such as “kinship” or “kinship and social organization” are now rarely offered and never a requirement. The second is a general retreat from rigor and precision. In addition to its universality and obvious indigenous importance, another reason that anthropologists focused on kinship was that it seemed to be especially amenable to precise analysis. It was defnite. It was complex. And it was often possible to evaluate two competing analyses against one another empirically. Most other organizational topics are much harder to get a grip on. In a 2018 article titled “We need to talk about kinship,” Adam Kuper started with the observation that anthropologists now talk much less about kinship than the people they try to understand. He sees this as problem and attributes it to the continued effects of what we are describing as the kinship apocalypse. By talking less, he meant two things. We spend less time on describing it and say less when we do describe it. Discussions of kinship have become nearly contentless. As his principal case in point, he argued that Schneider’s shift to “symbolism” subsequently led to Marshal Sahlins’s 2014 What Kinship is—and is Not. This, he says,

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takes off . . . from the taken for granted premise that kinship is a symbolic discourse. It discourses about “mutuality of being” or “common substance”—the currently ok terms for what used to be thought of as “kinship relationships.” (Kuper, 2018:4)

Whatever this is, it is not something that can be observed with precision. Nor is it what people really talk about. Kuper does not urge that we return to trying to understand what kinship terminologies are, or marriage rules, or the other kinship phenomena that dominated discussions before the shift to symbolism. He argues that we should talk about what those we study talk about, and that, he says, is families. People talk about their own families and there are families that hold enormous wealth and political power. All this is true; we do not disagree. But the next chapters will make clear that trying to look at them directly—which is exactly what Schneider did in American Kinship—is not the way to understand how they are constructed or what holds them together.

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The third point is related to the second. Notwithstanding the vagueness of the new formulations, they still retain the referential theory of meaning. They continue to accept the assumption that kinship must somehow “be” what kinship terms of other sorts—like the terms “kinship” and “relation” themselves— refer to. It must be some kind of thing out there beyond what people say about it. A 2016 article by Robert A Wilson provides a detached assessment of this persistence from the perspective of an outsider in a position to recognize it. Wilson is a philosopher, not an anthropologist. His interest is what he characterizes as “essentialism” in biological taxonomies. Prominent postapocalyptic arguments that he discusses include those of Maurice Bloch (2013), Janet Carsten (2004, 2013), David Eng (2010), James Faubion (1996), Sherry Ortner (1984), Nancy Levine (2008), Marshall Sahlins (2011a,b), Warren Shapiro (2010), Marylin Stathern (2005), and Thomas Trautman (2001). The arguments are diverse but most do in fact stay within the framework Schneider set out. The main exception is Warren Shapiro, who has always been a vociferous critic of Schneider. Wilson construes Schneider’s critique as having been aimed at biological essentialism, and argues that the anthropologists who have accepted it responded by replacing biological versions of essentialism with more social kinds of essentialism.

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As Western conceptions of kinship were pried from whatever forms of bioessentialism rigidifed them, anthropologists subsequently came to speak more freely of relatives than of kin, of relationships rather than of kinship. Relative and relatedness came to be the preferred terms of cultural analysis for emerging forms of kinship. (p. 574)

Wilson argues that instead of rejecting biological essentialism, anthropologists should redefne it. They should “redirect theoretical discussion of what kinship is by applying a view, the so-called homeostatic property cluster view of kinds, to kinship” (572). Instead of a few rigid features, they should see essences as a cluster that is subject to adjustment. This recommendation is also misguided. It is just this kind of fexible concept of biology that Morgan held when the journey to the kinship apocalypse began. Wilson is not showing the way out. He is demonstrating how easy it is to stay in. The indigenous ideas of kinship that we will describe here are not important because of the importance of something “out there” that they refer to. They are important in their own right, as well-formed indigenous systems of generative ideas that do not merely name kinship relations and organizations but actually allow their users to build and maintain them.

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CONCLUSION

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The kinship apocalypse has been distracting and destructive. But the studies of kinship that accept Schneider’s critiques without questioning his underlying assumptions are not all there is. There are still other analysts working with the same range of experience-based methods, distinctions, and classifcations of kinship terminologies and organizations that existed when componential analysis and the alliance–descent dispute grabbed center stage. There are two major texts still in print that represent this alternative legacy. These are Ernest Schusky’s Manual For Kinship Analysis (1983) and Robert Parkin’s Kinship: An Introduction to the Basic Concepts (1997). Their intent is basically empirical—to summarize what is known. Neither tries to present a comprehensive empirical theory of kinship in the present sense. Parkin describes kinship as a “privileged cultural order” imposed on the “biological universals of sexual relations and continuous reproduction through birth” (1997:3) and consistently uses kintype notation to say what terms mean. Schusky leans a bit more toward our own view of kinship ideas as autonomous systems in their own right. The other difference between them is that Schusky draws more on the American Indian literature, while Parkin draws on the British Africanist literature. Parkin is also the editor of Kinship and Family: An Anthropological Reader (2004). This provides a good sample of analyses across the empirical/positivist spectrum.

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Chapter 3

Theory of Organizations

A theory of social organizations in the present sense is a description of what human social organizations are, how humans construct them, and why.

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INFORMATION SYSTEMS, CULTURAL SYSTEMS, GENERATIVE SYSTEMS When we describe this theoretical perspective as providing a “new paradigm” and a “new science,” our purpose is to give fair warning. Old ways of thinking about anthropological science will not work here. This includes everything based on the unitary and deterministic conception of culture or society that has attracted followers since Tylor. Most consistently and pervasively, human behavior depends on communication. Communication is always interactive. Interactions become manageable and fall into recognizable patterns through being assigned to organizations. Organization, conversely, depends on communication and takes shape through it. So it is obviously important to understand communication. Modern linguistics took shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has continued to be an important part of anthropology ever since, one of the essential “four felds.” But linguistics has only shown us the structures of language: phonemic, morphemic, and syntactic. It is an analysis of language as a tool for communication, but not a description of how it is used in communication. The crucial breakthrough in understanding the process in which language is actually used was the publication of Shannon and Weaver’s Mathematical Theory of Communication, in 1949.

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Shannon and Weaver were engineers working for Bell Telephone. Their problem was to fnd a way to make existing communication technologies allow more users to transmit more messages without confusion. Their key idea was to equate the information potential of a message with its probability. The theory worked, massively. It has also been recognized as having genuine descriptive relevance to what we normally think of as meaning. It has increasingly come to inform our understanding of a wide range of relevant phenomena from brain function through language development to the formation of conscious thought (Massaro, 1975; Polk and Seifert, 2002). So there is no doubt that it is empirically true. But the elements of the original theory clearly corresponded to parts of an electronic communication system, and as of 1964, when Leaf began his feldwork, no one had been able to reconceive it in terms of what one fnds in the kind of naturalistic communications that anthropologists focus on. Shannon and Weaver represented the elements of their theory as in fgure 3.1. So conceived, communication is a linear process in which the “source selects a desired message out of a set of possible messages” (Shannon and Weaver, 1963:7) and transmits it with the transmitter through the channel to a receiver, which then conveys it to the destination. The transmitter changes the message into a form appropriate for the transmission, the receiver changes it back, the destination gets it. The information of the message is the inverse of the probability of the selection of the message. The information potential of the message source is its entropy, the degree of randomness in its organization. The channel also receives an input of noise, which is random. Shannon and Weaver connected the idea of whether the message was “understood” to the idea of feedback, which was also probabilistic. Since the aim of the message is to stimulate action on the part of the receiver, the sender takes the message as understood if the action that is observed is what the sender expected.

Figure 3.1  Shannon and Weaver’s Original Diagram of the Communication Process.

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If we are Bell Labs and we consider the information source to be a person or thing originating the message, everything else in the diagram falls into place as clearly observable phenomena: telephone sets, transmission lines, electrical interference, and so on, and the problem of improving communicative throughput becomes the problem of how much noise had to be reduced in the channel in order to make the receiver at the other end have a much higher probability of guessing the original message than any other. Things get much fuzzier if we try to apply this to natural conversation in the open air. What, then, shall we say the “message source” is making its selection from? Shannon and Weaver speak of the selection being made from language. They explain probabilities using the conventional imagery of balls in an urn: the probability of selecting the message is the probability of selecting one ball out of however many are in the urn. But we cannot actually think of language this way. As we observe, it is not a container of all possible messages but a tool for generating messages, and the number of possible messages is infnite. Similarly, is the channel the air? Is noise only what affects audible sound or is it, for example, anything distracting? How do we defne the receiver given whatever we take to be the transmitter? How does the destination know the message is understood, and what observable thing is the feedback to the source? There are two major reasons why these questions are so diffcult to answer. The frst is that the model is not a completely accurate representation of the variables of Shannon and Weaver’s own argument. The second is that the argument itself is slightly misconceived. To represent the facts of naturally occurring communication, the diagram should be cyclical, not linear. Conversations are interactive. Second, for faceto-face conversation the transmitter and receiver should drop out. This leaves the sender as a person who should obviously be separated from the information source as the ideas or information that that person invokes and conveys. The sender chooses; the information source is what provides the options from which the choice is made. The process of constructing and sending a communication only ends when the sender recognizes the response as expected or unexpected, hence probable or improbable, in order to formulate the next transmission. The receiver is another person who must have the same information “in mind” or otherwise accessible to decode the message. In addition, noise can affect both sending and getting feedback rather than sending alone. A corrected diagram is given in fgure 3.2. Since the sender and receiver now clearly correspond to actual people, the uncertainty is focused on what to take as the information sources and the channel. There are two possible views of what actual things correspond to information sources. One is that it is “knowledge” or “language” or “culture” or “mind” as a single totality. Shannon and Weaver, as just noted, say

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Figure 3.2  The Communication Cycle. Source: Murray J. Leaf.

“language” but don’t press it. The anthropological counterpart of this view is the idea of the “unifed whole,” and the well-established problem with this view, as we have noted, is that there is no such thing. The other view is that we use multiple information sources, and this is the view supported by the facts. It has been documented repeatedly and massively, although usually unintentionally. One of these information sources is language, but in any given community language only provides information on how to speak, not what to say. What to say is defned by the additional message sources. These are what defne the topics people use language to describe, discuss, and work in. The differences between them are what forces anthropologists to divide their ethnographies into separate chapters, and the coherence within each indigenous cultural source, if the anthropologist manages to capture it, is what enables them to make each chapter coherent. Therefore, to ask what cultural message sources are is the same as to ask what sort of thing gives coherence and unity to the separate chapters of a good ethnography, meaning an ethnography that forcefully and clearly represents the indigenous community from the point of view of those within it, an ethnography that lets an outsider put themselves in the indigenous position and see that if they were in that position they would do the same thing, whatever that thing is. To answer this question, it is necessary to recognize another point where Shannon and Weaver’s original imagery is misleading. It is the idea the source “selects” the message. Cultural messages are not selected. They are constructed. The idea that the source “selects” a message is consistent with the way they represent the source as an urn with a defnite number of messages in it and

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makes the idea of the probability of a message easy to grasp, but there are two problems with it. The frst is that the idea that somewhere there is a repository of all possible messages, ready-made for the choosing, would make the actual probability of “selecting” any one message astronomically small. This is unreal psychologically and conceptually. We do not feel anything like this level of uncertainty when we approach each other in the course of ordinary life. Changing the formulation to say that the source is “language” does not help. Language would be all the words in the vocabulary plus all the rules for combining them. That would mean that the probability of any one message is the probability of selecting any one word in the language for the frst word in the communication times the probability of the second word times the probably of the third, and so on, times the joint probabilities of all the ways they can be combined. Any way you try to phrase it, the number is mindbogglingly large. As a matter of fact, we humans do not go about our business with our minds so boggled. Things are much more predictable. In actuality, linguistic messages are not selected, they are constructed. Every language has rules for grammatical order, and once one begins to formulate an utterance those rules are called into play sequentially and quickly limit the possible choices of each succeeding unit until the utterance is complete. In fact, we readily anticipate what a person talking to us is likely to say, and what they actually do say usually responds to those anticipations with few surprises. But again these are linguistic expectations; there are additional expectations regarding the content. The second problem with the urn imagery is there is nothing in the communities anthropologists study that corresponds to such a thing. What we actually encounter, and what provides the choices for which noun to use as the subject of a sentence, which adjectives to apply, is our choice of one or another system of ideas held in consensus. This is also what gives unity to the kinds of distinctive sets of activities such as we would put in a distinct chapter of an ethnography. By “system of ideas” we mean a group of ideas that are frmly related to each other through interlocking defnitions and uses. This means that the defnition of each idea in the system involves at least one and usually several of the others, and that one learns to use each idea by also learning to use one or more of the others. Such interrelated defnitions are always hierarchical in character, in the sense that some of the ideas are more general and authoritative and others are taken as deduced from them; some can therefore be regarded as the premises or postulates of the system and others as their implications. The ideas that serve as the premises in such idea systems generally also are held in the frmest and widest consensus; those deduced from them are more variable. Such idea systems always have distinctive vocabularies; the interlocking ideas are their interlocking defnitions. Such idea systems are also usually, perhaps

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always and perhaps necessarily, associated with distinctive images, pictures of what the ideas are “about” that can be drawn or described as diagrams or threedimensional objects. So in that sense they occupy an imaginary space, and this imaginary space can always be transposed to enacted actual space by symbolic means. There is no limit to what such “abouts” may be, as the accumulation of ethnographies demonstrates: theologies, economies, worldviews, kinship systems, political systems, ecologies, the past, the future, and on and on. A system of ideas of this sort is necessarily a generative system. It enables a user to create many different combinations of the ideas that it contains. This generative property is precisely what allows it to be used as a message source. This is the most important thing that Shannon and Weaver’s urn imagery misses, and it is also precisely what gives them so much power as the communicative foundation of human society as contrasted with the societies of any other species whose members communicate with one another to coordinate their activity. Generative systems are ubiquitous in human communities. Everyone above the age of about ten knows many, and in in all cases they serve as information sources (message sources) for communications with others who share that knowledge. Few, however, are held in substantially universal consensus in communities, and these are the ones that anthropologists, in practice, have identifed as most important for understanding those communities. Kinship is always one of them. As with language itself, the probabilities that measure the information in a message do not arise from the way the message is selected from the source but from the way it is constructed with the ideas of the source. The probability of any given message takes shape as the joint probability of a series of unstated but unavoidable questions and answers between any two communicating people. First, what language will the person be speaking? The range of possibilities is usually small, often 1. Second, what set of social relations will be relevant. Usually, the possibilities are about 6. Is X going to address Y in religious terms, political terms, academic terms, or what? Third, what is their mutual relation in these terms? If X is father, is Y going to be son? Third, what is the technical topic? In any given social context, the number of possible technical topics will be limited to another few. Does X want Y to do some specifc family chore, does X want to know what Y will order off the menu, does X want to give Y a gift, and so on. Fourth, this gives Y a set of options so which one will Y choose? Soon after this point, there will be nothing more to ask and answer. The probability of any further message, or additional item in the message, therefore becomes 1—absolutely predictable. Psychologically, the questions and answers become repetitious. Semantically, there is nothing left to say. Practically and pragmatically, the conversation is ended. This was Leaf’s argument in Information and Behavior in a Sikh Village (1972; see also Leaf, 2004). It was that there were six entirely distinct cultural

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systems in substantially universal consensus in one village community in North India. Each one functioned as a message source in Shannon and Weaver’s sense once the components of their communication system were reconceived as we have just described them. In so doing, each was used to generate entirely different systems of communications about what the users considered to be entirely different topics, which were the purview of entirely separate and distinct organizations. The ideas were those of the Sikh religion, kinship, economics, factions, management, and the village farm ecology. Each chapter described the idea system named, how it was elicited, how it was pictured, how the ideas were used for the main organizational charters that made up the “structures” of its type (religious, kinship, and so on), and what the organizational charters were used to accomplish in the ongoing ordered life of the village as a whole. This is the new science: the science of cultural information systems and their uses, which is also the science of semantic systems as an aspect of language, of cultural idea systems, and of generative systems. Each different name evokes a different theoretical perspective, although their ultimate object is the same. “Cultural information systems” calls up information theory and the larger issues of control theory, and points to the problem of how people control themselves and each other, which of course suggests comparison between control based on communication with types of control based on other things (Leaf, 2004). “Semantic systems” calls up language theory and connects these analyses to sociolinguistics and the ethnography of speech. “Cultural idea systems” breaks into two divisions, as will be described here below: social idea systems used to construct social organizations and technical idea systems used to conceptualize technical activities that people in such organizations are assigned to carry out. And “generative systems” evokes the study of the conceptual bases of mathematics and logic. This has been especially important in the analysis of kinship systems (Read, 1984, 2003, 2007, 2017; Read and Behrens, 1990; Read, Fischer and Lehman, 2012; Leaf and Read, 2012, and elsewhere). Recognizing the parallels and convergences among them, it is impossible to avoid seeing that we are on a path to a new understanding of the social basis of reason itself. GROUPS AND ORGANIZATIONS People everywhere recognize the difference between an organization and a group. A group is a set of observable individuals. An organization is a system of named, interrelated, roles or positions. It is possible to have a group of people who are not organized and it is also possible to have an organization with empty positions.

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Roles and positions are conceptualized with many different kinds of imagery. Although we can recognize a group whose members do not form an organization, a functioning organization will always be populated by a group. Many recognized groups form multiple organizations of multiple kinds. As one conspicuous example, those who reside together in a dwelling are always a recognizable group, but they almost never form one single organization. The household defned as a legal residence will usually be one organization. Another might be a family defned in kinship terms. Some people in the legal residence may not be part of the family. Some people considered to be in the family may not live in the legal residence. Still another organization might be a business or a farm. Another, in some societies, is a religious community with a distinctive altar and a burial area. And in some societies, the household itself may be part of a compound or neighborhood organization with other households. CULTURAL IDEA SYSTEMS

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Organizations are constructed using cultural idea systems, also called cultural information systems (Leaf, 1972, 2009; Leaf and Read, 2012). As noted, cultural idea systems are systems of mutually interrelated defnitions established in frm consensus. Each distinct cultural idea system has a distinctive vocabulary and the interrelations among the concepts that establish the meanings of this vocabulary form a distinctive pattern. Once this pattern is known, however, the concepts are not tied to those terms specifcally. Once I know what “my father” or a “president” is, I can evoke the same ideas with many other words or with symbols other than words. The ideas can also be translated across languages. Cultural idea systems are of two main types: social idea systems and technical idea systems. SOCIAL IDEA SYSTEMS Social idea systems (or social information systems) are cultural information systems that defne systems of reciprocal relationships people can form among themselves. They defne social positions people can occupy as I and thou, reciprocally. This means that when I speak to you, I am “I” and you are “you.” But when you speak to me, you are “I” and I am “you.” The term “position” here should be construed very broadly and fexibly; there are many ways to imagine what people do or are that places them in reciprocal relations to others.

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Many social idea systems use some variant on the idea of an offce. Offces can be entered and left by appointment or election (Leaf and Read, 2012:101). Kinship positions, by contrast, are obtained by some variant of the ideas of birth, marriage, or a stipulated equivalent such as adoption. One “occupies” or “holds” an offce but one “is” a father or daughter. Kinship maps are social idea systems. Social idea systems can usually be drawn or diagramed, although not necessarily in the form of sets of related positions (Wagner, 1974; Leaf, 2009; Leaf and Read, 2012). They can always be imagined, in the sense of pictured in some way in the imagination. They can be represented in imaginary space. And precisely because they can be imagined, they can always be enacted symbolically and represented in ritual as well as “ordinary” behavior. This is prerequisite for teaching them, learning them, and using them to construct recognizable behavior.

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EGOCENTRIC VERSUS SOCIOCENTRIC IDEA SYSTEMS Idea systems can be either egocentric sociocentric. So are organizations. The term “sociocentric” is sometimes used as a synonym for “ethnocentric,” meaning to evaluate other groups or communities from the point of view of one’s own. We use the term here in a different way. It pertains to how ideas and relationships are defned. Egocentric means defned in relation to, or centered on, a specifc perceiving self, an “I.” Sociocentric means defned in relation to the social community at large, or all comers. The ability to distinguish consistently and clearly egocentric from sociocentric ideas might very well be a fundamental difference between Homo sapiens and earlier varieties of humans. It has powerful implications for the possible complexity of human social organization. Without it, many of the conceptual transformations fundamental to human social organization would not be possible. Examples of egocentric ideas are all of the basic kin relations: father, mother, son, brother, sister, and so on, in all languages. There are also many egocentric nonkinship ideas, such as linguistic person and tense, here, there, now, my, mine, and yours. Examples of sociocentric social idea systems usually defne what we consider to be social offces: the different military ranks, president, professor, doctor, judge, policeman, mayor, secretary, city councilman, guru, or wedding guest. The distinction between egocentric ideas and relations and sociocentric ideas and relations is not the same as the distinction between subjective and objective ideas and relations. Egocentric ideas and relations are usually perfectly objective. Whether someone is my father (or yours) is not a matter of

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opinion or subjective feeling. It can be established as a social fact, but it is still egocentric in that he is only father to me or my siblings. If we have a group of people, we can ask how many of them are fathers, for example, by show of hands. The response will be an objective fact about that group, in the sense that everyone present will see the same hands raised. But the mental calculation that each person goes through in responding is very different from the process that would be involved in asking how many are men. It requires knowing how to transpose an egocentric concept to a sociocentric one. Each person must frst of all know that in order to be a father (in English) one must be male and have a son or daughter. So, each person must ask themselves if they are male and have at least one son or daughter. If the answer is “yes,” then and only then they should indicate that they are a father. This indication, which is visible for all, then becomes a sociocentric expression of their egocentric relations. Conversely, sociocentric ideas can be transposed to be used in an egocentric way. Outside of kinship, most social ideas systems defne relations sociocentrically rather than egocentrically. An army corporal is a corporal to anyone. Their rank is on their sleeve. It is there for all to see. But one can still say “my corporal told me to do such and such” and the title “corporal” can be still be used in reciprocal address. The reciprocal is the name of any other rank, or “sir.” Similarly, economic concepts such as sell, rent, borrow, and own are usually described sociocentrically but can be applied egocentrically. To buy something one person gives money to another in exchange for the thing. This statement is sociocentric. But any actual transaction is egocentric. Some specifc person must take the role of seller, renter, borrower, and so on and another must play the part of buyer, owner, or lender, and so on. To support the conceptual shift between the sociocentric idea and the egocentric application, the cultural defnitions of these transactions include rules for the production of records. A sale, for example, includes the production of a receipt. This is usually written and the buyer gets one copy and the seller another. So, if there is a question in the future either party can produce their copy as a record of what happened. Such records are considered permanent even though the transactions are transient. But both the egocentric buying and selling roles and the sociocentric record are equally objective. Even without a receipt, an exchange of money for a thing with the understanding that it transfers ownership of the thing is a sale. It just may harder to prove that it happened. Spelling out the thought process of transposing egocentric to sociocentric ideas and relations may sound like an unnecessarily academic elaboration of what everyone already knows, but the fact that it is what everyone knows is precisely what makes it so important to spell it out. Such transformations

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are important in all human societies. Previous theories of kinship and social organization have not recognized the need to do this and it has been a source of enormous confusion.

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KINSHIP MAPS The social idea systems that defne relations and organizations of kinship have two distinct parts: the kinship map and ideas added to it. A kinship map is a conceptual structure that defnes a set of kinship positions linked to one another around a self. At least one such kinship map is established in consensus in every known society and every kinship map is so structured that it can be imagined in either a two- or three-dimensional conceptual space. It can also, therefore, be drawn as it is elicited, using symbols to represent the ideas of those who use it—not to impose alien ideas that they do not use. The self or ego is always linked directly to a small number of other kinship positions. In English, these are father, mother, brother, sister, son, and daughter. These can be pictured around the central self, using symbols representing the concepts that link them to one another. These linking concepts will always include some version of the idea of birth and may include an idea of marriage. The self is linked to all other kinship positions through the direct positions. Positions are linked in two ways: by mutual reference and by the use of common relational concepts. For example, a father is defned (in part) as a male parent of a son or daughter. A daughter is defned (in part) as a female child of a father or mother. A son is defned (in part) as a male child of a father and mother. And a mother is defned as a female parent of a son or daughter. Each position defned in one of these statements is used as part of the defnition of the other positions in the other statements. The common relational concepts are male versus female, parent versus child, and—very importantly—“of.” Since every direct relation to self is also a self to themselves, they must have direct relations in turn. Recognizing this, the core diagram can then be used to elicit the rest of the system, as described in chapter 4. One asks: What is the father of father to the original self? What is the mother of mother to the original self? We continue until we reach the boundaries of the system. The result is a diagram that those providing the information should recognize and be able to use, even though they probably have not seen it or even had it fully in mind before the elicitation process took place. They will, however, have spatial metaphors that suggest the idea of a diagram, such as speaking of kin on one or another “side” or some being “higher” than others, or kin being arranged in different “lines” or “branches,” or “close” and “distant.” The terminologies used to convey kinship maps generally also have rhyming

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Figure 3.3  Punjabi Kinship Map. Source: Murray J. Leaf.

patterns in their linguistic components that mimic the visual patterns of the groupings in the diagram. The frst published kinship map was Leaf’s representation of Punjabi (Leaf, 1971) reproduced in fgure 3.3. Chapter 4 explains in detail how it was elicited and how to read it. Promptly after it was published, Sylvia Vatuk (1972) responded by affrming its “wider applicability” and added some elaborations on the basis of her own kinship map for Hindustani from a neighboring region in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The shape was the same, only the terms were different. This means that every position was defned in the same way in relation to every other position, and that the whole refected the same idea of kinship in general. Vatuk’s publication provided a major validation of the kind that is expected for all experimental science. It assured that the experiment was replicable and gave consistent results.

ADDED IDEAS The ideas added to the kinship map are connected to it in a very specifc way. They are included in the defnitions of one or more positions that are defned in the map, or the relations that link positions to one another. For example, in the

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Punjabi kinship map, the equal marks that signify marriage are given additional meanings in Punjab customs and laws that establish that a marriage is not something that is created instantaneously at a moment in a wedding ceremony but rather something that is cultivated over time. It begins in a previous ceremony of engagement, is reinforced in the wedding ceremony and builds up with growing intimacy and interdependence until it is solidifed with the birth of children. Using the idea of marriage in the kinship map in the ceremonies of marriage performed in actual communities in Punjab allows the ceremonies to elaborate and specify the meaning of the idea in the map. The ceremonies, in turn, become the agreed-upon models for nonceremonial behavior, which we often refer to as “actual” behavior even though literally speaking ceremonies are also actual. A rule of inheritance is added by saying what relations inherit what things from what other relations. For example, the rule in most communities in Punjab is that all sons obtain equal shares of their father’s “ancestral property” from conception. A further rule is that all women have rights and maintenance from the properties of their fathers, brothers, and sons. This means that she has a right to maintenance as a daughter, sister, and mother. Of these, the obligation of son to mother is considered “most sacred.” This is the idea represented in the idea of the sacred cow. If we ask, in India, why the cow is sacred, the most common and frm answer is that the cow is “like mother.” An idea of a clan as type of descent group could be tied to the kinship map by a rule that could specify that a person belongs to the clan of their father. Or it could specify that they belong to the clan of their mother, and so on. Sometimes such additional ideas seem closely implied in the kinship map itself, but often they are not. Additional ideas may be changed while the kinship map remains the same, or the map may be changed while the additional ideas remain the same. The only way to know what ideas are connected to the kinship map in any given community at any given time is to elicit the map, then ask, then check. Social ideas systems are commonly represented in art and mythology. Kinship is no exception. These are not the same as the added ideas that are integral to the kinship map but they usually serve as reminders and explanations for them. In America, flms and plays commonly include enactments of marriage ceremonies. In India, Cow-Mother, gau-mata, is widely represented as an object of devotion in paintings and sculpture, including full-scale temples. TECHNICAL IDEA SYSTEMS Technical idea systems are also established in frm consensus but defne systems of objective things rather than social relationships. Like social idea

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systems they are marked by distinctive vocabularies. In literate societies they are often described in distinct books or other documents or in distinct chapters within books or documents. Unlike social idea systems, they do not involve the idea of reciprocity. Instead of systems of “I” and “thou,” they describe “it,” “the,” and “them.” Euclidian geometry is a technical idea system. Others are the theories of the different sciences. In systems of formal education, they are commonly represented in separate and distinct courses taught in separate and distinct kinds of classrooms: language courses, anthropology courses, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and so on. The present theory of social organization is a technical idea system. Academic disciplines always involve at least one technical idea system and usually several. So does knowledge of different kinds of farming, brewing, carpentry, printing, navigation, and all other such skills. An engine repair manual for a Toyota V6 contains a technical idea system. Each technical idea system is tied to a physical tool kit. Learning one is learning the other. The boundaries between technical idea systems are often diffcult to specify in the abstract, but they are also not very important in the abstract. In practical circumstances, they can be found by paying attention to what subjects have to be separated from each other in order to be practiced or taught. Think of the diffculty of trying to teach Chemistry and Biology in the same classroom at the same time, or Chemistry and Linguistics. The boundaries of technical idea systems are also often site specifc. The medical knowledge that defnes the work of a family doctor is very different from that of a surgeon specializing in corneal transplants.

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ORGANIZATIONAL CHARTERS An organizational charter is a description of an organization that its members treat as normative, enact collectively, and enforce upon one another. Social idea systems can serve as charters for organizations directly, although they rarely do so. More often, they provide conceptual vocabularies that several types of organizational charters are constructed with. Organizational charters are constructed by using ideas from a social idea system to defne a system of social positions with reciprocal relationships together with ideas from one or more technical idea system to defne the practical activities of those who occupy the positions. For example, a family farm will use kinship ideas to defne itself as a family, managerial ideas to defne itself as a business organization, and technical ideas to defne its farming activities. A pottery making family could use the same kinship ideas but different technical ideas. Organizational charters are commonly acted out in ceremonies. Ceremonies may be very simple or very elaborate. They might consist of nothing more than avoiding talking directly to your wife’s parents. Or they might be

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elaborate mobilizations of resources that involve special music, costumes, and the distribution of substantial resources such as gifts and food in front of a large audience. Regardless of their scale, ceremonies are reminders of rules. They either directly include statements of rules and policies that defne the positions occupied by individuals, as in a wedding ceremony in the West. Or they simply invoke the idea describing the relationship without explaining it, as a handshake invokes the idea of reciprocal friendliness rather than hostility. This is normally not said in the course of the handshake, but it might come to the surface if one person held out their hand and the other did not do the same. In most societies, important kinship ceremonies take place on the occasions of birth, attaining physical maturity, marriage, and death. All of these enact multiple interrelated positions around the principal actor at that time in their life. So, for example, ceremonies marking childbirth also mark motherhood, at least. Attaining physical maturity or coming-of-age ceremonies commonly mark a person as a new member of a group of others at or near the same point in life, as distinct from their immediate families. Marriage involves the families of those being married as well as the couple themselves, and funerary ceremonies enact the relationships among those who remain alive. The phrase “organizational charter” used here is intended as a less ambiguous version of Malinowski’s phrase “social charter.” In both cases, the legal coloring of the term “charter” is intentional. An organizational charter is a foundational description, comparable to a constitution. It is a system of interrelated expectations, rights, and duties, subject to social enforcement. As an enactment of the social charter, therefore, a ceremony is the functional counterpart of a contract. The actions state what the mutual obligations are. The ceremonial positions say who is to carry them out. The audience are witnesses. And taking the ceremonial roles and being seen by the audience to do so is equivalent to signing. Organizational charters can be very elaborate and highly formalized, or they can be largely unstated. Traditional charters are often enacted in ceremonies. Modern business corporations require charters to be written and highly formal. The relative formality of kinship charters varies greatly from region to region and culture to culture. In some societies a written marriage contract, signed by the concerned parties, is considered essential. In others, including the contemporary United States, proposing such a contract is viewed with suspicion or as an insult. It is inconsistent with the idea of a marriage as a permanent bond between two people based on love and mutual respect. By the same token, an American husband who gave his wife a long list of specifc duties to perform would be viewed as a bully or a jackass. If he further proposed giving his wife a monetary allowance on the basis of performing these duties, he would be viewed as not understanding what marriage was. The same judgments would apply to the wife if she treated her husband this way.

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In kinship organizations, computable relations based on the kinship map can be very extensive. Many kinship maps, as we will see, defne kinship in such a way that literally every human being can be seen as a relative of some kind, and anyone who is not a relative is not a human being. Because of this, the boundaries on membership in kinship organizations often depend on nonkinship criteria. For example, in the United States, if you would ask what organization occupies a household the answer is very likely to be a “nuclear family” of two parents and their children, perhaps with occasional grandparents. The answer is especially likely if you ask a sociologist. But according to the Population Reference Bureau, in the 2010 census, just 20.2% of all households were married couples with children. 28.2% were married couples without children. One-third was not “family based” at all. Each of these household types would have to defne their household organization using different ideas. In fact, the authoritative organizational charter for the American household is not drawn from kinship. It is drawn from the idea system defning management relations, of legal control and responsibility. It depends frst of all on recognition of a “house” as a “dwelling.” A dwelling is a kind of a building designed for living in rather than for business or manufacturing purposes. Given this, the organization that occupies the dwelling is defned as consisting of the “household head” and “others.” In the offcial census these others may be listed in order of seniority and closeness of kinship relation to the head, but nonkin living in the dwelling will also be included. Many societies have very defnite organizational charters for households, but if they defne the occupants by kinship relations, they do so only indirectly. A very common method takes the form of a stereotyped ground plan for a physical dwelling that is divided into areas that certain members of the household can occupy and others cannot enter. One example is the Navajo Hogan, laid out with posts at fxed directional points and a line through the center dividing the husband’s half from the wife’s half. Another is the Purum house plan described in chapter 9, dividing the family space from a space for visitors. Similarly, American houses are commonly described as containing a master bedroom, children’s bedrooms, family room, sitting room, dining room, and so on. INSTANTIATION Social idea systems and social charters describe relations in an imaginary space without a time dimension. But real interaction occurs in space and over time. It has a beginning, a here and now, and an end. So, to enact the ideas

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of an organizational charter in real space and time they must be transposed from imagination to action. The process of transposing a conceptual model to a behavioral process is instantiation. Ceremonies are model instantiations. Instantiations of organizational charters do not result in organizations as such, however, but in socially recognized situations considered to represent or embody those organizations. Except in some ceremonies, for example, we practically never fnd “a family” sitting about in some paradigmatic form. Rather, we fnd individuals who consider themselves family members engaged in a variety of different activities on different occasions in title of those memberships. The activities of a single organization over time usually involve many separate instantiations, defning many recurrent situations. The relevant literature is mainly in sociology but its roots are Kantian and pragmatic. They include symbolic interactionism in general, W. I. Thomas’s “defnition of the situation” and its successors. The most important recent developments have been Erving Goffman’s “dramaturgical” account of the process of “presentation of self” (1959) and Harold Garfnkel’s “ethnomethodology” (1964, 1967, 2002). Garfnkel’s description is the most precise. Ideas are instantiated through what he describes as the “documentary method of sociological interpretation.” That is, we treat our behaviors as though the behaviors were “documenting,” or demonstrating the existence of, underlying social relationships. The documentary method is the basic human stage-instruction for instantiating social charters, for creating the shared social situations through which we move in life. One basic rule of the documentary method that the ethnomethodologists describe is that to create a sense of ongoing social relations, we speak as if they already existed. We cannot say we are creating them because to do that is to imply that they are not already there. The techniques that participants use to do this run from almost nonverbal, like turn-taking or saying “uh-huh” to indicate that you are listening when someone else is talking, to highly explicit, such as shouting, “I am the head of this house and you are going to do what I say!” But as a rule they fall in between and usually depend on understandings about language use that are quite different from what linguists describe and radically unlike what any positivist has recognized. When a husband comes into his house and tells his wife specifc things their son did that day (such as “Tommy put a coin the parking meter”) that may seem purposeless or trivial unless one knows other things that happened previously (Tommy had tried to reach the meter but had not been tall enough), the family relationships are reaffrmed. If, however, he were to say “Hello, I am Bob Smith your husband and we have a son named Tom Smith” the statement would, by its very explicitness, instantly call

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into question the relationships it claims on its face to affrm. In Garfnkel’s terminology, it would call into question its “taken-for-granted” character (1967:38–42). The taken-for-granted character of social relations is not something that cultural actors merely observe as though it were external, or manifest as though it were internal. Nor is it something that society imposes upon them, as if from a distance. It is something they create and maintain with considerable effort. It is diffcult to fnd anything people are more attentive to. This is a major fnding. The ethnomethodologists’ results are supported by what now amounts to about four decades of descriptive studies of language use under the headings of the ethnography of speech, the ethnography of communication, and the sociology of language (cf. Gumperz and Hymes, 1964; Giglioli, 1972; ErvinTripp, 1973; Bauman and Sherzer, 1974; Donovan and Rundle, 1997).

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Opposed Purposes; Subversive Activity Since we have just said that individuals in an organization pursue the goals of the organization, some will object that there are often members who do not “really” share the organizational purpose or who pursue other goals or agendas on the side, secretly, or in addition. This does not contradict the analysis. It develops its implications. The organizational charter says what their purposes will be as member of the organization that is chartered. But the theory recognizes that the people in the organization would also belong to other organizations. The theory says that they would have other purposes as members of those as well, and it implies what their strategy would be for relating the two kinds of purposes to one another. First of all, they will recognize habitually that the idea systems for the different purposes are separate. They will not confuse them with one another. They will keep them separate symbolically and conceptually; they will act out the difference in their behavior. The logical way to do this is to engage in exactly the kind of behavior that the question is pointing to. It is to distinguish overt from covert, to make some ideas part of the public conversation of the moment and keep other ideas to themselves. That is, at any given moment, the idea system that defnes the organization that the overt situation is taken to represent will provide the overt meanings of their words and actions. But idea systems that defne other organizations they are part of will provide what appear to be covert meanings. Overt and covert meanings and affliations may support one another or they may be in confict, and we expect the participants to recognize this. It is impossible for a person to carry out a role in an organization without knowing the idea system that has been used to defne it. They literally would

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not know what to say. They would not know what ideas to invoke in conversation in title of their positions. But people vary enormously in the extent to which such knowledge is an object of conscious attention and care.

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Institutions In common usage, the term “institution” is ambiguous. Sometime it is a synonym for “organization” but sometime the sense is contrastive. Where the sense is contrastive, the two terms point to quite different social phenomena. We may call an individual court either an organization or an institution, but “the courts” is only an institution. My family or your family are organizations, but “the family” is an institution. So is “our family” in the sense that covers unspecifed contexts or in the sense of all those who could attend a family reunion. The explanation for this difference is that organizations have organizational charters; there is a defnite scheme that specifes every position in relation to every other. Institutions do not have organizational charters. They are considered to be, or defned as, background conditions to organizational charters in various ways. In this theory, we use the term “institution” only in the contrastive sense: an institution is an imputed background to an organizational charter or a group of related organizational charters, or to communicative situations that are considered to manifest organizational charters. “Related organizational charters” are different charters that draw ideas from the same social idea system, such as the Western idea of a family based on “unconditional love” in contrast with the idea of a household requiring a physical house and the provisions for a material livelihood, or of an “immediate family” as against an “extended family.” Institutions seem to encompass organizations but not the other way around. Every ceremony enacting an organizational charter is also necessarily projecting a concept of an institution that the organization is an instance of. When you attend a wedding, you are necessarily enacting the idea that there is a general class of things called weddings that this particular wedding is an instance of. INDIVIDUALS Individuals must be part of this description. Ideas exist only in and through human imaginations. No two individuals enact an organizational charter or position in exactly the same way. When individuals in an organization consider themselves to agree, it does not mean that they have absolutely the same view of all the relevant ideas and their meanings. It means that they acknowledge a

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general agreement and are willing to confer with, and to an extent defer to, the others in presenting a sense of a collective view of what it is.

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MAKING AND EXPRESSING CONSENSUS Idea systems include values. If parents are defned as feeding and protecting their children, this implies that it is right for them to feed and protect their children. When such ideas are used in creating organizations they entail rules. Rules have to be enforceable. To be enforceable, rules must be known and agreed upon (Leaf, 2009:166). In order to make rules collectively, members have to defne a specifc type of meeting, who would attend, a way of discussing their options, and a symbolic form for reaching and expressing a conclusion for the community as a whole. Since a protocol for a meeting or series of meetings of a specifc sort is also a protocol for an organization (the organization that is meeting), establishing a rule-making meeting is the same as establishing a rule-making organization, distinct from whatever organizations the policies rules might be applied in (Leaf, 2009:166). Anthropologists commonly assume that there is a sharp distinction between governmental assemblies in contrast to religious ceremonies. The frst are explicitly intended to create rules that do not already exist. The second are gatherings that enact or recite rules considered to be long-established and set, often by nonhuman agencies. In reality, the distinction between ceremonies that seem legal or practical and those that seem religious can be largely a matter of how familiar one is with the language of those involved in it. Ceremonies that seem to American and European anthropologists to be invoking supernatural or magical ideas are often just as much a kind of public negotiation and agreement on what occurs as what happens in an American or European government meeting or courtroom. As an enacted social charter, a ceremony cannot fully specify what is agreed to and by whom. By the very fact of being a ceremony, marked off from ordinary activity by special clothing, food, speech, and song, it declares that the relationship it is establishing is of a generic kind. It is not unique to these people in this time and place, as an actual contract might be. The only unique parts, usually, are the individuals taking the main roles and the others serving as witnesses. A ceremony of parturition, for example, says a birth as we defne it has occurred and who was involved. A wedding ceremony says that a marriage as we defne it has occurred and who was involved, and so on. Disagreement is not normally expressed by altering the details of the ceremony, as one might adjust the wording of the contract. It is expressed by not attending at all or by disrupting it.

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The way ceremonies serve as enacted social charters was a major theme in Malinowski’s early monographs. These clearly recognized the existence of multiple institutions in the present sense. For example, Argonauts of the Western Pacifc (1922) compares Western economic concepts of rationality, markets, money, and value with the Trobriand system of overseas trade in symbolic items of certain kinds called the kula. The trade actually involved two kinds of goods. One was the kula goods proper, which were ceremonial objects of no practical use but great ceremonial or “magical” importance exchanged in a highly formalized way in order of rank. High-ranking people in the kula party had high ranking kula objects which they exchanged with their counterpart in the community being visited. The second type was goods Malinowski described as being of great practical value but no ceremonial importance, that were often otherwise unavailable on the other island. These were exchanged between the same pairs of people, but with intense haggling. Malinowski carefully described the ceremonies at each stage of the process: selecting a tree by the person who was to be chief of the voyage, cutting down the tree and making the canoe, making up the crew in a way that marked what each person was contributing, more ceremonies on the way to soften the minds of the people they were going to trade with, the purely ceremonial exchanges that establish who was going to trade with whom for the more practical kind that whose values were not ceremonially fxed, to the division of the goods brought back at the end of the voyage. The description leaves no doubt these ceremonies were enacted contracts and that the performances involved careful calculation and negotiation. The motivation behind kula magic was the same as the motivation behind Western markets. The kula voyagers used the language of kula magic in the same way that Western businessmen use the language of business. Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926) similarly examines and rejects neo-Hegelian conceptions of law as the control of individuals by society as something completely over and above them. Instead, the indigenous adjudication that he described supported Edvard Westermarck: people quite consciously use law to control each other. Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927) assesses Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex, which Malinowski recognizes is implicitly based on European conceptions of the family, in relation to Trobriand family forms. It argues, again recalling Westermarck, that the Oedipus complex does not shape family relations but rather family relations shape patterns of psychological expression and repression. In The Coral Gardens and their Magic (1935), Malinowski does the same for Sir James Frazer’s conceptions of the difference between religion and magic. He compares Frazer’s descriptions of magical beliefs with Trobriand horticultural and landholding beliefs and practices, and shows, for example,

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the way ceremonies involved in clearing land and harvesting frst fruits affrm who has the right to clear the land and the right to harvest its fruits. They are, therefore, not so much “magical” as legal. Or, putting the same point a different way, he shows that the Trobriand ceremonies depend no more on a theory of magical infuence for the Trobrianders than signing a lease does for us. In Western societies, what are stipulated as completely secular legislative assemblies, like meetings of Parliament and the U.S. Congress, also have to meet specifc ceremonial requirements in order to be “offcial.” Specifc clothing must be worn, specifc forms of address are used, meetings must be held in a specifc place, meetings are opened with a prayer, and there is a very carefully circumscribed way to keep records of what has been agreed to. And exactly as in a Trobriand land clearing ceremony or canoe launching, if the ceremony is disrupted the problem that results has nothing to do with the supernatural. It is that there is a dispute among those concerned and some way has to be found to resolve it, either by negotiation or confict. Unfortunately, in his last years Malinowski turned away from this kind of close description and tried to articulate a description of culture in general along more positivistic lines. In this context, he used the term “institution” for something quite different, namely, a set of societal arrangements for meeting basic needs of different kinds (1944).

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CONCLUSION Communities are pluralistic. They have multiple and distinct types of organizations that do not add up to a coherent all-encompassing whole. This is a fundamental fact of Homo sapiens social organization. It is also a fundamental fact of Homo sapiens kinship organization, in the sense that kinship is always recognized in contrast to other kinds of organization based on other principles. One cannot have kinship without something to differentiate it from. An organization is a social construction with a single coherent set of reciprocal roles, relations, or positions shaped to a common purpose. This is the sort of thing we can see represented in a table of organization, a constitution, or a corporate charter. In an organization, the relation of any person occupying one of the positions with any other person occupying another position can be computed in an agreed-upon way. Such constructions necessarily involve using ideas of social relationships that the participants share. Organizations exist through time as instantiations of organizational charters. Organizational charters are constructed with ideas drawn from social and technical idea systems. But organizational charters are still conceptual models, not working things.

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A recognizable situation is created by the instantiation of organizational charters. It is unlikely that situations are created in any other way, that is, the present theory of organizations is also an analysis of cognized situations. A situation is the “here and now” that makes up the context of any meaningful action. Situations are constructed using the documentary method. We create agreement on underlying or surrounding realities by imputing and objectifying of culturally established idea systems. A corollary of recognizing the irreducible importance of individual constructive activity in creating and maintaining organizations is recognizing that no individual has “the whole picture.” There is no one “whole picture” to have. There are many individuals and groups operating in a complex system of overlapping pictures that they continuously regenerate. There are also, however, some individuals who have a better sense of the total range of idea systems in use and who are better able to promote agreement on common rules of behavior that are calculated to allow all of these various individuals pursue their own constructive ends. This is an important part of what people everywhere recognize as wisdom.

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Kinship and Biology

Our current understanding of how people construct their kinship systems greatly enhances our ability to identify the evidence for the evolution of kinship ideas in the paleoanthropological record. What we see is that kinship as we describe it here appears to be associated only with our own species, anatomically modern Homo sapiens. Social organizations are social constructions. Their members perform them interactively using shared ideas and learned processes, but this does not mean in any way that they are mere matters of opinion or fctions. They are as real as life and death. The relationships that participants create for themselves by using these particular ideas in the ways described are precise, calculable, and objective. The process is exactly parallel to the way the concepts of mathematics allow us to turn our always varying and subjective individual judgments of the shapes of objects in space into objective and calculable shared descriptions, and the way the theories of each of the physical sciences allow their practitioners to construct their objective realities. This implies an important question, “What are the subjective (individual) intuitions or perceptions of kinship that the concepts of kinship are objectifying?” Since we learn mathematics in formal educational settings after acquiring substantial language skills, it is fairly easy for us to understand what is meant by saying that mathematics formalizes our perceptions of objects in space, and that this formalization is what allows us to objectify them. Although the concepts of kinship work in the same way, our experience in learning them is very different. There is no point in our lives where we have the communicative skills to talk about kinship but have not yet begun to learn the concepts of kinship. So, while we would not readily think that our concepts for measuring size and shape come simply from the facts of size and shape, it is much easier to think that the concepts of kinship come simply from the facts of kinship. If 71

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we have been raised in the West, it is easy to think that these facts of kinship can be reduced to the two kinds of relations that Western kinship systems recognize: marriage and descent. In fact, however, the biological basis of the human family is the entire human reproductive anatomy plus the way this leads individuals of the species to form a characteristic type of biologically grounded system of relationships. Individuals experience this in an enormous number of ways: feelings of lust, love, hate, longing, admiration, impatience, irritation, the desire to be close, the desire not to be close, frustration, hunger, pride, sympathy, and many feelings that have no names. What is the feeling of a hug? Is wanting to be near someone a feeling, a sensation, or an emotion? What is the feeling of feeling safe? What impels a child stung by a bee to run to her mother? What it impels a child of twelve who is very unhappy with his parents to stay with them anyway rather than live on his own? What impels parents who have a child of twelve that they do not like to continue to feed and protect him anyway? Such things make up the bundles of subjective experiences that concepts of kinship objectify. We call this complex of felt dependencies, relations, and emotions the human biosocial family and biosocial family organization. The purpose of this chapter is to synthesize what paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, and social anthropologists know of how it evolved. Two complementary points are crucial to the story. The frst is that the basic human biosocial organization, our counterpart of the types of social organizations we see among our primate relatives, actually evolved long before our own species, Homo sapiens. The second is that our species evolved in the context of this biosocial organization and as an adaptation to it, not the other way around. This chapter synthesizes what we know of the process. The argument is provided with more of the archaeological and physiological evidence in Human Thought and Social Organization, Chapter 3 (Leaf and Read, 2012). ADAPTATIONS BEFORE HOMO SAPIENS Primates are the biological order that includes humans, the great apes, monkeys, and prosimians. All primates have some kind of biosocial family and local group organization. A biosocial family is a biological mother and offspring with some arrangement of associated males who recognize themselves functionally as a continuing cooperative association, irrespective of whether they are conceptualized as a family in a way expressed in language. Among primates, biosocial families are always aggregated in larger groups. Anthropologists use different terms for different types, associated with different species. For humans (Homo sapiens), the earliest identifable

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group appears to be a band. A band is a human group consisting of multiple biosocial families that cooperate to maintain a territory or to stay together as they move through territory. Primate groups in this biosocial sense have been studied from many perspectives by anthropologists, psychologists, biologists, and others all working together (Dunbar, Knight, and Power, 2001; Geary and Flynn, 2003). Humans and Pan (chimpanzees) had a common ancestor in the late Miocene or early Pliocene, about 8.5 million years ago. This common ancestor has not been identifed but is assumed to be a Miocene ape that was adapted for movement by brachiating through trees and walking on all fours on the ground with occasional bipedal locomotion. Brachiating means moving from branch to branch by swinging and climbing with arms and shoulders as apes do rather than walking, jumping, and running on top of branches as monkeys do. The line from this unknown ancestor to us passes through the group of species referred to as australopithecines. The australopithecines moved bipedally when on the ground in more open brush and savanna areas. Bipedalism involved fve separate but interrelated features that connect human physiology to the human biosocial family organization. The frst is the physical shape of the hips, legs, and feet and the adoption of erect posture. The second is the suppression of estrus swelling of the female sex organs because of this erect posture. The third is sexual dimorphism. The fourth is extension of human postpartum dependency, also in part because of the physiology of bipedal locomotion. And the ffth is human pair-bonding. None came frst. All coevolved, although bipedalism evidently preceded pair-bonding. Australopithecus was erect, a habitual walker. This is evident in part from skeletal remains. Its hips, legs, and feet are nearly human but the legs are relatively short and the foot lacks an arch. The arms are slightly longer than the legs and have long fngers. But the clearest picture of their bipedalism is several sets of fossil footprints. The earliest are from Laetoli, in Tanzania. These have been dated to about 3.7 million years ago and show the tracks of two individuals, walking through what was then freshly fallen volcanic ash. One small one, apparently a child, is walking in the footsteps of a midsize one, probably a female. The big toe is next to and aligned with the other toes as in a human foot and the walking gait is heel to toe. The Laetoli footprints have been specifcally associated with Australopithecus afarensis, whose skeletal remains are consistent with them and have been found nearby on the same time level. Their cranial capacity was about 20% greater than that of a chimpanzee. The dentition suggests a diet that included meat. This allows the consumption of higher-energy foods with much less chewing effort than the vegetal material consumed by Australopithecus boisei. The locomotion and diet are consistent with

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adaptation to an open, savanna like, environment. Bipedal walking allows a much greater geographical range than the foot and knuckle quadrupedalism of gorillas and chimpanzees. It also frees the hands for more carrying and manipulation.

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TOOLS, DIET, AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION The frst stone tools, in the form of fakes, date to 3.2 million years before the present (BP) and were found in Ethiopia. These tools predate the frst remains from the genus Homo. There is no agreement on who made them. Tools more complex than a fake used as a tool are dated to about 2.6 million years BP. These make up the Oldowan assemblage, after the Olduvai Gorge where tools like this (but not the oldest examples) were frst found. The main form is a chopping tool made by knocking several adjacent fakes off a cobble, leaving the cobble with a sharp edge on one side. They are 4–10 centimeters long and made from several different types of rock that can hold a good edge. The most likely main use was to cut through animal skin and meat. Oldowan tools were made by the frst species of the genus Homo, Homo habilis, the successor genus to the australopithecines that appeared about 2.5 million years ago. The type was frst found and named by Louis Leakey. Homo habilis remains are associated with Oldowan tools and bones that have cut marks that sharp fakes would have produced. Homo habilis has an almost completely erect posture, relatively longer legs and shorter arms. Its hands and feet are almost like our own, including an arch in the foot. Teeth suggest meat-eating. This might have involved hunting but defnitely involved scavenging. Evidence includes bones broken with tools used to extract marrow. Homo habilis was followed by several distinguishable phylogenetic species who lived contemporaneously. The most prominent, long-lasting, and widespread is Homo erectus, the frst human form to leave Africa. They spread into Europe and as far east as Indonesia, presumably walking on ground exposed by much lower sea levels. Homo erectus’ arms and hands have the same proportions as our own, but the species is highly variable in overall size, head shape, face, and dentition. Some varieties or subspecies retain larger teeth and jaws consistent with a more vegetable diet. Others have still smaller teeth and jaws, indicating still more reliance on meat. The tool assembly associated with Homo erectus is called Acheulean. The type tool is called a hand axe. It is made with bifacial faking, which involves the removal of fakes from the front and back of the nodule being transformed into the shape of a hand axe. Hand axes frst appeared about 1.6 million years ago and continued to be made until about 300,000 years ago.

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An Acheulean hand axe is made by frst taking a large fake off of a larger core, and then removing small fakes from the surface to make a tool that is relatively fat and often symmetrical, with the fat side having a teardrop shape. The pointed end is sharp. So are the adjacent edges. The more rounded end may have been blunted for holding in the hand. These usually vary in size from about 4 centimeters long to over 10. They vary in quality from rough and quickly made to blades that are so beautifully wrought, smooth, and thin that it is hard to imagine a practical use for them. Some could have been hafted, in various ways. Evidence of Homo erectus meat-eating is associated with the frst appearances of hearths and defnite evidence that meat was cooked. The earliest defnite date for cooking is about 250,000 years ago. Less defnite evidence for the controlled use of fre go back as far as 400,000 years. Animal remains associated with these sites include bison, rhinoceros, and elephant. From the types of animals, as well as tool marks on the bones, it seems clear that those who ate them were hunters, not just scavengers. Smaller and lighter jaws and teeth, in turn, are associated with expanded cranial capacity. Homo erectus also worked wood. Artifacts recovered include spear shafts and bowls. Managing all of this almost certainly would have required some form of spoken language.

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SEX AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION Bipedalism is related to reproductive behavior and social organization. The clearest way to think of this is in contrast to gorillas and chimpanzees. Being quadrupedal, the sexual organs of female gorillas and chimpanzees are exposed to the rear when they engage in normal movement. When females of both of these species are in estrus, they also become more sexually receptive and their sexual organs swell up visibly. The swelling is mild among gorillas but very conspicuous among chimpanzees. This is evidently attractive to males. They are not attractive sexually at other times, with the apparent exception of Bonobos. Bonobos of both sexes appreciate sexual contact at all times. The different patterns of sexual receptivity of these three species are connected to the differences in their biosocial family and forms of social organization, but the connection also depends upon their patterns of sexual dimorphism. In all three, males are signifcantly larger. But in humans the difference is smallest. Human (Homo sapiens) males are about 15% larger than females. Chimpanzee males are about 25% larger than females and mature male gorillas are normally twice the size of females.

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Females in all three species have long-term associations with their offspring. Chimpanzee males usually stay with their mothers until maturity, sometime longer. For gorillas and chimpanzees, females stay with their mothers throughout their lives. Sexual dimorphism comes into play in the way these mothers with offspring are aggregated into larger social groups. A gorilla harem has one dominant male. Other males born within the group are eventually forced out, forming bachelor groups. Each bachelor must eventually displace a dominant male somewhere if he is to have females and offspring of his own. The territories of gorilla harems sometime overlap somewhat without confict, but harems do not cooperate or share members with each other. The larger groups among chimpanzees are referred to as communities. A community has a single most dominant alpha male and a group of allied beta males that have frst access to females when they come into estrus. Other males form opposing alliances. These alliances are constantly being renegotiated through displays of friendly and hostile behavior. The hostile behavior is most conspicuous: outbursts of screaming, running, posturing and swaggering, breaking off branches and waving them about, and threatening anyone who doesn’t get out of the way. Symbolic displays easily turn into actual fghts resulting in serious injuries. Groups of males may patrol the boundaries of the troop’s territory, moving in single fle, and will fght with males from other groups they encounter, thereby expanding their territory. They also hunt members of other troops and occasionally kill them, either defensively to protect their territory or aggressively. Jane Goodall describes a situation in which, over time, one troop she was observing killed every member of the neighboring troop and took over its territory. Male chimpanzees also join together in hunting other animals for food, most commonly other tree-dwelling primates. Some sharing of kills with each other may occur. Bonobos were previously described as pygmy chimpanzees. It is only in the last thirty years that the substantial differences between them and the common chimpanzee have become apparent. Bonobos and Pan are about equally close to humans genetically. Bonobo behavior seems more humanlike, but females have the same pattern of sexual swelling and receptivity as common chimpanzees. Bonobo biosocial organization has been characterized as female dominated and their social interaction as “make love not war.” Troop social life is dominated by a group of senior females with their offspring. Although male-on-male violence does occur, social interaction is not dominated by male displays of violence and bullying like that of common chimpanzees. Rather, there is a great deal of hugging, snuggling, backslapping, and females rubbing genitalia together. The latter is a common female greeting and also

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appears to be the standard way to end confict and dissipate tension among females when it develops. With bipedalism, by contrast, in normal locomotion, female sexual organs face downward and are between the thighs. They are not exposed and there is no room for Chimpanzee-like expansion as an indication of sexual receptivity. So, there is no outward sign when sexual intercourse is more likely to result in pregnancy. It follows that the only way to assure that females are sexually receptive when in estrus is to be sexually receptive at all or most other times as well. This is one of the obvious bases of human pair-bonding. The other is the relative decrease of sexual dimorphism. As males became steadily smaller relative to females, the basis of group cohesion could not continue to be domination by few males. It would have to be wider acceptance among both males and females, and this is what we recognize as the human band organization.

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ENERGY EFFICIENCY AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION The biosocial transition to male–female pair-bonding was also supported by energy effciencies. In 1998, Catherine Key reviewed the literature on the energy costs of various activities related to paternal involvement in child raising among primates for her University of London dissertation, titled Cooperation, Paternal Care and the Evolution of Hominid Social Groups. Part of her conclusion was that “human males have signifcantly higher daily energy expenditure than would be expected for primates of their body size. Human females may be unable to increase their energy expenditure in a similar manner because it would suppress their fertility” (p. 188). By “human” she means the genus Homo. She argues that formation of male–female pairs allows a more effcient trade-off between fertility and energy effciency than species where males and females obtain food on their own and males do not share parental activities. That is, by having females devote more energy to childbearing and child-rearing and males devote more energy to gathering food for all of them, the pair uses energy more effciently than the males and females would separately, without such cooperation. FACE, BRAIN, AND LANGUAGE With bands composed of groups of relatively stable male–female pairs and their offspring, band size would be limited by how many pairs could cooperate with one another.

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Although sexual dimorphism decreased among Homo erectus, it was also highly variable from one population to another. We can infer an evolutionary consequence. The more dimorphism decreased, the more the advantage of greater communication abilities increased. Greater communication ability would have required greater ability to make and distinguish many different sounds precisely, and greater cognitive ability. Greater ability to look ahead would also have advantages. All of this would probably require larger brains. Genetically, brain size depends on two different sets of genetic controls: one for the size of the cranium and other for the size of the brain. Here again, meat-eating comes into play. The heavy jaw and large teeth associated with a vegetable diet requires heavier musculature. As the size of this musculature increases, its anchoring points reach farther up the sides of the skull, ultimately to prominent crests on the top. The result is a cage of muscle squeezing the growing cranium. By contrast, the smaller teeth and lighter jaws associated with meat-eating requires less musculature. Less musculature allows the highest points of attachment to move down from the top of the skull to the sides. This allows the cranium to expand if the brain within it is genetically programed to grow. Expansion can continue until the bone hardens. This depends on age. In the line leading to Homo sapiens, the age at which this hardening is complete has steadily increased. So, what are the selective pressures against larger brains? The most obvious is that brain tissue has a very high energy cost. While the brain makes up only about 3% of Homo sapiens body weight, about 20% of the caloric input goes into operating it. Putting the same point in a different way, a pound of brain requires about ffty times the energy to operate as a pound of muscle. No other species has ratios of brain to body weight equal to humans. The nearest is dolphins, at about half. Chimpanzees are next. What makes such a large human brain worth its cost? The frst part of the answer is that size is not all that is involved. The human brain is not only larger than other primates, it is more convoluted. The effect of the convolution is that more of the total brain mass is its outer layer, the cerebral cortex. This is the area associated with voluntary action. Voluntary action includes gesture and speech. The human brain is also confgured differently. For us, the most important comparison is with Neanderthal, the last Homo phylogenetic species that existed alongside Homo sapiens. Neanderthal brains were about 10% larger than Homo sapiens. They were also fatter, longer, and showed more sexual dimorphism. The human brain is more globular. Actual brains are not preserved in the fossil record but the major areas of the brain correspond in size to the bony plates in the skull over them. From comparing these plates, it appears that the greatest expansion in Homo sapiens brain compared to

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Neanderthal is in the temporal region (Leiberman et al., 2002). This includes Brocha’s area, for speech production and recognition. Paleoanthropologists have also concluded that Homo sapiens has a longer pharynx, the area between the back of the throat and the vocal chords. This makes them (us) more susceptible to choking on food than Neanderthal, but better at making vowel sounds. It therefore seems clear that the last adaptations of the human face and head—the part of our anatomy that most clearly distinguishes anatomically modern Homo sapiens from archaic Homo sapiens (such as Heidelberg man) and Neanderthal—were responding to selective pressure for better speech ability (Leiberman et al., 2001, 2002, 2007). Selective pressure in favor of speech ability could have been manifested in behavior in several different ways. One might be that females regarded better speech ability as an attractive feature in males and vice versa. Another might be that individuals with greater ability were better at raising and providing for their offspring. And yet another might be that bands with members with better speech ability had better survival rates than bands with less capable individuals. None of these excludes the others.

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THE ORGANIZATIONAL RUBICON OF THE UPPER PALEOLITHIC Now we come to what the paleoanthropologist Ofer Bar-Yosef (2002) calls the “Upper-Paleolithic Revolution” of the late Pleistocene, from 50,000 to 10,000 years ago. Over this period, the artifact assemblies of anatomically modern Homo sapiens populations were increasingly differentiated from their Neanderthal contemporaries. After it, Homo sapiens expanded and Neanderthal disappeared. Since then, for the frst time, there has been only one human species worldwide. We have already said that the difference was that Homo sapiens in the Upper Paleolithic developed the kind of human social organization that we describe here. Neanderthals did not. Now we explain the evidence. In order to think a kinship map, a person must be able to master several conceptual operations. One is to put oneself in the place of another. Another is to be able to think in terms of classes and make computations with classes. Another to be able to think recursively, which is to use the product of one computation in another computation with the same operation. And another is to recognize that the result of one computation is equal to the result of another. This is, for example, what is required to understand a statement like “father of father is grandfather” or “father of father = grandfather.” “Father” is a class. “Grandfather” is class. The computation father of father is recursive. “Of” is computation relation. And “Is” or “=” means they are the

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same, they can be substituted for one another. Other further class computations of the same sort are “father of grandfather” is “great-grandfather,” and also “Father of father of father is great-grandfather.” We cannot think kinship unless we can recognize such equations. The archaeological record does not preserve social idea systems, organizational charters, and methods of instantiation such as we can elicit among living communities and infer from historical documents. But now that we know what these basic components of social organization are, we can recognize the evidence for the logical operations that they depend upon. The archaeological record also preserves evidence of the kind of collective behavioral fexibility that this type of social organization produces. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE UPPER PALEOLITHIC REVOLUTION Bar-Yosef characterizes the features that mark the revolution:

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In sum, most of the components discussed above are seen as evidence for rapid technological changes, emergence of self-awareness and group identity, increased social diversifcation, formation of long-distance alliances, the ability to symbolically record information and that these are being the most typical expressions for the capacity of Upper Paleolithic humans for modem culture. The latter term means that the creators and bearers of these cultural traits were most probably the forerunners of historically recorded societies of huntergatherers. This also implies that they had modem cognitive capacities, although scholars who study cognitive evolution warn against such a simple conclusion. (2002:369)

This “symbolically recorded information” is of three main kinds. One is objects of personal adornment, beginning with beads and the apparent use of ocher as a body coloring (and insect repellent). The second is fgurative art, mainly pictures painted, incised, and pecked on cave rock walls. The third is sculptured fgures. Some of the sculpted fgures are on cave walls in relief, others are small individual fgures. The wall paintings and reliefs are usually referred to as “parietal art.” The sculpted pieces are referred to as “portable art.” The earliest unambiguous assemblages of this art discovered so far are in the Chauvet Grotto in Ardèche, France. They are dated to about 32,000 years ago. The central question is how these are related to one another. Are the “emergence of self-awareness and group identity,” increased diversifcation, symbolically recorded information, and the rest only independent manifestations

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of a real cause of Homo sapiens success that lies elsewhere, such as an increase in cognitive capacity? Or are they causally interrelated and mutually supportive as instruments of this success in their own right? Our argument is that they are causally interrelated. They are all integral to the type of ideabased social organization we describe.

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SELF-AWARENESS, THE IDEA OF SELFAWARENESS, AND THE IDEA OF IDEAS Somewhere in the course of the development of human biosocial family and group organization, our ancestors began to develop idea systems, mental images of relations associated with gestures and speech. The frst glimmerings must have begun very early. Paleoanthropologists, primatologists, and others now recognize that several species in addition to man have what they call “a theory of mind.” This means that they recognize their own intentions and strategies, attribute similar thinking to others, and then act toward those others on the basis of that attribution. They put themselves in the other’s place. If they had a way of representing this theory of mind in shared symbols, it would be a rudimentary social idea system, with the beginnings of the foundational ideas of self, other, and reciprocity. More elaborate idea systems were probably involved in the production of the frst stone tools. It may be diffcult to imagine that language had been developed very far at this time, but there must have been a way to indicate what the different tools were, what to make them out of, a way to indicate right or wrong steps in making them, and some notion of contingency, “if– then.” The expanding variety of tools also refected an expanding variety of tasks. Moreover, since tools are often found tens of kilometers from the sources of the materials they are made of, they are also evidence of either travel or trade over long distances, hence communication. In addition to technical ideas for the tool itself, there must have been social ideas for associating individuals with them, such as “mine” and “his.” And since we know that by this time biosocial organization involved at least family groups within bands, there must have been some way to speak of that. There is no reason to think that inventing sounds to represent things would be more diffcult than inventing the things themselves. The main problem is not actually inventing a sound but standardizing it within a speech community. But this process cannot have been very different from the process of standardizing the tools. Most probably, the two processes went together, as a pragmatic view of language implies. Beads are technically much easier to manufacture than a Levallois fake, but making beads as a decoration involves a new kind of conceptual complexity.

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To recognize anything requires a concept of a class: the class of things it is one of. So, when we make anything as more than an isolated object, we are also making it a symbol of the class of things that it is one of. A chopper says in effect, “I am a chopper.” The bifacial fake tool says “I am a hand axe.” A coat says “I am a coat.” But a bead does not just say “I am a bead.” It can also say “I am a symbol.” “I represent an idea,” perhaps of beauty, perhaps of rank, perhaps of gender. And, of course, this means that people who use such things must know what an idea is. Without an idea to represent, a shell bead is just a shell with a hole in it. So, the idea of a self that is implied by the presence of beads and other decorations is not just a self that makes choices, as in the theory of mind. It is also a self as an idea that can be represented by symbols. This is a major intellectual leap, and it must have been developed many times in isolated cases before it took hold for Homo sapiens generally. No human community now has just one kind of self-conception. All social idea systems defne relations that are reciprocal. Every reciprocal relation implies self-conceptions on at least two levels: self as an aspect of a defned role in relation to other defned roles, and a more personal self as that which takes on one role or the other. Modern human beings develop this understanding as they mature. They begin from a very simple subjective awareness of something like oneself as opposed to others to a complex conceptual structure involving both a personal-self self-conception and a personal strategy that recognizes and must deal with the problem of balancing the demands and opportunities of their different and distinct organizational selves: X the citizen who is also X the teacher, X the soldier, X the son, X the husband, X the voter, X the drummer in a band, X the employee, and so on. The complexity of what we might regard as our “total” self-conception is directly related to the content and structure of our various organizational selves and their relations to one another. When we fully appreciate the scale of this complexity we can more readily understand why there is a span of 40,000 years from the frst evidence of a self-concept in the form of beads and a block of red ocher with markings on it at Blombos Cave to what we see in the Grotto of Chauvet.1 Crossing that gap required a lot of thinking. TECHNOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES AND CLIMATE CHANGE Although the technological differences between the modern and Neanderthal populations were signifcant by the time of the Neanderthal extinction, these differences alone cannot account for the extinction. Technology is always embedded in organization. So, the increasing technological differentiation

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that developed between Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens, as well as among different Homo sapiens groups during the time when both populations existed, must have at least partly depended upon associated organizational differentiation.

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LOGIC, PSYCHOLOGY, AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION There is nearly universal agreement among archaeologists and paleoanthropologists that anatomically modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthal differed in cognitive ability. The problem has been to say what this difference was. Our view is that anatomically modern Homo sapiens may or may not have been smarter as individuals in some brute force information processing way, if we could rate species as we rate computers. Neanderthals’ larger brains must have been used for something. But Homo sapiens defnitely had more powerful ways of thinking collectively. The key is the fact that modern Homo sapiens’ social idea systems defne abstract class relationships and use computational rules involving reciprocity, recursion, and avoidance of selfcontradiction. Once we understand what this is, we can see the evidence for it. At this point, Piaget’s developmental psychology is relevant. His Logic and Psychology (1953) used concepts of formal reasoning to analyze the conceptual complexity of the behavior of children of different ages as they accomplished, or failed to accomplish, various tasks in experimental settings and natural observations. He represented this reasoning using two different systems: class inclusion logic and set theory. In doing so, he showed how different types of expressions in the two systems are equivalent. This analysis, his many publications with Barbara Inhelder, and the replication of their experiments throughout modern developmental psychology, have clearly established three distinct stages through which reasoning develops among modern Homo sapiens. The archaeological materials distinctively associated with modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthal can be analyzed in the same way. While we do not believe there is any general law that the ontogenic development of the individual has to recapitulate the phylogenetic development of the species, the idea does apply in this particular case (cf. Parker and McKinney, 1999). The last step of that development, arriving at the type of thinking Piaget associates with children beginning about age twelve, appears to be what characterizes our Homo sapiens ancestors but not Neanderthals, in the Upper Paleolithic. That is, the cognitive complexity of Neanderthal neurological processes was, apparently, comparable to the level of cognitive complexity we see in developing children before age twelve, but did not reach the level of complexity that Piaget describes for children twelve and above.2

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By “thinking” we are referring to conceptualizations established in consensus that can be used to form organizations and agreed-upon organized activities and behavior. Many writers have cautioned against assuming Neanderthals thought as we do. The opposite caution also holds: we should not suppose they did not think like we do if that supposition involves postulating an empirically ungrounded claim of our own radical uniqueness (Davies and Underdown, 2006). Thought is the interface between physiology and its products. It therefore makes sense to assume that there would be continuity in the development of the complexity of thought in parallel with the complexity of what it produces. In technology, the progression of technologies from simple fake to core-chopper through constructed shape (hand axes), to prepared fake and blade (Levallois), to prismatic core-blade3 and fnally to prismatic core-blademicrolith-hafting bespeaks a constantly increasing cognitive complexity that parallels the expansion of brain functioning such as expansion in the size of working memory (Read, 2008c; Read and van der Leeuw, 2008). It is also a progression of increasing use of preparatory thinking, through recursive operations, in which the relation between what is immediately done and what will ultimately be produced is increasingly indirect (see discussion in Read and van der Leeuw, 2008, 2017). The thinking involved in the increasing complexity of stone tools translates into the ideas of Piaget’s progression of developmental logic from simple object-to-object relations through thinking in terms of sets (“if this, then that and if that, then the next”). But the connection between stone tools or activities such as the sophisticated preparation of birch pitch for hafting documented at a Neanderthal site dating around 45–50,000 14C BP (Koller et al., 2001; Grünberg, 2002; Marcel et al., 2019)4 and social organization is remote precisely because these are what one makes, rather than what one has a relationship with. Accordingly, while practical objects always imply social relations and are used in the context of such relations, they generally cannot represent how those relationships are conceptualized. But art, designed expressly for the purpose of representing relationships, can do so. Art and the Idea of Ideas Virtually all the interpretations that have been offered of Upper Paleolithic cave art and related artifacts up to now have tried to seek their signifcance in details that only occur here and there, rather than features that occur in all of it. The details include the fact these paintings are often found in very distant reaches of caves that are diffcult to get to, that the drawings are often laid on in sequences, that they often picture animals that seem not to have been living in the immediate vicinity, and that the frequencies with which

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different types of animals appear in the paintings does not correspond to the frequencies of the animals in the associated physical remains or physical environment. Doubtless these imply something, but the most important features should not be isolated details. They should be what is most striking and inescapable.

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The Concept of Classes Probably the most conspicuous overall feature of the paintings is that they are esthetically striking. Many seem monumental. This is not an easy effect to accomplish. It has to refect a well-developed tradition that includes a defnite theory of artistic representation. The next most conspicuous feature, which many have observed, is that the paintings do not represent narratives; they represent kinds. Although they realistically depict each individual animal as it would be seen, including seasonal changes in the hair of the horses, pregnancy of female animals, horns that would be present or absent according to the season of the year, and so on (Delluc and Delluc, 2006), the depictions are devoid of context. There are no backgrounds. In the earliest caves there are no scenes. Instead, the individual animals are almost always in groups, large or small, of others of their kind.5 One example is the four horses in a widely reproduced panel in the Chauvet Grotto that also includes several aurochs and rhinoceroses. The horses are clearly of the same kind. They are together as they might have appeared in a herd. Whether it is one horse at four moments or four horses at one moment, each head shows a distinct individual. Yet because of the differences combined with their close resemblances to one another, they also represent the idea of a class. The relation of the individuals to the class, and of that class to other classes, is clearly a social idea, an idea shared among the humans in the group that made the paintings and use them for some purpose. It is on the cave wall, not “out there” in nature. It is absolutely not possible to see “out there” from this point deep in the cave. So it cannot be understood as anything other than a visual expression of ideas in the mind of the artist and of those others who will view it. Putting the same point another way: the style of the paintings emphasizes that each animal portrayed is of a kind and abstracted by the painter from the context in which it would have been perceived. As Georges-Henri Luquet (1926) says in his study of Paleolithic art discussed in White (1997), the grouping of animals is intellectually realistic rather than visually realistic. This is where we see the ideas needed to construct the kind of social organization described in chapter 1.

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Classes of Classes and Class Operations Putting the animals in groups of others like them juxtaposes the idea of the individual to the idea of its kind. This establishes an equivalence among the individuals that transcends their individual differences. That equivalence is the basis for individuals being members of the class. So, each species represents both the idea of the species as a class and the idea of individuals in a class. The parallel kinship idea is that of a position that can be occupied by one or more individuals but that is also conceptualized as something completely apart from the idea of the person or persons who occupy it. Moreover, the paintings in any given area or surface rarely represent just one class. There are usually several, sometimes many, in apparently deliberate arrangements. In the case of the four horses, as noted, the other classes are rhinoceros and aurochs. When you have several such classes you also have the idea of animals as an even more encompassing class. This is the additional idea of classes of classes, in two senses. First, the represented animals sometimes fall into two main classes: herbivores and carnivores, predators and prey. This is particularly striking in the Grotto of Chauvet because it has a dramatic panel of lions and bears, along with the physical remains of actual cave bears. Second, since every cave has multiple grottoes with different kinds of representations in each that cannot be seen from the other grottoes, at any given point in the system what an individual must be aware of is the individuals, classes, and the totality of all the classes he or she sees in that grotto, plus all the other individuals, classes, and totalities in all the other grottoes that at that moment for that individual exist only in the mind. So, one must also have an idea of mind as what they exist in. And mind represented in this way is collective, social as well as socialized, and not simply individual.

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HUMAN FIGURES AND SOCIAL CATEGORIES Human fgures are rare compared to the animals. When they are present, they are drawn or incised in one of four styles. Each style is different from the style of the animals. First, some are simply icons or tokens: handprints, dots, abstract representations of male and female genitals, indentations seeming to indicate wounds on animals (presumably from people), or geometric shapes that may or may not represent human beings but must indicate some human idea. Second, there are apparent portraits of actual individuals, but only the heads. These, too, appear as both paintings and moveable art. Third, there are abstracted fgures in the style associated with the well-known “Venus” fgures that also appear as moveable art. And fourth, there are the fgures often described as either “sorcerers” or as part human and part animal. The

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best known example is the “sorcerer” of the cave of Trois Frères, in Ariège, France dating to around 12,000 BP. Because of the ambiguity of this particular fgure and because it is so widely discussed, we start well with it. Then we can come back to a similar but much earlier fgure in the Chauvet Grotto.

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Sorcerers The most widely reproduced picture of the sorcerer of Trois Frères was drawn by the Abbé Henri Breuil, not long after it was discovered. He interpreted it as a horned fertility god associated with pre-Christian paganism and drew it accordingly. This interpretation does not hold up to a close inspection of the evidence. Paul Bahn and Jean Vertut (1997) provide a balanced and well-documented overview of all the art forms from this period along with clear photographs. For the sorcerer of Trois Frères, they show side by side both a small black and white reproduction of Breuil’s drawing and a good color photograph of the wall painting itself (Bahn and Vertut, 1997:165). There is an even clearer photograph on the website http://www​.europreart​.net​/preart​.htm. The url for the photograph alone is http:​/​/www​​.euro​​prear​​t​.net​​/imag​​esp​/p​​troif​​​001​_0​​4​.jpg​ (July 13, 2017). Bahn and Vertut’s photograph and the website both show that the fgure is partly incised in the rock and partly painted over the incising. In Breuil’s drawing, the body is viewed from its left side. Its head turned to its left. It is rendered with much detail to give a lynx-like muzzle with reindeer horns and large owl-like eyes staring at the viewer. The fgure also has defnite paws for front feet and is bending forward with the forearms slightly extended. It has a human-like midsection and rear feet, human-like male genitals below its buttocks in the rear, and a wolf-like tail above the buttocks. The left foot is fat on the ground, the right foot is raised and its sole is turned toward the viewer. So, all in all, the fgure is clearly neither human nor human in an animal disguise. What we see in the photographs is quite different. The fgure is defnitely blurry above the waist. There is a suggestion of a face turned toward the viewer, but there is an equally strong suggestion of a second face underneath it, as one would see in a person wearing an animal skull as a headdress. The conspicuous staring eyes are not there. There are lines coming off the head that may be man-made incising suggesting horns, but may not be. Breuil’s paw-like front feet are not there. The arms are short and held in the way an actor might depict an animal rearing, but where the paws or hands would be in the painting there are only blurs. Beneath the blurs, however, are fairly clear incised human hands, with the fngers together. They are defnitely not paws. If there were paws in the original painting, the way the paint was laid over the incised hands would have clearly suggested that the hands were

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under the paws, as when a person wears an animal skin. They would not have suggested a hybrid creature (or a god) with actual paws. From the shoulders down, the body is defnitely human with a human spinal curvature in a forward-leaning stance, on human rear feet. The contrast in shape between the left and right foot is sharper than Breuil’s drawing, so the left foot is more clearly facing downward. Its right foot is more clearly turned inward, to the fgure’s left, so we can see the bottom—as in a footprint. For people who depended on tracking, this would be an unmistakable sign of a human being rather than any other type of animal. The human-like genitals are evident but not the wolf-like tail. So all in all, the impression given by the photographs, unlike Breuil’s drawing, is much more that of a naked human in an animal-like pose with an animal-skin headdress. The pose suggests a slightly off-balance, forward, dance-like, movement. The fgure is high on the wall near the roof, about 4 meters above the foor. There is nothing else nearby. There is another fgure in a very similar pose elsewhere in the same cave, and this one is clearly a human in an animal skin. It is etched as well as painted and the outlines are sharp. He is in the middle of a herd of aurochs and other ungulates milling around him (Bahn and Vertut, 1997:178). The skin he is wearing has the distinctive horns of an aurochs. The fgure’s arms are extended in front of him and across them, reaching to his nose, is an object sometimes described as a fute. Just as the “sorcerer” is described as the frst evidence of religion, this fgure is sometimes described as the frst representation of music. The posture is more upright than the “sorcerer” and more strongly conveys a sense of moving in a sprightly manner or dancing. It also seems clear that the animal fgures were drawn over each other at different times and not executed as a single scene. Taking all of this together, what is most evidently being portrayed is a person in animal disguise, moving or even dancing among the animals he is disguised as. Animals of a kind group together, and he groups with them. There is a very similar fgure in a similar pose in the Grotto of Gabillou, in the Dordogne, but in this case the horns are those of a bison. The ambiguous fgure in Chauvet Grotto is very similar. It is in the deepest reaches of the cave. It, too, clearly has a bison head or headdress but the details below the horns are more diffcult to interpret because it is drawn on a stalactite in a way that uses lines in the rock to make up the line of a good part of the fgure’s back, as though the fgure is emerging from the rock or imputed into it. So, we cannot readily separate what the artist was depicting from what the rock was requiring. But on the whole, the face seems too tall to be a single head rather than a headdress on a head. In short, the interpretation of the sorcerer fgures that is most consistent with most of the details in most of the instances that stretch across a period

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of 20,000 years is that they represent humans disguised as animals, probably in a ceremonial situation. They do not represent a nonhuman being, such as a god. Such fgures necessarily presume a concept of a class of humans in contrast with classes of animals, together with the idea that a member of the class humans can represent or act as a member of a class of animals. The idea of a ceremony, if we think that it, too, is represented, repeats all of this in yet another type of representation that brings the art (representation in space) and the music/dance (representation in time) all together as a representation in space–time.

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“Venus” Figures and Classes of Persons The “Venus” fgures are most often discussed as moveable art—small fgurines rather than pictures on cave walls. The moveable art is found from France to Russia. The parietal art is found from Spain to France. In France, both are commonly found in the same sites. There are also fgurines of animals like those in the wall paintings, but they are even rarer. The material is stone or in a few cases fre-baked clay. Figure 4.1 is the Venus of Willendorf, in Austria, one of the most famous. The fgures are highly stylized female forms. They have exaggeratedly full and rounded stomachs, buttocks, and breasts, but minimal hands, feet, and facial features. Such forms also appear in the wall paintings and in that context seem to fade off into other types of fgures often described as “hominoid.” These are human-like but are not defnitely human. There are also a few made as carved reliefs, such as the well-known “Venus with a horn” in the cave of Laussel in the Dordogne. This has the same features as the moveable Venus fgures, but instead of her two hands folded across her breasts, the right hand is holding a sheep’s horn at shoulder level as though it might contain a liquid to drink or pour and the left hand is on her stomach above her navel. A similar painting is in the Grotto of Chauvet, immediately next to the bison-masked fgure noted in the previous section. They seem to have been a single composition, although this does not automatically mean that all the elements were executed at the same time. The female fgure is a midsection, frontal view. Nothing is represented above the hips and the fgure has legs but no feet. It is at eye level. All representational art involves a selection of some features to emphasize and others to de-emphasize. The Venus fgures exaggerate the features that would be associated with successful childbirth and child-rearing and correspondingly de-emphasize other features, including those that suggest personal identity. Other conventions include the structural angle of the fgurines and their nonrealistic body proportions (Gvozdover, 1989).

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Figure 4.1  The Venus of Willendorf. Photo: Don Hitchcock, 2008; donsmaps.com.

There are other fgurines of the same size and material as the Venus fgures but with different patterns of overemphasis and underemphasis. They are both male and female. Several hundred have been discovered in all, and various subsets of them have been studied from many interpretive perspectives. Bahn and Vertut (1997) provide a comprehensive review. Their frst conclusion is that the Venus fgure is not the main focus of the genre as a whole. Both women and men are represented at all stages of their respective life cycles without any overall emphasis for any particular stage (1997:160–61). So, the most general meaning of such fgures lies not in what specifc features are stylized in one case or another, but in the stylization as such. The obvious meaning of this is that it makes each fgure represent a class rather than an individual: the class of people in that particular condition or stage of the life cycle. The portrait heads also appear as small fgurines and as parietal art, but the latter are much rarer and never occupy large panels in profusion as the animal pictures do.

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All of these fgures exist over the same period, from about 32,000 BP to 9,000 BP, and the abstract and realistic styles complement each other. Evidently, therefore, those who left out the individual features in the abstract fgurines knew how to include them, and those who included them in the portrait heads knew perfectly well how they could have left them out. So, we are justifed in taking them together. When we do so, the portrait heads and the exaggerated fgurines represent the same hierarchy of class relations as the animals in the parietal art: individual, class, and multiple classes of classes in variable relationships that we can adjust by our own thinking. They also represent the hierarchy of conceptual mapping relations that mark the stages of human intellectual maturation as described in Piaget’s developmental psychology. Assume that each item of moveable art would be given to, made for, or otherwise associated with some actual person, probably in the condition represented. If so, the portrait heads would represent what Piaget’s identifes as the absolute simplest conceptual relation: a direct association of one object with one other, the person with the person represented. Each person would be a unique individual at a moment in time, just as each animal on a wall seems to have been a unique individual at a moment in time. The association of an individual with one of the stylized fgures would then represent the next simplest relation: the association of an individual with a class, such as a woman of childbearing age with the statue representing the class of such women. And from here, the next step is to relate each stylized fgure with others of its own kind and then with others of other kinds, which entails ideas of classes of classes of all sorts, hierarchical and cross cutting: the class of all male life cycle stages, the class of all female life cycle stages, the class of all adult stages, and so on. Taken together, therefore, the fgurines refect a concept of social organization based on conceptualized gender and gender roles rather than biological differences per se (Balme and Bowdler, 2006). These particular roles imply family organization. Family organization implies a conception of kinship. In addition, the possession of well-wrought fgurines by individuals who were most likely not their makers implies a division of labor by occupation or at least of specialization in addition to kinship. And fnally, the contrast between all the classes and subclass of the human fgures and all the classes and subclasses of the animal fgures recognizes a contrast between a conceptualized social order and a contrasting conceptualized natural order. Almost certainly, following Piaget’s analysis, these classes would involve sets of rules: what a male does, what a female does, what a mother does, and so on. Relating the rules of one class to an individual is the simplest kind of moral thinking, in the sense of the simplest way to connect a rule or pattern of behavior to any one actual individual. Recognizing that any given individual

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will be subject to multiple rules at different times, however, is the basis of organizational pluralism. This is exactly the same array of class relationships we see in kinship maps: the idea of an individual, of a position, and of classes of classes of positions. The only difference is that “pregnant woman” cannot be a kinship term, because it is not defned as part of a reciprocal relationship. Nor is “young man,” “girl,” or “old man.” But mother, son, and father are and it is only a very small step to connect the life cycle points to kin relations in this way. MUSIC AND TIME Another element of the Upper Paleolithic revolution is music. The frst musical instruments are also exclusively associated with Homo sapiens and predate the paintings in the Chauvet grotto, although some wall paintings from the period also suggest music as has been noted. In terms of the present analysis, it makes sense that visual art and music would be found together. Music expresses the idea of instantiating an idea in time, just as art expresses the idea of instantiating an idea in space. Organizational ideas must be instantiated in both time and space. And, of course, to have a melody or rhythm in mind and then actually perform it or witness a performance, with or without instruments, is to instantiate it in behavior just in the way social idea systems embodied in organizational charters are instantiated.

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PERCEIVER AND PERCEIVED, SUBJECT AND OBJECT, SELF AND OTHER The Upper Paleolithic contrast between the more realistic treatment of animals and the more defnitely abstract representations of persons conveys a clear sense that “we” who do the paintings are different from “they” whom we paint. It also implies that the individuals making up the “we” are substitutable for one another just as the “they” evidently are. And yet we (people) are also individuals just as they (animals) are. This contrast between we-people and they-animals is mediated by representations of humans in animal guise. The implication is that humans can take either perspective; they can be human-like or animal-like, observers and observed. And, of course, this makes no sense unless we take it as meaning that animals have a perspective to take. The paintings thus embody the idea of a difference as a difference in perspective, a cognitive capacity associated with the temporal–parietal juncture (Aichhorn et al., 2006) in the relatively

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expanded temporal and parietal cortex of Homo sapiens in comparison to Neanderthals. These ideas, along with the ideas of sets and relations among sets, are the logical building blocks of all our social idea systems, which in turn are the fundamental conceptual material out of which we build all of our relationships and organizations, including the idea of reciprocity itself. Together, and only together, this idea of self and the idea of reciprocity applied to social positions or relations adds up to the fully developed human self-conception as G. H. Mead (1967[1934]) described it: the absolute conviction that for every “self” there is an “other.” Self necessarily implies other. To understand what one is oneself, one has to have the conceptual ability to put oneself in the place of another. We have to be able say, “If I were in your place I would have done the same (or different),” and “I can see how you might think that of me.” And we have to be able to know we can do this. It is also relevant to this process of conscious abstraction that the art was evidently intended to be timeless, both in content and function. The paintings were timeless in content, as noted, in that the animals are consistently abstracted from time and space and presented without imagery of their environmental and physical context. They were timeless in function in the sense that the painters and viewers repeatedly came back to them over many seasons and even lifetimes, while the objects they represented (the actual aurochs, horses, and so on) had existed in three dimensions plus time, were probably gone by the time the paintings were made, and were certainly long gone when the caves were revisited generations and even thousands of years later. This means two things. First, that the artists understood that the ideas the paintings represented were also timeless, in the sense of lacking an inherent time dimension. Second, that the painters had to have the capability of transposing the one to the other—of relating all the classes of natural species to all the classes of painted species, of actual animals existing in time to the conceptual animals that were timeless, and, therefore, necessarily the capacity to consider the nature of symbolic representation. ORGANIZATIONAL PLURALISM Finally, the location of many of the paintings in remote areas of the caves also has signifcance that lies in what is more obvious rather than what is less obvious. We can speculate about what the remoteness may suggest for the artists’ ideas of caves as such, or of the earth. But it is absolutely certain that these were not places for any other kind of normal activity. So, they clearly attest to the ability to think, “that place is for that activity and this place is for this activity,” probably even “this very special place for this very special

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activity.” It is also evident from the dating of repeated occupations that these places retained their signifcance for very long periods of time. Neanderthal sites also show spatial separation of function, but of a simpler sort (Pettitt, 1997). Some rock shelters seem to have internal postholes that suggest divisions into partitions or rooms, although this is disputed (Mellars, 1996:286). There seem to be stone “walls” or lines of stones holding down windbreaks or partitions of skins (Mellars, 1996:307). Well-defned hearths are regularly found, and there is good evidence for a consistent spatial organizational of activities around them, some close and some farther away (Mellars, 1996:309–11). This is documented, for example, at Tor Faraj in the Levant (Henry, 1998). At Kebara Cave, also in the Levant, a living space against a wall appeared to be regularly cleaned with ashes (Davies and Underdown, 2006 and references therein). Work areas outside of rock shelters have been more diffcult to fnd but there was clearly some separation of function. It has been clear for decades from tool assemblages that some Neanderthal groups engaged in very largescale processing of large game, implying large-scale kill-sites such as Mauran (Farizy et al., 1994) and Salzgitter-Lebenstedt (Gamble and Gaudzinski, 2005). But this kind of differentiation, with each area constrained by its immediate functional utility, does not require much conceptual complexity to organize. The thinking can probably be done with just the concepts of a class of places, a class of activities, and one-to-one mapping between them. Similarly, a study of Somme Valley sites with Acheulean tool assemblages (associated with Neanderthal) from the Middle Paleolithic, dating to about 450–300,000 BP, showed separated areas for testing and selecting fint nodules for tool making, for several distinct types of manufacturing activities, and for processing animal carcasses (Tuffreau, Lamotte, and Marcy, 1997:238). Here, too, the site specialization seems to have been responsive to immediate natural constraints: the presence of large numbers of nodules to sample, a commanding view, the availability of work space, an area for working fakes that is near another area where they were produced, and so on. A similar pattern has been shown for Middle Paleolithic Neanderthal occupations in the Rhone Valley (Daujeard and Moncel, 2009). For Neanderthals, this kind of pattern evidently continued until they disappeared. The spatiotemporal temporal organization of Homo sapiens at the same time was distinctly more complex. To get a fner-grained view of it, Daniel Lieberman and John Shea compared faunal material in fve sites not far from one another in the Levant. They focused particularly on features that would indicate the season of the year in which animals were killed. The sites represent a time span from about 190,000 BP to 50,000 BP. Lieberman and Shea conclude that early Homo sapiens “practiced a strategy of circulating seasonal mobility, while Neanderthals in the same region

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30,000 years later were ‘residentially mobile.’ Analyses of their lithic hunting technology further suggest that archaic humans hunted more frequently than did modern humans” (1994:1). By “residentially mobile,” Lieberman and Shea mean a group had one residence in one place, through all seasons (thus using a collector strategy for obtaining resources) and when they did move it was to abandon the site entirely and establish a new residence in another place (Shea, 2003; see also Gamble, 1999). The alternative is that the group comes together or disperses in different patterns at different seasons or under various circumstances. The more mobile, seasonal, movement was based on a foraging strategy and was evidently more productive.6 In this region and time range, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals often exploited the same environments. So, environment cannot explain the differences. This difference in strategy may seem small. Lieberman and Shea wonder why it even existed (p. 322). But it refects a great difference in complexity of organizational thinking. Residential mobility is, again, a one-on-one mapping: one place, one group, and probably just one organization. Organizing the “more mobile strategy” requires conscious organizational pluralism: different organizations for going to different places for different purposes at different times. Organizational pluralism cannot be maintained unless those structures are strongly generative. Without powerfully generative idea systems, everything met, every problem solved, has to be remembered as it occurred. So, all remembering is rote remembering; all solutions are brute force solutions. One tries this, one tries that, one keeps trying until something gives. The diffculty that a human community would have in maintaining multiple organizations on this basis is mind-boggling. It would be like a recipe book with no topical divisions. With a framework of generative ideas, however, organization becomes possible, not only in individual thought but also in collective discussion and decision-making. Organizing a series of activities over a cycle of spaces and times implies frst being able to substitute conceptual reasons to move for immediate environmental reasons. It would involve thinking things like “When the nights are cold at X, the aurochs return to Y.” This would be related to a second series such as “When we are at X we do activity 1 (prepare spears), when we are at Y we do activity 2 (hunt aurochs),” and so on. In most cases, if the activities are different, the “we” will have to be organized differently. Intercepting moving herds is very different from hunting animals that are dispersed in small groups. Moreover, the different organizations that are enacted at different times must also be available in the group’s thinking and planning at all times. When you can think of going to X and then to Y, you prepare things at X you will

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need at Y but cannot readily obtain there (see Binford’s [1977] discussion of Nunamiut Inuit contingency planning for hunting trips), which may account for the great expansion of Aurignacian tool types at every site, rather than the Aurignacian tool types being an aggregation from many sites. It is very diffcult to see how this could be done without being able to think of classes of classes in a recursive manner, with full “equilibrium” in Piaget’s sense. The Neanderthal groups, by contrast, might have been able to do what they did with nothing more than a concept of classes (“This place is for this activity, that place is for that activity” or, on a larger scale: “Since we cannot get enough food here, we have to go to someplace else. We have a choice of places V, W, ... Z”), thus just using what Wynn and Coolidge (2004) have referred to as long-term working memory. ORGANIZATION AND INDIVIDUAL

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Pettit’s reconstruction of the Neanderthal life cycle emphasizes the high level of physical trauma in all Neanderthal skeletons, male and female, from an early age (2000:356–57). A pattern of movement and of organizational adjustment only in response to environmental stress would go a long way to explain this. Pettit attributes this to lack of organizational complexity and fnds supporting evidence in their funerary practices, insofar as there are any. He notes that “the purposeful burial of the dead as ritual end to the life cycle of at least some individuals may not have been that important” in comparison to Homo sapiens (2000:358). Total known Neanderthal burials are estimated from about thirty to a maximum of sixty (Pettitt, 2000:358). For Homo sapiens they are much more common. As he summarizes: Remains of individuals who survived into late adulthood (over 40 years) are very rare. I suggest that, for those individuals whose remains were not deliberately interred it is conceivable that they are abandoned in the shelters from which they have been recovered when accumulated trauma fnally rendered them unable to keep up with the social group. Furthermore, those who appear to have been accorded full burial may refect those who died while still in the company of their intimate network group (sensu Gamble, 1998a). (Pettitt, 2000:359)

Even without the present organizational theory, Pettit concluded that Neanderthals had little in the way of a conceptualized social structure, that their local bands were mainly organized around the characteristics of the individuals that made them up, and that the most important of these characteristics was mobility. Those who were buried, however unceremoniously, were the few who could keep up until the time of their death.

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We agree, but note that we still need to account for the few apparent cases of funerary marking that have been found, such as at the La Ferrassie rock shelter in the Dordogne. How would this be conceptualized? The frst and best-preserved body at la Ferrassie, called la Ferrassie 1, was excavated carefully by Louis Capitan and Denis Peyrony in 1909 and reported in 1910. It is an adult male, elderly by Neanderthal standards, who was not in good health and would have depended on the care of others. It is dated at between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago. Their conclusion was that the body had been laid in a natural depression in the occupational foor of the lowest Mousterian cultural level, which was the top of the previous, Acheulean, level. The two strata were easily distinguished by their soil types. The body was near a wall in a corner of the shelter, laying on its back but with its knees fexed and turned to the right side, its face turned toward the left. There was one fat stone about 20 centimeters across near its head and one at each shoulder. Capitan and Peyrony considered and ruled out the possibility that the rocks showed that he was killed accidentally on the spot. There was “splintered” bone scattered over the body. And all of this in turn was in turn covered with a mound of household detritus, leaves, and the like. Once they dug through this to the skeleton, they:

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then proceeded with great slowness and infnite precautions, starting with the lower limbs, with a veritable dissection of the skeleton, just freeing the bones but leaving them in place. Thus advancing step by step, the complete skeleton appeared to us then just as it had been laid down by its contemporaries, the Mousterian, extended on the back, the trunk slightly inclined to the left, legs very strongly folded under the thighs, the latter half bent over the pelvis, knees turned to the right, the left arm along the body, left hand at the left hip, right arm bent and the right hand near the shoulder, head turned left, jaw wide open. (http​ :/​/do​​nsmap​​s​.com​​/ferr​​assie​​.html​​#ref​e​​rence​. Accessed 14 June 2017)

Capitan and Peyrony concluded that the purpose of the arrangement was to retain the body and protect it. The other remains were an adult woman, three children, and two fetuses. They did not die together, but each one was treated in the same way. It was not separated from the group but kept within it and protected. This is consistent with Pettit’s view that the group was identifed with the individuals that made it up. Our more formal analysis lets us go farther. The funeral practices do not embody a clear difference between the idea of a class with a distinct defnition and simply a set or group of individuals. That is, they did not recognize the distinction between a group and an organization, which is fundamental to social human social organization as it now exists.

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Relatedly, as Pettitt and others have noted, there is also no evident concern with items of personal adornment. All of this is consistent with a minimal concept of the self as subject but not self as object, that is, self as a perceiving individual recognizing that other individuals are also thinking (i.e., a self with a theory of mind) but not self defned as an object by oneself and others through being able to occupy various social roles. In contrast, there are clearly marked burials associated with anatomically modern Homo sapiens at the site of Qafzeh, near Nazareth in the Levant. These date from 100,000 BP to 90,000 BP (Grün et al., 2005), 40,000 years before la Ferrassie 1. The tool assemblage of the site is Mousterian Middle Paleolithic, the same as is associated with Neanderthal physical remains at the same time (Mellars, 2005:13). This is a major reason for the importance of the site. It shows that human anatomical development did not go hand in hand with cultural development. It preceded it. It also defnitively settled the question of whether Homo sapiens descended from Neanderthal or was parallel to it. It was parallel. There were two graves. One was a double burial with a woman and child. The other was a child. The graves are distinguished from more casual or accidental forms of deposition by the fact that they are clearly excavated. Moreover, the grave of the child was dug into bedrock. The bodies were deliberately positioned in the graves. The position was much like la Ferrassie, but there were also items of personal adornment—grave goods. The latter are nodules of red ochre and “a series of” shell beads, although the beads were not directly on the bodies (Vandermeech, 2002; also Bar-Yosef et al., 2009). The presence of personal ornamentation is also documented in the near eastern sites of Ksar ‘Akil and Ũçağizli dating to 45,000 calendar BP (Zilhão, 2007). In the Aurignacian (associated only with Homo sapiens), beginning about 40,000 calendar BP, beads are common and made out of many different materials by methods that amount to mass production (White, 1992:551–56). Apart from burials, personal ornaments are known for Neanderthals in the Bachokirian (Bulgaria), Uluzzian (Italy and Greece), Altmühlian (Germany), and the Châtelperronian (France) sites, all of which are late. Most come from the latest levels (Zilhão, 2007), especially the Châtelperronian layer at the site of Grotte du Renne at Arcy-sur-Cure (France) (White, 2001). Paleoanthropologists disagree over whether these were endogenously developed or represent cultural borrowing from modern Homo sapiens. But even assuming they are a purely Neanderthal production, the artifacts at Grotte du Renne only resemble very early Homo sapiens sites such as Blombos with its shell beads, not the proliferation of seemingly mass-produced ornamentation found in Aurignacian sites. So, at most this suggests comparability of these late Neanderthals to Homo sapiens from 75 to 90,000 BP (d’Errico, 2003),

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not to the modern Homo sapiens partially overlapping with them in time in Europe. The oldest Homo sapiens site in which such beads were on skeletons in a way that shows how they were worn is Sungir, near Vladimir (Russia), and dates to 28,000 BP (Bader and Lavrushin, 1998). These graves also indicate sharp internal social differentiation. There were nine clear graves, of which:

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In total, the three most intact burials were lavishly decorated with more than 13,000 painstakingly prepared ivory beads arranged in dozens of strands, perhaps basted to their clothing. Although it is almost certain that the three individuals buried intact at Sungir were members of the same social group, there are remarkable differences among them in details of body decoration and grave offerings. For example, the man’s forearms and biceps were each decorated with a series of polished mammoth-ivory bracelets (25 in all), some showing traces of black paint. Around his neck, he wore a small, fat schist pendant painted red, but with a small black dot on one side. (Hitchcock, 2009: no page)

Items of personal adornment have much more defnite signifcance when found on a body in a prepared grave than they do when found loose. First of all, they have the inescapable signifcance of marking him or her as an individual distinct from all others, while the process of creating the grave and preparing the body for it would equally clearly mark the group he or she had been part of and that was now continuing without him or her. Moreover, there is nothing that prevents this group from being plural— several groups with several conceptually separate organizations. In fact, it is most likely. Funerary ceremonies in societies whose social organization we can observe directly enact such pluralism all the time. It is expressed in what is said and who says it, and often also by including grave goods associated with different identifcations. A relative may speak representing the family, a person from work may represent and describe the person’s employment, a political associate may represent a governmental organization in which the deceased had a position, and so on. Grave goods have the same range of meanings: religious symbol on the casket or the person, a business or churchgoing suit, a school tie, a fraternal pin, military medals, a retirement watch, and so on. The Sungir burials are clearly the same. Earlier burials probably are. The most likely reason that there are no remains of rituals or burials that express such complex relations among Neanderthals is that they did not have them. They must have had the same basic biosocial organization as Homo sapiens, but they did not have the same ways of conceptualizing it. Neanderthals must have had the ideas of individuals and sets and some kind of reciprocity. They must have been able to recognize some kinds of

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self-consistency, since they certainly had language and language depends on it. But since their organization seems never to have gotten above something that could be extended families containing several smaller family units, their ability to combine such notions to form new notions must have been very limited. What this means in Piaget’s terms is that their ability to think reciprocally at the level of sets of sets was limited or nonexistent. As we say in Human Thought and Social Organization: Evidently, then, the organizational Rubicon of the Upper Paleolithic lay between the conceptualization at the level of sets and more developed conceptualization that involves fully formed concepts of sets of sets with full reciprocity, and that made all the difference. (Leaf and Read, 2012:84)

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CONCLUSION We cannot know what the social idea systems of Homo sapiens were when Homo sapiens and Neanderthal lived contemporaneously. We can, however, see that only the artifacts of Homo sapiens require all the fundamental conceptual elements that known social idea systems embody: the abstract conceptions of self and other, individual, class, classes of classes, rules for class relations, and the concept of concepts. We can also be reasonably sure that at least one of these idea systems focused on kinship, given the concern with fertility and reproduction in all the representations of humans and animals, and the specifc identifcation of stages of male and female human life cycles in the human representations, based on gender, aging, and reproductive status. There is also strong evidence that nonkinship organizations existed separate from kinship, although again we cannot recover the idea systems themselves. The evidence is the separation of the areas where the art was done from living areas, and at least arguably also the separations of main dwelling sites from sites for other activities, which would have required specialized organizations. A family is one thing. A trading party going out to get an especially fne type of fint from a distant area is another. A meeting of several families or representatives of several families to decide how to drive an expected migrating herd of bison over a cliff is another. An organization of artists and students to create wall paintings is another. And probably an assembly in the cave to perform a ceremony that involves the paintings is still another. The tool assemblage provides abundant evidence of technical idea systems, as well as the level of skill in applying them. Moreover, since archaic Homo sapiens had substantially the same tool assemblage as contemporary Neanderthal in the Middle Stone Age when their social organizational ideas began to change, it follows that the social idea systems were separate from the

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technical idea systems. And if the two kinds of idea systems were separate and independent, then their users would have had to combine them consciously to create social charters for any actual working organizations, as we do. Probably the best way to think of the evolution of the capacity for conscious imagination in the line from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens is to consider the recent development of the computer. Once Australopithecine biosocial organization moved away from a single dominant male and multiple females or a multimale, multifemale group, to a group of male–female pairs with their respective offspring, it became increasingly advantageous to such groups to have a way to make their social relationships objective. In computer terms this is the equivalent of needing a better interface. An interface that relates words to images and can be visualized is a graphic interface. The words and images at this stage would be something like a core kinship map with the possibility of pulling out and recombining individual positions to defne organizations that would carry out specifc tasks. This would have involved a conceptualization of the positions in the biosocial family together with some way of linking families through the members. That is, for example, it might have included a concept of mother defned in such a way that there could also be a mother of mother or a sister of mother, and so on, and the same with father, that is, with the concept of a mother relation and of a father relation and reciprocally of a son relation and a daughter relation (Read, 2019). This would allow the next step to be either the idea of an expanded system of such core groups or a more extended set of defned positions such as we see in all existing kinship maps. Whichever of these two options is chosen, there are two possible paths for further development. One is to make the kinship interface increasingly complex to expand the range of subsets that it could be made to encompass. The other is to set a limit on kinship and apply the underlying ideas of social position, reciprocal relation, and recursive computation of relations to wholly different kinds of relationships. The frst would be the equivalent of a single interface such as we had with DOS when it was frst developed. The second is the equivalent of an interface with windows. Apparently, Neanderthals could not make the step to windowing, to pluralism. But perhaps they simply did not. It does not depend on ability alone. It also depends on two mutually supportive but independent conceptual inventions. One is recognizing the possibility of an absolutely sharp distinction between an individual that is designated by some sort of pointing or a proper name and a class that is designated by a defnition. The second is recognizing that no defnition of a class is clear except in contrast to other, opposed, defnitions of different classes. If the defnition of a kinship position is to be clear it must be contrasted with other kinship positions. If the defnition of kinship is to be clear, it must be contrasted with nonkinship. This is a pure

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matter of the way ideas work. It can only be discovered through thought and refection about ideas. Acting on it creates rules, and this particular rule is the foundation of all other rules in human social organization. This intellectual breakthrough must have been made by some individuals in the 70,000 years between the time represented by Blombos and Qafzeh shell beads and the time of the Chauvet Grotto paintings. Very likely it happened many times before conditions were right for it to catch on in the group as a whole, and then in many groups. Eventually, however, it formed the basis of all human organization that has been created since. It was an intellectual accomplishment of the absolute frst importance. Nothing human beings have done since has been more important.

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NOTES 1. The dating of the parietal art in Chauvet cave has been challenged. Pettitt (2008) has argued that the evidence for the date of 32,000 BP is questionable, but more recent C14 dates support it (Zorich 2011). Whether Chauvet is frst is less important than the fact that it seems to be the earliest we now know of. The caves that were really frst were probably submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the Pleistocene. The importance of the features does not depend on claiming they are the origin of what follows. It depends on recognizing that they represent a wide consensus that was already well established. 2. When we compare the level of thinking of Neanderthals to a childhood level in the cognitive development of modern Homo sapiens, we are not implying that Neanderthals were childlike in their thinking. The general way in which mature individuals—including nonhuman individuals—think and reason differs from that of immature individuals apart from the level of complexity involved in thinking. 3. Though blade technology was initially associated only with the appearance of anatomically modern Homo sapiens in the Upper Paleolithic, the manufacture of blades dates back to the Middle Paleolithic and as far back as 400 ka at the site of Qesem in the Levant (Barkai et al. 2003). However, blades may be made by different methods. Early blade production is analogous, not homologous, to Upper Paleolithic blade production (Bar-Yosef and Kuhn 1999). When comparing early blade production with Upper Paleolithic blade production, a distinction needs to be made between pre-Levallois, Amudian hard-hammer percussion technique for laminar blade production at sites such as Qesem (Gopher et al. 2005), the Levallois technique for blade production that conceptually resembles the process for producing Levallois fakes (Bar-Yosef and Kuhn 1999), and prismatic blade production that involves conceptualizing the relationship between volume and blade production (Boëda 1990, 1995) through a recursion-based technology (Read and van der Leeuw 2008). The latter takes on a unique and distinctive form in the Upper Paleolithic when it is coupled with more precise control over the form of blades by using soft-hammer and indirect percussion knapping techniques (Bar-Yosef and Kuhn 1999). They suggest that the proliferation of soft-hammer and indirect percussion technology for making prismatic

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blades in the Upper Paleolithic may have been triggered by the incorporation of “interchangeable components for composite tools” (1999: 333), that is, with tools that conceptually involve relations between classes. 4. Middle Paleolithic complex technology and a Neandertal tar-backed tool from the Dutch North Sea. (Marcel J. L. Th. Niekus, Paul R. B. Kozowyk, Geeske H. J. Langejans, Dominique Ngan-Tillard, Henk van Keulen, Johannes van der Plicht, Kim M. Cohen, Willy van Wingerden, Bertil van Os, Bjørn I. Smit, Luc W. S. W. Amkreutz, Lykke Johansen, Annemieke Verbaas, Gerrit L. Dusseldorp Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Oct 2019, 201907828; DOI:10.1073/pnas.1907828116.) 5. Centuries later, as in Lascaux, there are stick fgures representing hunters engaging in hunting activities, but even then, there is nothing saying when and where such hunting might take place. 6. In the context of modern hunter-gatherers, the distinction is more complicated than just an absolute difference in effciency between the two strategies. The two strategies have two distinct patterns for modern hunter-gatherers: less complex tools associated with logistical mobility using a foraging strategy and more complex tools associated with residential mobility using a collector strategy, keeping fxed the value for an interaction effect between length of growing season and number of annual moves measured by (length of growing season) × (number of annual moves) [GS × NAM]. That is, for two groups with the same value for GS × NAM, if one uses the residential mobile strategy and the other the logistical mobile strategy, the former will have qualitatively more complex tools (Read 2008b: Figure 5). This also means that the residential mobile group has a realized carrying capacity closer to the absolute carrying capacity than the foraging group (Read 2008b). Empirically, a foraging group and a collector group can have comparable GS × NAM values when the foraging group is in a region with a lower GS value than the collector group and the foraging group has more annual moves than the collector group. Modern hunter-gatherers translate residential mobility strategies into a higher realized carrying capacity, despite its associated, potentially greater risk arising from stochastic fuctuations in resource availability, by using more complex (more parts and detachable parts) hunting implements than groups using logistical mobility. Apparently, the reduced movement of the collector group in comparison to a foraging group, keeping fxed the length of the growing season, enables them to make and use more effcient, complex implements for procuring resources. For modern hunter-gatherers, there is a “missing strategy”: a residential mobility strategy with less complex tools than for a foraging strategy for the same length of growing season. Based on Read (2008b: Figure 5), if the complexity of tools and the length of the growing season is kept fxed, we would predict that a hunter-gatherer group with a residential mobility strategy would have a lower carrying capacity than a hunter-gatherer group with a logistical mobility strategy, but this is a “missing strategy” for modern hunter-gatherers and appears to be the strategy used by the Neanderthals. With the same complexity of tools (both Neanderthals and early modern populations had similar Mousterian assemblages) and coexisting in the same environment, early modern populations were using a foraging strategy with logistical mobility while the Neanderthals were using a collector strategy with residential mobility. Hence the Neanderthals were less effcient in the procurement of resources and thus likely had a lower realized carrying capacity.

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Kinship Maps

Every human community seems to make a distinction between formal and informal behavior and speech. The formal words or behavior are the more carefully stylized and enacted and are pointed to as having the greater authority. If you ask what “pop” means, in English kin usage, you will probably be told “father.” If you ask what “father” means, however, you will probably not be told “pop.” You will be given a defnition using other formal terms. Kinship terminologies in a strict sense are the recognized standard ways to refer to kin relations. Because of this, once we have some of the key terms and a few other locally important ideas clearly associated with it, such as an idea of family, or marriage, we can use the process of learning this nomenclature to elicit the entire kinship idea system as a web of interrelated defnitions. Such an elicitation produces a two-dimensional or three-dimensional kinship map. A kinship map is a graphic representation of the idea system (Leaf, 1971, 1972, 2000, 2001, 2006). Kinship maps, in turn, can be analyzed to expose the underlying mathematical structure that embodies and reinforces their systematic character and accounts for their power in serving to construct the many relations they are used in (Read, 1984, 2001, 2006, 2006a). We call these underlying structures kin term maps. Generative idea systems like these can be elicited using cultural frame analysis. The idea of frame analysis in general comes from linguistics: you use a part of language as a frame to elicit more of language. An example is to use the phrase “He was _____ing” to fnd what can be attached to the morpheme “-ing” to describe a continuous action. The strings of sounds that contrast with one another in this frame are thereby identifed as contrasting verbs. All generative idea systems have certain ideas that are better established in consensus than others. These serve as the premises of the system in conversations using that system. People agree on them and then work to agree 105

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on their implications. Frame analysis can be used to identify the premises, and the premises can be used in turn to identify the rest of the idea system. CULTURAL FRAME ELICITATION OF THE KINSHIP MAP

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For kinship idea systems, the method of cultural frame analysis starts with obtaining and diagramming a core of “direct” kin. For any individual user, or self, these are the relations connected to him or her only by whatever concepts are fundamental to kinship relations: usually some idea or ideas comparable to our idea of birth, parentage, motherhood, and fatherhood. The names of the direct positions are often translated locally with the English terms mother, father, son, daughter, brother, and sister. But these translations should never be assumed to have the same exact implications as their English counterparts. The same is true of the ideas of the relationships. For the West, the ideas that link the core positions to each other are generation, marriage, descent, and some equivalencies such as adoption. But other systems often differ. In some cultures, the idea of marriage is essential to the idea of parentage (or legitimate parentage) but in others is not. In some, mother might be a biological relation but father might be (as in Australia) a totemic or legal relation. It is up to them to say what these generative ideas are, not us. All our theory is saying is that there will be one idea recognizably comparable to our idea of kinship, it will be based on some relations recognizably comparable to our ideas of relations based on birth, and some of these relations will be direct and some indirect. Figure 5.1 shows the core kinship map for both English and Punjabi. Triangles are positions for males, circles represent females, square is either. We also sometimes represent a position that can be either with a triangle inside a circle. Punjabi terms are in italics.

Figure 5.1  Core Positions Labelled with Both Punjabi and English Kin Terms. Source: Murray J. Leaf.

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This is a good example of two basic confgurations that look the same and have kin term names that are established translation equivalents, but actually do not have the same implications. The differences appear more and more clearly when the way they are used to elicit further kin term positions is more fully developed. The confguration of fgure 5.1 serves as the eliciting frame to elicit the rest of the terminology and idea system. For Punjabi, we begin by asking what is bap of bap to you? What is ma of bap to you? What is bhai of bap to you? What is bhain of bap to you? And so on around the eliciting frame. Then we do the same with ma. What is bap of ma to you? What is ma of ma to you? And so on. The questions use what Read (1984) defnes as a kin term product. To be absolutely clear, for future reference here and elsewhere, we should generalize the form of this kin term product question. The general form is “What is (incrementing relation) of (reference relation) to (self position)?” Reference relation expresses the position from which you are asking the informant to do the computation with the direct kin term selected from the set of direct kin term relations. Self position is the position from which the position of the reference relation is expressed. Incrementing relation is the direct kin term relation whose position is taken with respect to the position of the reference kin term relation, itself expressed with respect to the self position. This is illustrated with the triangular relation graph introduced by Read (1984) and depicted in fgure 5.2. In fgure 5.2, R is any relation or position chosen as the starting point for the computation. The arrow from S to R indicates that R of S = R since S (self) is an identity element for the kin term

Figure 5.2  Kin Term Product Relation. Source: Murray J. Leaf.

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product (Read, 1984). The arrow from R to I of R indicates that the position labeled I of R is computed from the position labeled R using the incrementing relation I. The arrow from S to I of R and labeled IR indicates that the kin term IR is the relation from the self position for the position determined from the kin term product of I and R. The reference relation can be a direct relation, such as brother in English, or a relation that has been computed, such as uncle. The incrementing relation, however, must be a direct relation. So, if the reference relation (R) were the kin term “father” and the incrementing relation (I) were the kin term “brother,” the kin term product I of R would be brother of father and the answer (IR) would be that this is uncle to self. Thus, the elicitation question “What is bap of ma to you?” is of the form: What is bap (incrementing relation) of ma (reference relation) to you (self position)? This will yield dada. You can then ask, “What is bap (incrementing relation) of dada (reference relation) to you (self position)?” As the elicitation proceeds the new positions/relations that are described become reference relations in turn, but the incrementing relations and the self position remain the same. In the cultural frame elicitation, the elicitation will begin with asking what are all the direct relations of all of the direct relations for all of the direct relations, then all of the direct relations for all new positions that these questions reveal, and so on. In conducting an elicitation, it does not matter in an absolute sense whether the computation is stated as “the I of R is IR,” or symbolically as “I o R is IR.” The important thing is always be clear about which is the reference relation, which is the incrementing relation, and which is the new relation to self. Different languages require different ways of asking. In Punjabi, for example, “What is bhai of bap to you?” is “Bap da bhai ki e tuanu?” (Literally: Bap possessive pronoun bhai what is you-to?) Or “Tuanu, bap da bhai ki e?” The normal sentence order is subject–object–verb, in contrast to English which is subject–verb–object. It also does not matter what the order is in which the analyst goes through the reference relations. It is important, however, that no reference relations be skipped over, leaving a gap. It is also important that the incrementing relation is only a direct relation, never an indirect relation. That is, you do not include a question like “What is the cousin of a cousin to you?” The cultural frame for the kinship map is the direct kin. A crucial advantage of this procedure is that there is no need to use any language but the language of the terminology itself, and no need to use any ideas but the ideas the terminology is meant to convey. This includes the idea of the elicitation itself. People anthropologists work with may not have an idea of an elicitation but everyone has an idea of a question, and every kinship system includes an idea of being taught and learned. It has to, or it

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would not exist. The elicitation procedure should regenerate, in a compressed way, the procedures through which the kinship map is normally learned and taught. This should be recognized in the elicitation process, and the record it produces is a record of that process. As each position is queried in this way, the answers will be either a position that was previously named, one that was not previously named, or no position is named. If the frst, we ask if it is the “same” as the one previously named, and if it is we adjust the map accordingly, erasing and redrawing. Eventually, we must come to boundaries. There are logical/mathematical reasons why such boundaries must exist. These are explained in detail in Human Thought and Social Organization (Leaf and Read, 2012). They are not dogmatic stipulations. Every elicitation is also an experiment that tests them. For here, the most basic is that the boundaries assure that the defnitions within the system will be redundant and mutually reinforcing. They assure that the defnitions are redundant because if there are boundary positions or rules, there must be multiple paths that converge at them, and this is just another way of saying that the defnitions that make up those paths overlap. Overlapping is redundancy, multiple ways to defne any given position or relation, and redundancy is, in itself, reinforcement. The boundaries also assure that the terms that evoke these defnitions are limited and distinguishable from other terms that are not in the system. Boundaries are of two types: either we will reach a position such that any possible position beyond it does not defne a relative, or we will come to a rule for “etcetera,” a rule for going on indefnitely. To illustrate what kind of results this produces, fgure 5.3 is the kinship map for English. Compare this with fgure 3.3, the kinship map of Punjabi, obtained by exactly the same procedure. Although the two languages are distantly related, and therefore presumably also the two maps, there are many important differences between them. Start with English. If you attend carefully to the diagram, it should be easy to see how to read it and everything should seem familiar even though the full diagram as presented may never previously have been seen or envisioned. When we say that each position is a defnition of a relation, what we mean is that the defnition of the position is symbolized by the shape that indicates gender and the relations linked to it. So, for example, a great great uncle is male, the brother of a great great grandmother or great great grandfather or the husband of a great great aunt. Rule 1 in the diagram is an example of a boundary marker. It makes both the upper and the lower boundaries. It is a rule for etcetera. The rule is “Add another great for each additional generation.” Rule 2, which is the etcetera rule for Cousin, is that children of cousins are cousins. Rule 2 can also be indicated by the kin term product equations son of cousin = cousin = daughter

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of cousin. The other boundary condition is that there is no relation, or kinship position, defned beyond uncle, aunt, or cousin. In this diagram, the arrows mean that computations can be made in the direction indicated but not in the reverse direction. So that, for example, a great aunt is defned as a sister of a great grandmother or the wife of a great uncle, but the sister of a great aunt is not the defnition of great grandmother. Note the sharp division between the vertical line whose stem terms are mother/father and son/daughter in contrast with the line using and aunt/uncle and the line using nephew/niece. While few if any Americans would spontaneously draw this diagram on their own, once it is elicited it is very easy to

Figure 5.3  English Kinship Map. Source: Murray J. Leaf.

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see that the visual pattern repeats these auditory patterns of linguistic stems and qualifers (none, grand, great, great-grand, etc.). That is, the visual diagram repeats what can be described as a kind of rhyming diagram. English speakers will observe that this kinship map does not include the relations of a person with the relations of his or her spouse. The reason is that to draw it would require an overlay, so in this printed-page format it is easier to describe it in words. First, one’s spouse’s parents and siblings are one’s “in-laws.” The mother of one spouse is “mother-in-law,” the father of spouse is “father-in-law,” and so on for her other direct kin, but not beyond that. But these terms are not generally used for address. The most common pattern for address is to use whatever terminology the spouse uses. The next most common is probably personal names. It is more a matter of personal taste than cultural rule. Most other kinship maps associated with the Indo-European languages of Western Europe have the same shape, meaning the same arrangement of positions. This means that the defnition of each position in terms of the core ideas and its relations to every other position are also the same; all that varies is the words. Figure 5.4 is a photograph taken during an elicitation of the Czech kinship map by Murray J. Leaf, to demonstrate the method. This was in a meeting of European anthropologists in Pilsen, Czech Republic. The elicitation was not prearranged. The choice of language was made by the group, on the spot, and the standing informant, on the right, was a volunteer from the group. Others in the group participated as they felt inclined to. The elicitation was conducted in English; about a third of those present spoke Czech. Figure 5.5 is the fnished drawing of Czech compared to English.

Figure 5.4  Eliciting the Czech Kinship Map. Source: Murray J. Leaf.

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Figure 5.5  English Compared to Czech. Source: Murray J. Leaf.

English and Czech look like half of a pine tree and Punjabi looks like a butterfy. The differences refect the internal logic of the mutual relationships among the positions. Like English, Czech has a distinction between “lineals” and “collaterals” branching off a single descending line. Punjabi does not. Every Punjabi position above self is distinguished by “side,” depending on whether it is a relation through the mother or through the father. The same distinction is preserved in their reciprocals, below self, although it is less obvious graphically. In Punjabi, a descendant who is connected to you through his or her mother is always a different kind of relation from a descendant connected to you through his or her father. Another feature of Punjabi is that all of the terms distinguish whether a relation is connected to self by descent or marriage. For example, father’s elder brother is taia. His spouse is taii. In Punjabi [a] is the most common masculine ending and [aR] has the same meaning. The latter is used where [a] will not make a good sound contrast. So, father’s bhain is bhua, and her husband is phuppaR. Punjabi also makes no distinction between descent relations and collaterals on one’s own generation. So, all males are bhai and all females bhain. Notice that this includes all of the children of everyone on both sides on one’s parents’ generation. So, literally, everyone on one’s own generation is bhai or bhain. They are not “fctive” bhai or bhain, as some anthropologists have tried to say in similar cases. They are bhai or bhain. The spouse of one’s bhai, however, is bhabi and the spouse of one bhain is jija, although it is considered impolite to use these terms for address. On the same principle, all the positions for relations below self are in groups of four. Each group has a common noun stem and different endings. The stem indicates the exact path of the relation to self. The endings indicate

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whether the person is related by descent or marriage and their gender. So, for example, the children of one’s bhain are bhanja (male) and bhanji (female). The spouse of bhanja is bhanj-nuh. The spouse of bhanji is bhanj-joai. By itself, the term nuh designates the wife of son. The term joai, by itself, is the term for husband of daughter. It literally means one who has come. Unlike English, there is no rule for etcetera at the top and bottom levels. In Punjabi, these are the ends. The dada and dadi of nakardada and nakardadi are not relatives. Neither are the dada or dadi of parnana or parnani. To ask what relation they are is to ask a question people think is very funny. To compute a reciprocal term, one notes the links that go from self to that position, starts again at self, and traces the same chain in reverse. For example, in English, father is a one link up from self. The reciprocal is one link down from self. So, it is son or daughter, depending on sex. In Punjabi, bap is one link up and male. So, the reciprocal of bap is one link down. This will be putar if the person is male and putri if female, although in fact the terms are rarely used in address. Taia is one link up and one link to the right, and elevated a little over bap. This means taia is bhai to bap but older. So, the reciprocal is one link to the side to a male (the only choice is bhai) and one down (putar or putri of bhai). This path leads from self to the group of positions whose names have the stem patij-. The endings for the stem specify the connection. The putri of bhai is patiji (female ending), the putar of bhai is patija (male ending), the spouse of patiji is patij-joai, and the spouse of patija is patij-nuh. The reciprocals allow us to establish that the kinship map is logically complete and coherent for both the person who is speaking and the person spoken to. In the diagrams, reciprocity is assured by seeing that every pathway to a position above self has a path with the reverse path of links going downward, and every path to the side has the same number of links to another position on the same level or is self-reciprocal (self-reciprocal means, for example, that if I refer to you as cousin you refer to me as cousin.) With the general problems of discovering and demonstrating completeness, coherence, and learning solved, the different shapes of the kinship maps carry the different senses of what kinship itself is in these different communities. In English, there is a clear line of consanguines—ancestors and descendants, and at each generation a correlated set of collaterals that branches off. The line of consanguines can be extended forever. So, in English there is a defnitional association between being a relative and having common ancestry, as we have already noted. It is illogical to say a person is an ancestor but not a relative. To the side, collaterals are boundaries. There is nothing beyond them. So, while an ancestor of an ancestor must be a relative, a cousin of a cousin need not be. Mother-in-law of cousin is not a relation. This kin term product does not compute to any defned position.

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In Punjabi, there is no rule for continuing upward or downward extension, as already noted. The bap of parnana and the bap of nakardada may be ancestors, depending on exactly which parnana or nakardada they were bap of, but they are not relatives. There is no disagreement about this. Informants explain that they are not relatives because you do not have a relationship with them. They are dead. (The Punjabi term rista, meaning relation, has the same double meaning as the English term “relation” in this statement.) But while relationships cannot be extended vertically, they extend indefnitely horizontally. The construction for the -dada -dadi stem works just as the diagram implies. A dada is a bap of bap, but also any husband or brother of a dadi. The sisters and spouses of those dadas would also be dadi. So their brothers and spouses in turn would be dada, so on. Such links can ultimately include anyone on that generation. The same logic applies on the -nana/-nani side. So that logically everyone on the dada generation can be both one’s dada or dadi and one’s nana or nani. Punjabis see no problem in this. They have a rule to deal with it. First a relationship through known links always takes precedence over a relationship without known links. Second, if a person has traceable relations to a given person who is both nana and dada, or nani and dadi, this is called “do-sakhi,” meaning two-relation. In cases of do-sakhi, the rule is to use whichever is closest. If there are no known links on either side, the father’s side (dada/dadi) term is more polite. So, where the English terminology closely associates the idea of kinship with common “blood,” Punjabi involves much more of a sense of interaction and mutual construction. Since all kinship terminologies include in this way their own distinctive conception of what kinship itself is, any method for elicitation that assumes that kin positions can be defned in one and only one way is bound to distort or miss important aspects of systems that embody different concepts. But, a proponent of componential analysis may say, haven’t I (Murray J. Leaf) just contradicted myself by speaking of the Punjabi term dada by saying things like “father of dada”? The answer is that the terms in these cases should only be understood as they are defned within their own systems. So, for Punjabi, “brother” should not be understood in the English sense but as the translation of (or a synonym for) bhai, and so on. But, you may persist, aren’t I postulating that the direct kin are a universal. And again the answer is that I am not doing so in the sense of the positivists’ truths by defnition that are not subject to empirical verifcation. Our claim is empirical: that every terminology has at its core a set of direct kin around a self and these relations are defned as subsisting from birth in some sense. It is a claim that can be falsifed by fnding a society that had organizations that raised children that did not use such ideas. Finally, Morgan or Goodenough might argue that even though the concepts of father, mother, brother, sister, son, and daughter are indigenous and

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not universal, they are still biological, so there still must be some objective basis for their meanings. In fact, it is the other way around. Biology is not the objective basis for kinship, but rather kinship idea systems are the synthetic a priori categories for objectifying biology. Think of the way you learn Euclidian geometry. Of course, you learn casually some general terms for shapes: square, triangle, cone, perhaps even right triangle. But you do not learn geometry by assembling all such terms that seem to have shapes for their referents and trying to fnd their distinctive features. You learn it as a system of premises, theorems, corollaries, and very defnite computational techniques. You learn it as a technical idea system. Only then can you use it to characterize any plane or solid shape whatever, whether you have seen it before or not. The kinship idea systems work the same way. For kinship idea systems, the premises are the constellation of direct kin and the concepts that link them to one another—marriage if there is such, descent as conceived within the system, blood and bone, or whatever the ideas are. The specifc defnitions may be regarded as corollaries. The direct kin confguration contains the idea of reciprocity and how to compute it. The opposite of one up is one down; the opposite of one to one side is one to the opposite side. If sex of speaker matters it will show in the core. The remaining computational rules are obtained in the process of iterating the core outward. These include the idea of a kin term product (like brother of father), the idea of transitivity of relations, and the idea of recursiveness. And fnally, the completed elicitation leads to the idea of a boundary condition. Schneider was right to recommend that we represent the kinship systems of non-Western societies entirely in the native terminology. He was wrong to argue that this meant that kinship could not be analyzed with scientifc precision (see also Kronenfeld, 2009, who makes a similar argument). The only way we can gain such precision is through an appropriately designed experimental method. KINSHIP MAPS AS REPRESENTING GENERATIVE SYSTEMS Kinship idea systems are generative systems. Like geometry, mathematics, and languages, they have rules of combination that allow the user to compute or construct many different statements that will be mutually consistent with one another. One kind of statement is the real answer to Goodenough’s initial question “what do I have to know about A and B in order to say that A is B’s cousin?” The answer, as has been observed by numerous ethnographers (see Read, 2017 for references), is not that A decides if person B is his cousin by

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matching B’s objective marks to some mental template mysteriously attached to the lexeme “cousin” but by determining whether B is related to yet another person, C, who is related to both of them. Person B’s relation can then be computed to both, and B’s reciprocal relation to A. If A is a nephew of C, and if B is the son of C, then B is a cousin of A. For this computation, all who use the common terminological idea system will agree that it is correct, and that will assure them all that the computation is objectively correct. What happens if they can fnd no common linking relative? Then they are not related. Either way, the most important thing to know is the kinship map, which is exactly what Goodenough tried to skip around. Just as the kinship map can be used to construct individual reciprocal relations, it can also be used to construct genealogies. It is simply a matter of using the basic generative premises, meaning the core terms and their genealogical instantiation, to say how a person is related to self through the core terms, hence how that person is genealogically related to self from the genealogical instantiation of the core terms expressing the kin term relation of that person to self. By such computations the terminology generates a sense of a genealogical space. But all that this means is that genealogical identifcations are an application, or instantiation, of idea systems, not an inherent basis of the meaning of individual kin terms. The maps can also be used to generate defnitions of kinship groups: lineages, patrilines, mother’s side, generations, and so on. And if these ideas in turn are used to create actual organizations, then the idea systems can be said to generate the relations in those organization. But the maps can no more be reduced to those relations, groups, or genealogies than geometry can be reduced to any one of its innumerable uses.

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KINSHIP MAPS AS SELF-TEACHING STRUCTURES Everybody raised in a family learns a kinship map. They all do so in the same way: as part of learning who and what the family itself is and who their relatives are, from the center out. The frst terms one learns are normally those for one’s parents, although in the very beginning one does not know that one is learning “terms.” One is learning that parents exist and what they are. The terms are just some of the sounds they seem to like. Parents are, of course, also the main teachers. Parents also teach terms for oneself although they are not initially terms like “self.” They are the person’s name or a term like “baby.” They can also be terms like “son,” “daughter,” and so on. The other frst terms learned will be for others in the household, such as “brother,” “sister,” and so on—all in one’s own language and with the meanings of that language, of course.

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On the basis of developmental psychology, we can be reasonably sure that there are no general characteristics being associated with such terms as they are frst learned. The association is simply a sound with a thing. The term “mother” or “ma” goes with a specifc person. “Father” goes with a different specifc person, “brother” with one or more specifc people, and so on. But in time, which depends more on physiological maturation than external circumstance, one becomes aware that some of these sounds are associated with yet others. An English-speaking child may become aware of another about their age who is not in their household and be told that person is also a “brother” of someone. Or such a person may be a “cousin” of someone. Eventually, around age fve, the maturing child begins to form the idea of a class, based on recognizing one-for-one similarities. So, they try to reformulate what mothers have in common, what brothers have in common, what sisters have in common, and so on—to be able to identify others in ways that get more approval. For non-English speakers we can be absolutely certain that these criteria are not formulated in English kinship terms. Nor are they formulated in terms of supposedly biological relationships represented by kintypes, like Mo–MoSi–FaSi. Rather, they are defned in terms of overt characteristics such as apparent age, size, gender, how frequently one sees them, who they are associated with, and where they live and how they behave toward you. At the same time, and based on the same ability, they learn the I–Thou relationship. This is a class relationship. It is also a reciprocal relationship. They learn that there is a class of people speaking and a class of people they are speaking to. “I” is what they are when they are in the class of people speaking, and “you” is what they are when they are in the class of people spoken to, and vice versa. Still later, however, the technique of identifying classes simply by overt characteristics of the members also breaks down. You encounter, for example, a male about your age who think must be a cousin but you are told he is an uncle. Or you encounter somebody you think is an uncle and you are told he is a cousin. At frst it is confusing, but at around age eleven, a person can go from thinking only of individuals in classes and begin to think, recursively, of classes of classes. They can then understand recursively that a cousin is the son of an uncle where they understand that son is a class and uncle is a class. Similarly, an uncle is the brother of a father. These are still not kintypes in the sense that Murdock, Goodenough, and the componential analysts intended. You do not know “actual” biological characteristics or relationships. What you know is kin term products: if someone is defned as your uncle and someone else is defned as their son, then that person is your cousin: son of uncle = cousin. If, in a different language, someone is defned as the “father” of your “mother,” they are your “grandfather”: “father” of “mother” = “grandfather.”

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It is only at this point in their maturation that a person begins to have a complete understanding of their kinship map. This includes understanding how it provides the meanings of the formal kinship terminology as well as all of their synonyms or alternative forms and at least most of the other symbols and symbolic actions that can convey the same ideas. KINSHIP AND OBJECTIVITY

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We are not denying biological relatedness and saying that kinship is only a social imputation. We would not say this any more than we would say geometric shapes are only a geometrical imputation. But private recognitions of biological and familial relations only become objective when we formalize them under shared categories. For kinship, this objectifcation begins with the kinship map. There is more. This is where the work of Dwight W. Read (1974, 1984, 2001, 2007) comes into play. Many of the componential analysts recognized that there was something mathematical about kinship idea systems. They commonly used the expression “kinship algebra” to describe both the ideas they were trying to impose and what they were trying to fnd. But by rushing to impose their own pseudo-algebra, they obscured the deeper and more pervasive algebra that was already there. In fact, kinship idea systems embody algebras in the strict sense that the core of direct kin can, on analysis, be reduced to even more basic abstract primitives, while the basic computational operation “of” can be defned as an algebraic operator in such a way as to restate the generative process underlying the original elicitation. As Read has shown, not all direct kin are generators in a strict algebraic sense, and which ones are generators has important implications for the way the terminology as whole is logically constructed. STILL DEEPER STRUCTURES Read’s algebraic analysis enabled him to develop a computer program by which idea systems could be analytically reduced to their premises and then regenerated. This is the Kinship Analysis Expert System (KAES), described in chapter 11. The frst version was developed with Clifford Behrens and published in 1990 (Read and Behrens, 1990). Development has continued with Mike Fischer, at the University of Kent, Canterbury. The current version, written in Java by Read and Fischer, is available on the Internet at http://kaes​.anthrosciences​.net/. It can be downloaded with fles for the kinship maps of American English, Punjabi, Shipibo, Omaha,

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and Trobriand (male terms only). Data for the maps is stored as .xml fles. For Read, the importance of developing the KAES program has been that this provided him with a way to develop a theory of the structural logic of kinship terminologies without it being an imposed theory in the sense of logical positivism. Computers are inherently dumb—they cannot do anything without instructions telling them what they are to do and for these computer instructions to work with the system of kinship relations expressed through a kinship terminology, the computer instructions must implement the kinship ideas of the users of kinship terminologies and the way they defne and work out kinship relations using the kin term product as the fundamental means for working out the conceptual interrelations among kin terms. Identifying the kin term product, frst published in Read (1984), was critical for working out how the kinship terminology is not simply a list of names for genealogical categories, as has been assumed since the time of Morgan, but is the basis for the kin term equivalent of a computational symbolic system such as arithmetic for computing with number symbols. Read’s 1984 article was a major theoretical breakthrough as it showed how the kin term product provided the users of kinship terminologies with a symbolic computational system for structurally organizing the kinship relations expressed through kin terms, thereby creating a space of kinship relations within which social relations are worked out and can be developed into other forms of social organization. This has made it possible to work out a theory for the structural logic of kinship terminologies, much in the way that in physics theory is used to work out the properties of a physical system. Read’s analysis has shown that not all of the direct relations are necessary as generators to produce the entire map. Rather, kinship maps that we have analyzed so far fall into four major types, as described in chapter 11. There may be more. For the group Morgan considered “descriptive” the only generators needed are parents and children. The other groups cannot be generated this way. For the type that Morgan considered “classifcatory” the generators have to be a parent and ascending or descending sibling, and sex of speaker has to be specifed. Where the kinship maps are different for male and female speakers, there must be some way for these two kinship maps to join, and there is. The characteristic of these terminologies is that there will be a crucial link that makes them a single kinship map. For some terminologies (especially the Polynesian terminologies) it is not parent–child but brother–sister. To see the whole kinship map, a male identifes with his sister and vice versa. This identifcation is usually also part of the indigenous theory of what kinship is, what it is based on. Anthropologists have typically ignored such theories, or discussed them simply as local speculations on paternity, biology, and the like. Now we can

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see that they are actually pointing to important logical features of their kinship worldview. Since there does not seem to be an evident historical linkage among societies with “classifcatory” kinship maps, the explanation for the resemblances must lie elsewhere. Most likely it is in the constraining power of logical choices given the need for self-consistency, as many have actually already suggested, one way or another. Once one feature is chosen for a system of kinship defnitions, others follow by implication. Having invented logic, doubtless as part of the process of inventing language itself, we are now constrained by it. Perhaps still more broadly, having invented conscious thought we are constrained by its inherent rules. This brings up what has been described as the principle of the limitation of possibilities. We will return to the problem in chapter 11. The present approach to kinship, and social analysis generally, provides a far more promising path to understanding both what the power of the human imagination is and how it constrains its own operations. But we also need to learn from the past, to avoid leaping to conclusions beyond the reach of our evidence, and to be sure that the evidence is as solid as we can make it. For the near term, we need to add more examples to our worldwide corpus of kinship maps and their uses. To facilitate this, we can place entire maps in a database along with other features of the society in which they’re described with a similar level of precision. We are no longer in the era of punch cards and counter-sorters. There is also no excuse for remaining bound by the kind of crude data coding they required. Placing whole kinship maps in a database is feasible, in two ways. First, the diagrammatic map itself can be stored and retrieved as an image. But even more powerfully, once a map is obtained and its generating principles are extracted, these can be stored as character fles and will both allow the map itself to be reproduced and will allow an analyst to examine the implications of alternative formulations of its premises. GENEALOGY? So what about genealogy? Is it completely unreal? The answer is that it is real in several different ways, but none of these are what was assumed by the positivistic lines of analysis leading to the kinship apocalypse. First, most cultures recognize a difference between biological genealogy and social kinship, both formally and factually, although the distinction may not be articulated in the same way Americans or Europeans do it. Social processes to move people between the two types of relationships are well documented and no one has described a society where such processes do not exist. When a child is born there is usually also social recognition of its parents. The fact of biological birth alone is virtually never suffcient. One also can adopt a child or disown one.

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The second point is that, even in English, we do not generate a terminology from genealogical categories, but rather we generate genealogical categories from the terminology. We do so by replacing the fnal computed relationship terms for the string of direct terms that are needed to compute it. That is, for English speakers, when we connect two people by saying one is the other’s grandfather, we know that the kin term grandfather can be computed by the kin term products father of father = grandfather and father of mother = grandfather. Since the direct relation father has associated with it the genealogical relation, genealogical father, and the direct relation mother has associated with it the genealogical relation, genealogical mother, we can also refer to the other person, recursively, as father’s father or mother’s father, where the possessive form indicates that father and mother are being used as names for genealogical relations. Thus, we go from the kin term product of direct relations to the corresponding genealogical relations for the direct terms and thereby to the genealogical relations associated with a kin term. Instead of describing X as the uncle of Y, we describe X as Y’s father’s brother, or as Y’s mother’s brother, or as Y’s aunt’s husband since we have the kin term products, brother of father = uncle, brother of mother = uncle, and husband of aunt = uncle. To start with genealogy and then arrive at kin terms, we would frst have to explain why users of the English kin terminology consider that mother’s brother, father’s brother, mothers sister’s husband, and father’s sister’s husband should all be in the same category that is then labeled by uncle, and similarly for all other kin terms (except the kin terms for the direct relations). No one has provided satisfactory reasons for how the categories of genealogical are formed frst and so the English kin terms are just linguistic labels for those categories. The same is true for the terms in every other terminology. It follows that if we ask which depends on the other, then clearly genealogical categories in this indigenous sense depend on terminology and not the other way around. When we know the kinship map we can determine the genealogical relations corresponding to the kin terms. But no kind of genealogy will allow us to construct the kin term map directly from the genealogical relations. It would be like trying to learn geometry by asking people how they describe various shapes, one at a time. Kinship maps are representations of generative conceptual systems of kin terms. They have to be obtained through a method sensitive to how terminologies are generated. CONCLUSION Every kinship system rests on a kinship idea system. At the core of these idea systems is the kinship map: the defnitions all those who make up a persons’ relatives. This is an important fact. Discovering it was an important step forward for ethnological theory. Kinship idea systems are associated with

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distinctive vocabularies that members of the communities readily identify and report. These include what anthropologists have historically recognized as “kin terms” or “kinship terminologies.” The interconnections and implications of kinship ideas usually exist at the level of deep habituation. Like categories of grammar, community members know them and can sense that they are coherent and comprehensive, but do not normally go about exposing them in order to check this coherence and cohesiveness explicitly. Nor does our normal cultural repertoire provide a method for doing so. But all human communities have methods for teaching them, and these methods necessarily both embody its logic and make it available for observation. Cultural frame analysis replicates this indigenous teaching process. So we can now get the kinship maps out in the open and see their cohesiveness and coherence directly. We can also expose the inner logic that gives them their generative power, which is precisely the power to underlie and integrate the many usages that they have.

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Ideas Attached to Kinship Maps

Kinship maps rarely serve directly as organizational charters for any social groups in a community, and never serve as the organizational charter for all of them. To create the usually large number of recognized kinship organizations, additional ideas have to be connected to the ideas of positions and relations in the kinship map, and still further ideas and conventions must be developed to instantiate these charters in actual behavior in time and space. This means that in order to connect kinship maps to kinship organizations we need to recognize four types of phenomena. These are (1) additions to the kinship map, (2) creation of organizational charters, (3) symbolic conventions for instantiating the organizational charters, and (4) techniques for defning situations. This chapter describes them in general terms. The remaining chapters provide examples.

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TRADITIONAL VERSUS MODERN SOCIETY For the rest of this book, we need to make a distinction between traditional society and modern society. Most of what we say refects traditional society. This distinction is not one between nations. It is mainly between systems of production and productive organizations. There are two main types and the proportion of the population engaged in each type varies greatly from nation to nation. In traditional society, most businesses are family businesses and the physical structures that house the family also constitute the major infrastructure

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for the business. Family relations and connections may extend well beyond the individual household and link households into larger networks. Such networks range from guilds in historic Europe to castes in historic South Asia. An important portion of international business in many felds is still conducted this way. In such societies, consensus on what kinship obligations and rights are in any one kinship group is maintained by the need to cooperate with all the other kinship groups that it deals with. In contrast, by modern society we mean societies where businesses are primarily organized with economic/managerial relations defned by law, that have nothing to do with kinship in principle. The defnitions of these organizations are now highly standardized worldwide and include parastatal organizations, partnerships, limited stock companies, and various kinds of publicly chartered corporations, for-proft and nonproft. There are also organizational charters for organizations designed to engage in activity that is illegal. The trend worldwide over the last 2000 years has been that the economic activities of these kinds of legally defned productive organizations have expanded and increasingly drawn people and resources away from family businesses. As this has happened, governments have increasingly developed legal distinctions between businesses as one kind of physical establishment and organization in contrast to households as a very different kind of establishment and organization. At the same time, however, as people have become more capable of earning their living as individuals working in places of their own choosing rather than in occupations they were born to, the organization of these purely domestic organizations has become more fexible. So paradoxically but predictably, one aspect of this is that while many more households in modern societies are not businesses, they are also not kinship organizations. They are either made up by individuals who live alone, which in traditional societies is almost impossible, or consist of individuals who come together only for domestic convenience or economy. We should avoid the temptation of leaping from recognizing the difference between traditional and modern productive regimes and their respective physical establishments to the assumption that each is associated with a different and distinct nation-state or population. There are, in the United States, people who work in corporate offces, engage in recreation on the basis of paid admissions, obtain their food from commercial establishments owned by corporations, and live in an apartment they rent or a house they own individually or perhaps even as a business. But such a person can still have relatives living on a family farm and “go home” for holidays with the family. Such a person might, in fact, go home to such a family farm in India or China. Kinship is a type of organization, not a type of society.

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ADDITIONS TO THE KINSHIP MAP Additions to the kinship map include most of the rules of exogamy and endogamy beyond basic incest prohibitions, rules of inheritance, rules of descent, kinship gender roles, ideas of rank, and ideas of kinship groups of various kinds such as the household, the family, kindred, lineage, clan, caste, tribe, and many others for which there are no English names. The list can never be predetermined for any community. It can also be contested and changed. A contemporary example of a contested addition is the ongoing effort in Europe and America to change the defnition of marriage so that it does not require those being married to be one man and one woman. There seem to be two central issues. One concerns public approval of homosexuality. The other concerns the logical structure of the kinship map. Basic defnitions make the wife female and the husband male. The question is whether recognition of same-sex marriage would have the same kind of destructive implications for the kinship map as would recognition of marriage involving incestuous relations. Logically, if gender identifcation were removed from the concepts of self and spouse, or more importantly father and mother, would it have consequences throughout the map and logically lead to its implosion in the horizontal dimension? Users do not have a theory that lets them say this as clearly as we have just done, but many seem to feel intuitively that it would and public debate has been implicitly exploring several options to avoid it. In the early years of the discussion in the United States, when there was a major debate about whether the relationship should be called “marriage” or “domestic partnership” the idea of domestic partnership was a way to leave the traditional concepts of the map undisturbed by conventionally separating the realm of law from the realm of kinship. But proponents of same-sex marriage opposed this separation as a kind of discrimination. This has been generally accepted. This did not end the logical threat to the kinship map, however. An alternative solution that seems to be emerging is to relax or adjust the defnition of gender itself, defning it as more voluntary than ascriptive or more a matter of feelings than physiology. But whether or how to do this continues to be hotly contested in some quarters. It should be noted, though, as discussed in Read (2017), that same-sex marriage does not change the structure of marriage. Instead, it only changes the assumption that bride is instantiated by a female and that husband is instantiated by a male and the assumption that a husband is a male and a wife is a female. When marriage in American society centered in the past around the economic well-being of females, with a father having the responsibility for the economic well-being of a daughter and with marriage being an implicit contract that transfers that responsibility to the man who

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becomes her husband, same-sex marriage was a contradiction of marriage as a contract establishing responsibility for the economic well-being of a female. But with the transition to the current view of marriage as presumably expressing the love of one person for another, and with the acceptance of the notion that two persons of the same sex can express love for one another, same-sex marriage is no longer counter to the perceived basis of marriage, hence instantiation of bride and groom by two persons of the same sex does not violate the premise upon which marriage is now based, at least in American society.

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Rules of Descent The simplest and most constant addition to kinship maps are rules of descent or inheritance. There is no sharp line between the two since one of the things that can be inherited is membership in a kinship group. Patrilineal descent means that whatever one inherits, it is through one’s father, father’s father, and so on. Matrilineal descent means that whatever one inherits, it is through one’s mother, mother’s mother, and so on. Anthropologists also recognize many societies that they characterize as having matri-patrilineal descent or patri-matrilineal descent. These are not necessarily exclusive. In many societies, individuals inherit one thing from their male parent and another from their female parent. There are many societies where different bodily aspects are inherited this way, such as blood from one and bone from the other or substance from one and soul from the other. Conversely, females may be associated with one kind of property and males with another. Females may inherit their distinctive property from their mothers, males inherit theirs from their father or their mother’s brother. And fnally, we should note that inheritance does not necessarily imply that the person from whom one inherits something has died. It may also take place at birth or at some point later in life such as initiation as an adult, initiation into a guild or priesthood, or marriage. Variations are nearly endless. There is little point trying to catalog them. It is much more important to understand what any given usage means in its social context. Incest and Exogamy “Exogamy” means “out-marriage.” The term means that one marries a person from outside a specifed range of kinship relations. “Endogamy” means “in marriage.” It means that one marries a person from within one’s kin group in

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some sense. Every human society has a rule of exogamy. Some also have a rule of endogamy. The most basic rule of exogamy prohibits marriage that would violate the incest prohibition in order for there to be reproduction by the married couple. This exists in every kinship system but it takes different forms. At a minimum and speaking roughly, incest is sexual relations between brother and sister (in the English sense) or parent and child. Rules of exogamy commonly expand this minimal rule to other positions defned in the kinship map. For example, many American states defne incest as including sexual relations with a “frst cousin,” among others. Or they may use ideas not included in the kinship map, such as in the North Indian prohibition of marriage within one’s own village. Efforts to explain the prohibition of incest have been of two major types: biological and conceptual. The most common biological explanation is that the incest prohibition lies in the recognition that “inbreeding” leads to weakness and disease. This is supported in the modern literature by the recognition of known genetic diseases in many populations that are associated with recessive alleles. Such diseases are more likely to be manifested in offspring of parents who are closely related. Some anthropologists argue that people recognize these diseases and therefore consciously invent and enforce such rules in order to avoid them. The counterargument is that they do not consciously recognize the diseases and that the prohibitions are caused by evolutionary trial and error. The debate continues. There is some evidence on both sides, but neither explanation covers all the forms of all such prohibitions. In addition, it is the change in marriage pattern from generally outbred to inbred that leads to the increased rate for the expression of deleterious recessive alleles. As selection removes deleterious alleles, the rate for the occurrence of deleterious alleles reaches the equilibrium with deleterious traits it may have had before the population started inbreeding (Read, 2018). A different type of physiologically based explanation can be summed up as “familiarity breeds contempt.” This goes back to Westermarck’s The History of Human Marriage (1881) previously noted. Westermarck argued that the ethnography showed that growing up together suppresses sexual desire. So people seek spouses outside of their family simply because that is where they fnd people who are attractive. This, too, has been supported by some research. A famous example was Melford Spiro’s study of marriage patterns among young men and women growing up together in Israeli kibbutzim. They are not biologically related, but observe a kind of de facto incest taboo anyway (Spiro, 1958). More recent work, however, has shown that children growing up together did not lose sexual interest in one another as they sexually matured (see references in Read, 2018).

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Freud’s Totem and Taboo, published in 1913, offered a psychoanalytic explanation. He argued that the frst form of the family was a “primal horde.” The organization was like that of a gorilla band: a single dominant male with a harem of wives and their offspring, male and female. The dominant male would expel the young males as they approached maturity. Then one day there was a revolution. The young males of the band, instead of waiting to be expelled by the dominant male, joined together to kill him in order to take the females (their biological mothers and sisters) for themselves. After they killed him, they ate him. They were immediately struck with overwhelming guilt. To expiate this guilt, they resurrected him in symbolic form as the clan totem, established worship of the totem, and denied themselves sexual access to the women of the clan as their punishment. So, in one fell swoop, we have a synthesis of Darwin and Durkheim, the origins of the incest taboo, religion, morality, psychosis, the suppression of sexual desires, guilt, symbolic displacement, dietary prohibitions, and the Oedipus complex. Although this is massively contradicted by every sort of available evidence, many of the scholars who contributed to the kinship apocalypse were also interested in psychoanalysis and continued to try to fnd something in it that they could rescue. The most widely cited conceptual explanation is attributed to E. B. Tylor: people would either marry out or die out. That is, no line of self-perpetuating individuals would be able to survive by itself. In order to survive, small groups must form wider associations. Tylor phrased this as the choice between endogamy and exogamy, in-marriage and out-marriage. The necessity to survive, whether recognized consciously or unconsciously, explained exogamy. Lévi-Strauss and the alliance theorists make this a fundamental premise. In alliance theory, the prohibition of incest is described as generating the necessity for rules of exchange. Since the men of a descent group, such as a lineage or clan, cannot have children by their sisters and daughters, they must make those sisters and daughters available to other groups and take wives from other groups. This requires exchange. The expectation of exchange gives rise to the division of labor between the sexes, and the cycles of exchange expand to include goods associated with men as against women and wife-takers as against wife-givers. All of these arguments have signifcant bodies of followers. None of them has been shown to describe without contradiction even one human community. The Logical Prohibition of Incest In fact, the clearest basis of the incest taboo is partly biological but mainly conceptual, although neither has been recognized in previous theories. The connection to biology is simply the recognition that sexual intercourse leads to reproduction. Sexual relations between and among children and parents

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and between siblings are forbidden because reproduction involving children and parents has to be forbidden. The reason for this, in turn, is conceptual. Refer back to the core of direct kin that is also the generating premise of the kinship map. Remember that this not just a diagram of relations. It is a diagram of reciprocal relations. Ask what would happen to the core if the child of ego could also be the child of ego’s parent. The answer is that there could be no distinction between ego’s generation and ego’s parents’ generation. Reciprocally, this also means no distinction between ego’s generation and ego’s child’s generation. So, the generational distinction would collapse. The entire map would collapse in the vertical direction. Similarly, ask what would happen if all the children of siblings were the same as own children? The answer is that there could be no horizontal differentiation. The chart would collapse in the horizontal direction. So, the idea that parent and child cannot also be parents and the idea that brother and sister cannot also be parents are both logically necessary for there to be any kinship map at all. Moreover, since the core structure of direct kin is also the generative structure for all other relationships, whatever distinctions are used in the core must be carried through to the other positions of the kinship map. The defnition of “incest” implicit in the core, therefore necessarily becomes implicit in the whole: a basic principle for separating generations and descent lines that cannot be violated anywhere in the system of kinship relationships. It follows that all defnitions of all positions have to follow the rule that a position on one generation cannot form a procreating pair if position 1 is parent or child of position 2. Nor can two positions on the same generation form a procreating pair if position 1 has the same parent as position 2. It also follows that positions in descent relations cannot form procreating pairs if they are more than one generation apart. That is, it would be equally destructive of the vertical dimension of the kinship map if a person in a position could form a procreating pair with an ancestor or descendant in a kin term position two or more generations away. These general principles place powerful logical constraints on the formation of all kinship maps. So regardless of whether in a biosocial sense human families must choose between marrying out or dying out, the strongest and clearest cause of the incest taboo lies in the fact that we could not conceptualize kinship as a consistent, generative system of reciprocal relations without one. Extensions of the Incest Prohibition Probably every known community has some extension of the idea of incest beyond one’s direct kin. The way this is phrased depends in part on what one’s direct kin are defned as. In most of the states of the United States,

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incest prohibitions are regulated in state law and commonly include all ancestors and descendants, brothers and sisters “of the whole or half-blood,” uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews, and adopted children or stepchildren. The prohibition extends to marriage, sexual intercourse, and sometimes “deviate sexual intercourse.” Without these extensions, the possibility of a person having children with their aunt or uncle would pose the same conceptual threat as having children with their parents. It would create contradictions that could not be resolved without collapsing the map in both its vertical and horizontal dimensions. It would destroy the map. With the Punjabi kinship map, by contrast, the American kind of specifcation would not make sense. The map makes everyone on one’s own generation bhai (brother) or bhain (sister). So, of course bhai and bhain in some sense have to be marriageable. So, in this case, the rule of exogamy is not stated using terms from the kinship map. It is that one should not marry anyone in the gotra (patrilineal clan) of their pura char—“complete four.” This means anyone in the gotra of their mother’s father, mother’s mother, father’s father, and father’s mother. The frst assures that the kinship map will not collapse horizontally, the second that it will not collapse vertically. One also cannot marry or have sexual relations with anyone born in one’s own village. This assures that the system of property rights underlying the division of labor by sex will be preserved. Since both English and Punjabi defne marriage primarily as something one does with nonkin, they can be described as systems that require exogamy. There are also kinship systems that require endogamy, “in-marriage.” This means that while incest continues to be prohibited, one must marry a relative of some kind. The most prominent example in the anthropological literature is Morgan’s Tamil or Dravidian. Since we discuss this at considerable length in chapter 10, we will not do so here. But we can anticipate the conclusion by saying that in this system as it actually functions, the rule of endogamy serves to assure that people will get marital partners in a situation where there are otherwise very few possible partners available, while still maintaining the conceptual consistency that the generative structure of the map requires. In sum, the logic of every system of reciprocal kinship relations requires a set of distinctions at its core that will ensure the separation of generations and the separation of descent lines. Without this, it is impossible to conceptualize reciprocity in a rigorous and objective way, and without a way to objectify reciprocity, kinship-based society is impossible. Marriage Rules In order to enable the members of a community to articulate and manage their biosocial families and social organization, their conceptions of property

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must be related to their household division of labor and the provisions for care of children. A crucial connection is formed through the marriage rules. One aspect of all marriage rules is the rule of residence: where a newly married couple goes to live. Anthropologists recognize three main possibilities: patrilocal, matrilocal, or neolocal. Patrilocal means that the woman joins the household of the man. Matrilocal means that the man joins the household of the woman. Neolocal means that the couple forms a new household of their own. There are many nuances. For example, the label “patrilocal” sometimes means that the woman actually becomes part of the household of her husband’s and his father’s family. In other cases, it means that she and her husband come to live near the husband’s parental home, in the husband’s village. In still others, it means that the new couple begins in the husband’s father’s household but later moves out to a new house of their own. There are also many systems that are not readily classifed. Whatever residence rule is chosen, in societies where resources are scarce, there are usually additional provisions to ensure that the household who is losing the boy or girl is compensated and that the household that is accepting the boy or girl is obligated in some balancing way. This is not because of some inherent principle of dualism, as alliance theorists proposed. It is because households are interdependent and maximizing the productivity of each household in the community benefts the community as whole. Any type of property has to be distinguished in two ways: what it is and who owns it. Who owns it does not just mean whether person X owns it or person Y. A simple concept like this might apply to purely personal property, like individual sets of beads, clothing, and perhaps weapons. But more important properties like hunting areas, livestock, farmlands, wells, houses, work areas, trees, groves, and tools needed for crafts or trades are always owned and managed by organizations of some kind, and for most of history these ownership rights have been based on kinship. They have been the rights of members of some kind of domestic group or household. The properties of the primary controllers are then subject to further claims by related units. The reasons for all of these arrangements lie in our human ability to look ahead. People everywhere know that they cannot survive as a collection of isolated individuals. There must be provision for cooperation. This, frst of all, requires the creation of organized groups and provision for cooperation among them. Second, there must be provision for insurance, which is the management of risk. If one unit, such as a household group, dies out or otherwise becomes nonviable, there must be provision for the redistribution of its properties, and sometimes remaining members, to others. Since the more distant kinship organizations or relatives are defned using the ideas of the same kinship map that defnes the most central or primary organization, the map provides the core of the shared conceptual structure

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for relating these different kinship organizations and their property rights to one another.

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TOTEMISM As described in Chapter 1 the alliance–descent dispute was intended to revitalize the authoritarian view of science and society of Emile Durkheim, who sought to provide a cleaner and more sane-seeming version of the recognizably incoherent argument of Wolfgang Köhler, who in turn sought to provide empirical justifcation for Hegel’s conception of the state as all-controlling Reason. This entire chain of argument was built on the idea of “totemism” as a general form of religion and as a system of totemic clans that went with it. So we should say where this idea came from and what happened to it. The word “totem” comes from Ojibwa. The various defnitions all appear to go back to an essay by J. F. McLennan titled “The Worship of Animals and Plants” in the Fortnightly Review of 1869 and 1870 (Leaf, 1979:123–24). McLennan was responding to the widely reported practice of naming kin groups after natural species: crow, bear, fox, corn, beaver, and so on. In English, the kin group so named was almost always described as “clan” or as a “gens.” Clan is taken directly from English usage and is especially associated with Ireland and Scotland. The term “gens” was Latin and was considered to mean the same thing: the maximal group of people descended from a single common ancestor. Within a clan one expects to fnd lineages. Groups of clans, perhaps descended from related ancestors, are “phratries.” Totemic clans were a prominent topic in most of the nineteenth-century theories about the origins of kinship and religion. Following McLennan, most of these theories described clan members as regarding their totems as ancestors and substantially all of the theories connected clan identifcation to incest rules and marriage rules, but there was little agreement on anything else. Some authors said a person had to marry a person of their own clan. Others said they could not. Some said they had to marry certain other clans. Others said they could not. Many of these theories related clan names to food prescriptions and rules about hunting and hunting territories. Some explained why clan members can kill or eat their totemic species. Others explain why they cannot. Some of these contradictory ideas were attributed to the same communities, although most of the time they were attributed to different communities but still to “totemism.” There was no consistent pattern. Moreover, such claims were almost never based on frsthand evidence or good followthrough analysis to see if the rules actually were followed and, if so, why and how. By the end of the nineteenth century there was a large literature

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agreeing that totemism was an early or primitive form of religion closely tied to clan-based social organization. This ended in 1910. Alexander Goldenweiser, a student of Boas, reviewed the literature and published Totemism, an Analytical Study. He came to the conclusion that all the studies together proved the opposite of what each one claimed separately. Separately, they claimed to explain totemism as a universal social system on the basis of one or a few cases from one or a few areas. In the aggregate, what they showed was that it was not universal at all. Apart from the use of such names, no other features regularly occurred together. Nor were the names themselves even consistent. They were things like wichetty grub, bison, and beaver, which one can eat, but they were also crow, wolf, and fox which one would not normally want to eat. They also included things like feather, smoke, cloud, and sun which are not edible at all, and are neither plants nor animals and at least arguably also not species. And fnally, clan names are often very uncertain, with the same actual individuals reporting different ones, such as “we are smoke, or feather,” and offering different views of how they are interrelated such as “smoke is the same as feather” or “smoke is descended from feather.” Notice that Goldenweiser’s article was published before Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Durkheim should have known that what he was describing did not exist. So should have his audience. Since Goldenweiser’s critique, the only recognized anthropologist to write about totemism as an actual social system has been Lévi-Strauss, in a strange little 1963 monograph of that name. It began by acknowledging that totemism was not real, but said he was going to describe it anyway because it was the symbolic representation of the type of society posited by alliance theory. This is not an empirical argument; it is the opposite of science. It is saying that the world should be like what I want to think, rather than that I should fnd a way to think what the world is. Lévi-Strauss’s arguments continue to come back to life among anthropologists from time to time. Totemism is also often described in books on world religions. Nevertheless, it is a fantasy. DESCENT GROUPS Since every kinship map involves the idea of some kind of descent relationship linking parent to self to child, it is easy to imagine that such links continue upward and downward. From this, it is easy to jump to the idea of a hierarchy of kinship groups organized on a principle of matrilineal or patrilineal descent. It is especially easy if one has grown up speaking one of the Indo-European languages of Western Europe, like English, whose

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associated kinship maps actually have such indefnite upward and downward extensions. On this basis, many anthropologists have postulated hierarchies of descent groups building up the society as a whole. According to most common usage, the lowest level unit is the household. Households are grouped into lineages, several lineages make up a clan, several clans make up a phratry, and several phratries may make up a tribe or tribal segment. Groups of clans or phratries may also make up two halves of a dual organization, that is, a system of two moieties. This is what Morgan did for the Iroquois and what Needham did for the Purum. Such descriptions were also common for African societies. E. E. Evans Pritchard’s description of the Nuer of South Sudan as a “segmentary system” of this type with no central government, held together only by recognition of their mutual relationships, is considered an anthropological classic. S. F. Nadel’s description of the Nupe state in what is now Nigeria is similar but, in this case, the tribal organization includes a hereditary monarchy. This is “descent theory” in a general sense. In the chapters that follow, we reanalyze several such cases. In chapter 8, we will do it for the Hopi. In chapter 9 we will do it for Rodney Needham’s alliance theory argument for the Purum. Chapter 10 will include a reassessment of Morgan’s description of the Seneca in relation to the debate over Dravidian terminologies. The general point is that where there are generative kinship relations, it is safe to assume that there must be larger kinship organizations of some kind, but we cannot assume that these are the same kinds of kinship organizations familiar to us from our own cultural backgrounds. Rather, they will be conceptualized in terms consistent with the kinship map itself. The only way to determine anything for sure, however, is by fnding the ideas that are held in frm consensus in these communities. Again, facts must be explained by facts, not “analytic” imputations that simply disguise ethnocentric presuppositions. PROPERTY Rules of inheritance require some idea of what can be inherited. This is an idea of property. In traditional societies, most property is held or controlled by individuals either as their personal property or in title of their membership in kinship organizations. In “modern” societies, most property is held or controlled by individuals either as their personal property or in title of their membership in nonkinship organizations. Societies can be arranged roughly along a continuum from traditional to modern in this sense, according to how much property is held and managed by kinship and nonkinship organizations, although the difference between them is not always sharp.

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Property is that which can be owned and transferred. But the idea of owning and transferring does not make useful sense without the additional idea of rights. In many cases, one cannot transfer things physically. It can only be done conceptually and socially. If one buys a unit of land, for example, one cannot physically pick up the land and put it in one’s pocket, or in any other place. The land stays where it is. Very often it cannot even be enclosed because others need to be able to cross it. What one buys is the right to be recognized as the person who can use it and control its use by others. It is similar for water rights, ownership of houses, and possession of hunting territories. Transfers of property rights must be publicly marked in a way that indicates public acceptance. In nonliterate societies, this is done by ceremonies. In literate societies this is done by written records, which are also generally created in a ceremony or in a ceremonial manner. That is, they must be done in a set public context and follow a set form. There is a very close association between writing itself as cultural invention and this use of writing. Virtually the frst evidence we have of writing consists of records of sale and possession in the form of seals, receipts, and inventories. There is no society in which everything is considered property. Societies usually have very well-formed ideas about this. The famous treaty speech of Chief Seattle, which appears to be authentic in its basic concepts, says that unlike the white man, he and his people cannot think of the earth as something they own, hence also as something they can agree to give up. Many Native American groups, do, however, consider the idea of property to include certain kinds of songs. One person may trade such a song to another and when they have done so the frst owner no longer has the right to use it. Some societies consider human beings as property, or possible property, and so on. In the early years of anthropology, along with the search for the frst kind of social organization and the frst religion, there was a great deal of interest in the idea of “primitive communism.” This was a supposed state of society in which all property was held in common. It turned out to be as much a fantasy as group marriage. What we fnd is always more complicated. There are defnitely provisions for assuring that families are cared for and that family properties will be effciently used not only for the beneft of the family members but those associated with them in the larger community. At the same time, however, this is always done by the assignment of property rights to individuals balanced by the assignments of mutual rights and obligations of care and responsibility among individuals. FIVE PROPERTY REGIMES Ideas of property are of two broad kinds: social and technical. Social ideas can be very abstract, like the ideas of “property” and “my” themselves. Or

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they can be more specifc: real estate, money, water rights, government property, personal property, and so on. Whatever they are, they defne reciprocal relationships between people in the capacity of rights holders in property of that specifc type. Technical ideas of property defne the physical characteristics of things which can be treated as property in the society. For example, in the United States all states recognize agricultural land as a specifc type of property and tax it differently from other types of land. This is a social category; it implies specifc mutual obligations between the owner and governmental bodies. But to actually farm agricultural land also requires the use of technical idea systems regarding types of soil, possible crops, relation to climate, and so on. The sea, by contrast, in American law is something only governments can own. In Japan, by contrast, property in land and property in the sea are more alike. Fisherman’s cooperatives in coastal communities own specifc parts of the sea, which they fsh according to specifc methods. Some are hand line only, some rod and reel, some allow nets. Some allow cooperative members to bring paid fshing passengers who are not members, some do not. Cooperative rules also apply to the kinds of boats fshermen can use. For any given society, technical and social ideas must work together pragmatically even though they have to be separate logically. The social ideas that defne property rights should make sense in terms of the technical ideas that objectify the physical properties of the things they are applied to, but the ft is often awkward and can be socially contested. In the course of its history, Homo sapiens has developed fve major systems for providing food, shelter, and security. Each depends on a distinctive concept of property and each has had to have distinct types of social organization to manage it. In their order of emergence, they are hunting and gathering, also called foraging; agriculture; pastoralism; mass production and commerce; and industrialization. Only the frst was shared with earlier ancestral species. The last three are associated only with Homo sapiens. Each has been built on the other in the order named. Each has changed the others. And all of them are still with us. In Western kinship terms, there are four major ways to acquire rights in productive properties. These are birthright, inheritance, adoption, and marriage. There seem to be others in other kinship systems, but up to now our analyses have not been clear enough to delineate them. There is no society where acquisition of property depends on kinship alone. Traditional societies universally have systems of exchange of various kinds, some idea of gift, and some idea of a general human right of access. Every system of production includes natural incentives for trade. In hunting or fshing, if you get more than you can immediately consume, it makes sense to give it to someone else in expectation of receiving something back

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in the future. Whatever the chance of such a return is, it will be greater than zero, which is what one would have if they simply let the surplus go to waste. In agriculture, it is impossible for any family to grow exactly what it needs. It will always produce more of one kind of thing and less of some other thing, such as enough wheat straw for fodder for their animals but more grain than they need as food. Trade can either be direct exchange of one thing for another, which may be immediate or delayed over time. Or it can be indirect through the use of money in connection with the ideas of contract, mortgage, loan, purchase, rent, or hire. Money, in the sense of a token whose value is assigned and maintained by government and legally defned as an instrument by which rights can be transferred, is a social idea system. As physical stuff with numerical value, it has technical properties represented by technical ideas. It is quite possible to have physical money that does not meet the social requirements to be used to transfer rights legitimately. Hunting and Gathering

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In hunting and gathering societies, territories are usually controlled by groups of families linked by kinship relationships into bands of families residing together. Individual rights to hunt or gather materials are obtained through the band by marriage or birthright. But much of the actual work is done by organizations conceived of for the specifc task, such as a hunting party, a specifc type of organization for processing the results of a large kill, or parties for collecting fruit or roots of a certain type at a specifc time. People are recruited into such latter organizations on the basis of characteristics like gender, availability, age, and skill rather than specifc kinship relations. There are very often formal ceremonies for allocating what has been produced by such task-specifc organizations to organizations based on kinship for actual consumption. Agriculture Similarly, the predominant landowning unit in agricultural communities is the farming family. Families are considered to own specifc areas of land, wells or water sources, tools, storage facilities, and houses. But such communities very commonly also have families with different occupational specialization and task specialization by age and gender. Family occupational specializations commonly differentiate landowners, laborers, and specialized craftsmen from millers to blacksmiths. Gender specializations vary enormously. Among the Seneca, traditionally, women farmed and men hunted and traded. In South Asia, women manage internal household budgets and men do the farming and

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trading. Among the Hausa of northern Nigeria, who allow one man to have several wives, each wife manages a separate budget for themselves and their children and contributes to maintenance of the man. The women’s activities usually include farming their own plots of land and trading the surplus on their own account. The most effcient form of agriculture in terms of calories produced per calorie consumed in human effort is slash and burn, also called swidden or shifting agriculture. In this, the farmer, usually a family, clears a patch of brush or forest by fre in the dry season. Then they come back and plant their crops in the ashes just before the following rainy season. They come back again at the end of the rainy season to harvest the crops. They may plant again the next year but usually not for more than three years. Rather, they come back for a few volunteer plants they may harvest but concentrate their efforts on clearing a new feld and repeating the process. They may not replant this feld for twenty or even ffty years. So this type of farming requires a lot of land, long memories, and a way to obtain wide social agreement on who has a right to what specifc areas in any one season. In this type of system, the ultimate “owner” of any tract of clearable bush is always a kinship group that persists through time, identifed by some principle of descent. The individual farmer is a member and appeals to a recognized organizational authority in selecting their plot to clear, often by asking a specifc kin group priest to perform a public ceremony asking for a good harvest, which affrms publicly that the family has the right to such a harvest. Public recognition of the ceremony is the equivalent of a license to use the plot. The most labor-intensive system of agriculture is wet rice farming. This uses permanent felds and permanent systems of water distribution that require enormous effort to build and maintain. The land of one farmer always abuts the land of several others, and for purposes of irrigation and pest control they have to work together. One of the best documented examples of this kind of system is in Bali, described and flmed by Stephen Lansing. The system of terraces and waterways is laid out on the slope of a large volcano whose crater, flled by rain, serves as the reservoir. The terraced felds are irrigated by a system of dams and channels starting from near the rim and leading to the sea. Families own their felds, but they are organized in cooperative irrigation units called subacs. Each subac has its own water temple near the head of the channel that provides its water. The subacs, in turn, are related to each other hierarchically in a way that corresponds to the fow of water. Farming activities within each subac are regulated by ceremonies led by the priests of the subac water temples. In these ceremonies, representatives of the farm families come together to agree when to plant, when to water, and what areas to leave clear for purposes of pest control. The priests of the local temples, in turn, coordinate their

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ceremonies with the ceremonies at the main temple to Dhanu Devi, the water goddess, near the crater rim that regulates the entire system. The temple priest does not need to use any sort of force or threat to bring people to agreement. The ecology of rice production itself forces everybody to realize that they must cooperate. You cannot keep your own feld dry if others around you are irrigating; you cannot regulate pests except by having no crops in an area that is too large for pests to cross, and no one farmer has this much land. Lansing does not record the kinship terminology or inheritance rules of the farmers he describes, but others do. The conceptual framework of the temple ceremonies is recognized by all concerned in Indonesia as Hindu. The centralized system of water control is recognized as Adat Hindu water law. The rules for property ownership, in Bali considered “customary law” (Dyatmikawati, 2016), are the same as what in India are called Hindu Mitakshara law. Only men are property owners. They obtain their rights from their father from birth. Brothers and father have equal shares. Females have rights to maintenance from the property of their brothers, sons, fathers, and husbands. Since the national law changed in 2010 to require gender equality, efforts have been underway to give women more rights of possession. They now appear to have a right to a share in property acquired by their parents in the course of their marriage, but not in the property of fathers and brothers inherited from their fathers and brothers (Dyatmikawati, 2016:15). The purpose of the Hindu system is to assure that management of household property remains in the hands of householders within the village community. If one household dies out, their house and land will go to the men in other households who are most nearly related. Since the marriage rules are that men stay in their natal village and women marry out, giving women property rights would in practice mean that their husbands, living in other villages, could control part of the property of their natal family in their natal village. This is seen as potentially destructive both of cooperation between households within villages and between families across villages. In India, women commonly sign these rights away. Their traditional rights to maintenance are more valuable, as is maintaining cooperation between her husband’s family and her brothers. The changes in Bali appear to recognize the same implications, and they try to preclude them. Retaining the traditional rights of men in the property their fathers inherited is part of this. Indonesian law also extinguishes inheritance rights of people who take employment outside the family (ibid.). Pastoralism Pastoralism is a system of subsistence based on the herding of domesticated animals, usually cattle (bos species), goats, sheep, camels, donkeys, and horses. In far northern Europe and Canada, it involves reindeer. It is often

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associated with long-distance trade. The trade goods are the animals themselves and things they are used to carry. Pastoral groups are mobile and often relatively well armed. In Africa, there are several regions characterized by the relationship between a more militarized pastoralist ruling group and a linguistically and culturally related agriculturalist population that they rule, but that they also often come into confict with. These include Fulani and Hausa in West Africa, Tutsi and Hutu in Burundi, and Nuer and Dinka in South Sudan. Pastoralism probably provided for a larger proportion of the total human population in the more distant past, when agriculture was less extensive and overland transport for trade was not mechanized. But for the last two hundred years, it has involved a small and steadily declining portion of the total human population, although it still occupies substantial amounts of land. The best-known and perhaps most comprehensive portrait of the kinship ideas and organization of a pastoral society is enshrined in the Qur’an as Islamic law. The best-known anthropological account is Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer.

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Commerce and Mass Production For most of the last two millennia, going back to the Bronze Age, larger scale commercial production and trade has also been managed by families or alliances of families, often also acting as local rulers. Such families also commonly supported military organizations and took part in trading networks. Their estates commonly depended on unfree labor, mainly slaves captured in warfare or “clients” consisting of peasant families who could farm small holdings of their own but also owed a certain amount of time or work to their overlord. These commercial technologies were scaled up versions of household technologies using the same kinds of labor, and their trading networks are highly capitalized versions of earlier household to household and village to village trade. This is what we see in the Iliad, Odyssey, and the epic of Gilgamesh. This kind of aristocratic production, warfare, and trade evolved into the monarchies of Europe and much of Asia and continued in many places into the twentieth century. Industrialization Mass production for commerce has used natural forces to multiply the output from human labor as far back as we can see: wind power, animal power, and water power. But the Industrial Revolution enormously increased its extent, scale, and character. This started with the invention of the steam engine at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This was quickly improved and

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followed by the invention of the internal combustion engine, which was in turn followed by the invention of electric generators and motors. These, in turn, allowed for the invention and production of new types of productive machinery, and the cycles continue to the present. Industrialization feeds further industrialization. Production feeds production. While nothing prevents a family from owning and operating a factory producing something with mechanical or electrical energy, the development of the idea of a joint stock company, a corporation built by selling shares to anyone who will buy them, greatly enhanced the ability of individuals without family fortunes to amass funds to build very large productive facilities. This began in the sixteenth century and was rapidly accelerated by legislative enactments in the nineteenth century. The process continues, as increasingly complex and effective business regulation makes investment more secure and attractive. Today, most large productive facilities are owned and managed by corporations rather than families. While no government collects information on employment according to whether the employer is a regulated corporation rather than a family-owned business, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to doubt that most people who work for salaries are employed by either businesses that their family does not own, corporations, or governments. The building codes of American cities now regularly distinguish between residences and places of business. Residences cannot be used as places of business, and, apart from public accommodations, businesses cannot be used as places of residence. In a traditional community, this would make no sense.

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CONCLUSION The kinship map is the social idea system that distinguishes kinship organizations from all other organizations, but in order to be used to create organizational charters the ideas of the map must be combined with other ideas, including property ideas and rules that connect property rights and obligations to kinship positions and relations. These include rules of marriage, birthright, inheritance, and descent. In most societies, they also include rules governing adoption and changes in legal status comparable to the difference between minority and adulthood. Kinship maps rarely provide direct templates for social organizations. But they do provide direct templates for interpersonal reciprocal relations in title of kinship positions. These are the relations of “diffuse enduring solidarity” that Schneider tried to explain but could not. They say things like “If I am your uncle you are my nephew, and if you are my nephew your sister is my niece.” But they do not say anything more.

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Anthropologists have often sought to show that kinship ideas, however conceived, control kinship behavior. Such efforts have consistently failed. But the failure is actually a positive fnding. That kinship ideas do not control kinship behavior has become a fact. So, take it off the table and ask the questions that come next: What does control behavior, and what do kinship ideas have to do with it? The answer is that they are conceptual tools that people use to try to control each other. How? I cannot control you unless I get others to agree with me. You cannot control me unless you get others to agree with you. We both try to use the common ideas in such a way as to form a consensus we all can share and enforce.

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Chapter 7

Domestic Group Organizations

Domestic groups are the socially recognized groups that form around one or more biosocial families. Domestic groups always involve some ideas defning kinship relations and some ideas defning property. Since the early search for “primitive communism” in which property rights were assigned to the group as a whole showed that there was no such thing, the only option we actually have evidence for is the assignment of property rights to individuals. A few examples can indicate how this works.

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THE PATRIARCHAL EXTENDED FAMILY Legal scholars associate the Indo-European language family with a very broadly distributed system of property rights that they describe as the “patriarchal extended family.” Important examples include Roman law, Hindu law, and Hittite law. This was the type of kinship and family system that Morgan and the other nineteenth-century theorists considered “civilized” and set out to explain. Roman Law As already noted, the comparative lawyers took their theory of the evolution of Roman law from the Roman jurisprudents of the late Republic. According to them, Roman law began from the idea of the patria potestas, the power of the father. The pater familias, father of the family, had been in fact, and continued to be in theory, the absolute ruler of the family. His word was law, and originally the source of all law. He had the power of life and death over 143

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family members. Only he could make contracts. Only he could buy or sell property of the household. Only he could receive or remove members. In principle, the patria potestas lasted as long as the father was alive unless it was removed legally. When he died, all of those under his authority became sui generis, meaning legal individuals in their own right. This devolution did not mean that there was no longer anyone at all who had the patria potestas over all that had been his property. It meant that each of his sons now had, independently, patria potestas over their own part of their father’s property in each of their own households, including each son’s own spouse, children, and son’s wives. Morgan and his colleagues accepted this theory. In fact, while the patria potestas was an important theme of Roman law, it was never the only one or the dominant one. Nor was it as simple and unalloyed as the standard description indicates. First of all, as John Crook (1967) has argued, the power of the father is different in three distinct areas: sacral power over household religious activities; gubernatorial power over family members, adoptees, and slaves; and property headship. It was most complete in the frst two, and substantially qualifed in the third. Throughout this history, Roman law was divided into two major bodies: connubium and commercium, family law and contract law, and there are important provisions in each that limited and constrained the use of the patria potestas. The principal limitation was that all transfers of people or property made by a paterfamilias exercising his patria potestas required the ceremony of mancipatio. This was a symbolic sale between one paterfamilias and another. The people who could be so transferred were those noted above. Such property was res mancipi, as opposed to res nec mancipi (“not res mancipi”) which did not require the ceremony and did not come under the patria potestas. Defnitions of res mancipi by various writers are by example rather than by a general statement. The examples include agricultural land in Italy, cattle, houses, servants, and slaves. The act of transferring a res mancipi was represented by tapping a scale with a copper ingot and handing it to the other paterfamilias while stating who was being bought and what the conditions were. For a marriage, it was handed to the paterfamilias from whom the woman was being obtained. To emancipate a son, his father sold him to another paterfamilias on the condition that the buyer releases him, which the buyer agreed to do. To transfer land, the ceremony would be the same. Whatever the purpose, the ceremony required fve witnesses who had to be adult citizens, plus one other to hold the scale. This made the action public, and therefore subject to public approval or disapproval. This was a powerful constraint. Romans were always careful to preserve their honor. Honor included a reputation for upholding law and morality. Dishonorable actions

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could bring a person to the attention of the Censor. The Censor was a senior Roman of undoubtable integrity who kept the census, the roll of citizens by family and rank. The Censor could strike a person off this roll for dishonorable, notorious, or criminal actions. This removed the person from citizenship and social rank. There was no appeal. The transfer of property upon the death of the paterfamilias was similarly constrained. Consistent with the idea of absolute power, a paterfamilias was expected to make a will, but the will had to follow the law. The law included carefully specifed rights of inheritance for one’s wife, own children, and children of concubines, although these changed over time. It also included residual rights for brothers and, of course, parents and ancestors if there were any. There was a further check in the commercial law. A magistrate could not order a person to do any specifc act. Penalties were either in the form of money or physical punishment. So, if a person owed money and could not pay, the punishment was that he would be transferred to the creditor or creditors “in personam,” to do with as they wished or to sell into foreign slavery. If there was more than one creditor, they could divide the debtor. This meant literally that they could cut him into pieces in proportion to what was owed, and it was a stated principle that the law did not care greatly if the proportions were not exact. Since such a debtor would also have been a paterfamilias, the relevance of this to the idea of family property lies not in what they could do but in what they could not do. They could not forcibly take the res mancipi and dispossess the family. So, in the end, when we consider how the power of the father had to be applied and what it could be applied to, Roman law clearly protected family property even though it did not explicitly contain a concept of family property.

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Hindu Joint Family The modern and historic Indian counterpart of the Roman family headed by the patria potestas is the Hindu joint family. Anthropologists have been arguing about it for over 150 years, going back to Henry Maine. The concept is well established and generally well defned in Indian law. The problem that anthropologists and others have found is that it is very diffcult to fnd an organization “on the ground” that actually corresponds to it. The relevant laws pertain to marriage, succession, rights of children, rights of women, and landholding. There are two rules of succession, Mitakshara and Dayabhagha. The Mitakshara law is phrased only in terms of the relation between a father and his sons. The Dayabhagha law takes the sons’ mother or mothers into account. Both are recognized as equally “Hindu.” The Mitakshara rule is by far the most widely adhered to. It pertains both to the

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division of property and to its reversion. The rule has four major elements. The frst is that only men have hereditary rights of ownership. The second is that they obtain these rights from birth. The third is that they hold these rights equally with all brothers and with their father. The fourth is that rights of sons preempt (take precedence over) rights of brothers. This applies to all “ancestral property,” but not to property that is “self-acquired.” Any property obtained by inheritance is ancestral, as is any property obtained with inherited resources. The rule means, for example, that if there are three sons of a father named A, each of the sons will own one-fourth of the father’s original estate from birth. The father will own the remaining fourth. If one son, B, should die, his share would revert to the father and the remaining sons (his brothers), with the result that the brothers would each own a third and the father would own a third. If one of the remaining sons, say C, has a son of his own, D, that son would become half owner of his father’s (C’s) estate, but would have no direct claim on the shares of C’s brothers or father (A). Then if C himself dies, his remaining half share would go to his son (D) only, making D a third owner of the original estate. If the original father (A) or another of the brothers dies, D would also have a claim on the share that would have fallen to his father (C). The rights include both rights of ownership and rights of preemption. Preemption means that if the original father (A), for example, had sold the ancestral property to anyone but his sons without their permission, they could reclaim it at any time by paying the buyer the original sale price. The sons would have the same right even if the father only sold his “own” portion. If the sons did not exercise this right, the father’s brothers could. If the brothers did, the sons could later claim the property from them in turn on the same basis. Sons, in effect, lock property into one’s own descent line. They make it diffcult to sell one’s own ancestral property, but by the same token they make it extremely diffcult for anyone else to attempt to take it away. There are many variations in the interpretation of this basic rule, such as, for example, concerning the force of the son’s son’s (D’s) claim against a widow of one of his father’s other bothers, or as against that of the original father’s brother in the event of the death of the father (A) and there are two remaining sons without issue. These vary by region and, often, ethnic group and jati, and such variations make up much of the substance of Indian “customary law” insofar as they are recognized and enforced by courts. In Sidhupur Kalan, the Punjab village where Leaf did his original feldwork, traditional rights of preemption are said to have extended much further than the modern law recognizes and this extension still has moral force. More importantly, the local operation of the Mitakshara rule is infuenced by local

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translations of the key technical ideas. Since most landowners are of the Jat jati (a jati is the type of group usually rendered by the English term “caste”), it is, in most cases further interpreted by Jat customary law. Jat customary law does not allow the sons the right to demand a division of the ancestral property against the father’s wishes. If the father opposes division, the property can only be divided after his death. The legal birthright still exists, however, so the father cannot by any means treat the property as if it were his own in a Western sense. The legal term “ancestral property” corresponds, in village discussions, to the Punjabi phrase jadi jaidad, which means simply “old property.” In practice, villagers are inclined to make a presumption that property is ancestral unless there is a clear reason to do otherwise. The English phrase, “Hindu Joint Family,” is not usually used in the village. The Punjabi term used in its place is parivar. This was defned for Leaf when he frst began systematic elicitation of kinship concepts as “a group of relatives who cooperate in some property.” It was distinguished from ristadari, who are the group of all of one’s relatives. Very distant relatives would be in one’s parivar if they cooperated in property; very close relatives would not be in it if they did not so cooperate. A legal joint family of record might in fact be divided into several distinct village parivars, living in separate houses, although villagers would recognize this larger group and have no trouble speaking of it as a parivar as well. A functioning household (parivar) is expected to consist of one male line and associated dependents. The male line would be the master (malik), his wife and children, surviving parents, and perhaps an unmarried brother or two. If children include two or more sons, the family will stay together until both of the sons have sons of their own or until there is a major dispute. Adult sons would generally be described as haqdars, rightsholders, although women with clear rights (e.g., as widows holding property in trust) could be too. While it is understood that the malik predominates, it is also understood that the rightsholders all exercise an element of independence in judgment and that in the case of major disputes they represent the potential lines of cleavage along which new parivars might be formed. In any case, if two lines of sons descending from sons seem well established, the expectation is that the household will divide. The stereotyped occasion of the division is that the two mothers will quarrel because each will seek advantages for their own son. In 1965, only one family had members who would not be expected to be in the parivar under the stereotyped description. They had a resident daughter and her husband, but no natural son. In 1978, the pattern still held. There had been no change in the basic concepts or the basic expected organization itself, although demographic changes had somewhat changed its signifcance.

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In short, in modern India as in ancient Rome, there is a well-established idea of family property and a strong sense that this idea should be protected by law and government policy. But this is an institutional idea, not an organizational charter. There is no stereotyped model of what the family is that holds such property, or of the property itself. Rather, all property rights are individual rights. So, is there an organizational charter for the Indian joint family? Yes, certainly, but it is not a simple stereotyped or “normative” idea of what such families should be. It is a set of kinship ideas that each actual biosocial family group uses to develop its own self-defnition, which they negotiate and adapt through time with other families. From an evolutionary point of view, this is probably much more effcient than it would be to have one stereotyped family structure for everyone.

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The Developmental Cycle of Domestic Groups A similar unsuccessful search for a general model of family organizations developed in the Africanist literature beginning in the late 1950s. This was the “developmental cycle of domestic groups” offered as a general household theory on the basis of a very widespread pattern in sub-Saharan Africa. In India, if you survey the houses in the village, all of them will have a very similar multidimensional generational organization with one main senior couple, but perhaps two, their offspring, and perhaps other siblings. But if you make the same kind of survey in sub-Saharan Africa you will fnd some houses or households with just a man and his wife, others with a couple and their children, and others with multiple generations similar to an Indian household. Very often, these households will be grouped into compounds and the household heads will be related to each other by descent. In Muslim areas you may also fnd compounds consisting of a man in his house and several wives with their children in their houses. In this latter case, what is “the” household organization? In 1958, Meyer Fortes and several other British anthropologists proposed an answer based on the idea of stages in a life cycle (Goody, 1958). For example, a butterfy at one stage is an egg, another a caterpillar, then a pupa, and fnally a butterfy. But it is also always a butterfy. These domestic groups, Fortes suggested, are like that. And, as in a life cycle, the relationship between one stage and the next is not simply nominal. It occurs through cause and effect. Fortes was originally trained as a geographer and saw the mechanisms as lying in such things as the aging of the members of the family, the birth and growth of their children, and the tools they accumulated. Unfortunately, he was also a positivist and sought to minimize the role of

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individual decisions based on indigenous ideas while generalizing the scope of the material constraints. This engendered the same kind of unbounded dispute as componential analysis and alliance theory. We will stay with the facts. The facts are that in some places, such as villages in India, domestic group composition and activities are relatively uniform from household to household and constant across time. In other places, such as traditional communities in much of West and Central Africa, domestic group composition and activities vary from household to household and go through a regular sequence of changes across time. But a household’s composition and activities are not its organization. They are always the outcome of the actions of the household members and various others acting in title of their positions in multiple organizations, drawing on various kinds of resources within and beyond the immediate household.

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American Kinship and Family Law American family law also protects family property by specifcations of individual property rights of family members without a formal concept of family property or of the family as a property holding body. In most states of the United States up to about 100 years ago, household property was under the sole control of the male household head, on the model of the patria potestas. But also like the patria potestas, the power was subject to important legal and social constraints. Today, adult men and women, married and unmarried, have equal power to make contracts. There are two major regimes with respect to marital property. Forty-one states have common-law property rights and nine have community property. In common-law property states, property obtained solely by the husband or wife is owned by them individually and remains theirs to dispose of by will upon death. Property obtained jointly is owned jointly. In community property states the husband and wife are joint owners of all property acquired by either one in the course of the marriage. So, upon death, the husband or wife may dispose of only half the property by will. Either way, the couple’s children have no rights in the joint estate, although they may own things personally. But this is not all. In either type of state, minor children have a right to be educated and to share their parents’ standard of living. If the parents are alive, they are obligated to provide this. If they refuse, they can be compelled to (although not very effectively). If the parents die, these rights continue as claims against the estate. Where practical, the standard of living would include maintaining their domicile. Provision for this would take priority over other distributions. To assure that the requirements of wills and of law are met, state courts have initial jurisdiction over every death. If the court cannot assign responsibility for

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carrying out these obligations to a family member, it should assign them to an executor. Debts of the deceased take the priority after obligations to dependents, and only after that is the judge obligated to carry out instructions of a will. In one state, Louisiana, inheritance law follows the French Civil Code. Common law allows children who are not minors to be disinherited. Louisiana law prohibits disinheriting any offspring under twenty-four years of age. It is also more prescriptive than most about what children are entitled to. So, in all forms of modern American family law, just as in ancient IndoEuropean law, there is a clear provision for the protection of family property even though the phrase family property is not used. Why do it this way? Why not have a legal defnition of the family or household that digests or encapsulates all the varying conceptions that one encounters in the fow of daily life and communication in the United States? Why not defne the nuclear family? The basic answer is that as a practical matter there are so many variables that affect household organization that a single simple defnition could not make appropriate allowances for them. Basic statistics on American household composition, ethnic identifcation, and size as of the 2010 census are summarized in table 7.1. Table 7.1  American Domestic Groups, 2010 Census

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USA Domestic Groups All households Family Married couple Male with family Female with family Nonfamily total Nonfamily male-headed Nonfamily female-headed Ethnic/Race identifications   White (all)   White (non-Hispanic)  Black  Asian   Hispanic (all race)   Native American   Pacific Islander Number of people  1  2  3–6   7 or more

Number (in millions)

Percentage

115 76 55 5.5 15.1 38.9 18 20.9

100 66.1 47.8 4.8 13.1 33.8 15.7 18.2

89.7 80.7 13.9 4.6 13.6 0.8 0.1

78.0 70.2 12.1 4.0 11.8 0.7 0.1

31.9 38.6 42.9 1.8

27.7 33.6 37.3 1.6

Source: America’s family and living arrangements: 2012 population characteristics. https​:/​/ww​​w​.cen​​sus​.g​​ov​/ pr​​od​/20​​13pub​​s​/p​20​​-570.​​pdf.

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The census publication cited in table 7.1 relates these results to previous decades going back to 1970. Over this period, the percentage of married couples with children declined from 40.3% in 1970 to 19.6% in 2012. Over the same period, the percentage of households consisting of married couples without children has remained nearly constant, between 30% and 28%. Four other types of household have increased over the same period. These are “other family households,” from 10.6% to 17.8%; “other nonfamily households,” from 1.7% to 6.1%; one-person households, from 17.1% to 27.4%; and two-person households, up from 28.9% to 33.8%. The percentages of all larger households have declined. These trends connect to others. The increase in single person families is related to the increasing divorce rate. This is evident from the fact that most of these families are female-headed. Upon divorce, custody is usually awarded to the mother. The decline in family size overall is related to increasing urbanization and higher rates of female employment. And the increasing number of families without married couples is related to poverty and lack of employment. According to the same publication, for 2012 the percentages of households with children living with one parent by ethnicity/ race were 12% for Asian, 17.3% white non-Hispanic, 27.5% Hispanic, and 52.1% black. Further, a signifcant difference between Hispanic and black was that in the Hispanic families the largest portion of households showed a parent as the head while in black families most showed the grandparent as the head. While a few elected politicians seem to think that they should legislate family composition, the overwhelming majority rejects this view in favor of specifying the fnancial obligations of marital partners toward each and their children, contributing to certain agreed-upon public goals, and suppressing certain notorious abuses. The goals are to promote home ownership, social order, safety, health, employment, and education. The abuses are incest, child marriage, involuntary marriage, and polygamy. Further constraints include the legal defnition of a place of residence as opposed to a place of business. Given this framework, people do the best they can. The system seems to be working reasonably well. A December 2015 publication of the Pew Research Center titled Parenting in America asked parents to rate their neighborhood as a place to raise children. The choices were fair/ poor, good, or excellent/very good. Answers were sorted by family income. For families with income of $75,000 or more, 78% said their neighborhoods were excellent, while 7% rated them as fair to poor. But perhaps surprisingly, for respondents with family incomes of less than $30,000 a year, 62% still rated their neighborhoods as excellent/very good while those rating their neighborhoods as fair/poor increased only to 18%.

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MYTHS AND MOVIES Public ceremonies enacting agreement on kinship ideas take many forms. Religious stories and myths are often distinguished from “entertainment,” on the principle that they represent “the sacred,” or the supernatural, and mere entertainments do not. This distinction is not empirically sound. They have the same basic social function and the same kind of analysis can be applied to them. They enact social charters. If they did not, they would not be meaningful to a mass audience. This is precisely why entertainments such as flms, plays and novels so often include ceremonies and reactions to them. This raises an entertaining question. If entertainments enact organizational charters but do not actually create organizations, why do we have them? Why do we pay money to see them or to read them? The answer appears if we pay attention to how we discuss them. Why is Casablanca often described as a great American flm while Thunder Over Arizona is a potboiler that almost no one has heard of? Why do so many people discuss or allude to the characters of the Star Wars series? More basically, why do we discuss any of these, ever? And most basically, why do we care what happens to a fctional character? The answer has two parts. The frst part is that we intuitively recognize them as portraying organizational charters that are important to us, and that recognition, in itself, entails a need for agreement with others. The second is that it is much easier to illustrate organizational charters in fction than in actual ongoing behavior. In fction, it is easy and normal to construct a story around one single set of organizational ideas, one social charter. It is impossible to construct an actual day this way. In a story, the key characters usually stay in the same social framework, the same set of relevant relations, from beginning to end. In flms and plays, this is symbolized in many ways, from consistency of sets and lighting through recurrent themes, ideas, and voices in the dialog. In an actual day we repeatedly move from one different situation to another and back, often very quickly in response to very small cues that an unknowing witness might easily miss. In these situations, we often fail to reach the agreements we think we should have, what we think we understand about a relationship constantly seems to slip away, people often seem to have divided or unclear loyalties, and often do not communicate very well. And fnally, as we go through the fow of events in our daily lives, we normally do not have an audience sitting beside us whose reactions we can hear and compare to our own. So it is in fction and art, not “real life,” that we usually fnd organizational ideas that are important to us most clearly displayed for public comment and assent.

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Of course, in such presentations the formal defnitions do not appear as formal defnitions. That would call into question precisely what makes them important, the stipulation that they are the unquestioned background of the action portrayed. Literary critics recognize many genres of fction. They identify them in many ways, such as poetry versus prose, epic poetry versus ordinary poetry, plays, flm, flm noir, Westerns, adult Westerns, war movies, science fction, fantasy, and chick ficks. Epic poetry is the most enduring of the genres of fction. It also appears to be the most organizationally pluralistic. A single poem is usually many stories in one. Meters, rhymes and other mnemonics, line length, and the like are generally consistent to assist memorization and recitation, but the stories place the characters in multiple types of settings, each associated with a distinctive set of organizational relations, juxtaposed to each other and typically in tension or confict with one another. For example, most of the action of the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer is organized in terms of fve distinct organizational charters. Each of these is associated with a distinctive place: the abode of Gods, the palaces of Agamemnon and Priam, the ships, the plain before the walls of Troy, and Odysseus’ house. (The adventures with the Cyclops, the Sirens, and Circe in their respective places are sideshows: the charter is the same as on the ships but the circumstances bring out different possible problems. What is the sense of the story of Circe, for instance, if it is not that a beautiful woman has the ability to make good men long at sea act like pigs and not want to return to the boat?) Two of these recurrent social charters are variations on family organization. One of these is represented by the descriptions of the Gods in Olympus, the other by the contrast between Helen (wife of Agamemnon) and Penelope (wife of Odysseus). The gods in Olympus are the family of Zeus in his household together with all his more distant relations by affliation and descent. What are the characteristics of their relations? Among them there are friendships and enmities, support and betrayal, and bitter, long-seething jealousies. They even conspire to thwart the will of Zeus himself. Yet no one is driven out and no one leaves. Why? What would have made this reasonable, even reassuring, to its intended audience? It could not be something about Gods. Ordinary Greeks 2,500 hundred years ago did not encounter the gods any more often than we do. But they had families and experienced family relationships. Were they like those portrayed in the family of Zeus? Most likely, and this is exactly what the poem implies. Since the gods were immortal, transposing such relationships to them implies that the relationships were also immortal. In plain language: people don’t leave families because family relations are permanent. You can choose your friends but you cannot choose your relatives. Live with it.

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By contrast, the relationships portrayed in scenes set in the palaces of the mortal rulers Agamemnon and Priam are dramatically not enduring-nomatter-what. They are transitory. They can be broken or altered at a whim. It is often not clear who is loyal to whom. They also depend not only on who is in what kinship relation to whom, but who has infuence with the king. These are clearly not ideas of family relationships in an ordinary household, as represented by the relations among the Gods. They are the relations of interestbased kinship alliances in aristocratic households, where family power cannot be separated from family wealth and public authority. These scenes represent the organization of government in a familistic society, not family as such. No one leaves the family of Zeus and although individuals try all sorts of deception, nobody openly confronts his authority. In the courts it is quite different. Joining and leaving, fghting for and fghting against, is what nearly all of the narrative is about. The stories of combat are different again and represent the relationship between the aristocratic leadership (claiming partial divine ancestry) and the common soldiers. So does Odysseus’ voyage. The themes are leadership and followership, discipline and indiscipline. And fnally, Odysseus’ relations to his wife and her would-be suitors once the voyage is over are framed by the confict between the values and rules of aristocratic marriage and inheritance on the one hand and the values and rules of conjugal fdelity, love, and honor on the other. Odysseus’ problem in this substory is to reestablish himself simultaneously as both a king in his palace and as a husband in his family home, not just one or the other. The same kind of analysis works for the two great Indian epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, although the organizational ideas are different. The poems are usually described in terms of abstract themes of Indian religious philosophy, and they do indeed contain long discussions of these matters. But they draw their basic plot and role relations from the same village-level social idea systems and organizational charters we fnd today. In the Ramayana, Ram builds up an alliance to recover his wife, Sita, who has been kidnapped by the demon Ravana. Ravana has taken her to his palace in Sri Lanka. The role relations that the plot utilizes are the kinship idea of the relationship between a husband and a wife and the political idea of factions. The kinship concept is that a husband, as owner of the ancestral property his wife and family depend on, is his wife’s steadfast and unselfsh protector, while the wife trusts the husband’s ability and willingness to carry out these obligations above all. Factions today are described as alliances among friends to defend their families against immoral “opportunists.” Using the factional ideas, Ram seeks help. He appeals to the monkey King/God Hanuman and his followers. The fact that Hanuman is a monkey while Ram is human makes absolutely

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clear the logical separation between the kinship idea system and faction idea system. Hanuman cannot possibly be Ram’s relative. The negotiations are exactly the same as what one might see from a village leader today, who starts as an isolated individual and must obtain the help of others to defeat an outside enemy. The single-minded way Ram goes about doing it, and is ultimately victorious, makes him not just any husband but a heroic husband. Sita, in turn, is the equally perfect wife in her steadfast trust in Ram and her personal virtue until she is rescued. The Mahabharata, by contrast, is built on a portrayal of the kinship relations between brothers as the coparceners of a household property, the governmental idea of a good ruler, and again the idea of factions through which the two sets of brothers mobilize their respective supporters to enforce their claims against each another. Indian national television serialized the story in Hindi in ninety-four episodes between 1988 and 1990. The audience was enormous, even though about half of it did not speak Hindi and probably a third would not identify themselves as Hindu. In America, flm takes the place of epic poetry. Films have formulas. Film critics do not agree on what a formula is, but they are sure they exist. In fact, they can be elicited as basic lists of characters and relations that the stories are expected to involve. Thunder Over Arizona (Republic Studios, 1956), for example, was described in a review as a “humdrum Western.” The main characters and plot events of a normal, stereotypic, Western are easy to elicit from a random audience, such as a university class. The characters are the hero, heroine, villain, sidekick of the hero, gang of the villain, sometimes parent or parents of the heroine, and the townspeople. The action occurs in the West not long ago. The hero is “just a cowboy” and not attached to the region. The heroine has property, a ranch. The ranch is outside of town. If the heroine has relatives in the flm, they will be elderly and unable to protect the property on their own. In Thunder Over Arizona, it is her father who has this role. The hero seeks to protect it for her. Their mutual relation is love without lust, unwaveringly. The villain seeks to obtain her property. His relation to the heroine is lust without love. The action of the movie reveals these relationships. The townspeople are initially either unaware of what the villain is up to or insuffciently frm in their recognition to do anything about it. The hero recognizes the heroine’s situation and will come to her rescue. To do so, he has to fnd a legal way to expose the villain and secure the support of the townspeople. He announces that he has a plan. The action of the flm follows the way he carries it out. The contrast between the bumbling and genial sidekick of the hero and the menacing and secretive gang of the villain emphasizes the contrast between the openness and goodness of the hero and the secrecy and badness of the villain.

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The flm is expected to convey a kind of reassuring nostalgia. Critics and others express disappointment if it does not. The question, therefore, is: How do we know all this? How do we know what to expect and what to feel? How do we know what to want? The way to answer this question is to transform it to another: Where do we encounter such relations in ordinary life? Where, or in what situation, do we encounter men with the properties of the hero, women with the properties of the heroine, and so on? The interpretive key is to restate the description of the action at a just slightly higher level of generality than what is actually shown. Instead of “not long ago in the West,” restate the locale as “the real recent past.” Instead of “just a cowboy” note simply that you do not know what that is and you do not see any actual work. Note that the hero is intelligent, active, loves the heroine, and has a plan to protect her. Note that the heroine is a person with family property who needs protection. They love each other but there is no overt sex. The love also has no observable beginning and no observable end. Once you see through the deliberately thin disguises this way, the obvious conclusion is that the plot enacts the stereotyped relationship between a father and mother as it should be seen from the perspective of a child of about six years of age. The “classic” American Western movie represents the organizational charter of the American family from the perspective of a child in such a family. We go to them to feel what we think we should feel, or should have felt, in such a position. In the complementary “adult” Western, the relations are the same but the point of view from which they are seen is that of the adults, as the name implies without saying why. This is accomplished mainly by devices that call elements of the initial formula into question, particularly the sharp love: lust and good: bad contrast between hero and villain. In Shane, widely recognized as one of the frst of the genre, the heroine was married and had a living husband, while the hero was someone she had apparently loved previously. So, the love between hero and heroine “now” (the time in which the flm is set) was clouded and ambiguous. The townspeople knew that the villain was evil from the outset but were ineffective and the cast of characters included the heroine’s slightly annoying son of about six whose admiration for the hero was far more apparent than his admiration for the heroine’s husband—explicitly occupying and disturbing the child position that conventional (nonadult) Westerns leave vacant for the viewer. Although flm genres commonly become specialized vehicles for enacting specifc systems of organizational ideas for several decades, eventually they exhaust the possible problems of the underlying organizational charter and another genre takes it up and starts over. The traditional war flm (and novel) of the 1940s and 1950s dramatized ideas of teamwork and the separation of

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political unity from ideological, ethnic, or religious unity. Subsequently, this was picked up by much of the science fction of the 1960s and 1970s. The ethnically mixed, dedicated, and basically good-hearted men of the infantry squad or submarine crew became the ethnically mixed, dedicated, and basically good-hearted men of the space ship crew. The Star Wars genre has picked up the plot structure of the Westerns with an overlay of themes (but not roles) from religion and politics. Instead of occurring not long ago in the West it occurs a long time ago “in a galaxy far away”—not in the future, like previous flms involving ideas of space travel. For the rest, hero and heroine are the same. The Republic replaces the heroine’s ranch. The galaxy replaces the town. The social relations of the frst of the series were those of the “classic” Western and the relational confusions among the principal characters of the frst and second sequel are the complications that the adult Western added. The Matrix is substantially the same thing with a more particularly New Testament eschatology. In this case, the Western hero is also the Messiah but ultimately gets the girl. This is placed in the future, which is only logical since it uses the idea of the Messiah’s second coming. The print versions of the same genres use the same organizational charters and it should not be diffcult to see that the same ideas also provide the baseline expectations of most genres of news reportage. It is easy to see that the same ideas that appear in fctional genres also appear in ceremonies that establish actual relationships. The ideas of the classic American Western are substantially the same as the ideas of the stereotypical American wedding (Leaf, 2009:148; Read, 2018). The bride is the heroine who needs protection, of course; the bride’s father is in the picture, but, like her relatives in the Western, cannot continue to protect her. The groom is not associated with any relative but has to be supported by his “best man,” showing that he has the wherewithal to protect the bride/heroine. The guests who are separate before the ceremony and come together at the end parallel the townspeople who are the witnesses to the groom/hero becoming the protector of the bride/heroine. The villain is not present but the basic threats are always there, to be countered by the groom/hero through his publicly made promises: to love, honor, and obey, in sickness and in health, till death do you part. This should not be surprising. Two descriptions of the same organization should have the same basic cast of characters. The same applies to the ideal of Indian marriages in the epics and Indian marriage ceremonies. Fictional genres are an embodiment of organizational folk models, ceremonies embody many of the same models, and actual organizations do as well. In short, the social charters in a community are not arcane codes to be found by obscure hermeneutics. They are what everyone knows. They are not beneath the surface of things. They are the surface of things.

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AGING All human beings age and all human societies conceptualize age, usually in several ways. All, as far as we know, recognize age and aging in assigning social roles and responsibilities. In Western societies the most authoritative way this is done is sociocentric. By law and common practice, an individual is assigned a name, usually some sort of identifying description such as footprint and description of gender, and a date of birth, all at birth. Age is then marked chronologically in the number of years since that date of birth as part of subsequent offcial identifcations. So, everyone has an objectively known birthday and age in years, and there are conventional ceremonies to mark them. But this is by no means universal. Many governments around the world do not assure that all people born are offcially noticed and recorded at the time. And in many traditional societies, such as Purum described in chapter 9, age in a chronological sense is not socially salient at all. So how is age measured and marked in these cases? Since kinship idea systems recognize the succession of parents and children, they must imply some concept of age. This begins with the kinship map. Kinship maps necessarily include an idea of generations and must have at least three, ego’s own, ego’s parents, and ego’s children. Without this they cannot have a generated structure and reciprocal relations. Many kinship maps also include an idea of relative age in the sense of born before (older) or born after (young) ego, and many of these carry the distinction over to the +1 generation as elder and younger brothers and/or sisters of parents. Some variations on these possibilities are described in chapters 9 and 10. And fnally, different parts of the kinship map become salient in defning relations with other actual individuals for each user as they proceed from birth through maturity to death. For a child, only the parts of the kinship map above ego are likely to be populated by actual people. For a very old person, only the positions below ego are likely to be populated. When a person’s age is defned only in relation to others defned as kin in their kinship map, the conceptualizations of age are logically egocentric. For a person’s age to be compared with that of others who are not necessarily relatives, this egocentric defnition needs to be made sociocentric. This can be done in many different ways. One possibly universal example of the way the egocentric age is turned into sociocentric age is the way the egocentric changes provide criteria for moving from one stage to another in a community-recognized life cycle. This is what we appear to see in the Upper Paleolithic representations of human fgures at different stages in life. In contemporary communities, such stages are commonly marked in ceremonies, as well as cultural stereotypes,

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in rules, stories, songs, and myths. Thanks very largely to the work of Victor Turner, anthropologists now recognize “rites of passage” as a large class of ceremonies with a remarkably standard format. The stages are (1) identifying the person whose status is to be changed, (2) removing them from society in that status, (3) placing them in a symbolic condition of being “betwixt and between,” often symbolized by nakedness, (4) describing their new status and applying it, and (5) accepting them back into society in this new status. Rites of passage commonly occur at birth or frst haircut, puberty, availability for marriage, marriage, birth of children, and death. There are also many cultural mechanisms that allow egocentric age defned in the kinship map to be transposed into sociocentric concepts defned in nonkinship organizations. Common examples are age and sex-specifc occupations, warriors’ associations, and public offces assigned on the basis of seniority in lineage organizations. One often misunderstood example of this last kind of transformation is the traditional South Asian village institution called the panchayat. In villages, disputes are often described as being settled by this body. But if you ask who is in it at any point in time when there is no dispute, you will not get an answer. If you ask for a defnition, you will be told it is “respected old men.” Such reports have led various national panels concerned with local government in India and Nepal to conclude that panchayats must have existed in the past but have now faded away. They have therefore undertaken to restore them. To do so, they have established elected bodies at the village level with the same name and assigned them nominal judicial functions. But it does not work. Elected panchayats have repeatedly been recognized as failures, for many different reasons. But the traditional panchayats continue to be reported in the same way as before, and apparently they are effective. What is happening? The explanation is that urban, formally educated, experts do not understand the signifcance of the phrase, “respected elder” or “respected old men” in this context. The key question is “Respected by whom?” If one goes to a village (or lives in one) and asks who the “respected old men” of the panchayat were in specifc cases, they will be named. If one asks why these particular people and not others, it will be explained. The reasons given make it evident that the key point is that those chosen must be respected by both disputing parties, and usually also by others. If one inquires further into what is involved in this, it turns out that respected people are usually the heads of infuential households or lineages who are knowledgeable but not directly involved. This makes the connection between the panchayat organization and its function clear. Disputes between households threaten to grow into larger disturbances. Every household needs support. No household depends on all others but each one depends on some others. So, if there is a dispute and a

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group of respected men representing such other households can be assembled to give advice in a public way, and if the others present agree that this is good advice, the parties to the dispute would necessarily be under great pressure to accept it. If they did not, they would risk losing the support of those who have advised them and those who have approved the advice. In Native North America, an equally widely recognized but very different social role was taken up by men approaching, or just at, the age of marriage. Such men commonly formed groups to travel for trade among other people, often at great distances. Anyone traveling in this way also had to be prepared to defend themselves, but if they were going strictly as a war party and not for trade, they signifed this with special markings on their bodies. In some tribes, men of the same age also formed named associations such as the Cheyenne “dog soldiers,” who assured that everyone worked together in preparing for the major bison hunts. There are no rites of passage associated with these roles, but membership in trading parties, war parties, and associations like the dog soldiers was very clearly marked. It may be tempting to think that the recognition of age in kinship idea systems is simply a matter of naming a physical characteristic. But the most obvious physiological basis of age in kinship is birth order: frst born, second born, and so on. Yet this kind of absolute birth order is never recognized in kinship maps. All we see in kinship maps is whether someone is born before (older than) or born after (younger than) ego or born before or born after a person who is in a reference relation such as ego’s father. Why? This explanation, too, turns on the difference between egocentric and sociocentric logic: kinship maps are egocentric, numbered birth order, like chronological age, is not.

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GENEALOGY, FAMILY, LINEAGE Finally, genealogies in various shapes are yet another kind of sociocentric inference that can be constructed using the kinship map. In some societies, such constructions have important social purposes and either amount to, or are related to, organizational charters. Genealogies can take many shapes. A genealogy can trace the descendants from a specifc individual or pair of individuals, it can trace ancestors, or it can trace descendants. Socially important genealogies are almost always selective, for example, they trace descent through males only, or females only, or from one specifc person only. Many societies have specialized genealogists who keep records of who is descended from whom over long periods of time for social, legal, or political purposes. In South Asia, offcial land records include genealogies of all

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landowners by jalaph and patti, meaning roughly caste and lineage. For Hindus, it is also customary to take the few very hard bones that remain after a person is cremated to specifc spots on sacred waterways in order to perform ceremonies committing them to the water. At these places, the family members are met by intermediaries who ask them their gotra name and village. The intermediary then takes them to the Brahman panda (priest/genealogist) who keeps their family record. They then question the panda about their family to ascertain that they do indeed have the records. If they agree that the answers are correct, the panda in turn asks them about the person whose remains they have just brought as well as anyone else he might not already have in his record, and receives a fee for doing so. Such records may go back hundreds of years. They are occasionally subpoenaed by courts for use in legal cases. European royal families employ professional genealogists to keep similar records. The institution may well go back to the Roman Censor. And as already noted in several places, genealogical links can be used simply to connect given individuals to one another. Like every other type of social construction, if such genealogies are signifcant in a society, we would expect them to have indigenous names.

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CONCLUSION There is no point trying to list all the types of ideas that can be attached to kin term maps. People are imaginative. The important thing to understand is that the kinship map provides for, and shapes, the way they are used in creating organizational charters. Its positions are formally precise but substantively almost entirely undefned. This is precisely why instantiation is a critical part of kin terms. It is also what is easily and commonly misunderstood as referential meaning. They are like symbolic numbers. Symbolic numbers are precise in relation to other numbers but nearly vacuous in regard to what they can be applied to. The componential analysts were exactly wrong: kin terms are not important because of what they specify (or refer to) but mainly because of what they do not specify. Kinship, especially in traditional societies, must be used to form many different kinds of organizations. The formal precision but semantic near-emptiness of kin terms provides the hooks on which additional specifcations can be hung while the reciprocal completeness and coherence of the kinship map assures that the applications of these additional concepts will be reciprocally complete and coherent as well. Of course, different ideas brought together must make sense together. But the context in which they have to make this sense is not the kin term map as a whole. It is only one or another organizational charter formed with it. So

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a father as the head of the family business can have one set of properties or relations to the others in the business, while a father as a representative of the household in the local political system can have very different properties or relations, and a father as legal head of household in an American community property state can have yet other relations. And, of course, the idea of “head of the family business” need not be assigned to the father if there is someone else more capable of doing it.

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The Hopi

The Hopi are one of seven linguistically distinct but ecologically and organizationally similar Native American groups referred to as Pueblo, in the states of Arizona and New Mexico. The term “pueblo” is Spanish and simply means village. But it has also become an ethnonym—a name a people use to speak of themselves. This is one way they recognize their commonality. Another is that their oral histories commonly include migrations of clans from one village to another, usually in response to some disaster. The Pueblo peoples are distinguished from most other North American native groups by living in permanent villages with houses made of hewn stone or adobe bricks and relying on agriculture for their subsistence. So to sixteenth-century Europeans, Pueblo communities looked like their own peasant villages. The Pueblos are divided into two regional groups. One, called Cibola, is in the Rio Grande River watershed. Their farming involves irrigation based on diversion from rivers. The other, called Tusayan, is on the Colorado Plateau in the Colorado River Watershed and depends mainly on “dry farming,” meaning without irrigation. This is a much more complex and sophisticated system than the name suggests and their kinship organizations are an essential part of their system for managing it.1 The Hopi are the main Tusayan community. They are the westernmost of the Pueblos and live primarily in thirteen villages. Twelve are on three mesas in the central part of northern Arizona. One other is Moencopi, a single village with land that is now a detached part of the reservation forty-nine roadmiles west. The Hopi term for the Hopi country is Hopitutskwa. Scholarly knowledge of the traditional culture and organizations of the Pueblos, and of the Native American communities of Arizona and New Mexico in general, is more complete and more voluminous than for most other native North Americans. One major reason for this is that these groups 163

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have been more successful in maintaining their cultural and organizational continuity up to the present. There are several reasons for this in turn. The most overriding is that the region had remained under Spanish rule for nearly 300 years, until 1821. It was then under Mexican rule until the MexicanAmerican war of 1846–1848 and the following Gadsden purchase of 1853. Stable American control was not asserted until after the Civil War. Spanish imperial claims had stretched from the Mississippi to the Pacifc, north into what is now Canada, plus Florida. But their practical colonizing efforts north of present-day Mexico were mainly confned to southern California, southern Arizona up to Tucson, the Rio Grande Valley, southern Texas, and southern Florida. In all of these areas, as in Mexico, Spanish policy was initially aimed at converting the indigenous populations to Catholicism, moving them into Spanish controlled settlements, and bringing them under Spanish administration. It was not to preserve indigenous cultures. It was to suppress or absorb them, and in many areas it succeeded. But in Arizona and New Mexico, it largely failed. The Hopi were especially resistant. The frst Spanish penetration of the Rio Grande Valley was the Coronado expedition in 1540–1541. After this, nothing happened until the colonizing expedition of Juan de Oñate in 1598. This expedition attempted to establish a permanent Spanish administration and military presence in which the Pueblo communities would be subject to demands for religious conversion, tribute, and forced labor on estates granted to the missionaries and colonists. This was the encomienda system. Oñate brought one hundred twenty-nine heavily armed conquistador-colonists and nine Franciscan missionaries. Among other things, they demanded that the pueblos supply them with food from their stores. The Acoma pueblo, on an exceptionally high mesa about 60 miles west of Albuquerque, refused. In an initial skirmish, Acoma’s defenders killed thirteen of Oñate’s men. These included his nephew who was leading the raiding party. In response, Oñate and the rest of his men destroyed the pueblo in a three-day battle. Survivors were tried for insurrection. All adults were sentenced to slavery for twenty years. The Spaniards also cut off the left foot of every adult male. Children were distributed to colonist families to be raised by them. Oñate was eventually tried and convicted in Spanish courts for maladministration and excessive cruelty, but his successors continued to make similar demands. In 1629, Franciscan priests accompanied by troops established missions at Zuni and the Hopi villages of Awatobi and Oraibi. The Spanish brought useful things that the Hopi willingly adopted, including wheat, peaches, sheep, goats, horses, donkeys, and long-horned cattle (Jett, 1977). But they also took land on the mesa for their church, demanded that the Hopi supply them with food, and tried to convert them to Catholicism and suppress the indigenous ceremonial cycle by force. They forced the men of Oraibi to go to the San

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Francisco peaks, 90 miles to the south, to cut roof beams for the church and bring them back, largely by hand. Several Hopi died in the process. They demanded Hopi labor for building the church and for extravagances such as bringing drinking water from unnecessarily distant sources. And they took sexual advantage of Hopi wives and daughters when the men were not present to protect them. In the Rio Grande Valley, abuses were even greater. Finally, in 1680, the Pueblos struck back. On a prearranged day, all across Cibola and Tusayan, they attacked. The Spanish military, priests, and settlers were driven out. The priests at Oraibi and Awatobi were killed. The church at Oraibi was destroyed. The Hopi took its roof timbers to use elsewhere but left the remains of the walls and bell tower. They stand to this day as a reminder to all, near the end of the mesa, just apart from the village houses. Awatobi village itself was subsequently attacked and destroyed by warriors from the other Pueblos when they thought converts there might support the missionaries’ return (Turner and Morris, 1970). The Pueblo rebellion was followed thirteen years later by the “reconquest.” The Spanish managed it in the same way as the original conquest and the previous conquests in Mexico. They identifed ongoing local conficts. They allied with one group against the other. Then, with horses, armor, and superior weapons, they served as the decisive shock troops for their allies and in the end dominated everyone. But this time the Spanish administration modifed their previous policies. They ended the encomienda system, gave up trying to convert the Pueblos to Catholicism by force, abandoned demands for tribute and for involuntary labor, and in the Rio Grande Valley and Zuni began to recognize and protect pueblo land and water rights (Vlasich, 2005:37–60). They did not recolonize the Hopi. Spanish administrators and military offcers had to act according to law. If not, they could be tried and punished. But it was always an aristocracy and never a democracy, and the ruling groups had serious disagreements among themselves over what the law was and how it applied to those they conquered. These views evolved over time. In the initial period of conquest, a key question was whether Indians were rational human beings with souls. If they were, the law had to apply to them and they had to have representation in it. If not, they could be treated as animals. In 1550–1551 the debate came to a formal head in Valladolid, Spain. Bartolome de Las Casas argued that the Native Americans deserved the same consideration as all other human beings. Juan de Sepulveda argued that they did not, citing cannibalism and other practices. The Spanish Crown agreed with Las Casas. The implications of this decision ultimately affected the way the Spanish religious and military authorities viewed the causes of the rebellion of 1680. After the reconquest, local Spanish courts and administrators recognized that the way to prevent a new rebellion

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was not through violence and brutality. They were increasingly concerned with protecting the pueblo communities from exploitation. Their decisions built up into a body of legal records and doctrine that articulated pueblo land and water rights in a way that allowed traditional village-level organizations to maintain control of their agricultural systems. The Spanish administration thereby created a distinctive body of customary law that articulated with the formerly unwritten principles in such a way that they could be adjudicated in a formal court backed by the power of the state. The oral system of organized relationships was restated as a written system. These legal decisions recognized that lands were preeminently village lands and individuals had possession and use on the basis of village-level organizational decisions. The same applied to water resources. So no individual villager could sell their land or their water rights to a nonvillager without village concurrence. The law also evolved to recognize specifc village offcials as representatives of the village and did not interfere with their selection. Villages could also sue to regain or acquire new land or water rights and they could enter into contracts. This is very important for the persistence of the traditional kinship systems because the internal mechanisms by which land and water rights were allocated and productive responsibilities were assigned were based on traditional kinship groups. When the American government fnally took over from the Mexican government, all of this became part of American law. Under American law, all Native Americans who live on reservations are “wards” of the American government. This means that government administrators are responsible for securing their rights under the relevant treaties and law. By and large, in the Southwest they have honestly sought to do so. But this protection can mean very little if it is not clear what the rights are. For the Pueblos, by the time the American government asserted control, they were relatively clear. Non-pueblo peoples of the same region did not have a comparable system of legally articulated rights and obligations, but the American administration was organized on a large regional scale that encompassed Pueblo and non-Pueblo. There was, for example, sometimes just one agent for both the Hopi and Navajo. This automatically created a framework in which the ways of dealing with Pueblo problems were readily extended to the others. One extremely important result of American control is that it has ended intertribal and intratribal warfare. Another is the advance of education and the decrease of cultural and economic isolation. On the other hand, the legal authority allowed Indian agents and other administrators to decide policy unilaterally. There was no requirement for Indian agreement and the Americans often failed to seek it when they should have. This was especially destructive in the way public education was introduced in the 1890s. The Bureau

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at the time established a policy of cultural assimilation, aimed ultimately at the destruction of indigenous cultures. The Hopi resisted, as did all other groups, for reasons the analysis here should help explain. The resulting hostility lasted until John Collier was appointed director of the Bureau of Indian affairs in 1933 and ended the policy. Cultural misunderstanding has decreased as reservation political mobilization has increased, but it has been a slow and often diffcult process. It was not until 1948 that the Arizona Supreme Court struck down a provision of the state constitution that prevented Indians on reservations from voting.2 Now, however, all of these groups vote in state and federal elections. They also have elected tribal governments. These articulate their concerns with the Bureau of Indian affairs and other U.S. federal agencies represented on the reservation such as the Department of Agriculture and the Public Health Service. They have schools coordinated with state and local schools in their area, and they have courts that operate in the manner of American municipal and state courts and articulate with nonreservation courts. There are increasing numbers of tribal and private businesses, particularly along Arizona Highway 264. It is also important that both Arizona and New Mexico established landgrant universities in the 1880s, before becoming states. In the twentieth century, both universities developed internationally important anthropology programs that made the Native American cultures of this region a major focus. They have also provided high quality undergraduate and graduate educations to many students from the same populations. In consequence, many of the federal, state, and local government personnel on the reservations are now from the reservations.

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THE ECOLOGY Arizona is divided into three major physiographic zones. The northern 40% of the state is on the Colorado Plateau uplift. The Hopi are almost in the center of this area. The Colorado Plateau provides the watershed for the Colorado River. The plateau extends northward from central Arizona to almost the northern borders of Utah and the western half of Colorado. Geologically, it is bordered by the Basin and Range Province on the west, south, and southeast, and by the Rocky Mountain System on the north and northwest. It is tectonically stable, composed of the same nearly horizontal sedimentary strata of sandstone and limestone from edge to edge. Their times of deposition go back 540 million years. Many of the strata were deposited under deep seas, others as dry land, refecting uplifts and subsidences. The most recent uplift, which

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raised the plateau to its present elevation, began about 250 million years ago. The down-cutting through it that produced the Grand Canyon began about 5 million years ago. Two main rivers drain the part of the Colorado Plateau that is occupied by the Hopi reservation and the Navajo reservation that surrounds it: the Little Colorado and the San Juan. The Hopi reservation is between them, in the watershed of the Little Colorado. The Little Colorado begins at the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau near St. Johns, Arizona. It fows mainly west to Winslow, Arizona. There, it turns more northerly to join the Colorado. The confuence is about 20 miles inside of the northern border of Grand Canyon National Park. The San Juan begins at the continental divide in northern New Mexico, fows past important ancestral pueblo sites in the Four Corners area, and joins the Colorado River in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, in southern Utah. In the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River is a mile below the canyon rim. The San Juan and Little Colorado cut increasingly deep canyons as they approach it. The Plateau surface consists of broad plains, mesas, and a few volcanic peaks. A mesa is a fat-topped mountain, a part of an earlier level of the general plateau that has been left standing as erosion removed the land around it. Elevations of the main plateau surfaces vary between about 1,200 and 2,400 meters. A few peaks, often of volcanic origin, are higher. The San Francisco peaks near Flagstaff reach 3,851 meters. This is the highest point on the Plateau and in the state. In the Basin and Range Province to the south, the underlying continental plate is being pulled apart, leaving remnants of the formerly continuous plateau as isolated mountains separated by basins flled with the rubble from their disintegration. In Arizona, this Province includes the northern end of the Sonoran Desert that extends down to Mexico’s Gulf of California. Further east, in New Mexico, it includes the Chihuahuan Desert that reaches into Mexico’s Eastern Sierra Madre. The mountains in this province are ecological islands, with distinctive plants and animals. Their tops often reach the elevations of the Colorado Plateau, but the desert foor between them is commonly 2,000–3,000 meters lower. In Arizona, it goes from about 300 meters above sea level at Phoenix to 3 meters at Yuma. A large part of the transition zone between the Colorado Plateau and the Basin and Range Province is the Mogollon Rim. This is a band of steep canyons and sharp ridges about 100 miles wide north to south and 200 miles long northwest to southeast. It begins just south of Flagstaff and runs southeast just about to the New Mexico state line, where it loses defnition. At the base of the rim, exposed rock goes back to the Precambrian era. In the frst half of the twentieth century, this made Arizona the most important

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copper-producing region in North America, until larger discoveries were made in Africa. On average, Arizona is a desert. If rainfall were evenly distributed over the state it would not be enough for rain-fed agriculture. But the mountains are rain collectors and the canyons are water concentrators. The native populations have developed distinctive systems of agriculture to exploit this. The heaviest rainfall in the state is along the Mogollon Rim. This can reach 1.2 meters. The higher mountains in the Range and Basin Province south of the rim attract 0.7–1 meter. Rainfall drops off rapidly over the adjoining deserts. North of the rim and at a slightly lower elevation, the Hopi area is in a rain shadow. According to the U.S. Weather Service, Tuba city has an average annual precipitation of 162 millimeters (6.37 inches), of which about 84 millimeters falls from July through November. The monthly rainfall pattern over the state is light winter precipitation concentrated in December– February, followed by a dry spring, followed by infrequent but often violent thunderstorms from mid-July through November. In Tusayan, monthly rainfall peaks in September. The most important Hopi grain crop is maize. Maize is normally considered to require about a meter of water. About one-third of this is needed at the time of sowing and two-thirds around tasseling, when the plants put on their greatest growth. This means that if the Hopi maize had the usual water requirements, the farmers would have to collect and concentrate rainfall from nearly ten times the area that the roots of their plants actually reach. In fact, Hopi maize is distinctive and uses less water than the normal American feld corn (Collins, 1918; Brown, 1952). Exactly how much less has not been determined. But it is nowhere near 90% less. The basic plant metabolism is still the same. What varies is the portion of growth going into stalk and leaves compared with seed and the pattern of early growth in the ground when the seed sprouts. Compared to ordinary American feld corn, which is planted in neat rows of single stalks about 10 centimeters apart and stands from 1.5 to 2 meters tall, the Hopi plants are short and scruffy looking. They are planted in bunches of 7–10 plants 2–3 meters apart. They grow with short stalks and dense clumps of leaves. But they have comparatively enormous ears. Developing these varieties and the techniques for using them was an extraordinary agricultural accomplishment. More than anything else, it has enabled the Hopi to stay on their lands in safety because no one else can survive there. Early twentieth-century anthropologists often portrayed the Hopi as “conservative,” passive, having a fear ridden personality, ritual-minded rather than practical, and militarily ineffective (see Dozier, 1951:62). Such descriptions are not consistent with the intelligence, energy, and social discipline

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they have shown and continue to show in building and maintaining this cultural ecology.

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THE HOPI RESERVATION From East to West, the three Hopi mesas are called First Mesa, Second Mesa, and third Mesa. They are actually not freestanding independent mesas in a strict sense but southern fngers of the large mass of Black Mesa. Each is separated from the other by a wash that begins near the northern edge. The washes do not quite join the Little Colorado, but spill out onto alluvial fans in the plain just north of it. The Hopi reservation does not include all of Black Mesa. The northern part is in the Navaho reservation. None of the washes have permanent fows of water on the surface, but all food during rains and have below-surface fows at other times. Each pueblo’s felds are along the wash, in adjacent arroyos leading into it, and out on the plain toward the Little Colorado. The felds in washes and arroyos are arranged to capture the foodwater from summer storms while minimizing the number of plants that will be washed away or buried. In the channels, farmers build extensive check-dams to stop the foodwaters and force the silt that they carry to settle. The silt is mineral-rich, containing particles freshly broken off from the rock of the mesa by winter freezing and thawing. This is fertilizer. Crops are planted in this deposit on the upstream side of the check-dam, not below it. There are also several techniques for accumulating winter snow. Fields in the open are slightly bowl shaped, carefully cleaned before winter, and usually separated from one another by substantial areas of open ground. Fallen snow blows into them from the surrounding surface but does not as readily blow out of them. Where such felds are on sloped or shaded ground, they are usually located so that they are exposed to the morning sun but not the afternoon sun. The reason is that for most of the winter the morning air is cold enough to keep the snow from melting in the sunlight. This allows the snow to collect farther into the spring before melting into the soil, and therefore closer to the time for planting the new seeds. New Oraibi split off from Oraibi in a confict in 1890. The split is usually described as between those who were in favor of adopting ideas from the Americans and those who wanted to stick strictly to tradition. But the cause of this difference of opinion was not simply a concern with maintaining tradition. It was much more deeply concerned with continuing sustainability. The Hopi know that their ways have let them survive while others have tried and failed, including Mormon would-be missionaries in the early nineteenth century. In terms of American chronologies, this has worked for over a thousand

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Figure 8.1  Oraibi Village and Fields. Source: Dwight W. Read.

years. In terms of the traditional Hopi chronology, it has worked since the beginning of human life on earth. There is no assurance that American ways will do as well. The traditionalists stayed on the mesa; those favoring change moved down. Similar splits led to the founding of two more villages on Third Mesa: Hotevilla and Bakavi (Whiteley, 1988). Figure 8.1 is the view from the road along the mesas looking west to Third Mesa. The village of Oraibi is toward the right. The Franciscan ruin is on the left end. In the foreground are felds and check-dams in two arroyos whose streams join Oraibi wash. The size of the check-dams compared to the houses on the mesa top indicates the enormous amount of labor that has gone into creating this system. The cleared areas at the foot of the mesa are also felds. These felds are facing east, sloped toward the morning sun but shaded from the late afternoon sun. Their crops will also receive additional water and silt from the mesa slopes above them. Each of the Tusayan villages is near one or more permanent springs. They use the springs for household consumption and some of their agriculture. The springs refect the stratigraphy of Black Mesa. Like the rest of the Colorado Plateau, it has layers of more permeable and less permeable rocks. The permeable layers form aquifers. The highest point of Black Mesa is its northern edge. Its internal strata tilt downward gently toward the south. So the

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Mesa as a whole collects rainwater which fows internally toward the Hopi villages. The villages draw water from four named layers. With such a huge collector and few points of release, the water supply is reliable. The higher elevations of the Mesa also have juniper, piñon, and pine trees that provide frewood and timber. This is especially important for making vigas, the beams used to support upper foors and roofs in the type of Pueblo architecture that is also seen in archaeological remains throughout the region. Since wood of the right size for such beams is both hard to fnd and hard to transport, it is very valuable. Over the last forty years, however, houses built in the old style have largely been replaced by houses built of brick and framed in the American style, without vigas. The detached community of Moencopi is also on a wash. But this has enough fowing water from springs and runoff to allow year-round surface irrigation. In the nineteenth century, when attacks from the Navajo and the Utes were still a danger, farmers from Oraibi would run to Moencopi wash in the morning to tend their felds and run home in the evening. Now, Moencopi is a permanent Hopi village. Tuba City, which adjoins it, is Navajo and is on the Navajo reservation. People from both communities farm in the wash and share the irrigation system.

Figure 8.2  Moencopi Wash from Moencopi Village. Source: Dwight W. Read.

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Moencopi water management is different from that of the three mesas. In this case, the agricultural bottom of the wash is fat and the felds nearly fll it. There is no provision for snow accumulation. But the arroyo has especially steep walls. Since it is oriented north–south, the walls refect the sun’s heat in the morning and evening while protecting the crops from cold winds in the winter. It thus serves as a natural greenhouse and allows a longer growing season. All of the techniques for exploiting such features are ancient. Their traces can be seen in archaeological sites that go back over a thousand years. Black Mesa also has accessible coal seams. The coal is used for domestic cooking and heating.

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HOPI PLURALISM A person living on the Hopi reservation today has many organizations to participate in, of many different kinds. These include all the state and federal agencies represented on the reservation and the businesses noted above. They include schools and hospitals. They include the factional organization that goes back at least to the split between old and new Oraibi and persists today in structuring similar conficts in at least several of the Pueblos, perhaps all. And they include the tribal government, police, courts, and administration. Although we focus on kinship, we need to bear in mind that from the point of view of any individual, these different organizations have to ft together. This does not mean they have to form a single structure. They do not and cannot; the ideas used to create them are too different. But it does mean that their functions should be mutually supportive in the lives of those who participate in them. If a person has trouble in their household, they may try to resolve it by seeking help from another kinship organization. But they may also go to the police or an offcial in the tribal government. If households have a dispute over a piece of land to farm, they may try to resolve it within the ceremonial system or they may go to court. DIVISION OF LABOR IDEA SYSTEM The Hopi have a sharp division of labor by sex. Almost all traditional activities are either men’s work or women’s work, although it is a matter of general expectation rather than rigid rule backed by sanctions. This idea system is independent of the kinship idea system in the sense that it applies to other kinds of organizations as well. But it is attached to kinship ideas in the charters of the major kinship organizations. As will be described, these are mainly households associated with women’s work and kivas associated with men’s work.

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Women’s work will be described in connection with households since most of it occurs there. Some of men’s work will be described in connection with kivas, but most of it occurs elsewhere. While there have been very thorough studies of Hopi agricultural and pastoral technology, it is diffcult to get a picture of the way they allocate their time. Mischa Titiev’s monograph provides a glimpse (1944:195–98). He classifes the major men’s activities as herding, tending cornfelds, tending bean patches, tending melon/squash patches, house-building, hauling wood (for fuel), tending horses, and “miscellaneous activities.” He asked fve men to report the days spent on each during a ninety-seven day period from August through November, 1933. The activities that took the most time were herding (29%), cornfelds (17%) and house-building (10%). Only 18% is devoted to “no work.” Several writers, including Titiev, have noted that Hopi households try to have one year’s grain in reserve. Physically, maize will store for much longer. So why not grow more? The obvious answer is that they do not have the manpower. To store a two-year supply would require increasing the area farmed by 50%. Holding other activities constant, if Titiev’s fgures are even remotely accurate they would not have this time. The labor constraint is important for understanding Hopi kinship because a main logical feature of the kinship relations is their fexibility. This gives each person an extremely wide range of other people to call on for cooperative activities.

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KINSHIP MAP Kinship organizations are constructed with ideas from the kinship map. This is what allows Hopi to see them as parts of a single institutional system. The Hopi kinship terminology was frst described by Robert Lowie (1929). This was followed by Elsie Clews Parsons (1931, 1932) and Titiev (1944). In fact, this literature is one of the frst in which the phrase “kinship terminology” came into use. Lowie and Parsons assumed that the meaning of a term was the genealogical relations it could refer to and used a listwise system of elicitation based on English. In addition, Lowie’s study was framed with Morgan’s distinction between classifcatory and descriptive terminologies. He described the Hopi terminology as “bifurcate merging or DakotaIroquois” (1929:365). Given this, his aim was to investigate Morgan’s suggestion that it refected an earlier system of cross-cousin marriage. His conclusion was that it did not. Lowie’s argument, in turn, was the starting point for Murdock’s statistical analysis of bifurcate merging terminologies aimed at answering the same question and cited in Chapter 1. Murdock concluded that there might be

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an association, but the way he set up his statistics made a false positive inevitable (Leaf, 1979:218). Parsons also thought there might have been such a system in the past. We will return to this question after describing the kinship map. Until then, the important point is that as far back into past as records and memory run, the Hopi have had a very clear rule that a man does not marry a woman from his father’s clan. There are some apparent exceptions, but what they mean will become clearer when we discuss the Hopi idea that is being rendered as “clan” in this statement. Titiev, by contrast, had a more clearly experimentalist conception of science and was more concerned with representing the Hopi’s own ideas of kinship than treating it as something physical that they might not understand accurately. The Hopi responded to Titiev’s work with affection and acceptance. On Third Mesa, he was adopted into the tribe and the Snake clan. Lowie and Parsons gained no such acceptance. By the time Titiev wrote, Fred and Dorothy Eggan had also provided descriptions of aspects of Hopi kinship. Taken all together, these are the accounts that presented the controversies about Hopi clan organization that we have already noted. The anthropologists said the Hopi had a hierarchy of phratries, clans, lineages, and households. The Hopi denied it. Titiev could see that the problem arose because Lowie and Parsons were failing to recognize how closely the clan ideas were connected to the kinship terminology, but he did not have a method that would let him see the Hopi’s own alternative. Now we do. Based on Lowie’s, Parsons’, and Titiev’s data and asking how the defnitions are connected from “self” outward, as we would in the method of elicitation described for Punjabi and English, we can reconstruct the kinship map as though we are eliciting it. The resulting kinship map for a male speaker is shown in fgure 8.3. The meanings of the symbol are in the key. R1 to R5 are rules. Using the same procedure, the map for a female speaker is fgure 8.4. The initial [i] is a possessive prefx, “my.” Plural is indicated by [m] as a suffx. This will be used here instead of the English phoneme [s], so kya’am means more than one kya’a. The terms ina’a and ingu’u do not refer to a single man and a single woman, as do the terms father and mother in English. Instead, ina’a refers not only to the man an English speaker would refer to as father, but also men an English speaker would refer to as uncle (excepting husband of aunt), and to a son of any man that speaker would refer to as ikwa’a, with the latter including those men an English speaker would refer to as great uncle (excepting husband of great aunt), and so on. Thus, all the males in the clan of one’s father who are in the +1 generation with respect to speaker are ina’a. A similar comment applies to the term ingu’u.

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Figure 8.3  Hopi Kinship Map, Male Speaker. Source: Murray J. Leaf.

These glosses point to an important property of the terminology that Hopi shares with other native North American terminologies. As the maps imply and the rules say, the kin term product of iti’i (“child”) and the kin terms ikyaa (“sister” of “father”) and ina’a (“father”): iti’i (“female child”) of ikya’a = ikya’a and iti’i (“male child”) of ikya’a = ina’a. Anthropologists refer to these equations as “skewing rules” since they cause a term that otherwise is a +1 generation term with respect to speaker (the term on the right side of the equation) to also be a 0 generation term with respect to speaker (the term determined by the kin term product on the left side of the equation). Terminologies with equations like this are referred to as Crow terminologies since a terminology like this was frst identifed with the terminology of the Crow Indians. Anthropologists have devoted substantial effort to “explaining” them. For Hopi specifcally, the same idea of the importance of descent group membership is refected in the only major difference between the male-speaker and female-speaker maps, which Lowie and Parsons did not get because they elicited the terms as the names for kintypes. It is that for a female speaker, all of her own children are classed with her sister’s children as itii and her brother’s children are imuyi. But for a male speaker his own children are classed with his brother’s children as itii and his sister’s children are itiwaiya. Titiev did get

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Figure 8.4  Hopi Kinship Map, Female Speaker. Source: Murray J. Leaf.

this, and sums it up with a single principle: a man’s children are children of his clan, but a woman’s children are children in her clan—they are members of it (Titiev, 1944:11). What Titiev recognized, but Lowie and Parsons did not, is that the meaning of the terms includes the idea of clan; it cannot be stated in terms of our ideas of tracing back genealogically to a founding ancestor, let alone tracing back biologically through bloodlines. This means we have to also ask about the Hopi idea of clan, and when we do that, we can see why the Hopi refused to accept the anthropologists’ imputation of phratries and lineages: all of these depend on the idea of tracing back to a founding ancestor, and this is not what the Hopi idea is. We return to this in the next section. A further difference is that for a male speaker, younger sister is isiwa while younger brother is iturpku, so the two relations are separated. For a female speaker, both are itupko. It is one relation, regardless of sex. So, in the female speaker map, it is drawn as one position with a triangle as well as a circle. This is reported by Lowie and Parsons as well as Titiev, and none of them has an explanation for this (ibid.). Rules 1 and 2 are very important as indicators of the idea of clan relations that these terms are actually considered to designate. Ikya’a, which Lowie and Parsons have as the term for father’s sister, is actually all the women of one’s father’s clan except sometimes the most senior women. So, the

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“daughter” (iti’mana) of ikya’a is also ikya’a to self, and so on. Similarly, “brother” of ina’a (“father”) is ina’a, and, collectively, ina’a is all males of one’s father’s clan. The term ina’a also applies to father’s sister’s son, mirroring the fact that ikya’a applies to father’s sister’s daughter for women of the father’s clan. Underlining this, Titiev notes the Hopis’ nearly complete disregard for the concept of generation. This should have struck Titiev as being possibly contradictory in a society he thinks is organized into a hierarchy of lineal descent groups, but he did not pursue it. Rules 3 and 4 refect the principle that one does not marry a person in either one’s father’s or one’s own clan. (So the term for a husband of a woman of one’s clan and the term for a wife of a man of one’s clan must be different from term for one of the defned clan relations.) Rule 5, for male speakers, again refects the importance of clan identity. Children of male itiwayam will be children of one’s own clan. Children of female itiwayam will be in one’s own clan. In one’s own (mother’s) clan, ingu’u includes one’s birth mother and all her ikokam and female iturpkum. On the next generation up, one’s iso’o is not necessarily ones biological ingu’u’s biological ingu’u in Lowie’s genealogical sense. Such a person may not be alive. But a Hopi clan always has a senior clanswoman. In English, this person’s title is rendered the “mother of the clan.” According to the logic of what Lowie reports, this should be iso’o. In ceremonies, this is represented by one woman, but there is no information about whether this would be the same woman in all of the clan’s ceremonies. Parsons presents a different possibility. She gives the term kya’ata, which has been included here although neither Lowie nor Titiev mention it. It would be rendered in English as “great grandmother.” Parsons says it has no reciprocal. This implies that the position is more like an offce than a kinship relation, which may explain why no one else reported it. The offce-like sense also seems to be implied by the way the English phrase “mother of the clan” is used, so from a Hopi point of view this may be how the term is actually conceived. Until someone does an elicitation building out from the direct kin as described in chapter 5 and specifcally asks about this, we will not know. Notice that the maps as drawn have no position for children of ikya’a and itaa. The reason is that they are covered by Rule 2. Lowie, Parsons, and Titiev all report that the reciprocal of ikya’a and itaha is iti’i, the same relation as one’s own child. Lowie also says iti’i is the word for child in general. That is, for a female user of this map, looking up to one’s senior relatives one sees the matrilineal clans as noted, but looking down to one’s juniors and one’s siblings’ descendants or younger relatives, one sees only iti’i, who are distinguished only from one’s own daughters, iti’mana. Americans are now familiar with the African saying: “It takes a village to raise a child.” The Hopi kinship map says it takes two clans. But this is not all that we need to

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understand; the Hopi idea that is being rendered here as “clan” is quite different from the Western idea that the term invokes. We still have to describe what the Hopi idea is.

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Anthropologists’ Clan versus Hopis’ Clan Lowie, Parsons, and others have described the Hopi clan as a corporate, property-holding, unit in a hierarchy of such units: phratry, clan, lineage, and household. They described a phratry as a group of clans that recognize that they are related, often describing themselves as the same as one of the major recognized clans, as branches of it, or as its “real” representatives. They describe the clan as a distinct, named, unit that Hopis assign themselves to. They describe the lineage as a single descent line from an ancestress through women of a clan leading to a group of real sisters, and they describe a household as a single domestic group belonging to a lineage and residing in a house owned by a specifc woman. The Hopi say this is wrong. They have no term for phratry and deny that they have them. They also have no term for lineage and deny that they have them. The anthropologists recognize the disagreement but say the units exist anyway—the Hopi simply have no names for them. The Hopi reject this. What is going on here? The explanation is that the Hopi’s concept of the clan is very different from that of the anthropologists. It does not lend itself to being placed in such a system. The most important aspect of this difference is that the descent theory view of Lowie and Parsons represents the Hopi concept of the clan as purely sociocentric. They see it as defned only with respect to the female descendants of a founding ancestress. In fact, it is both egocentric and sociocentric. It is egocentric from the point of view of individuals in households. But it is transposed into a sociocentric idea in the ceremonial system, which provides a large part of traditional village-level governance, including the processes for defning and enforcing property rights. In order for genealogy to provide the criteria for assigning a kin term to an individual in a sociocentric way, there would have to be some sociocentric convention or marker to establish what a person’s parentage was, something that would make their parentage a fact that was the same for all comers. Americans do this with birth certifcates and the conventions for establishing a legal identity. For Hopi, since the clans are matrilineal there could be a socially recognized founding ancestress from whom descent is reckoned. But that is not what they say they are doing. There is no traditional Hopi counterpart to the idea of a founding ancestress. So, while Hopi certainly have an idea of clan membership being passed on through time by belonging to a matriline of living women, they have no culturally established way to make descent from a founding ancestress a criterion for clan membership.

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Instead, the concept of clan implicit in the Hopi kinship map is egocentric. So is the Hopi mechanism for establishing a person’s initial kinship relations, meaning his or her immediate family position. Titiev describes it. In fact, he opens with it. Without saying why, he starts with a dramatic description of traditional Hopi childbirth. A woman having a child does so in a room absolutely alone, behind a closed door. No one is there to help. While this may seem cold to us, as perhaps it also did to Titiev, what this means in terms of Hopi kinship is that there can be absolutely no confusion about who’s baby it was. A more personalistic way to express the same point is that the mother, and she alone, is the creator of the child, that the identity of the child is purely and only through her mother. It is only after they hear the child’s frst “petulant wail” that the child’s “maternal grandmother,” meaning the mother of the mother, can enter the room to cut the umbilical and assist the mother and child. Then “several other women may be summoned. Chief among these are the women from the child’s father’s clan” (1944:7). According to the kinship map, these are the child’s kya’am (kya’am is the plural of kya’a). The father himself is not in the household at all. He is in his kiva. So it is the women who give the child its clan identity—both clan of the mother and clan of the father. And although the term for mother, ingu’u, applies to more women than one’s own birth mother, this ceremony makes it absolutely clear that each Hopi is defned as having one and only one birth mother, and this person is recognized with absolute clarity. This enacts the defnition of a person’s place in the kinship system. Every detail is relevant to how kinship and clan membership are conceived. It is defned frst by a person’s relation to his or her birth mother, alone: his or her ingu’u as one specifc individual. Then a person’s place in the kinship system is defned in relation to the mother’s clan by her link to her own mother. And then a person’s relation to the father’s clan is defned through its women. So, while the kin terms are all generic, what the sequence says is that to establish the clan of any individual, and their place within that clan, the frst authority is the mother herself, as an individual. Then her ingu’u as a specifc individual, and then the person’s kya’am, as a specifc group of women connected to that individual through his or her ina’a. Of course, no individual would remember meeting his actual ingu’u, alone, at the moment of birth. But the ceremony assures that he or she will grow up in a household where everybody should identify one specifc woman this way, even though others will be called by the same kinship term. The rest follows from the use of the kinship map. Whoever this specifc ingu’u identifes as ingu’u, itaa, ivava, iqoqa, iturpku, and itiwaiya are necessarily in one’s own clan. Similarly, a person growing up knows who their ina’a is, and whoever that person regards as his ingu’u, itaa, ivava, iqoqa, iturpku, and itiwaiya are in his (the ina’a’s) clan.

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Hopi descriptions and the anthropologists’ puzzlements about them make clear that such reasoning can be carried out more or less expansively, depending on the circumstances. Considering one’s clan’s land in contrast to the lands of other clans could involve a wider group than considering the felds of one’s own household in contrast to that of other households in one’s clan. Of course, this opens the possibility that one person in one household who considers himself Bear-Clan may not identify the same people as making up the clan as another person in a different household— especially in a different village—and every anthropologist has recognized that this happens.

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Clans, Property, and Organizational Charters Up to and including Titiev, every anthropologist who tried to say what Hopi clans were started by asking about their members. They asked for lists of clans by village. They took surveys or censuses and asked what clans people are in. They asked which clans people in each clan say they can marry. They asked who they actually did marry. And they recorded the clan stories. For Oraibi, as of 1932, Titiev found twenty-nine clans in nine phratries (1944:35). Since the total population was only 826, clans cannot be large groups. In fact, no clan had more than thirty-fve members and many had just one male or one female. Although Titiev got good agreement on his lists among his informants, no two lists of this kind by different anthropologists have agreed, in two senses. First, people do not agree on the names and histories of the clans. Second, people do not agree on who belongs in them. The literature also includes many instances of people reporting that two or more Hopi clans with different names are “the same,” and that Hopi, Zuni, and Navajo individuals whose clan names are the same or similar have considered themselves to be related. This, too, does not make sense if we defne clans as exclusive corporate groups based on common ancestry. But if this is not right, what is? Peter Whiteley is the most prominent contemporary writer who has pursued this problem. In a 1986 article, he says the Hopi terms commonly rendered as meaning “clan” are -ngyam and -wungwa (Whiteley, 1986:78). Neither Lowie, Parsons, nor Titiev gave the terms. They just used the English. The Hopi terms are not freestanding names for a type of group. The initial dash means the term requires a prefx. The prefx is the group name, so Honawungwa is the name translated as Bear Clan, Biaquoi-wungwa is Strap Clan, Qua-wungwa is Eagle Clan, and so on. -Ngyam is used the same way, only it means “members” instead of “member” (Haugen and Siddiqi, 2016:349). Whiteley also argues that “clan” should not be understood in a Western genealogical sense:

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Descent is an important concept for the understanding of Hopi society. However, it’s importance lies in the cultural use of descent as an idiom to delineate individual and group statuses and in the practical effect these statuses have upon social action, not in its supposed conformance to a rigid set of theoretical precepts about unilineal descent groups. (1986:78)

Relatedly, without getting into organizational ideas as such, Titiev (1967) had argued that Hopi kin terms primarily meant, or evoked, what he called “sociocultural values.” For the Hopi, he argued, as for Americans, there is a presumption that relations with relatives are “friendly.” So, using a kin term for someone expresses or invites friendship. Whiteley’s “concepts” and “idiom” and Titiev’s “values” all correspond to what we are calling “ideas.” But while Whiteley and Titiev agree that the meanings of the terms are not genealogical and that the Hopi have no term corresponding to phratry and lineage, neither of them abandons these terms in their own descriptions. To see Hopi kinship as Hopi see it, this is what we need to do. In fact, the Hopi concept that fts the kinship map is clearly documented in the Hopi origin myths. They describe an upward journey of the Hopi people, in groups whose names end with -wungwa, through three lower worlds into the present fourth world, in which the features of the present world and the gods that the Hopi now recognize were progressively born or created. Different parts of the stories are recited in different ceremonies. Hopi oral history is constructed in the same way. It is a continuation of the same origin stories. Two sets of such stories are available on the website Sacred Text Archive (http://www​.sacred​-texts​.com​/index​.htm). One of these is rendered in English by Edmund Nequatewa, a highly regarded Hopi scholar (Nequatewa, 1936; http:​/​/www​​.sacr​​ed​-te​​xts​.c​​om​/na​​m​/hop​​i​​/ind​​ex​.ht​m). Nequatewa was entirely fuent in both English and Hopi. We can safely assume that his translations are both respectful and thoughtful. Nequatewa does not use the word “clan.” Where others would do so, he speaks instead only of “people,” and in context it is clear that this means both each individual people—Bear people, Reed people, and so on—and all the people taken together, the Hopi people. So, it seems clear that he regards “people” as a better translation of -wungwa than “clan.” If we accept this, it follows that the way to work out what the Hopi mean by -wungwa is to work out what Nequatewa’s translations show the stories mean by “people.” What other ideas are associated with it as part of its defnition? One immediately obvious difference between the sense of the English term “clan” and the English term “people” is that the latter lacks a defnite sense of descent. A people simply is. Whiteley’s quote above is making the same observation. Another is that the idea of a people is less readily associated with the idea of a group that is closed and inward-focused. Clans are “clannish.” We have no

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similar term for what people are. And fnally, the idea of a clan (in English) is associated with the idea of a founding ancestor whose name the clan bears. The idea of a people has no such association. Usually it is associated with a place, a language, or a history. From this point on, we assume that Nequatewa recognized these English associations in choosing “people” rather than “clan” to represent the Hopi concept and we follow his usage. The most important aspects of the way the Hopi idea of a people is used are articulated in the descriptions of the origins of the villages. These distinguish between “royal” or “leading” peoples and commoners or ordinary peoples. The stories represent a royal people as deciding where a village will be and starting to build it. At that point they own everything in the village and do everything in the village. Other peoples are described as coming later and asking to enter. Each people is described as having a chief who speaks for it and gives orders to those within it, which they ought to obey. The chief is always male. The royal people’s chief asks the applying people’s chief what ceremonies and knowledge they have to contribute to assure good weather and good crops. Some have very good ceremonies and knowledge to offer and some have little or nothing. They state their case honestly. No stories are about lying or deception. If a people have a lot to offer, they are given land and their ceremonies are incorporated in the village ceremonies. If their ceremonies are important enough they may also be made a royal people. If they have little to offer in the way of ceremonies and knowledge, they may be given land at the outer margins of the village felds and their obligation will be to defend the village physically, to serve as lookouts and warriors. They remain as commoners, peoples of little importance. The idea of a group wandering through space and time, represented by a chief, and fnally given land in a village is sociocentric, the same for all comers. The myths and stories are repeated every year in the annual cycle of ceremonies. All the peoples participate. They do so in costumes that represent what they are: Bear, Antelope, and so on. Through this participation, the egocentric concept of a people embodied in the kinship system and utilized in the household organization is transposed into a sociocentric concept at the village level. It becomes objective: shared by all. Titiev’s study of Oraibi contains an appendix that lists the major ceremonies and the clans that own each. There are fourteen ceremonies. The Parrot people own two. The Spider people own one and co-own one with the Kokop (Warrior) people. All other clans listed own only one. This means that over half of the peoples own none. The defnition of clan lands, given in the same stories, is also sociocentric. Each people’s land is delineated as a continuous area by agreed-upon markers. The felds of one clan are not interspersed among the felds of others. The stories imply that the order in which clans come to the village and the

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importance of their ceremonies established a village-level order of precedence and subordination. This idea is defnitely salient in debates over the rights of the different peoples in the different villages, although how it applies is a matter of disagreement. It is, in fact, a key idea in the several factional splits leading to the formation of new villages (Whitely, 1988, 2008) In short, the idea of -ngyam and -wungwa is egocentric in the context of household organizations but sociocentric in the context of village organizations. It is, therefore, associated with organizational charters of several types, not just one. Each one associates the kinship map with a different kind of property. The household is one major type of kinship organization, with one distinctive organizational charter. All scholars recognize this. The other major charter is for the kiva organization. This, too, is recognized by all. But there are others as well. Each ceremony has its own organization that its performers belong to. There are women’s associations for women, and children who become gravely ill can be proposed by their parents for adoption by a man of a people considered to be able to cure that illness. The clan of this type of adoptive father is called their “doctor clan.” And there are the four men’s societies that all young men are initiated into in what is usually called the “tribal” initiation that makes them eligible for further initiations into the ceremonial and other societies. All of these organizations use the kinship map as their basic social idea system, simply replacing birth with adoption as the way a person joins. The theoretical debates have focused mainly on efforts to show how these are all, somehow, parts of one single larger kinship system or social structure. The debates have not been resolvable because there is no such overall unity. The organizational charters are separate and distinct. There is also a traditional organizational charter for the village as a whole. This uses the idea of peoples who move about and can make agreements with one another through their chiefs. Titiev describes its ceremonial representation for Oraibi. It was the formal “Chief’s talk” (Monglavaiyi) that closes the Soyal ceremony. At this time, any man organizing a major project, such as an expedition to quarry the special type of stone women use to cook on or an expedition to collect salt, should announce it (Titiev, 1944:117). The ceremony includes the Village Chief, War chief, Tobacco Chief, and a village Crier, who makes offcial announcements. Each people also has a Chief, who is also chief of the ceremonies they own. It is not clear from Titiev’s description whether all of these peoples’ chiefs are present or only the most prominent. The Hopi describe the Soyal as the most important ceremony of the year. In Oraibi, it is owned by the Bear people and the Village Chief is the Bear people chief. The Soyal is performed each year at the time of the summer solstice (ibid.).

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Chiefs are chosen by consensus. There is no formal election process but the ceremonies and associated stories defne the Hopi ideas of leadership (Hopimomngwit) dramatically and precisely. Those who lead in the ceremonies are expected to exhibit the same ideas. So, it is logical that the process of agreeing upon the leaders for the ceremonies is also the process of agreeing upon the leaders for the community that the ceremonies are intended to beneft. A recent Masters paper by Cliff G. Kaye, in the American Indian studies program at Arizona State University, spells this out in great detail (Kaye, 2016). Kaye is Hopi, from Moencopi.

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THE HOUSEHOLD ORGANIZATIONAL CHARTER Whiteley notes that the household members are often identifed as “comprising the ‘real’ members of such-and-such a clan” (1986:74). He thinks the term “real” in this context usually translates the Hopi term pas (ibid.). The sense is not real as opposed to fctitious but real in the sense of core. In connection to kivas, the -ngyam and -wungwa are described by Whiteley and others as “traditional ceremonial sodalities” and as “social” clans (ibid.). These are the organizations that perform ceremonies. The ideas of the kinship map are used in both contexts, but the additional organizational ideas are very different. The household organization is associated with the ideas embodied in the physical house. The kiva organization is associated with the ideas symbolized in the physical kiva. The design and contents of each type of building are entirely distinct, and both have many details with great moral and social signifcance. Houses are built above ground, have doors and windows, are often multistoried, and have different rooms for different designated purposes. The rooms have straight walls usually meeting at right angles. They have fat foors and ceilings. Traditionally, house roofs are built very strongly. They are supported by vigas, strong beams made of tree trunks, often brought from great distances. So roofs are also work areas and traditional places from which to watch ceremonies. Houses are where women do their work. Titiev is very clear that the Hopi expect a woman to spend her life in the house where she is born, unless she moves to an entirely different village or off the reservation. Inheritance is matrilineal; marriage residence is matrilocal. So, the family is not simple or “nuclear” but may be quite extended. It will contain all the living daughters of the one or more sisters who were born in it and all their children including their unmarried sons. Their married brothers, who live with their own wives, continue to cooperate in providing for their household of birth. The house is owned by the woman who has inherited it from her mother, along with the

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land that the members of the household farm. If there are several sisters who marry and have children of their own, the house may be divided or expanded to provide separate space for each. Apparently, building and rebuilding houses is another important part of what men do. The woman’s husband is not an owner of the house or the land. His children belong to their mother’s clan, not to his. They are among her people; they are children of his people. His wife’s brother is their disciplinarian; he is their friend. The wife’s brother is expected to protect the wife’s interests and assure that the husband carries out his obligations. Each house has a specifc room for storing the maize that its residents grow on its felds. There are established ways to organize the room. There are also defnite ceremonies for bringing in the frst ears of maize and placing them in the room. These designate who belongs in the house and whose responsibility it is to farm the felds. Other crops are treated on the same model. It is the husband’s duty to provide the maize; it is his wife’s duty to prepare food with it for the household and meet the household’s obligations to their people and village for various ceremonial purposes, which are also organizational purposes. In principle, if a husband does not perform his duties satisfactorily, all a wife needs to do to divorce him is put his shoes outside the door. Anthropologists have characterized this as “brittle matrimony.” According to Titiev, divorce is frequent. It is also not of much public concern because each woman has so many cooperative ties to so many other men as well (1944:17 ff.). Of course, the same man who is a husband in his wife’s house is the wife’s brother for his own sisters. So, the marriage and inheritance rules form a system of checks and balances where everybody in the community is both owner and worker, ruler and ruled, friend and disciplinarian. The tensions between a man’s obligations as husband and his obligations as brother, and between a boy and his father as against a boy and his mother’s brother, are major themes in Hopi ceremonies. THE KIVA ORGANIZATIONAL CHARTER Kivas, by contrast, are always built below ground. They are usually one large room with built-in benches along the side and a set and symbolically signifcant arrangement of freplace and other furnishings. In ancient ruins and some modern Pueblo villages, they are circular. In Hopi villages they are rectangular. This may be an adaptation to the rectilinear way the rocks of the mesas fracture. Kivas have neither doors nor windows. They are entered through the roof. What one sees of a Hopi kiva from the outside is a ladder coming out of rectangular hole. The logo of the offcial website of the Hopi

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tribe represents the same kind of entry. So do the kivas of Mesa Verde, built and occupied by ancestral people from 600 CE to 1300 CE. As women are in charge of who is in each house, men are in charge of who is in each kiva. Women are not normally allowed inside, although there are ceremonies that include them. Otherwise, women of the people sponsoring a ceremony deliver the food they prepare to a man at the entrance. As houses are where women do their distinctive work, kivas are iconically where men do their work, other than what they do out-of-doors. They are where men make the costumes and practice for the ceremonies they put on, all of which Hopi describe as praying “for rain, crops, and health” (Titiev, 1944:171). But they are also where seeds are started to be transplanted when the danger of frost is passed and where tools are made and repaired. In Hopi tradition, weaving is men’s work and kivas are where men traditionally do it. It is especially where they weave certain types of cotton blankets of ceremonial importance, including those needed for weddings. Since all of the ceremonies express the values of coordination, discipline, and cooperation, and many of them implicitly refect the order of precedence among the peoples, agreeing on how to perform them is agreeing on what that order is and who represents which people. This necessarily affrms each people’s landholdings and place in the overall village system of precedence. In this sense and others, the kiva is defned as where men make political arrangements. This is why it is an appropriate symbol of the tribal government. As only the more important clans own ceremonies, also only the most important peoples own kivas. But as the “royal” people welcome people of other clans to the village to farm and accept their ceremonies in exchange, the peoples that own the ceremonies accept members of other peoples to join their performances. Participation in the ceremonial activity of the tribe begins with what Titiev calls “Tribal Initiation”—his capitalization. There are parallel ceremonies for boys and girls. Parsons says they are both called natoña, “taking in” and the same name is not used for initiation into any other associations (Parsons, 1923:156). This is also the frst ceremony of the annual ceremonial cycle. Children undergo it at about the age of twelve. It places them in one of four societies. After this, they may be initiated in the societies that produce specifc ceremonies. The initial choice is made by their parents. The process in the frst initiation is conceptualized in the same way as in all that follow. It is offering the boy for adoption to another man who will be the child’s ceremonial “father.” The ongoing disagreements about which people own different ceremonies and their relation to other named clans do not matter at the individual level. A young man is not adopted by a people generically but by a specifc man recognized as representing it. He and his wife thus become the adoptee’s additional ina’a and ingu’u. Their people-relatives are

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recognized as the adoptees relatives in turn, just as in his -ngyam of birth. Although Whiteley and other anthropologists call the adopter his “godfather” and describe the additional clan relationship as “fctive,” the Hopi do not. It is real and important, as the descriptions of Titiev and Whitely both make clear. The organizational charter for the kiva as such is very similar to the charter for the ceremonial associations that use it. As the kiva is owned by a specifc clan who shares it with others, so is each ceremony. During the ceremonies, the people who owns it (who include the adoptees) usually have exclusive use of the kiva and adjust its arrangement for their purposes by building specifc types of alters and bringing in specifc paraphernalia, which otherwise are kept in the owning people’s house. Sometimes ceremonies are performed entirely within the kiva; sometimes performers emerge from the Kiva and perform the ceremony in a plaza or other outdoor space. Ceremonies normally last nine days. The frst few days are devoted to preparation of altars, costumes, and the like and some preparatory action like taking prayer offerings to shrines in distant places, usually without public fanfare. Major public performances are usually on the ninth day. The best known Hopi ceremony among non-Hopi is the Snake dance. It is performed in alternate years by the Snake people and the Antelope people together, each using their own kiva. In the years when it is not performed, its place in the ceremonial cycle is taken by the very similar Flute ceremony performed by the Flute people (Titiev, 1944:146–54). Both mark the start of the agricultural season. And the symbolism of both represents the warming of the earth, rainstorms, and the regeneration of crops. The men who perform them are costumed but recognizable as individuals. In the performances, they usually move in lines or fles. When in line they are arranged in order of physical size, with the largest individuals in the lead (not, e.g., in order of age or in order of rank in some sense). Each group of dancers is costumed uniformly and the steps of the dance are all together, steady, uniform, and dignifed. The Snake dance has been publicized by non-Hopi as though its focus is on the snakes that the dancers use in part of the dance and then release, as part of a magical effort to cause rain. This mistakes symbol for message, or the wrapping for the package. The focus is described in songs that are sung as part of the performance. It is to dramatize specifc stories of the movements of the peoples up from the underworld and their arrival in their present arrangement. Since every participant and Hopi observer knows that the performers represent all the peoples, their disciplined and carefully coordinated action has to be taken as signifying their disciplined and carefully coordinated acceptance of the arrangement being described. The villages that host the Antelope–Snake and Flute ceremonies have shifted over the years. Titiev said they were held in fve of the villages, but

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did not name them (1944:150). At present, it seems from public notices that they are held in two villages on Second Mesa. In the 1960s, the Oraibi ceremonies were considered to be especially authentic. There were many attendees from other Pueblos and tribes. NonIndians were welcomed as well. Since the 1980s, non-Indians have been barred. The reason given on the tribal website is that they persisted in using cameras and looking through binoculars, even though asked not to at every ceremony. There were many other breaches of propriety as well, including stealing shrine objects and inserting themselves into the performance (Whiteley, 1996). The effect would be comparable to visitors disrupting a faculty meeting or a military briefng. Hopi have also grown to regret the earlier cooperation that led to publication of detailed descriptions of the ceremonies because of the ways nonHopi have used them (ibid.). They now insist that they are tribal intellectual property. The idea these concerns are trying to protect is the idea behind the ceremonial activity itself: cooperation through mindful self-discipline. And the main framework for expressing these ideas is the kinship system: the kinship map, the idea of a people, the idea of a people’s property, and the organizational charters of household, kiva, and ceremonial association built with them.

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THE CROSS-COUSIN MARRIAGE PUZZLE The disagreement over whether the Hopi formerly had a system of crosscousin marriage, described in the introduction to this chapter, depended on different interpretations of the relationship between a man and his kya’am as represented in important life cycle ceremonies. A boy’s kya’am wash his hair at frst naming and a man’s kya’am wash his body in preparation for burial. In the marriage ceremony, at several points the groom’s kya’am vigorously taunt him and the bride, saying that they do not want to give him up and that they are far better sexual partners for him. The same behavior recurs in other kinds of ceremonies that involve dancing in couples. The teasing apparently can be very convincing. Titiev assumes that the allusions to sexual intercourse by the kya’am with the boy being married indicates that there was a past time when marriage would take place with the kya’am; that is to say, marriage was expected between a man and a woman who is a member of his father’s people. There are examples of men who marry one of their kya’am without provoking public censure. But there are three main reasons to separate this from the idea of cross-cousin marriage as described by Morgan and the later alliance theorists. The frst and simplest is that kya’a is not defned just by the

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“cross-cousin” kin term product, kya’a = itii o iqoqa/itiwaiya o ina’a (“child” of “sister” of “father”), but also by the “aunt” kin term product kya’a = iqoqa/ itiwaiya o ina’a (“sister” of “father”) and by the “child” of “cross-cousin”: itii o kya’am = kya’am (“child” of “paternal cross-cousin” is “paternal crosscousin”). Thus, the kin term kya’am refers not only to females of a male speaker’s father’s people in the same generation as male speaker, but to women of father’s people in generations above and below the generation of male speaker. The term is commonly rendered in English by Hopi as “aunt.” Second, its reciprocal is not on the same generation as self and the Hopi have substantial folklore portraying the inappropriateness of cross-generational marriages. So most kya’am would defnitely not be marriageable. The third reason is the way these behaviors ft into the pattern of expected behaviors among all kin. Titiev devoted the second chapter of his monograph on Oraibi to “the reciprocal behavior of kindred.” This takes each of the major reciprocal relationships and describes the specifc behaviors associated with them. The pairs, in order, are husband–wife (igponya–inuma when used by outsiders or iwuhti (my woman) when used by the husband), father–son (ina’a–iti’i), mother–son (ingu’u–iti’i), father–daughter (ina’a–iti’i), mother–daughter (ingu’u–iti’i), older brother–younger brother (ivava–itupka), older and younger brother in relation to older and younger sister (ivava, itupka–iqoqa, isiwa), older sister–younger sister (ivava–itupka), mother’s brother–sister’s son or daughter (itaha–itiwaiya), grandfather–grandchild (ikwa’a–imuyi), grandmother– grandchild (iso’o–imuyi), father sister–brothers daughter (ikya’a–imuyi), father sister–brother son (ikya’a–imuyi), male relative in law (imu’inangwa), female relatives in law (imu’wi), and father’s sister’s husband (ikwa’a). All of the descriptions give ceremonial representations and actual examples of the behaviors described. For ikya’a–imuyi, Titiev emphasizes the bond of affection: Almost from the moment of the boy’s birth his ikya’a begin to treat him with affectionate regard. They helped care for him, they name him in some fashion that referred to their own clan, and they make him feel everlastingly welcome in their homes. As soon as possible a boy begins to pay back their favors by bringing them gifts, by giving them a good share of the rabbits that he kills when hunting, and by bringing them salt whenever he goes on salt gathering expeditions. (1944:28)

The Hopi use kinship relationships to manage many more kinds of community-wide organizational activities than Schneider’s urban Americans and these activities can be very labor intensive. So every Hopi has the problem of retaining the cooperation and help of his or her relations and at the same

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time of balancing their own obligations to each of them with their obligations to the others. This is the problem that the behavior of kya’am toward their iti’i and his prospective wife most obviously represents. The kya’am are saying, in dramatically exaggerated form, that they want to keep him for the father’s clan. They do not want to lose him. Their lascivious behavior is in keeping with the Hopi view of sexual activity as behavior that a child will naturally engage in upon reaching sexual maturity, with several sexual partners. Sexual intercourse is not linked to marriage, and when a young girl becomes pregnant she simply designates the boy who pleases her the most as the father of her child, hence as the man she will marry, regardless of whether he is the man who impregnated her. In effect, the Hopi separate sexual behavior from marriage. It follows that the lascivious behavior of the kya’am does not suggest marriage. It only suggests that he if he stays in his mother’s clan, all of his desires will be satisfed by his kya’am. The only other group of women who could express such an idea would be his own mother and sisters, but this would imply incest, which is logically destructive of kinship relationships as such. An important Hopi term of opprobrium, indicating a person who cannot be trusted, is “two-heart” (Simmons, 1942:19, 120). It is often rendered in English as a witch. But there are several other English expressions involving the idea of “heart” that seem to get closer to the Hopi associations. These include referring to a person as acting “from the heart” and being “goodhearted.” English-speaking Hopi use an almost identical expression: a person whose “heart is good” is a person who can be given responsibility in putting on ceremonies for the community (Titiev, 1944:127). It means a person who acts with integrity, sincerity, and a regard for others. The word “Hopi” itself means peaceful, and disciplined cooperation is a supreme Hopi value. We who do not speak Hopi should respect the judgment of Hopi who are fuent in English regarding appropriate translations. In sum, there is no need to postulate cross-cousin marriage in the past to explain the behaviors of kyaam in the present. CONCLUSION Like all other human communities, the Hopi have multiple organizations of multiple kinds. In European-American society, most of these are not based on ideas of kinship. But in the Hopi case most of them are. This means specifcally the ideas of their kinship map, which includes the idea of a people. Important types of organizations of this sort are the households, Kiva associations, women’s associations, and curing associations. One becomes part of a household by birth or marriage. One becomes a member of the other kinship

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organizations by adoption. It is all still kinship. To call it “fctive” kinship is ethnocentrism and it is bad science. If we ask what makes it effcient or benefcial for the Hopi to use the same conceptual framework for these different kinds of activities, the answer appears to be that they are a small population in a very challenging environment. In order to survive they must carefully manage the time and effort they put into each of them. Having them all organized with a common language of obligation and rights makes the time and energy devoted to each of them comparable. In many ways, kinship in Hopi functions the way economics does in Western societies, providing a common framework for people to evaluate and prioritize their various commitments. If we ask what makes this common language work, the key ideas appear to be reciprocity together with the idea of a people. The kinship map says that every person has just two groups of relatives that they share property with: their own people and their father’s people. But the concept of one’s people is expandable, both in its egocentric and sociocentric senses. If you are a Bear-person because your ingu’u is a Bear person, you can call on other Bear people in the sense of those who live with you in your household; you can call on Bear people in the sense that includes the men born in your household but now living in other households; you can call on all Bear people in the village; you can call on Bear people in all villages; and you can call on Bear people plus the others who Bear people recognize as linked to them, which is Spider people. If you have been adopted by Snake people, you can do the same with them, and so on. Of course, you do not expect everyone you call on to do what you ask. That will depend on how salient your common interest actually is. Hopi kinship provides a language of friendship and reciprocity, not control. Kinship organizations are not the only kind of organizations in Hopi communities. They never were. But the ideas of the kinship map still appear to be crucial for the organizations that the Hopi depend on to survive as a cohesive community in their present environment. NOTES 1. The University of Arizona Arid Lands Center Website has a good brief description of Hopi farming methods (http​​s:/​/c​​als​.a​​rizon​​a​.edu​​/OALS​​/ALN/​​aln29​​/s​ole​​ri​ .ht​​ml). 2. It was not until 1959 that an Arizona district court struck down another law that prevented a white person from marrying a nonwhite person. The legislature then repealed it.

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Chapter 9

The Purum

As noted in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, Rodney Needham published Structure and Sentiment: A Test Case in Social Anthropology to support the claim that the alliance–descent argument was fundamental to anthropological theories of kinship and to make a decisive case for the alliance side. Half of his argument was a critique of Homans and Schneider’s Marriage, Authority, and Final Cause: A Study of Unilateral Cross-Cousin Marriage (1955). The other half was an analysis of Purum kinship, based an original monograph by Tarak Chandra Das. Needham argued that Das did not understand his own description. Das recognized that the Purum had a system of cross-cousin marriage, but did not recognize that they represented a system of prescriptive marriage alliance that strictly accorded with, and supported, Lévi-Strauss’s alliance theoretical conception.

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BACKGROUND TO THE PURUM Das was an anthropologist at the University of Calcutta. The feldwork was done in several trips with his students between 1931 and 1936 (Guha, 2011:250). The total time in the feld was less than one year and all the work was apparently done through a translator. The organization and style of the account indicates that the feldwork was done in the manner of a survey, ticking off a standard set of topics. Since most of Das’s topic headings are the same as in Notes and Queries in Anthropology, this was probably his guide. Das was not arguing for a distinctive or comprehensive theory of his own, but rather addressed a hodgepodge of contemporary theoretical suppositions. This was bound to produce lapses and inconsistencies. But it was just what made the account useful for Needham, who claimed that his own theory 193

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allowed him to correct errors and to reveal connections in the social organization that Das had missed. The Purum live in three villages in the hills of what is now Manipur State, India. Purum is both an ethnic and linguistic identity. The larger language group it belongs to is Old Kuki, which in turn is part of the Kuki-Chin group in the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. This language is related to those of the Kachin, Chin, and Karen “hill tribes” in Burma. It is completely unrelated to both the English and Bengali spoken by Das and his students, which are in the Indo-Aryan language family. There are over ffty separate ethnic groups in this region that are described as “hill tribes.” It is an offcial designation and means two major things. First, they are not part of the large population that practices settled agriculture on the valley foors and identifes with Hindu civilization. Instead, they live in village communities on the mountain ridges, practice slash and burn agriculture, and have their own distinctive mythological traditions and local deities. Second, their society is not conceived of as divided into castes in the sense of horizontal strata that are occupationally complementary (in theory) and socially ranked. Instead, they are divided into unilineal descent units that are occupationally similar and socially equal. These descent units are linked by the type of marriage bonds that alliance theory focuses on—matrilateral “cross-cousin” marriage. Specifcally, Das says, they practice mother’s brother’s daughter’ marriage: a man marries his mother’s brother’s daughter. The reason that the hill tribes are composed of so many distinct ethnic/ language groups is not just a matter of historical accident. Each is associated with one or a few villages in a distinct area, and each makes a conspicuous effort to differentiate itself from the others by small variations on a shared tradition of dress, ceremony, language, and social organization. In most of these groups, the villages are politically autonomous. There is no tribal political organization above them. So the cultural identity alone is the recognized marker of a claim to possess a distinct farming area. Everyone in that group has a claim on land for a house site in one of the group’s villages and a claim on some of that group’s farmland. All of this is well recognized. The problems are in the details of what each of these statements means. The Linguistic Survey of India of 1904 put the population speaking Purum at between 500 and 1000. Das reports 303 and he writes as though he is describing an isolated remnant of an earlier way of life that is disappearing before his eyes. Consistent with this, the 1951 census showed just forty-three people. But the 2011 census shows over a thousand. So they were not dying out after all. Something else was going on. In World War II, the Manipur valley was the site of the largest battle in continental Southeast Asia. Coming inland from Mandalay, a large Japanese

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force entered Manipur at Moreh to attack the allied base at Imphal. The base was defended by Indian army units with British leadership and American air support. The result was the greatest defeat of the Japanese up to that time. The Purum villages were just south of the road from Burma to Imphal. This was the main route of the Japanese invasion and subsequent retreat. Apparently, the villagers abandoned the area to avoid the fghting but subsequently returned. In the meantime, they must have gone to live with related groups in the area. In the process, however, we see that they did not just survive. They increased in number. The implication is clear. The numerous but small tribal differences do not signify passive and unintentional group isolation. They signify active differentiation coupled with intergroup communication, and therefore also mutual recognition of a common way of life and common interests that all of the groups are willing to work together to preserve when they have to. Needham’s reanalysis stressed two main points. First, alliance theory was not about tendencies or preferences. It was about prescriptions, absolute rules for which there are no exceptions. It is an argument for complete social determinism. Purum, according to Needham, has a prescriptive marriage system in which the marriage choice of everyone is conceptually determined by membership in a specifc clan and the relationship of that clan to others in a chain of wife-givers and wife-takers. Second, recognizing this determinism produces a “total system analysis,” encompassing everything in the society: every relationship, all ceremonies, and all thought. There is no pluralism in Needham’s account, so it is primarily the parts of Das’s account where he seemed to recognize pluralism that Needham tries to correct. Following Lévi-Strauss, Needham argued that matrilateral “cross-cousin” marriage model is one of “marriage in a circle” as illustrated in fgure 2.4. But the circle need not be totally encompassing, so that every group in the society had one and only wife-giving group and one and only one wife-taking group, which would create the problem of which group frst wife-giver got wives from and the last wife-taker gave wives to. In fact, instead of circles, triads would do. It was enough that each group has one or more wife-giver and one or more wife-takers. They need not all align. In our terms, the dualism was egocentric, not sociocentric. So, the frst part of Needham’s analytic problem was to fnd these triads. The second part of the problem was to show that the ideas connected to the wife-giver/wife-taker relationship in the marriage ceremonies were also connected to everything else. Following Lévi-Strauss, Needham therefore tried to connect the distinction between wife-taking clans and wife-giving clans to all-encompassing opposed cycles of male and female goods. This total pattern of exchange was “dualism” in

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Lévi-Strauss’s sense, which in turn appeared to refect a “fundamental proclivity of the human mind.” Das called the marrying units in Purum “sibs” rather than clans. We will follow Das. The Purum name for sib is sagei, which Das says is a Meithei term, not Purum/Old Kuki (1945:116). Meithei is a Tibeto-Burman regional lingua-franca. He included eight “genealogies,” each giving one of the Purum sibs by name, the descent lines of married couples in it, and which other sibs each had taken wives from and given wives to. And he included one very large table, X, listing all the combinations of husbands and wives, with their clans, that he could pull together from three different sources. This data was an important focus of Needham’s analysis. One of the features of the Table X was that the names of the sibs were not consistent. Sometimes instead of sib names they had the names of what Das called subsibs. Needham put this down to error. But there was a pattern to it. Where the marriages were described in terms of sib names, they were consistent with a rule of mother’s brother’s daughter marriage, as Needham had argued, with clearly different wife-giving sibs and wife-taking sibs. But if you took the marriages where the couple was identifed with subsib names and replace those subsib names with the names of the sibs they belonged to, it turned out that the supposedly ironclad marriage rules were consistently violated. Brothers and sisters were marrying individuals within the same sib. Das had done the same analysis and come up with the same observation:

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The evidences which we gathered in 1936 . . . show that the subsib has come into prominence and taken over some of the functions of the sib. . . . The rules regulating the selection of brides and bridegrooms, e.g., that a man and his sister may not marry into the same sib, have already ceased to operate in connection with the sib and are now associated with the subsib in preference to the sib. (1945:132)

This is one of several major clues that leads to a very different reanalysis of Das’s description, comprehensively devastating to Needham’s and LéviStrauss’s theoretical approach. Another clue is that despite recognizing the importance of subsibs, he gives no separate indigenous name for them. So they must still be sagei. And if so, sagei does not indicate the type of fxed and controlling corporate groups that Needham needs in order to make his case for social determinism through marriage prescription. It indicates, instead, that marriage choices are shaping the way the Purum use their idea of sibs (sagei). And instead of Purum society being totally unifed in a single system of organizations of just one type, it is pluralistic.

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THE PROBLEM OF THE PURUM CONCEPT OF AGE Purum society cannot be analyzed as a single system based on marriage exchange alone because it is not a single system based on marriage exchange or anything else. It has multiple types of social organizations, not just one. Kinship is just one of them. One part of kinship is a system of linkages based on matrilateral cross-cousin marriage. But the things that are linked are not clans as Needham described them. They are families in lineages as Das described them, and there is more to kinship than this. There is also more to Purum social organization than kinship. The key to understanding Purum concepts of kinship, as well as to the way kinship is related to other idea systems of Purum society, is their concept of “age.” Das notes that the Purum are “never very accurate about the statement of their own age, not to speak of the previous generation” (1945:42). It seems a small point. Needham did not even mention it. But why did Das include it? The reason is that he could not avoid it. Unlike Needham, he recognized that in Purum society “age” is a central organizational concept. It is what prestige and authority are defned as refecting. Respect behaviors are phrased according to the “age” of the respected person. A body of people called “elders” sits with the elected village offcers in important public gatherings and is distinguished from the rest of the villagers. In fact, Das calls Purum a “gerontocratic community” (1945:174). He emphasizes that the elders outrank the village offcials. When the elders appear at a public gathering, be it a judicial function or a feast for some purpose, they are always seated frst in order of precedence, which is “order of seniority of age” (1945:80, 140). The offcials are seated next. They are seated in order of offcial rank, but because rank is related to time as a village offcer this, too, implies relative age. This conspicuous importance is why Das asked them if they knew their ages in a chronological sense, and why he was puzzled when they did not. But he went no farther. He should have. When you fnd that what you expect is contradicted so clearly, it usually means that you are making an assumption that should be corrected. If the Purum concept of age is not chronological, it must be something else. In fact, we can see on closer analysis that the reason they did not know their ages in a chronological sense was that chronology is not relevant; it would even be confusing. The Purum concept of age is based wholly on relative birth order as it is recognized in and structured by the kinship map. The term “gerontocracy” means rule by elders. But the details of Das’s account show something more complex, something more like checks and balances. Formal power resides in the village council, a body of appointed

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offcials entirely distinct from “the elders.” The village council has power and legal authority, but the elders have prestige and moral authority. Das makes this very clear in describing the way the power of the offcers has changed over time. Formerly, he says, the power of the offces was virtually unrestricted. Now, the offces require work and “bring neither honour nor money”:

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The result is that these posts are no longer held by older inhabitants of the village who command universal respect in this gerontocratic community but are thrust upon younger heads, who are compensated with some social privileges. Though there is no limitation to the period over which an individual can enjoy the highest post—khullakpa—in practice, we fnd that it is not held by the same individual for more than two or three years. Young men who have risen up to this eminent position do not occupy it till death or even old age but relinquish it within a few years. (p. 174)

The ranks of the village offces defne the sequence in which a villager moves through them. When a person in one offce leaves it or dies, those in the ranks below it are moved up to fll the gap and the vacancy created at the bottom is flled by a newly designated person in the manner discussed by Harrison White in his book, Chains of Opportunity. Das does not describe a specifc selection process, but evidently the elders have a large role in it, since Das clearly implies that the “honor” and “respect” that adheres to the elders includes the ability to thrust the actual work of administration onto younger heads. This raises two questions. First, how does one become an elder? Second, what is the idea system that defnes them? Is there one idea system defning the elders and another the village council, or is there one idea system defning village government that includes both? The argument to be made here has three main parts. First, there is one village idea system that includes the elders and the village council as organizations with complementary and balanced powers. Second, that there is another idea system defning kinship. This provides the primary Purum concept of age. Third, that some people, who must be male, can become village elders by transposing this kinship age into claims on the kinds of authority and power that the village organizations exercise. We start with the village.

THE VILLAGE IDEA SYSTEM “The elders,” in Das’s account, are consistently described as a defnite body of men who are known to all. They are ranked in accordance with their age

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and have defnite duties in the governing of a village. The idea of the elders is consistently discussed with, and related to, the idea of the village council, as well as with the larger governmental system for a region. They have a specifc building to meet in, the ruishang, which Das describes as the “village assembly Hall.” This is set apart from the houses, but near the only other public place that each village constructs. This is the laman, which Das describes as “the place for the god Nungchumba” (1945:44). Das says he “seems to be the most important deity of the Purums. He is sometimes spoken of as the tutelary deity of the village but this is not always borne out by facts” (pp. 188–89). Nungchungba, as the village god, contrasts with the “sib and household god, Senamahi.” Senamahi has a separate type of priest, a pipa, and separate ceremonies. First fruits are taken to Senamahi, not to Nungchungba (1945:57). Moreover, Das explicitly says that: “Now-a-days they go to the house of the pipa of the subsib instead of the sib” (1945:58). The implication of the way these ceremonies contrast with each other is that rights to farmland are defned in the context of ideas associated with the sib idea system, and therefore the kinship idea system, rather than the village idea system. Within the sib, one owes this right especially to one’s own subsib. The contrasting village idea system and kinship idea system each involve a contrasting idea of a self. The way the Purum idea of a person as a member of the village as a whole contrasts with the idea of a person as a member of the individual household is much like way public life in the West is contrasted with private life. One of the places this becomes evident is in Das’s description of the rules for commensality. There are restrictions on who one may take food with. These restrictions are different for taking meals in the household versus taking meals in village ceremonies. In the household, a man may eat together with his wife, children, grown-up sisters, and older brother’s wife, but not with his younger brother’s wife or unrelated women. However: On occasions of social or religious feasts this homely arrangement does not prevail. In the course of these feasts the priests and village elders including the village offcers take their seats in a defnite order prescribed for the occasion. Thus we hear that on the occasion of the frst haircutting ceremony the seat of honor is given to the thempu who offciates on the occasion, followed by the village offcers . . . in order. After them the village elders take their seats in order of seniority of age. Women, young men, and children may not sit with the men in the same place but occupy a separate area where they enjoy themselves freely. (p. 80)

A public feast like this is a genna, and in a village genna the situation is defned with ideas from the village idea system rather than the household idea

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system. The men with the village-level positions are separated from the others and internally divided. The divisions are the offciating person, the village offcers, and the elders. The offcers are arranged in the order of their offcial rank. The elders are seated in order of seniority of age. Das describes the Council as settling all disputes—whatever people bring to them. This includes matters such as theft, assault, and rape. The Council hears such cases in the ruishang. When they meet to do so, some of the elders are also included. All of this is sociocentric, not egocentric. It is constructed as “objective”— the same for all. The village elders of any village are the same for all in their village, for all Purum, and for anyone else. THE KINSHIP IDEA SYSTEM The kinship idea system has three major components. One is the kinship map. The second is the ideas of sibs, which includes the rules of marriage and descent. The third is the idea of the household. This idea system is egocentric.

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The Kinship Map Das does not use an idea like the kinship map in any form, or any sort of diagram to represent the Purum kinship terminology. He presents most of his information listwise in Table XII, that has fve columns. The frst column is the terms, numbered 1–24. The second column is “Nature of the terms.” For each term the entry here is either T.A. for term of address, or T.R. for term of reference. The third, fourth, and ffth columns are headed “Man speaking,” “Woman speaking,” and “No mention of the speaker.” Each of these gives a set of English glosses for each term. The terms used in the glosses include the direct kin and additional relations like elder and younger. He also uses terms like “step-father.” But Das does not defne each term in terms of the others. There is nothing like “kapu” is “apu” of “apu.” In what follows, we will often render Das’s “elder” and “younger” as “ascending” and “descending.” This is because we now know what Das had no way to imagine. It is that in kinship maps of this type—embodying the ideas of Morgan’s classifcatory systems—these elder-younger pairs actually have an important logical function that similar locutions in our own type of terminologies would not have. They are indispensable logical generators. The “elder” term has to be combined with the father or mother term to generate the ascending logical structure, above the self position, while the “younger” term has to combine with the son or daughter to generate the descending, reciprocal, structure. This is explained and illustrated in chapter 11. So while

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Figure 9.1  Purum Kinship Map, Female Speaker. Source: Murray J. Leaf.

the conceptual contrast between elder and younger is often important semantically, and in Purum it is especially so, the ascending–descending contrast is most crucial logically. Figure 9.1 is the kinship map representing the kin term glosses provided by Das for a female speaker. Figure 9.2 is the map for male speaker (1945; pp. 147–52). Both maps were constructed from the center outward as described in chapter 3, using the defnitions Das provided in his Table XII and following the rule that each symbol should represent a single idea. All twenty-four terms in Das’s list are described as terms for reference. Some of them are also described as terms for address, but he explicitly says that the terms for address are applied on the basis of person’s sib membership only, and not “even” by subsibs. So this has to extend beyond reckoning through links defned only for direct kin. The terms of reference all begin with the ka or [k] phoneme. He gives its meaning as my; it indicates possession. The terms of address are identical except that they lack this initial phoneme. Also as a matter of the linguistics of the terms, the ending [pa] is male and [nu] is female, while Das says -te, which he translates as “younger” actually means small. In linguistic terms, [ka] is a preposition; [te], [pa], and [nu] are postpositions. The noun stems are what occur between them. It would probably help to have a more formal linguistic description.

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Figure 9.2  Purum Kinship Map, Male Speaker. Source: Murray J. Leaf.

Das is reasonably clear about how he got his information. He describes two male informants who he interviewed at different times on two different feld visits. He says that he based both interviews on their genealogies. So, the procedure must have been that he asked them for their genealogies and then asked what the terms were for specifc relatives they had named. But since the map does appear to be complete, in the sense that everything fts in, there are no major contradictions, and it has boundary positions, he must also have gone beyond this genealogical procedure and asked what the terms meant in general. The frst thing to note is the pattern of positions that led Das to characterize this as representing or embodying a system of cross-cousin marriage, with the man marrying his mother’s brother’s daughter. This is what Needham fastened upon, and wanted to make an even stronger case for by eliminating or dismissing apparent inconsistencies. On the 0 generation, for the femalespeaker map, the woman’s spouse, ka-pu-shal-pa, is in fact (meaning by defnition) the son of her kapu or her ka-ni (“father’s sister”), who is the brother of her ka-nu (her “mother”). And since ka-pu is the opposite sex of ka-nu and ka-ni is the opposite sex of ka-pa (her “father”), ka-pu-shal-pa is the female speaker’s cross-cousin.

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Das evidently did not ask whether the Purum themselves had a term that could be accurately translated as cross-cousin, cross-cousin marriage, or parallel-cousin. Most likely they did not, since the Purum have no concept of “cousin” in the English sense to begin with. As in South India, it is more likely that the Purum ideas were more like the ideas of having property rights versus having marriage rights. By same token, as the note 1 says, all of the terms for a woman’s sister are the same as the terms for the wives of her husband’s brothers of comparable “age.” This means that the children of ka-terr (the woman’s husband’s elder brother and her own elder sister) are her parallel-cousins, who are shown as classed with the woman speaker’s own elder sisters (ka-u) and younger sisters (ka-nau-te) and elder brother (ka-ata). So parallel-cousins are equated with own siblings while cross-cousins are equated with spouse and sibling’s spouses. But notice also that the map does not include children for father’s younger brother (k)a-pa-te and his spouse, ka-nu-te, with two exceptions. One exception is that for male speakers, Das’s defnition #14, ka-ata includes as one gloss “Father’s older and younger brother’s elder son,” and #16, ka-u, includes as one gloss for male speaker “father’s younger brother’s daughter.” Das does not include “father’s younger brother” as a link for any other terms. He also does not include a relation for a woman’s own younger brother. Note that ka-u is elder sister and ka-ata is only older brother. So the pattern is that elder children of father’s younger brothers are merged with elder brothers and sisters, but younger children are dropped. He does not say why, but the pattern is too consistent to be a misunderstanding. This contrast between recognizing children of father’s elder (ascending) brothers as relatives and not recognizing children of father’s younger (descending) brothers as relatives would not make sense if Needham were right, which means if the marriage relations were conceived only as relations between sibs and everyone in a sib was classifed with the kinship relations, so that the only distinction to maintain was between wife-givers and wifetakers. But it does make sense when we recognize that the Purum are also concerned with marking relatives by their concept of “age.” We will return to this when we see how the kinship idea of age represented by what Das is rendering as “elder” and “younger” relations is transformed into the sociocentric concept that distinguishes those who are defned as “the elders” in the organizations built with the village idea system. The next main feature of the kinship map is the way the boundaries are defned. Starting at the top, ka-pu and ka-pii are the most distant recognized ancestral positions, so the meaning is generic male and female ancestor. But we have to ask what this means. Are they end points after which a person can be an ancestor but not a relation, like parnana/parnani and nakardada/ nakardadi in Punjabi, or do they go on indefnitely, refexively. Das says:

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“The term kapu is used by a man to indicate his father’s father as well as all male agnates of his generation and the generations above him.” So they go on indefnitely. This consistent with glosses of (k)a-pa-te and ka-nu-te, which are their reciprocals (three links down instead of three links up). Note that for the male speaker, the ka-pu relation continues down through all generations to −1. The relation ka-pi, wife of ka-pu continues to ego’s own generation. If a man has to categorize a spouse of that particular ka-pu, on the same level as his children, she would be ka-shnau-nu, since ka-shnau-nu is also that particular ka-pu’s mother’s brother’ daughter. So ultimately, the ka-pu and ka-pii of each Purum is the ka-pu and ka-pii of every other Purum. As we will see, the origin myth says the same thing. To the sides of the kinship map for both male and female speakers, the boundary on the left side is marked by the married-in males, ka-arrang and ku-pa. The boundary on the right is different for male and female speakers. For male speakers, it is the line of “kapu-kapii” relations continuing down from the +3 generic ancestor position to the −1 generation. So obviously the Purum idea is not like the English idea of a grandparent. For female speakers, ka-pu and ka-pii are also on her parental generation, but not on her own. On her own generation, the boundary position defned in the map is ka-ata, which Das defned only as “elder brother.” There is no defnition for child of ka-ata in turn. Here, too, a younger line is being dropped out. And this, too, is related to the way the Purum symbolically transpose the kinship idea that Das is rendering as “elder” into the village idea that he renders as age. Within these boundaries, the speaker’s relations on generations 0 and +1 can be divided into two halves that mirror one another. These are labeled A and B. The reason that no relatives by marriage are shown within each of these groups on the +1 and 0 generations is what has already been described as the implicit rule of cross-cousin marriage. The terms for the spouses of speaker’s siblings in group A are the same as the terms for opposite-sex positions at the same level in group B. At risk of being repetitious: elder brother’s (ku-upa) wife in group A is ka-u. This is the same relation as wife’s elder sister in group B (ka-u). Wife’s elder sister (ka-u) in group B is the same relation as wife of elder brother in group A (ku-upa), and so on. In the same way, the term glossed as younger brother (ka-nau-pa) is also spouse’s younger sister’s husband and younger sister (ka-nau-nu) is spouse’s younger brother’s wife. There is some confusion about the meaning of the term for younger or descending males in the +1 generation, (k)a-pa-te. One source of this confusion is Das’s insistence on imposing the anthropological distinction between terms of reference and terms of address. Ka-pa-te literally means “my little father.” But in XII, his main list of glosses, he gives the term a pa te for father’s younger brother, thus leaving off the [k] that he says indicates a term of address, as distinct from a term of reference. XII includes ka-pa-te,

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separately from a-pa-te, but Das glosses this only as “step-father” and as “husband of younger sister of mother” (ka-nu-te). He numbers the terms 19 (ka-pa-te) and 19A (a-pa-te). So the contrast is deliberate. Elsewhere, however, he notes that when Chaumba, his main informant on kinship terminology, was asked how he addressed certain individuals in his own genealogy who were his father’s younger brothers, Chaumba responded “ka-pa-te” (Das, 1945:310, 311). Das then added in parentheses a-pa-te with a question mark. So while Das was trying to be consistent in his distinction between terms of reference and terms of address, Chaumba apparently was not. Why? The obvious answer is that Chaumba did not care. The Purum distinction is simply between the possessive form of a noun and a form that does not specify possession. Das’s gloss for term #7, ka-pa-te, is “step-father.” This presumably means a man married to one’s mother who is not one’s own father (usually when one’s father has died, since divorce or abandonment is very rare among the Purum). We return to Das’s idea of terms of address in the next section. Since all the other males on that generation are referred to as father or elder (ascending) brother of father, ka-pa-te evidently has the relational sense of “little descending male relation of my father on my father’s generation.” To preserve Das’s presentation of the information while recognizing that there actually is a single underlying Purum concept, the kinship map here combines ka-pa-te and a-pa-te as (k)a-pa-te. Notice that the elder sons of ka-pa-te are not treated the same way as the elder and younger sons of ka-terr in the two maps. In the male-speaker map, the elder sons are recognized and grouped with ka-ata, while the younger sons are not recognized at all. But in the female speaker chart no descendants of ka-pa-te are defned at all, anywhere in Das’s description. This dropping out of younger lines is, again, a crucial feature that is devastating frst of all to Needham’s argument and secondarily to Das’s. It is devastating to Needham’s argument because Needham’s argument is that all that matters is sib membership, which is patrilineal. If this were so, we would expect everyone connected to the same sib by patrilineal descent to be recognized in the same way. We would not expect some of them to be recognized and some dropped on the basis of birth order in some way. It is damaging (but not devastating) to Das’s description because it points to a mechanism that might account for what he reports as sibs splitting into subsibs, but also shows why Das cannot recognize this for himself. Das describes sibs as though they are straightforward corporate units, sociocentrically defned, all dividing into subsibs. What he actually describes, however, is a mixture of sibs and subsibs, such that some families in some sibs arrange marriages on the basis of their sib identity while other families in the same sibs arrange marriages on the basis of subsib identity within the same sib. It is logically possible to have sibs split into subsibs, but sibs cannot logically

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split into subsibs and not split into subsibs at the same time. Das has something wrong. The theoretical problem here is like the Hopi, where anthropologists were attempting to impose a hierarchy of phratry, clan, and lineage on the more fexible and relativistic Hopi concept of a “people.” Only the Purum idea is different from the Hopi idea yet again. The Hopi imagery is an individual as one of a group of contemporaries. The Purum imagery is the individual as a unique point in an ongoing line of descent. Each individual male is both the unique lowest member in a line of elder brothers, father, and father’s elder brothers, and the unique eldest member in a line of younger brothers, their sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters in turn. The uniqueness is because among any set of people a speaker identifes as elder brothers (kuupa), for example, there must be one for whom there is no other elder at all, another who has that one as an elder, another who has those two as elders, and so on. So the relative age of each person in that line will be precisely defned, even though the absolute age in a chronological sense would not be. A woman sees herself the same way, looking to her father and father’s elder brothers. Das’s description leaves some possible ambiguity about exactly how extensive the groups of elder and younger brothers are. He says, as the map shows, that for a male speaker the elder sons of ka-terr are grouped with ka-ata and younger sons are ka-tau-pa. But he does not say what relative the sons are “elder” in relation to. Are they elder in relation to ka-pa, the younger brother of ka-terr, or are they elder in relation to the speaker? Most likely it is the speaker: a person would be classifed as ka-ata if he were a descendant of one’s ka-terr and about the same apparent age as one’s ka-ata. But it makes no difference. Either way, each individual male can still be seen as occupying a unique position as the end point in a line of ascendant males of greater age and the beginning of a line of descendant males who are ever younger. Looking at the kinship map as a whole, then, what we see frst is that all marriages involve a man marrying the ka-shnau-nu of his ka-nu. In Das’s and Needham’s terms, this is his mother’s brother’s daughter. But there is nothing that connects this to an idea of solidary clans in Needham’s alliance theory sense or to sibs in Das’s sense. What we see is an idea of descent lines that are both quite short and unique to each speaker. These descent lines can be identifed either with recognized sibs or with what Das calls subsibs. Remember that the term for both is the same, sagei. What matters, according to Das and the data, is only that the woman a man marries is not classifed as a ka-u by links through known actual individuals. And this, in turn, means that none of the actual individuals who are a female speaker’s ka-pu, ka-terr, or (k)a-pa-te are also her prospective husband’s ka-pu, katerr, or (k)a-pa-te.

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Terms of Address Seeing the way the kinship map separates out a speaker’s own line of patrilineal ancestors from younger brothers’ lines and allows the latter to drop away raises the question of how he or she would conceptualize the latter. Das provides the answer in a separate list of what he calls “abbreviations” of some of the terms in the kinship map. They are “terms of address used by men and women in respect of persons belonging to their own as well as to other sibs, when no direct relationship exists”:

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U is an abbreviation of Ku-u and means elder brother’s wife (man speaking [MS] and woman speaking [WS]). Au is an abbreviation of Ka-u. It means elder sister (MS and WS) but it also means husband’s elder sister (WS). Apu is an abbreviation of Kapu. It means wife’s brother (MS) and mother’s brother, mother’s brother’s son and mother’s father (MS and WS). Upa is an abbreviation of Ku-pa. It means elder sister’s husband (MS and WS) and husband’s elder brother (WS). Ata is an abbreviation of Ka-ata. It means the elder brother (MS and WS). Kanaunu means younger brother’s wife (MS). Katuna means sister’s daughter (MS). The key is Das’s phrase “direct relation.” He evidently means a related person you can trace actual links to through actual, known and named, people using relations of descent and marriage as defned in the kinship map. These are the relatives in our group A and group B. Otherwise, one uses these terms. Note that these relations are only on the +1 and 0 generation and otherwise require the speaker to recognize only their sex and whether they are in one’s own sib or connected by marriage. Das does not say what these defnitions mean in practice. He does say they are only used for people older than oneself. This is the same basic rule as in the rest of South Asia: If the person addressed is younger, one uses his or her proper name (Das 125, 126). Since there are, by defnition, no direct links to individuals so addressed, and since there is no chronological defnition of age, the way to apply them must be by analogy: address a person as “older” if they are like others you address as “older.” Again: age but not chronological age. Marking Age in Kinship Organizations The kinship concept of age implicit in the kinship map is represented in kinship rituals. These kinship rituals, in turn, allow a person’s age as defned in

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the egocentric kinship map to be transposed, eventually, into the sociocentric concept of an “elder” defned in the village idea system. Although the kinship map was constructed using the principle of assigning one position in the graph to each defnition insofar as this was visually possible, we had to make an exception for the positions ka-pu and ka-pii in order to represent the idea that they are, in our terms, multigenerational. There is a parallel exception for Ka-tu-nu and ka-tu-pa. These are two sides of the same kinship idea: they are reciprocals of one another. The multigenerationality of ka-pu and ka-pii is precisely what produces an ego-centered and relative representation of age in the kinship context that can be transposed into a sociocentric way to rank elders in the village context. Since elders are only men, we focus on males. Imagine the way the positions in a man’s kinship map would be flled throughout his life. In any kinship system, as a person ages the number of relatives in the positions in the generations above them declines and the number of relatives below them increases. In Purum, because of the way the kinship maps drops descendants of descending brothers, this change due to aging is most clearly marked by comparing the composition and number of people who are his own kapu or kapii and those to whom he is kapu or kapii. A very young boy with no wife would have many kapu and kapii. As he aged and married, more people would continue to be born to his or his wife’s relatives and all of these would be younger while older people would die off. His group of kapus would therefore shrink while the size of the group for whom he was kapu would grow. The composition of these two groups would also change. His kapu group would at frst contain only brothers of his mother, his father and mother’s father, and the parents of their parents in turn if any were alive. After he married, it would contain his own wife’s father and brothers, but fewer from his mother’s generation or above. And fnally, if all went well, he would have no kapu in the generation of his wife’s father or above but he would himself be kapu to many of his sister’s husbands, daughter’s husbands, and eventually son’s daughter’s husbands in his own generation and those below him. As these changes occurred they would necessarily and objectively attest to his aging—still with no idea of chronology. The same kind of age marking occurs in the composition of a man’s own patrilineage. On his own generation, he recognizes as relations both ascending and descending brothers and ascending and descending sisters. On his father’s generation, however, he distinguishes only father and ascending brother of father as relations. His descending brother of father is recognized with a term (a-pa-te) that Das describes as “derived from that for father’s father’s brother’s son,” among others, but this is only for description and not address.

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A complementary point concerns the left-hand side of the terminology, the wife-takers. The dashed line means that these relations are defned through one relative only, that is, through their mother. The logical reason that they are not defned through their father is that the patrilineal connection is not what matters in their relation to ego. It is the marriage connection. Ka-arrang and ku-pa are men who will address ego as ka-pu, and the more men there are in these categories and the greater proportion of these men are that are ku-pa, the older ego would be. Once again, then, the kinship map marks off three descent lines but not three sibs. Needham was wrong. Das was right. Ego’s line is distinguished from the descending lines of his father’s siblings, and ego himself will be excluded from the descent lines of his ascending brothers. As one becomes older, one also becomes more separated out.

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THE IDEA SYSTEM OF SIB AND TRIBE Since the ideas of the sib and tribe are sociocentric, not egocentric, and since neither is explicit in the kinship map, they must be defned separately and attached to it. This is done through conventional knowledge and in a number of ceremonies associated with Senamahi, the family and sib god. It is connected to the map by the rule of marriage. As already noted, Das says that the Purum word for sib, sagei, is taken from a regional lingua franca. The important question, however, is what it means for the Purum. Since he did not ask for their defnition of the term, it has to be inferred from what he says about sibs themselves. We have already noted that the idea of the sib is connected to land-holding and farming rights. Another statement is that “a number of families form a sib” (p. 117). Another is that the sib’s “main social function is to regulate marriage” (p. 122). So it is connected to families and marriage. Another is that with one exception, sibs are in turn divided into subsibs (ibid.). Also “The subsib is a pure social grouping and consists of a number of either biological or limited-joint families or both.” And fnally, both sibs and subsibs are named (p. 119). So, the idea is connected to marking and remembering ancestry. Lévi-Strauss describes matrilateral cross-cousin marriage through a model showing a circulation of wives in one direction among groups of equal rank. Das describes the role of sibs in Purum marriage similarly: The social function of regulating marriage is the most important social function of the sibs. But social rank does not play any part in the selection of brides and bridegrooms. The concept of hypergamous union is neither found at present nor

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is there any evidence of its prevalence in the past, in feasts and festivals precedence is accorded by age and village positions. (1945; p. 140)

The rules for marriage are given as: Purum boys and girls could marry only in one or more selected sibs. Such unions between the different sibs were fxed by traditional customs. Besides this there was another custom by which the boys and girls of any one of these sibs might not marry into the same sib. . . . Thus brothers and sisters could not marry into the same sib. (p. 123)

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But also notice what Das is not saying. Contrary to Needham and LéviStrauss, he is saying the Purum recognize a difference between being brother and sister and being in the same sib. “Traditional customs” set the marital relations between sibs. But “besides this” there is the rule that brother and sister cannot marry into the same one. In this context, Das’s use of the English terms “brother” and “sister” must mean that they have the same actual individuals as ka-pa and ka-nu (parents). Unlike the other terms on the +1 generation, and like our own “father” and “mother,” these terms are understood as referring to single individuals, not classes that may have many members (like our term “brother”). In addition to having a separate sib god, the sibs have an origin myth. The villages do not. According to the origin myth, the names of the sibs come from their founders. Das gives the story: The frst pair of human beings . . . were Marrim or Mulshu and Multon. The man Marrim . . . was the progenitor of the Marrim sib. Marrim married Multon the woman and four sons were born to them in the following order viz., Makan, Kheyang, Thao, and Parpa. These four brothers were ancestors of the remaining four sibs of the Purum which were known after them. The rank of the different sibs was based on the precedence in birth of their progenitors—the father’s sib occupying the highest position. (pp. 108–109)

Does this contradict Das’s previous statement that hypergamous unions are now unknown; that with respect to marriage the sibs are equal in rank? It would if you think of the sibs as solidary units in which all members share the same rank, as Needham argues. But it does not if you recognize this is not imagining marriage as the concern of solidary sibs as such but rather as households that produce other households that may be later conceptualized as sibs. The myth is equating the ranking of sibs to the rankings of the men who represent them, “based on precedence in birth.” But it is also saying that this

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is in the past. This does not imply that such initial sib rank is an important consideration for families arranging marriages now. The mechanism for the segmentation assumed by the origin story is the separation of descent lines by birth order that is built into the structure of the kinship map. The logic of aging and the logic of segmentation are two aspects of the same conceptual system, although neither Das nor Needham have a theory that allows them to see it. As stated at the beginning of this chapter, tribal identity in this region does not simply happen. It is actively maintained. While Das emphasized that the Purum were “perhaps the most docile of all the tribes” (1945:71), all the hill tribes including the Purum have been on the brink of war with one another and with ruling governments over land and political autonomy as far back as myth and history run. Current maps of Manipur state show several villages with the same names as three of the villages Das describes: Khulen, Thampak, and Chambaung. The Purum villages, however, are distinguished as Purum Khulen, Purum Thampak, and Purum Chambaung—plus three others as of the 2011 census. Names of villages of other tribes are similarly constructed, for example, Lamiong Kullen and Laiching Khullen. In terms of the present theory, the tribe is not an organization. It is an institution. It is the agreed-upon totality of all Purum descent groups and therefore the common background to all marriage arrangements. This implies that the tribe is also the agreed-upon maximum population within which one fnds relatives as defned in the kinship map. This is implied in the way the origin story identifes the frst Purum with the frst people.

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THE IDEA SYSTEM OF THE DOMICILE: NINGAN AND PHUMLIL As the tribe is a maximal kinship unit defned in the kinship idea system, the household is the minimal unit. The defnition of the household is embodied in a stereotyped ground plan for the domicile. Although Das says there is a strong tendency for Purum families to be “nuclear,” it is very clear that this in itself is not a Purum social convention. It is an outcome of responses to many different constraints, including the system of farming. The Purum do not have a conventionalized picture of what these responses will be. Rather, their conceptual model for the domicile provides a formalized stage on which they will be arranged and played out. Das provides a diagram: All Purum houses are of two types based on roof shape: four-sloped or two-sloped. The four-sloped house is larger (1945:47). Both have the same

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Figure 9.3  Das’s House Diagram. Source: Das, 1945, p. 245.

ground plan. The house is rectangular, divided lengthwise by “an imaginary line.” One side is called phumlil and one called ningan. The front door is on the right side (10). So, one enters into the ningan side. The back doors are on the same side (11, 12). Ningan also designates the married daughters of the patriline. There is a post in the middle of the outside wall on each side. The post on the ningan side (2) is called senajuphi; the post on phumlil side (1) is chhatra. The master of the house has his bed (3) in the phumlil part, nearer the wall—a little toward the back from the chhatra post. Unmarried sons and daughters lie in different beds placed closer to the front along the same wall (4). Future sons-in-law, guests, and young men who come to pass the night in his house have their beds on the ningan side, opposite to those of unmarried sons and daughters (5) (pp. 48–49). At night, “For the occupiers of the phumlil side the ningan part is tabooed and vice versa” (p. 244). There is, however, an exception to this taboo for young men who are married to daughters of the household but are doing bride service for the household until they can take their wife and move to an independent household of their own. Bride service means that they work for the household of the girl’s father for a period of years, usually three. They still must sleep on the ningan side while their wives sleep on the familial side, but they can cross over freely. The phumlil also contains the “family hearth” (6), the “place where the water pots are kept” (9), and “the shelf for keeping dried fsh and meat” (7). The place where the zu pot is kept is on the ningan side (8). The house of a pipa has an altar for Senamahi (13) near the back door on the ningan side (1945: 48–49). The line between ningan and phumlil sides clearly divides the master of the house and his family from all other families, including those formed by his married daughters and sons who have established households of their own.

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Since all doors are on the ningan side, no one can enter the phumlil side without passing through the ningan side, through the family area. So, the phumlil side is not open to the village as such. In addition to sleeping in the house, people also prepare and share food there. The list of “abbreviations” given above was described by Das as the categories of people who would take meals in the house in addition to the direct kin. So, they must also be the people who would occupy the ningan side. There are also general rules for decorum. They were described in response to a question about joking behavior. The answer was that joking is permitted with qualifcations by degree and kind of relationship within ego’s generation, but “Joking of any sort is not allowed with the parents or parents-in-law or anybody of their status” (p. 153). The division of sides between phumlil and ningan automatically entails a process through which each household gives rise to other households through marriage and inheritance. Das describes it, beginning by noting that the household “is patrilocal in residence,” the married sons returning to their father’s house until they can set up a house of their own, or until the marriage of the “next younger brother” (p. 111). He says quite positively that “All the sons thus marry and leave the father except the youngest one. The youngest or only son . . . lives with his parents even after marriage and looks after them even in their old age” (p. 112). As a result, he not only enjoys the entire property of the father during the latter’s life-time but also inherits it after his death to the exclusion of his other brothers. But public opinion, however forces him to share this property almost equally with his other brothers. (p. 112)

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And: As each elder son marries, he constructs a new house with the help of the villagers and begins to produce his own food by cultivating a piece of forest land which lies all around the village and to which he is entitled by the laws of the land. He does not depend on his father for starting this new unit of society as no capital outlay is necessary for this purpose. In this way all the elder sons marry, one by one perhaps, and separate from the father and set up new houses. (p. 112)

As a person’s sons grow up, marry, and establish their households near their father, so also daughters grow up, marry, have their husbands do bride service in their own house, and then leave with their husbands to build their own houses. The result is that a person goes through an evolution of roles or positions defned in the household model just as one does in the kinship map. At frst, one sleeps in a bed on the side of the master of the household.

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Eventually, he or she becomes the master or wife of the master of a household of their own. Then their phumlil side becomes populated with children. Then the ningan side becomes populated with people seeking to marry those children. Then fnally the phumlil side is again empty of everyone but the household head, his wife, and one remaining son with his wife. Whatever an elder of the villages is, it cannot be someone in the frst or second stage but it surely would be someone in the last stage. All of this defnes the Purum concept of age. DISTINGUISHING THE HOUSEHOLD FROM THE VILLAGE

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Without actually being in the community and eliciting information directly, the best way to discover the several idea systems is to look for distinctive places in the village, then for the titles of people associated with them, and then the ceremonies that enact their organizational charters. Then we can work back to the ideas that the organizational charters utilize. Purum ceremonies with an audience of any size usually involve the preparation and distribution of what Das describes as “meat and zu.” The meat is usually pork but may be mithun, the local water buffalo. The animal is sacrifced as part of the ceremony and the meat is prepared as a curry and eaten with rice. Das describes zu as rice beer and says how they make it. It is a fairly elaborate rice wine, prepared over about two weeks and diluted with water shortly before consumption. The Purum drink a lot of zu. Das’s main description of the physical layout of Purum villages is in chapter 2, titled “Economic Life.” His frst point concerns their political autonomy: Of the four villages, Khulen is the oldest and largest one. It is stated that the other three villages have sprung from this one. In spite of this, Khulen has no political or social supremacy over the other villages. However small it may be, each village is an independent unit with its village offcers, its communal religious rites and festivals and its social, political and economic rights and responsibilities. Purum social organization has not developed beyond the village. (1945; P. 40)

He next describes the number of houses, then the rites connected with selecting a village site. Signifcantly, no offcial or priest of any kind is involved in this. It is an “egg divination” conducted by those who intend to settle there. The stated purpose is to seek a sign that it will be a fruitful place (1945:41). Once a village is established, the villagers construct the two major

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public places already noted: the laman, the “place for the god Nungchungba,” and the ruishang. He notes that “both these places are situated a little apart from the cluster of dwelling houses” (1945:44). The laman and ruishang are the locations of the activities of the elders and the village council. In addition to the laman and ruishang, Das says that “some” of the villages have a raised platform left from where individuals have put on a thien-hong-ba genna. A genna, as previously noted, is a public ceremony. The most prominent ceremonial offciants are the thempu and the hierarchy of pipas. The former handle religious practices for Nungchungba, usually conducted at the laman. The most important ceremony invoking Nungchungba that is not conducted at the laman is when a villager frst occupies a new house. It is not clear whether there is just one thempu per village or several. The pipas, as already noted, offciate for Senamahi, the sib and household god. There is one pipa for each sib and subsib in each village; the symbols of the god are in their houses. For the frst fruits ceremony, farmers take offerings from their felds to the house of the pipa. They are cooked and distributed by the wife of the pipa with a formalized statement from the farmer that they wish to eat the new rice from then on, and ask Nungchungba permission to so. Pipas do little else. The village offcials and elders have much more to do. Their function is to solve problems that are brought to them, usually in the form of complaints of one villager against another. Das describes the Purum justifcation of this activity as the need to protect the village from the malevolence of the environment and preserve the general peace. Accordingly, it is considered necessary that offcers have some power of enforcement as well as the power to commandeer supplies for ritual purposes. The highest offcers in rank are the Khullakpa as already noted, the Luplakpa, and the Hunjahanba. The Luplakpa is essentially a vice-Khullakpa who can act in his stead if he is absent. The Hunjahanba can substitute for the previous two if they are not present and is the chief “performer in the worship of Nungchungba” (1945:180). The fourth in rank is the Zupanda, whose responsibility is to make arrangements for households to supply the zu that is consumed “on occasions of public interest.” These include all meetings. The next three, in order of rank, are collectors of pigs for sacrifce, coins, and rice. Das describes the eighth as a “medicine man.” His duties are unclear. The offcers also must provide feasts when they are initiated into offce. Their ranks are expressed by the amounts of pigs and zu they are required to offer. If the Purum had one single social organization integrated by the marital exchange relations between sibs, we would expect the village offcers to refect this. Either specifc sibs might control specifc offces or the ranking

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of the offces might refect a ranking of sibs. Since the villagers were very clear in telling Das that the offces were ranked but the sibs were not, he tried to fnd if there was any pattern such as individual sibs dominating specifc offces. He did fnd one village in which the Khullakpa tended to be dominated by the largest sib, but the explanations he described were selfcontradictory. Either the Purum themselves were inconsistent or Das was. For Needham, the dissociation between sibs and offces was an important problem that he tried to resolve. For us it is what we would expect: pluralism. Kinship is one thing and the village political organization is another. The sibs (sagei) are concerned with marriage relations and in that respect are not ranked. The offces are ranked and are not concerned marriage relations. But what about the elders? They too are ranked and they sit with the offcers when they adjudicate. The crucial point for understanding the relationship is that it does not appear that the adjudicating body is ever only all the offcers and or only all the elders. It is always some of each. It follows that “elder” is a kind of village offce exactly comparable with, and related to, being a village offcer. Moreover, at several points in Das’s descriptions that have been quoted, there is a defnite sense that being an elder includes the ability to appoint village offcers, and often depends on having previously done one’s duty as an offcer. So in the idea system defning the village council and elders, which we can call the political idea system, the career path to honor and authority is householder to offcer to elder. How does one enter this career path? Das never says how many elders there are. Nor does he say that all elders were village offcials, or that the villages offces are the path to becoming one of the elders, although this would make very good sense. What he does say, as already noted, is that elders seem to be able to push the work of being offcers on those younger than themselves, and that no one who attains the highest rank wants to hold it for very long. His descriptions also suggest that the elders may be slightly more numerous than the offcers. So assume there are about ten elders out of a village of between 80 and 150 people. How do the ten or so come to the identifed? MARKING A VILLAGE ELDER: MAKSA AND APU In order to become a village elder, a man’s egocentric age marked by his place among his kin has to be transposed into sociocentric age in the context of the village organizations. This is done in a series of increasingly prominent public ceremonies. The common denominator in both the kinship and village contexts is the use of the term apu to defne his position. Apu is the nonpossessive form of ka-pu. Its reciprocals are ka-terr, ka-tu-pa, ka-shnau-pa, and their respective wives. In the village ceremonies, the crucial relationship is

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apu and maksa. The person who is the object or focus of the ceremony is described as apu; those who serve him are his maksas and their wives, who are his ningan. Needham places great emphasis on interpreting the term kapu/apu in the ceremonies because he wants it to mean “wife-taker” in terms of LéviStrauss’s alliance theory. In his 1958 article, he described the term apu as:

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not an individual designation but a category, which includes men under one status regardless of their individual attributes of, age, genealogical level, etc.— The status of wife giver. This is a common feature of matrilateral connubium. (1958:81)

Needham’s implication is that it would apply to ego’s entire wife-giving clan (sib), so that the maksa–apu relationship was a relation between clans and therefore signifed the clan-to-clan linkages based on marriage exchange that alliance theory claimed. The kinship map shows how this is wrong. First, for a male speaker the term apu also applies to his ancestors in his own lineage and not only to the lineage of his wife. For a female speaker it applies to ancestors and mother’s brother. And second, it does not apply to a whole sib but only to the line of senior males leading to ego within it. In addition, in Das’s description of terms of address noted above, he says the term is used by “a woman to address a man from her mother’s group of sibs” if he is older (1945:126). And “A man addresses a man of his mother’s or wife’s group of sibs as Apu (if elder) or by name if younger” (ibid.). This is consistent with the kinship map; Needham’s explanation is not. Note also that Das says “group of sibs,” not “sib.” More fexibility means less prescriptive determination. Das is also talking only about address, not service in ceremonies. Das is clear that in public ceremonies, it is the defnition in terms of “direct links” that applies. His discussion of the ceremonial duties of the maksa gives the gloss of apu as “wife’s father, wife’s elder brother, wife’s brother’s sons.” These are as given in the map for male speaker. It might be possible to think that “wife’s father” actually meant all men in her father’s sib, but it is not at all reasonable to interpret “wife’s elder brother” this way. Needham is also exactly wrong to say that apu includes people “regardless” of their individual attributes of age and genealogical level. What it actually does is include them in order to put these individual attributes on public display. The consistent character of the rituals in which the maksa participates is that they are given by their apu for the general community. On such occasions, the maksas’ stereotypic duty is to provide the meat. The maksa’s wife, ningan, prepares and serves the required number of pots of zu.

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Two important village rituals at which the maksa presides are the Thienhong-ba genna “for the attainment of social rank performed by the ordinary Purum villagers” which is initiated by the principal (p. 155), and the ritual of initiation to one of the village offces, which “every village offcer . . . has to provide” (p. 176).1 The maksa also performs in several life cycle rituals, but not all. He does not perform in naming, ear-piercing, or parturition. By contrast, examples of important village rituals where the maksa does not serve are divinatory ceremonies in general, frst fruits, Panthonglakpa, and the To-lai-hong genna. First fruits has been described. Panthonglakpa is the god of the village gates, and is worshipped with the sacrifce of a pig and zu at each gate of the village. No status is shown, no divination made, and no maksa presides. A village priest called maipa presides and “the expense of this worship are borne by the villagers together” (p. 199). To-lai-hong genna is a status ritual, but not for individual householders. It is given at the instigation of the villagers for a new high village offcer “to establish his claims to social superiority on a frmer basis” (p. 154). The frst life cycle event in which the maksa participates is the frst haircutting ceremony, at about age three. Although the father in fact supplies the food, the principal (who Das calls “the boy”) gives the following speech to the priest who has cut his hair:

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From today all my evils have departed. The pig we have killed is small and the zu we have prepared is not so nice but in future, if I am allowed to grow older and remain free from diseases, the pig will be bigger and the zu nicer still. (p. 237)

“We” refers to the boy and the maksas and ningans, who have in the conventional manner killed the pig and made the zu. This ritual initiates a process of hair growing that ends about age ffteen, when the hair that was cut to a small circle at the frst ceremony fnally is allowed to grow over the entire head. No ceremony is performed at end of the process, and none further during it. There is no puberty rite (pp. 237–38). The next life cycle ceremony is marriage, at which the maksas again are used. This is not one ceremony but a series that includes a period of bride service of several years punctuated with several distinct rituals involving exchanges between the family of the bride and the family of the groom. The initial ceremonies are not attended by the maksa, as when the father of the girl accepts the offer of marriage by father of the boy by drinking a cup of zu (p. 242). But “the party which goes out to greet the newly married couple” at the end of bride service “consists of only the maksas and the ningans” (p. 245).

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After marriage, maksas are employed on initiations into offce, the genna mentioned at the ceremony on entering a new house (p. 155), and at the annual worship of Sabuhong in connection with the frst appearance of rice shoots in the felds (pp. 222, 223). This last is “performed by the village offcers individually for the common welfare of the village” (p. 194). Lastly, the maksas and the ningans offciate at a person’s burial. The way they do so unambiguously shows that they are serving the individual and not a sib. The sequence of activities is as follows. Immediately after the initial show of grief by the relatives of the newly deceased, the body “is washed in tepid water by the maksa or in his absence by the parents, brothers, sisters or other relatives” (p. 252). This indicates directly that the deceased is the principal of the ritual; the ritual is to serve him, and to this end the maksa and other parties to the ceremony are on equal footing. Between washing and burial, “the village offcers and other inhabitants come and sit either within or outside the house.” The maksa kills a pig and the ningan makes zu. “He does not pay for either” (p. 252). After this, the maksas dig the grave (p. 253) and four of them carry the dead body out of the house on their shoulders. They carry it to the sib burial ground accompanied by “friends and relatives, both male and female” (p. 254). Offerings including zu are left at the grave and the people return to the house of the dead person and wash their “hands, mouth and feet with water provided by the inmates of house.” “A fre is kindled in front of the door within the verandah and every one of the funeral party touches it there” (p. 255). These are purifcatory rites, and they are served by the family of the deceased, not the maksas. By implication, the latter are among those who purify themselves. The last action of the sequence of purifcatory rites, after the house of deceased is purifed, is as follows: Then the oldest maksa drinks a little zu and eats a little of the pig’s fesh which he cooked before going to bury the dead body. Then the thempu [the priest associated with the village god, Nungchungba] does the same after him and they are followed by the others, . . . All persons may now enter the house. (p. 255)

The clear meaning is that in the act of burying the body, the maksa has changed from server of the assembly of villagers (cooker of the food) to member of the assembly (eater of the food). The termination of the earthly existence of the person the maksa serves terminates the existence of the maksa group, signifed by the identifcation of its senior member with the community at large. It is important to notice too that the description clearly calls for a group of maksas with a most senior member and more junior members.

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The fnal point that illustrates how fully the kinship representation of age is carried over and transformed into the village demonstration of age concerns the structure of the maksa group. Composition of the Maksa Group The actions of the “oldest maksa” in the purifcatory rite connected with the funeral of a man and the dissolution of his maksa group reaffrm that the group has a hierarchical structure based on age. This necessarily changes in time. The substitutability of relatives for maksas in the burial procedure is unusual. Normally, only the maksa can do the maksa’s work. It is in this sense a functional category rather than a kin category; if a maksa is needed, someone will be found to be it. The defnitions refect this. At the same time, however, the maksa group also has an internal differentiation cognate with the shift from position in the total terminology to descent-group headship as indicators of age as one passes from childhood to maturity. Although all maksas are alike in one sense, “without distinction of generation,” there are some that are “better” than others. According to Das:

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The best type of maksha/maksa for a man is his daughter’s husband. Next, in order, are the sister’s husbands and so on upwards. When a man has no such relative living, his place may be taken by the husband of any woman of the clan. (1945:42)

He further says that sister’s husband is not the best type of maksa in any one of the tribes related to the Purum, which he also investigated (p. 49). And of the best maksas, “the husband of the eldest daughter is senior maksha” (p. 43). Thus as maksas in general mirror ego’s direct relations in general, ego’s “best” maksas mirror his individual lineage. Both the latter groups provide the clearest embodiment of the relations of “age” positions described in the origin myth and applicable to the village as whole. This means that over time, the maksas get “better.” This change has several aspects. First, as ego gets “better” maksas, his overall group of maksas focuses more on him uniquely. When ego is very young he has no maksas to himself. As he and his brothers age, they come to have a segmented set of maksas. Finally, perhaps, ego may be served by a group completely separate from that of any sibling (but not separate from his father’s group).2 Second, as ego gets older, his maksa group gets younger. He loses his older maksas and gets more young maksas. At frst haircutting, it is impossible that ego will have a maksa younger than he is. At burial, it is likely that most of them will be younger. So the maksas increasing youth progressively emphasize ego’s elderliness even as the changes in “goodness” of the

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group increasingly emphasize his uniqueness. At some point, if he lives long enough, he will be an obvious candidate to be included among the elders of the village as a whole. Das does not describe anything like a formal process of selection or election. So we conclude there was none. Without it, those whose agreement to the selection would most important would have to be the elders who are already recognized, and any view they expressed would almost surely also be the view of families they represented. In sum, the function of the maksa group is to objectify the “age” of the apu they serve. They do it by transposing age as an egocentric defned within the kinship idea system into age as a sociocentric concept defned within the village idea system.

CONCLUSION Alliance theory assumes that the logic of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage, as described in fgure 3.1, is universal. This in turn assumes that descent means the same thing everywhere, that marriage means the same thing everywhere, and that kinship groups are defned the same way everywhere. All of these assumptions are wrong. For Purum, we see that each constituent concept is different from what the alliance theorists assumed. Concepts of kinship differ from society to society, sometimes subtly and sometimes dramatically. They are always distinguished from nonkinship concepts, yet they are also so constructed that a person can move from kinship to nonkinship and back logically and coherently in creating a complete life.

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NOTES 1. “Community” is meant to contrast here with “land.” The maksa does not operate at divinatory rituals, either at the village level (p. 220, 223, 41) or for private purposes (p. 233, 234). Instead, he performs at ceremonies oriented toward the village as a whole, as signifed both by what is said and by who gets the meat and zu. 2. In one sense, ego cannot change places in a kinship terminology. He/she is always ego. But in another sense his position does change. When ego as a concrete person is young parts of the terminology are in his/her case latent: he has no children or affnes, to say nothing of grandchildren and the like. But on the other hand he/she very likely has a full complement of father’s, father’s brothers, and so forth. Under these circumstances, we can speak of ego being in a child position in the terminology. Later the condition reverses itself. The superior part of the terminology is useless to ego and he has a full complement of offspring and the like, for example. For practical purposes, we can then speak of ego as occupying an adult position and/or as having an adult terminology. As terminologies in general must comprise different sexes, so too they comprise different ages. This does not seem to be suffciently well recognized.

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Chapter 10

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The Dravidian Problem Transformed

As noted in chapter 2, a central claim in Morgan’s theory of social evolution is that the Tamil terminology of South India and the Seneca terminology of Northeast America are fundamentally the same. Both, he claimed, were Dravidian. This chapter shows what the Tamil and Seneca kinship systems are without the confusion of Morgan’s method and returns to “the Dravidian problem” in a more empirical way. Briefy, the similarities between Tamil and Seneca kinship idea systems and organizations are interesting but weak while the differences are equally interesting but substantial. Morgan was right to call attention to the similarities, but wrong to brush aside the differences. Both require explanation, meaning we should understand why the Tamil have certain features of their system of kinship that resemble the Seneca but we should also understand why other features do not, and why this is of no importance to the Tamil. The users of a terminology see each part of their system of kinship in relation to the other parts, not in relation to any other system. So, this is our problem: not to explain just the part of the Tamil system that is like the Seneca but to explain the system in its entirety, and likewise the Seneca system. Once we understand how all of the distinctions work in each system, it becomes clear that the explanation for Morgan’s “Dravidian” category is not evolutionary at all, but rests on an entirely different notion that anthropologists have evoked for nearly as long. It is the principle of the limitation of possibilities. The principle is simple enough. It is that when people are trying to solve a specifc problem with limited resources, there are only a limited number of possible solutions. So the same solution is bound to be developed by different people in different communities independently of one another. Such similarity does not show a historical connection. The principle has always been easy to apply to such things as cooking or making tools and 223

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houses. It has been much more diffcult to apply to conceptual matters like kinship. Now, however, we have a much clearer notion of what those conceptual resources are. So, we can apply it to kinship terminologies.

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SOURCES Tamil is one of the four major Dravidian languages of South India, the dominant language in the state of Tamil Nadu. Leaf frst constructed the Tamil kinship map in 1966 on the basis of published glosses provided by Irawate Karve (1965), to see how it might resemble what he had elicited personally in Punjab. But Karve’s defnitions were based on lists of relations like Morgan’s and the glosses were in English. So they left important questions unanswered. In 2006, Leaf had a very good Indian graduate student who spoke both Tamil and Telugu. Telugu is another major Dravidian language, the most important in the Indian states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh that border Tamil Nadu to the north. One day, the student mentioned that his family was visiting from India and they were organizing a marriage. Leaf took the opportunity to do a clean elicitation with them. This allowed him to check his interpretation of Karve’s information and extend the discussions into questions that Karve’s method obscured. They also provided a comparable discussion for Telugu. We will not reproduce Telugu here since the shape of the map is the same, which means that the ways the positions are defned are also the same. The terms and concepts Leaf elicited were clearly the same as what Karve reported. They also agree with Kathleen Gough’s (1967) description of Tamil marriage considerations. Morgan’s terms are also recognizably the same for the most part. Finally, in 2019, Leaf discussed a draft of the present description with two Tamil-speaking colleagues at the University of Texas at Dallas, who added further information. We use the standard Roman transliteration for the Tamil letters used to write the Tamil language. The Seneca kinship map given below is based on Morgan’s table as adjusted according to the discussions in Wallace Chafe’s 1967 Seneca Morphology and Dictionary. Chafe is not concerned with kinship as a separate topic. His discussions of the kinship terms are in his dictionary and focus on giving the meanings of the indigenous morphemes. He does this by what they mean in terms of Seneca ideas. One very important point is that the Seneca terms are not nouns. They are verbs or verbal stems. This means that they describe relatedness as a type of action, such as “be father to.” Some of the relations differ for male speakers and female speakers. Chafe does not use the same orthography as Morgan, but his transcriptions are close enough to leave no doubt in matching the terms. This map retains Morgan’s orthography as the simpler to write, although it is less accurate in representing the

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sounds and phonemes. Chafe’s discussion covers how they are used in various constructions. His entries cover all of the consanguine positions defned in Morgan’s list but not all of the affnes, and this also shows how Morgan had imposed alien conceptions. TAMIL KINSHIP MAP AND FAMILY ORGANIZATION

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Figure 10.1 is the kinship map of Tamil for a Male Speaker and fgure 10.2 is the map for a female speaker. As for all previous kinship maps, the symbols all represent indigenous concepts. A triangle is a male position and a circle is a female position, as indigenously understood. Vertically separated levels will be interpreted for analytical purposes as different generations as indigenously understood. Solid lines from positions in one generation to positions in an adjacent generation represent connections by birth, as indigenously understood, from the position in the higher generation to the position in the lower generation. Dashed lines mean the same. The only reason for dashes is so the two sets of connections can be distinguished visually. Saying the relation is defned through one person only means only the set of links indicated is required for defning the relationships, such as anni being defned as magal of attai or mama even though, by defnition, the husband of attai is

Figure 10.1  Tamil Kinship Map, Male Speaker. Source: Murray J. Leaf.

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mama and wife of mama is attai. Where one position is higher than another position on the same generation as self, the higher means ascending in the sense of born before speaker and lower means descending in the sense of born after speaker. Equal marks represent relations by marriage as these are indigenously recognized and understood. The only difference between the kinship map for male speaker (fgure 10.1) and female speaker (fgure 10.2) is that adjacent pairs of triangles and circles (including the labeling), and the triangle and circle representing self and spouse of self, respectively, are interchanged, and that the spouse position labeled manaiwi (“wife”) in fgure 10.1 is changed to kanavar (“husband”) in fgure 10.2. These differences between the two kinship maps leave fxed anna/tambi and akka/tambi as the terms used by speaker to refer to “ascending/descending brother” and “ascending/descending sister,” respectively, as well as maccan/annachi and anni/maccini as the terms used by speaker to refer to “ascending/descending brother” of “spouse” and “ascending/descending sister” of “spouse,” respectively. These differences leave unchanged the birth connections between the “ascending/descending brother” and the “ascending/ descending sister” positions to the pair of positions labeled by magan/magal and to the pair of positions labeled by marumagan/marumagal, respectively. The kinship map, whether for male speaker or for female speaker, divides what are cousin positions for English speakers into what anthropologists describe as either “sibling” positions or “cross-cousin” positions. That is, on the 0 generation, all positions are either labeled by “ascending/descending sibling” terms, namely, anna/tambi (“ascending/descending sister”) and anna/tambi (“ascending/descending brother”), and are opposed to maccan/ annachi (“ascending/descending male cross-cousin”) and anni/maccini (“ascending/descending female cross-cousin”). To put it more colloquially, what anthropologists defned as parallel-cousin (among others) is referred to in the same way as own “sibling.” What anthropologists defne as cross-cousin (among others) is referred to in the same way as “spouse” of “sibling.” Note that “spouse” of “sibling” is not shown. This is because they are understood by the kin term products, kanavar (“husband”) of akka/ tankai is maccan and manaiwi (“wife”) of anna/tambi is anni/maccini. This is what Morgan (and others) have taken as showing that the map assumes cross-cousin marriage. But caution is needed to avoid distorting the indigenous ideas. The English term “cross-cousin” is not the proper translation of any Tamil word, although Indian writers now use it in describing this and other Dravidian systems. More generally, the English term “cousin” is not the counterpart of any Tamil kinship concept, just as was noted for Punjabi. For Tamil, the generic category that includes the other children of one’s own parents (one’s “close” or “own” akka, tankai, anna, and tambi) is pangal, which implies rights in

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common property. Marriage with them is incestuous. The contrasting term that encompasses maccan, annachi, anni, and maccini is murai, which means they are marriageable. Indeed, it is said to imply a marriage right. So, within the marrying group, property rights and marriage rights are complementary. This is a crucial idea. The top and bottom positions on the map, ellu-paTTi/ellu taTTa and their reciprocals ellu pEththi/ellu pEran, are conceptual endpoints. As with Punjabi and Purum, beyond ellu-paTTi/ellu taTTa, a person is an ancestor but is not the instantiation of a kin term relation, so the kin term product appa/amma of ellu-paTTi/ellu taTTa does not determine a kin term, meaning that there is no Tamil name for this kin term product. Also, as with Punjabi, the most distant ancestors, ellu-paTTi/ellu taTTa, are actually thought of, and described as, only for the male line. In wedding ceremonies, blessings for the new marriage are affrmed up to the sixth generation—of male ancestors. And, as with Punjabi, the evident reason is the association of the male line with the family’s ancestral property and occupation. In contrast to Purum, however, the Tamil kinship map does not imply that “cross-cousin” marriage must be unilateral, meaning just on one’s father’s side or just on one’s mother’s side. A man’s wife may be either be a woman he refers to by “daughter” of “ascending/descending brother” of “mother” or by “daughter” of “ascending/descending sister” of “father.” So, no global marriage pattern emerges from this connecting of lineages through marriage relations. Although locally it could be marriage in a circle, it could also be direct exchange of women between lineages or exchange in alternate generations. Whether it is one of these globally would depend on additional concepts being part of the marriage idea system. Figure 10.2 is for a female speaker. The terms are the same. The only difference is that the positions are connected differently. For the male speaker the lines leading to own children also come from own brothers (those anna and tambi who share the same parents) and wife’s own sisters (meaning those anni and maccini who share the same parents). For the female self, they come from own sisters (those akka and tankai who share the same parents) and husband’s own brothers (those maccan and annachi who share the same parents). But the lines going to own children’s spouses (marumagal and marumagan) are reversed for male speaker and female speaker. This is how the kinship map embodies the idea of marriage with one’s murai. As we will see in chapter 11, when we discuss the generative logic for the Tamil terminology, the Tamil idea of “cross-cousin” marriage derives from the generative logic of the kinship map, unlike what happens in the Purum terminology. In Tamil-speaking areas, as in South Asia generally, the terms for kin on one’s own generation and above are commonly used for polite address. Since one’s ellu taTTa is everyone who is “ascending/descending brother”

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Figure 10.2  Tamil Kinship Map, Female Speaker. Source: Murray J. Leaf.

or husband of ellu paTTi and ellu paTTi is everyone who is “ascending/ descending sister” or spouse of any ellu taTTa, the category logically includes literally everyone on one’s genealogical parent’s parents’ parents’ generation, or at least everyone in one’s own marrying subcaste. Similarly, any male of one’s own father’s generation would be addressed as peri appa if born before one’s own father or cittiappa if born after genealogical father, respectively, although another translational caution is in order. When we say “born before” or “born after,” this has to be understood as though it was qualifed with “known or supposed.” There is no Indian requirement for anything like a birth certifcate and birthdays in a Western sense are not kept track of. Birth order is generally remembered for people that have the same mother, but the chronological distances between births are not. Classifcation of individuals not born of the same mother is based mainly on their physical appearances. Public memory is further confused by gaps created by high rates of infant mortality. Logically, each of these relational categories can apply to such a large number of individuals that any given individual could marry someone who has no traceable genealogical connection. In practice, however, Tamil families in South India actually do try to assure that their sons marry a person who is their “close” or “true” mother’s brother’s daughter or father’s sister’s daughter, with known links. This leads to certain birth defects and genetic

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diseases refecting recessive genes becoming prominent in some family lines. They recognize this and consider it to be a problem. Yet they continue the practice. We should ask why. The reason is that this marriage pattern helps preserve social rank and wealth. Gough evidently was given the same explanation. She describes the marriage pattern as “subcaste endogamy.” In the Dravidian area, in contrast with the Indo-Aryan area to the north, the idea of a gotra (pronounced gōt—long “o” as in vote) is not salient. Marriage is stereotypically described primarily as “within the caste.” There are considered to be only two castes: Brahmin and non-Brahmin. But each caste is divided into what Gough calls subcastes. This is a named, endogamous, group whose members are considered to be associated with a specifc occupation and social rank. This is the actual endogamous group, stereotypically and in fact. Some are very prominent in history and politics; many are not. The number recognized is very large. No one knows how many. In consequence, most actual subcastes are quite small. This is what makes fnding a spouse an often diffcult strategic decision. Marriage practices assume that social rank is very important and mobility is diffcult. Rank is a family matter, not just an individual attribute, and largely depends on material wealth. Material wealth, in turn, is hard to come by and very largely depends on what one has inherited. The dominant form of Hindu family law in South India is the same as in the North—Mitakshara law. As noted in connection with Punjabi, girls do not inherit but all females have rights to maintenance. It is also customary to provide a daughter who marries with a substantial amount of material goods to take with her to her husband’s household. This is what is called dowry, and it is a topic of continuous social commentary and criticism. People are very reluctant to state a rule for deciding the value of the goods given in dowry. Paying great attention to this rather than to the relations between the individuals carries the same sense of crassness in India that the preoccupation with the cost of a wedding does in the United States. There are many stories of aggressive demands by families of especially well-qualifed young men, of socially ambitious families of girls giving enormous amounts in order to assure connections to wealthier families, of “dowry deaths” of girls who are abused by their new husbands’ families because the dowry was insuffcient, and of girls committing suicide because their parents will not provide anything at all. But these are recognized as abuses and perversions. In North India, when Leaf asked families why they did not want to say how much they should give in dowry, the frmest answer was that “you cannot put a price on a daughter.” But by observation and by listening to discussions, it was possible to see that for families concerned with acting decently and properly, the amount was about what her inheritance would be if she were

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male. This is also considered to be the same as what her maintenance would cost for about three years, until she becomes established in her new home as a mother in addition to being a wife. Dowry is also considered to assure that the girl will be respected in her new home and not be regarded as a burden. The same considerations apply in the south. Because so much of a family’s resources go into dowry, the effect of marrying one’s close “cross-cousin,” either patrilateral or matrilateral, is that over time families in the same subcaste of the same socioeconomic status exchange wives and dowry back and forth about evenly and thereby also maintain their relative wealth. They thus form small groups of interrelated lineages, which can be as few as two. The most complete description of the demography behind this type of marriage pattern is Elder Sister’s Daughter’s Marriage in South Asia, by Anthony Good (1980). Good carefully distinguishes the actual ideas of the users of the system from various ideas that anthropologists have imposed on them and relates the actual uses to their demographic contexts. His feldwork focused on three villages in southern Tamil Nadu. One has fourteen subcastes. The other two have eleven each. The total population in all subcastes is just under 2000 people in 380 families (1980:475). Because of subcaste endogamy, the total marriageable population any one person has access to is very small. Only two of the subcastes he lists are in more than one village. More than half are represented by fewer than four families. This means that most people have to fnd a spouse from between three and fve families in their own village. The consequence is that if all marriages were actually restricted to a woman the prospective husband refers to as anni/maccini (“ascending/descending cross-cousin”), whether in a genealogical sense or not, it would often be impossible to fnd a match of appropriate age. As Good’s title suggests, marriages between a man and a woman on the generation below his are described as marriage with one’s elder sister’s daughter, not just sister’s daughter. The “elder” distinction, though, needs clarifcation. Good emphasizes that the woman being married is always the “terminological” elder sister (or what we refer to as the ascending sister) and never the “genealogical” elder sister. In terms of the present theory, this means that it is a woman he refers to as anni (as shown on the kinship map), but excludes his elder sister born of his own parents and raised in his own household. A woman he refers to as anni includes, for example, the makal of annan of amma (read “daughter” of “older brother” of “mother”), who may be older than the male person in question. It is not generation or relative age that is given high priority in applying the ideas expressed in the kinship map, it should be noted, but the computed kin relation as such. Thus, makal of annan of amma is anni, regardless of the

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relative age of the individuals involved. The important thing is that she has a daughter of a suitable age, younger than the male himself but not too much younger. Also, note that in the Tamil kinship map above, an elder sister’s daughter is on the marriageable side of the Tamil version of the cross/parallel contrast: a man’s own children are classifed with his own brothers’ children and wife’s sisters’ children, in contrast to his own sister’s children and wife’s brothers’ children. The “daughter” of an anni (“ascending sister”) is also not pangal. She has no rights in one’s property. Her mother would have a right to maintenance, but she would not. So if she is not pangal, she is murai. Once married, the woman in question would be manaiwi (“wife”). Good does not say this explicitly, since he was not addressing this precise situation, but he summarizes an extensive literature on Dravidian kinship that describes the way the woman upon marriage is described as coming to be of the same “blood” as her husband, or in some communities, of the same bodily substance. So, presumably, she would orient herself with respect to kinship relations in the kinship map from his perspective. In short, the Tamil kinship map embodies a kinship worldview of reciprocal expectations that is applied with recognized variations to make up social charters for the individual family, the extended family, the endogamous subcaste, the other castes and subcastes that make up one’s village and regional community, and ultimately the larger society consisting of all other groups that share these ideas.

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SENECA KINSHIP MAP AND FAMILY ORGANIZATION In Iroquois society, a very different set of considerations is relevant. Morgan evidently did not fully understand what these were. The female kinship map is frst (fgure 10.3) and then the male kinship map (fgure 10.4). The dotted lines do not denote a concept different from that of the solid lines. They are drawn differently only to make them easier to see. These are the only points where the defnitions for the male speaker differ from that of the female speaker, and the only way they differ is that for male speaker the connection from ah gare seh to his own children is from the male ah gare seh, and for the female speaker they are through the female ah gare seh. It should be noted in this connection that while Morgan used ah gare seh for relations of both sexes, therefore suggesting that it was an explicitly genderneutral term like the English term “cousin” that he recorded as its translation, in fact it is not. According to Chafe, the Seneca term is quite different. It is not a noun at all but a verb phrase that Chafe translates as “be cousins,” and the root of the phrase always follows a prefx that indicates whose cousin it is

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Figure 10.3  Seneca Kinship Map, Female Speaker. Source: Murray J. Leaf.

Figure 10.4  Seneca Kinship Map, Male Speaker. Source: Murray J. Leaf.

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(in this case ah, means “my”), and has a suffx that indicates gender. The term is explicitly defned, according to Chafe, as “the relationship between members of the same generation whose parents are consanguineally related if these related parents are of opposite sex,” which is to say, their cross-cousins. But another, entirely different Seneca phrase is used to describe the relation if the cousins are in the “opposite moiety,” meaning the moiety from which one’s own moiety members take their spouses (Chafe, 1967: gloss number 12). That is, a man uses the same kin terms for his genealogical children and the “children” of his “ascending/descending brothers” and uses different kin terms for the children of his “ascending/descending sisters.” A woman uses the same kin term to refer to her genealogical children and the “children” of her “ascending/descending sisters” and a different term for the “children” of her “ascending/descending brothers.” There is no grouping into lines of wifegivers, own lineage, and wife-takers as for Purum. Nor does the map suggest a closed system composed of a consanguine/affne opposition like Tamil. Everyone is kin to those in his mother’s clan and to those who are children of his father’s clan, as implied by the universal common ancestor pair hoc sote and oc’ sote, but those they marry are not kin. So in this case, the endogamous group is the Seneca nation or tribe as a whole. The +2 and −2 pairs hoc sote/oc’ sote and ha ya da/ka ya da, respectively, at the top and bottom of the maps, are map boundaries that are refexive, meaning that “father”/“mother” of hoc sote/oc’ sote is again hoc sote/oc’ sote. So the terms hoc sote/oc’ sote are used for all generations above the +2 generation. A similar comment applies to the −2 generation and the generations below the −2 generation. Morgan does not explicitly say this. With his theoretical interests there was no reason for him to look for this property of the Seneca terminology. But since the terms he reports for the +3 and −3 generation are the same as for +2 and −2, the refexive character of these kin terms must be inferred. It would be logically mind-boggling and create a selfcontradictory rule of inference if the +2 and +3 positions were the same but +4 positions were something else. Seneca speakers, unlike Punjabi speakers, recognize individuals who are their more distant ancestors as relations. As in the Tamil kinship map, the Seneca kin terms for genealogical siblings also refer to “parallel-cousins” and do not refer to “cross-cousins,” who are referred to as ah gare seh. But, unlike Tamil, Seneca does not identify “parallel-cousins” with the spouses of “ascending/descending siblings.” Nor does it identify spouses of own children with the “ascending/descending siblings” of “children” of the opposite sex. So, while it is classifcatory according to Morgan’s lineal–collateral distinction between descriptive and classifcatory terminologies, it does not have some of the properties associated with other classifcatory terminologies. “Cross-cousins” are identifed, but not equated with each other’s spouses.

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Altogether, on one’s own generation, the only kin relations that are distinguished are ha’ga/ka’ga, ha’-je/ah’je (“ascending sibling,” “descending sibling”) and ah-gare-seh (“cross-cousin”). The former refers to the kin term products, “children” of “ascending/descending brother” of “father” and “children” of “ascending/descending sister” of “mother,” and the latter to the kin term products “children” of “ascending/descending sister” of “father” and “children” of “ascending/descending brother” of “mother.” Other “children” of ha-nih who are also children of own mother are also in one’s own lineage and clan. But children of other ha-nih, whose wives are uc no ese and not no yeh, are in the “all others group,” which contains children of other lineages and other clans. The same logic applies to the −1 generation. Morgan’s list of relations includes “step-father.” The Seneca term he records for it is hoc no ese, shown in the map as the male attached to one’s mother (ha nih) who is not one’s father. The same term is used for husband of ah ga huc (father’s sister). So apparently it is used to refer to a man married into one’s clan or lineage on one’s mother generation other than one’s actual father. On the same reasoning uc no ese, which he glosses as “step-mother,” would be a woman married to one’s father or father’s clan brother who is not of one’s mother’s clan (because a woman of mother’s clan would be no yeh). So they would also not be in one’s own clan. The married-in positions in Seneca cannot be drawn in a single place because they are not defned as single positions. We could replace each of them with a rule, but have instead drawn them in multiple positions to underline the contrast that Morgan evidently missed or chose to ignore. The male-spouse relation hoc no ese on the +1 generation is just one example. In the 0 generation, all males kin to speaker by marriage only are ha ya o. All women kin to speaker by marriage only are ah ge a ne o (with the exception of the term ah ge ah’ ne ah for “wife” of male ah gar she, which appears to be a phonetic variant of the term ah ge a ne o). And in the −1 generation, all males who are kin to speaker by marriage only are oc na hose and all females kin to speaker by marriage only are ka sah. Moreover, and very importantly, at no point does the terminology identify any of these spouses with a “cross-cousin.” So while one marries an appropriate Seneca man or woman according to their ideas about marriage and kinship relations, unlike Tamil this is not built into the Seneca terminology. An appropriate marriage partner is not defned as a specifc type of descendant of one’s own lineal ancestors. It is, rather, a subset of one’s relations of a certain type: a specifc subset of those who are a gare seh. Accordingly, it would be better to represent the coherence of the Seneca kinship concepts by describing the marital positions with rules, as we did for Hopi, and the Seneca rule is clear and well attested. It is that one marries a person from a clan (or matrilineage) in one’s opposite moiety.

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Other Seneca Ideas As with Tamil, the Seneca kinship maps ft into, and support, a larger Seneca kinship worldview. Two features of the kinship map that are especially important for this function are also features where Seneca differs clearly from Tamil. The frst is that all of these Seneca relations are defned by descent from one relative in the marital pair rather than from the pair as such, and the way the descent lines converge is defned only in terms of the gender of that one parent, so this is the way it is drawn. This is why the descent lines in the kinship map link to the symbols for the individual relations, triangles and circles, rather than the equal marks. The second is that the Seneca map has fewer closed loops, or more positions defned only as spouse. So for individual users of the Tamil kinship map it is entirely possible that one can have traceable relations as defned in the kinship map to everyone in one’s usually very small subcaste. Such links would not be easily conceptualized for users of the Seneca kinship map, nor would it be as necessary to consider them since the pool of potential spouses would be much larger. The additional kinship ideas that the Seneca associate with kinship have been described in a 1996 dissertation by Deborah Doxtator, at the University of Western Ontario. The title is What Happened to the Iroquois Clans?: A Study of Clans in Three Nineteenth Century Rotinonhsyonni Communities. The introduction explains that the question in the title is ironic. Morgan describes a system of Iroquois clans. Several American writers since Morgan have reported that they had disappeared. Doxtator’s argument is that such clans never existed. Morgan’s problem understanding Seneca clans was very similar to the problem later anthropologists had understanding Hopi clans, discussed in chapter 8. Morgan pictured Iroquois organization as something like a matriarchal version of the clan system of the Scottish Highlands: sociocentrically corporate, property owning, and hierarchically organized. In fact, it was based on entirely different conceptions that amounted to a different philosophical worldview. This was, among other things, more egocentric than sociocentric, more “bottom up” than “top down.” What Morgan calls a clan, Doxtator says is better thought of simply as a “family,” although of course in the Iroquois’ own sense. Traditionally, speaking of families would have entailed relating them to the Seneca longhouse, which they recognized as the distinctive basis of their village organization. A longhouse was occupied by several related matrilineages. Matrilineages were grouped into moieties, and marriages were arranged to link moieties to one another. Doxtator’s “families” would be at the minimal level a woman and her immediate children and spouse within a longhouse, then her other close families in the longhouse, then the entire longhouse, then all the longhouses of a single clan, and so on.

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This worldview still persists, although in recognizing its persistence it is also necessary to recognize that it never was set and static. It was, and is, a way people negotiated their relationships to an environment, both ecological and social, that they conceived of as constantly changing as people, including themselves, respond to it. There are two fundamental contrasts in the Iroquois worldview that defne what Doxtator describes as “the complementarity and balance of the ‘two sides’ in Rotinonhsyonni thought” (1996:iii). One is the contrast between male and female. The other is the contrast between clearing and forest. They come together in that the clearing, which is also the village center, is the domain of women and the location of the agriculture that the women engage in. The forest, which surrounds the village, is the domain of men and the location of the hunting and trade that they engage in. Both domains are constantly expanding or contracting, and changes in one always affect the other. The central organizational concept that brings this all this together, she argues, is the family conceived fundamentally by the complementarity of men and women. And the family, in this sense, is not a unit on a fxed scale. It, too, expands and contracts. The same ideas can be applied to describing the moral mutual obligations of men and women around the “freside,” in a village as a whole, in an alliance of multiple villages, and in the nation (1996:25). The matrilineal families are associated with specifc areas of land in a specifc way. The men of the family are associated only with their forest land, as a whole. The women only with the cleared land, which is demarcated into garden plots. For a family to succeed, they had to have access to appropriate areas of both kinds. Therefore, recognizing the necessity of wider social integration, everyone agrees that one cannot marry within one’s own family. Families are grouped into moieties, and marriage is between moieties. The strategy of marriage was therefore not a matter of arrangements among clans but of using matrilineal descent rights to assemble a viable household—again, an idea used at many levels of scale. The entire system was, and probably still is, conceived of as intentionally forcing families to reach out to one another to form relationships of cooperation and interdependence in order to assure the unity of the whole and the preservation of its resources. So, the worldview that the Seneca articulate with their kinship map is not just about marriage or even just about kinship. It is about the place of human beings and the Seneca community in nature. CONCLUSION Morgan’s characterization of “Dravidian” was wrong as a terminological description since it grouped the terminologies of actual Dravidian speakers

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with the Seneca terminology despite many features that they did not share. But it was most wrong, in a way that is still relevant today, in the way he associated the distinctions between terminologies with different levels of intellectual development, suggesting that those who used classifcatory terminologies actually did not think as precisely as those who used descriptive terminologies. This is ethnocentrism, and, as Schneider pointed out, it occurred in all of the debates that were involved in the kinship apocalypse: descent theory, alliance theory, and componential analysis/ethnoscience. Kinship maps and the ideas associated with them are not just systems of nomenclature or description. They are frameworks for systems of morality. They are meant to be enforced, and they evolved in such a way that they can be enforced by the mechanisms available in small-scale, relatively unspecialized, communities. This is why they command the loyalty of the people in the communities who use them, not because these people are simply mindless carriers of whatever culture they have inherited. To treat other cultures as intellectually inferior is to suggest we have nothing to learn from them. This is a mistake. To understand other cultures, we need to understand that the people who live them have minds that work just like ours. To understand how this happens, we need to understand their kinship idea system and the ways they instantiate it.

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Kinship, Logic, and Mathematics

The focus of the previous chapters has been on seeing how different ideas are brought together as coherent idea systems whose dimensions can be displayed through a kinship map. Exactly how and in what way there can be a coherent idea system for the kinship relations expressed through the kin terms making up a kinship map has been in the background in these chapters. This chapter, based on the extensive work of Read on the generative logic of kinship terminology systems, foregrounds the computational basis that both defnes kin term relations and organizes them into a coherent and consistent system of relations that provides the conceptual basis for the interaction of group members as kin. Making evident the computational basis for kin term relations involves a paradigm change, discussed in Read (2007). We shift away from the assumption that kin terms are the epiphenomena of genealogical relations to recognizing instead that there is a generative logic to the system of kin terms expressed through a kinship map that does not depend upon prior reference to genealogical relations as the basis for providing the meaning of kin terms. In so doing, Schneider’s perception that kinship systems are not frst and foremost based on genealogical relations can be implemented rigorously. But we do not do this by rejecting kinship as if it were simply a Western construct imposed on others. We do it by making evident the conceptual basis through which a space of kinship relations is built up. The space of kinship relations is built up from both a space of kin term relations determined through the logic of kin term products and a space of genealogical relations determined through the logic of recursion in the form of genealogical expressions such as “my mother’s mother’s son.” The structure for the space of kin term relations can be displayed visually using what Read (1984) refers to as a kin term map. The kin term map 239

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also makes it evident that a kinship terminology is also a computational system for working out kinship relations without referring to genealogical relations. Rather, as the ethnographic accounts discuss, kin term relations are determined directly from kin terms by culture bearers using the logic of kin term products. For this reason, the kin term space determined through kin term products of the kin terms making up a kinship terminology is not a Western imposition. Instead, it expresses indigenous kinship ideas organized through an underlying logic made evident through the kin term map derived from the kin terms obtained by use of the elicitation procedure discussed in the previous chapters. The kin term map makes it visually evident that the terminology is a system of kin terms built up from a core subset of the direct kin terms making up the elicitation template. What we do in this chapter is to work out precisely how this is realized. The elicited kinship map makes evident that there is a conceptual framework that allows all the kinship ideas connected to it to be brought together in a single coherent system. This coherence is not simply individualistic or egocentric; it is not simply a coherent conceptual framework for each self that it surrounds. It is also coherent sociocentrically, from the point of each “other” who is also a self and all of the interacting reciprocal relations that all of these selves and others form in their various kinship relations and organizations. This is what turns subjectivity into objectivity. Imagined space in individual minds is turned into social space that people know that they share. It was a major invention in the history of human thought and recognizing it as such has been a major discovery for anthropology. Since the framework is coherent, the relations that people form with it can be coherent as well. Without this basic coherence, there could be no reciprocity upon which kinship relations are based, no social order, and no practical cooperation. Kinship ideas do not form the only moral and organizational framework for any society, but they form the frst one that most people learn most thoroughly and that they use as the gateway to the others. As we have shown, the positions in the elicited kinship map are defned with a kin term computation of a specifc form: the kin term product as defned in fgure 5.2. Eliciting a kinship map with a cultural frame consisting of all of the direct kin defned within that system assures that all possible computations of this type are asked for and included in the result. This necessarily shows that kinship maps have a generative structure, in the sense of a structure that is generated by performing a set of computations in a regular order. But precisely because it asks for and merges the results of all possible computations of this type, it does not say precisely which computations, in which order, are most crucial. This requires another type of analysis, and this analysis takes us to a very long-standing question of fundamental importance

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for understanding what the human mind is and how it works. The question is, “how are generative structures possible?” To be clear, the question is not whether generative systems are possible. We know from experience that they are. We construct them all the time, in many felds: the physical sciences, logic, mathematics, and computer programing. We elicit them in linguistics. We see that they are used in a generative way and we see that if people from a community come together to talk about kin relations, even if they do not all have the same understanding initially they can work out an agreement based on computations using the underlying rules. But this does not explain what we see. Where do people get the ability to do this, and why do they have it? The question is illustrated by mathematics. Numbers, arithmetic, basic relationships of algebra, and geometry have been around as far back as we can see written documents. These, too, are recognizably systems of generative ideas, although they are not social. On the surface they are recognizably all “the same” in the sense that they all use numbers and basic rules of numerical combination. But it wasn’t until the eighteenth century, with the development of modern number theory as a distinct feld of study, that mathematicians began to ask and answer truly fundamental questions such as where our idea of number comes from and what holds together all the various uses of the idea of number in a such a way that it has its own internal force and structure and is not simply an intuitive recognition on our part. People—scholars—began to see that they could prove the various systems are integrated, refecting common principles. And when we construct such proofs, we can ask what makes them what they are. What makes them compelling? What makes their conclusions seem so unavoidable? What makes us accept them, collectively and not just individually? This question is especially important for kinship maps like Tamil and Seneca, where the defnitions and sometimes even terms for a male speaker are different from those for a female speaker. If there is a different set of defnitions for a male speaker and a female speaker, so that they cannot be elicited together, how do we explain that users nevertheless use them in a mutually consistent and coherent way, just as others use kinship maps that are the same for male and female speakers? For example, in English, if person B is brother of person A and person C is son of person B, then C is nephew of A. The answer is the same whether A is male or female. But in Tamil, if B is anna (“ascending brother”) of A and C is makan (“son”) of B, then C is makan (“son”) of A if A is male. But C is maru makan (“nephew”) of A if A is female. Thus, makan of anna is makan for a male speaker and makan of anna is maru makan for a female speaker. Yet the two maps ft together, in two senses. First, their users use them

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consistently and each can take the position of the other. Second, they both yield further computations that yield the same term for both male and female users, such as makan of makan (= makan of makan of anna) is pEran for a male speaker is the same as makan of maru makan (= makan of makan of anna) is pEran for a female speaker. As analysts, we have to have an encompassing analysis that shows how this happens. The fact that Morgan’s “Dravidian” classifcation is based on criteria that often do not concord with one another, and Tamil and Seneca are in many ways very different, only makes explaining this feature they actually do have in common more important. One important discussion of this problem, specifcally in relation to the Dravidian problem, occurs in a 2010 paper written by Read titled “The Generative Logic of Dravidian Language Terminologies.” A subsequent paper relating his Dravidian analysis to other types of kinship maps is “A New Approach to Forming a Typology of Kinship Terminology Systems: From Morgan and Murdock to the Present” (2013). The remainder of this chapter is based on them.

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THE KIN TERM MAP Read has been focusing on the generative logic of terminologies and related questions since the late 1970s and has shown how this and these other issues are resolved through mathematically analyzing the underlying structural logic of kinship terminologies to determine the generative logic underlying the kinship map for a terminology and expressed through a kin term map. The analysis has two major steps. The frst is to redraw the kinship map as a structurally isomorphic kin term map that shows its generative structure. Structurally isomorphic means that they have the same positions in the same relationships, the same boundaries, and they yield the same computations. The second is to restate this generative structure as an abstract algebra using the idea of a kin term product introduced in Read (1984) and shown in fgure 5.2, in order to make the generative logic of the terminology explicit in the form of a grammar expressed algebraically. For those who cannot develop such an algebra on their own, Read has also developed the Kinship Analysis Expert System, a computer program that anthropologists can use to reduce a kin term map to its generative core in a series of controlled steps. As the key shows, each arrow is what the generating terms are, and it is not possible to know fully what the generating terms are unless one knows what the steps are. So, the analyst tries various combinations. This takes time and imagination. But so far, for every kin term map examined,1 it has

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always been possible to fnd a solution that has a more restricted set of generators than the kin terms corresponding to the entire core of direct kin relations, and a precisely delineated generative process for developing the rest of the kin term map from this set. The mathematical analysis of kin term maps is possible, in turn, because the indigenous kin term product computation used to construct the kin term map can be restated mathematically as a binary operation, leading to viewing the terminology as having the form of an abstract algebra. This is not a stipulation on our part. It is a fact, and it is both empirical and formal. Because of it, or because of recognizing it, abstract algebras can be used to defne the elements that these operations operate upon in a highly explicit way that assures that all the combinations of elements are consistently defned with no gaps and no internal contradictions. Read noted in his 2010 article that the idea of a kin term product provides a formal criterion for what should count as a kinship term, in the sense of a term in a terminology. It is not absolutely necessary to have the results of a cultural frame analysis in hand as a starting point. So, in that sense, cultural frame analysis and the kin term product analysis can proceed independently from one another. They can therefore be used to confrm or disconfrm one another. For motivating the kin term product from ethnographic observations, he cites an observation of Anthony Good with regard to a Dravidian speaking group: “If ego knows what term to use for alter A, and also knows what term A uses for alter B, he can easily work out what term he himself should use for B” (1981:113). For example, for English speakers, if Person A knows that Person B is “uncle” and Person B calls person C “daughter,” then Person A can calculate that he (Person A) should call person C “cousin,” or more succinctly, “daughter” of “uncle” is “cousin” as a kin term product. While some anthropologists might mistakenly regard this type of calculation as genealogical, Read and Good explain why it is not. It is not necessary to know or think of the genealogical referents of the kin terms involved (“uncle,” “daughter,” and “cousin”) in order to make the computation since making the computation is based on one’s knowledge of one’s own kinship terminology. This is the computation diagrammed in fgure 5.2. Kin term maps are also developed in a series of steps without the use of the cultural frame schema from which a kinship map is elicited. Cultural frame elicitations proceed by spiraling outward, eliciting at each step all of the kin terms identifable from each of the direct relations that make up the frame. As noted, the precise order in which positions are added is not important. The idea is to assure consistency by seeking maximum redundancy. Kin term maps, by contrast, are generated using the kin term product and the generating terms. Each generating term can be used independently of the other

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generating terms when determining how one kin term is linked to another kin term through the kin term product to form a structural whole, namely, the complete kinship terminology. The generative process depends on identifying a set of generators and a set of hypotheses about the structural organization of a kinship terminology. In this sense, constructing a kin term map is much more of an analytic process than a type of elicitation. The most basic hypothesis is that the generating kin term computations, usually with self and one or two incrementing relations, produce a core structure, and this structure in turn is replicated in various ways to make the complete kin term map. This core is what is generated frst. Then the replications make use of this core structure, much as musical compositions are composed by introducing a specifc theme and then adding variations, or, perhaps even better, as designs in pottery may start with a simple theme like a row of marks of a certain shape, then duplicate the row in a different direction, then group the rows plus their duplicates in further arrangements. The other hypotheses concern what the further replications (steps) are. Most commonly, and perhaps universally, the frst structure is an ascending structure of kin terms that has the form of an ascending line from self to the upper boundary, a structure formed from making products of an ascending generating term with itself. Another hypothesis is that the ascending structure will be duplicated to make a mirror-image descending structure, with the descending generating terms structurally defned as reciprocal terms for the isomorphic ascending generating terms. And a third hypothesis is that there either will be no difference between kin term maps for male and female speakers or, if there is a difference, that the male and female kin term maps will ft together as a coherent whole. Since 1984, Read has adopted the convention of writing kin term products in a defnite order. Although he has not defned this order in terms of the diagram in fgure 5.2, we can do so here, using his notation of the binary product symbol, “o,” to indicate the operation “of.” The order is Incrementing Kin Term Relation o Reference Kin Term Relation = Speaker Kin Term Relation (1984:3). The reason for this order is to distinguish kin term products from the very similar idea described in the literature of componential analysis as “relative products.” An important description of relative products is in Wallace and Atkins (1960) “The Meaning of Kinship Terms.” They begin their discussion by associating relative products with the idea of “kin types.” They note that this refects standard English practice. What they mean is that in English they can say things like “mother’s brother is uncle,” using the possessive form for the relative product “mother’s brother.” So this is what was transposed into kintypes: the kintype MoBr is mother’s brother and is referred to as uncle, FaFa is father’s father and is referred to as grandfather, FaFaBr is father’s

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father’s brother and is referred to as great uncle, and so on. Thus, using the normal order for relative products, this would make the relative product analog for the kin term product given above, but using kintypes rather than kin terms, be: “Reference Genealogical Relation’s Incrementing Genealogical Relation is the Speaker’s Genealogical Relation.” Read reversed this for kin term products (with “Genealogical” replaced by “Kin Term”) in order to make it absolutely clear that the two different concepts, kin term products of kin terms and relative products of kintypes, are based on opposed concepts: kin term relations versus genealogical relations. But as we have said, the main point is not the convention of adhering to one order or the other but to be clear that the computation of a kin term product always has to involve a reference kin term relation, an incrementing kin term relation, and the kin term relation of the incremented position to speaker, and not kintypes or genealogical relations. Figure 11.1 is Read’s kin term map for Tamil. “A” is the diagram for a male speaker, “B” is for a female speaker. As for the Tamil kinship maps in chapter 10, all the positions have the same names for both male and female speakers. In both diagrams, the differences between the male and female diagrams are only in the ways some of the terms are connected. In the kin term maps, every symbol has a consistent and precise meaning. The notation [I, i] indicates that in this case the “self” position acts as a covering term for male self (I) and female self (i). The arrows, shown in the key (bottom row), and the equal marks (for marriage) in the kin term map indicate the connections between pairs of positions. In algebraic terms, the kin terms and self are the symbols upon which the kin term product operation acts. The position where the arrow begins is the reference kin term and the position that the arrow terminates at is the product of the computation of the generating term associated with the arrow with the reference kin term. As the key shows, each arrow is associated with a direct relation whose kin term representation has been identifed as a (possible) generating term. The kin term for the direct relation represented by an arrow is indicated by the shade and form of the arrow and its associated name. The shades indicate gender: black arrows are used for male terms; grey arrows are used for female terms. Bold would indicate that gender is not specifed. Direction means ascending and descending, in reciprocal pairs. Thus, a grey arrow pointing upward with a flled arrowhead and a solid shaft has been associated with the ascending, female marked kin term amma and the similar grey arrow pointing downward but with different tangs on the arrowhead is its reciprocal, namely, the descending kin term makal. These ascending and descending direct relations are more inclusive than a direct relation considered in isolation since, for example, a descending direct relation is the reciprocal of an ascending direct relation, thus forming

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Figure 11.1A,B  Tamil Kin Term Maps: (A) Male Speaker and (B) Female Speaker. Source: Dwight W. Read.

a pair of reciprocal direct relations. The generative direct relations of interest are the relations in the smallest set of ascending direct relations that can be used to generate the ascending and reciprocal descending kin term relations. They are indicated in fgure 11.10, below, used to illustrate the Kinship

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Analysis Expert System. We will refer to the generative direct relations as primary kin terms. To summarize, to represent the kin term product of a primary kin term with a reference kin term, the arrow representing the frst term of the kin term product starts at the term representing the reference position and ends at the product result. So, to be absolutely clear, the solid grey arrow with the solid head, representing the amma relation, that starts at [I, i] and ends at the amma position should be read as “amma of self = amma.” The same arrow from the amma position to patti should be read as “amma of amma = patti.” Similarly, the dashed black arrow with the V head from patti to pattan should be read as “annan of patti = pattan.” The grey arrow with a V arrowhead and a solid shaft going from makan to petti indicates that makal of makan is petti. Equal marks indicate marriage relations. So, there is no need to introduce additional concepts such as “birth” that would, in this case, take on an alien and misleading signifcance. In some kin term maps, sibling terms (brother or sister) are generators, in addition to parent terms. For these kin term maps, and when sibling terms come in pairs, we represent this sibling relation with a pair of arrows, with one arrow directly above the other. The upper arrow should be read as the “ascending” kin term relation and the lower arrow as the “descending” kin term relation. Ascending means that it is part of an ascending construction. Descending means that it is part of a descending construction. This is very important for defning the generating steps. Ethnographically, ascending descending relations are often translated as “elder” and “younger.” But not all elder and younger relations in a semantic sense are ascending and descending in a relational sense, and vice versa. As it happens, Tamil illustrates this very nicely when contrasted with Purum. The positions beyond the core relations indicated by arrows are all computed as the kin term products indicated by the sequence of arrows connected to them, starting from [I, i]. The kin terms are the Tamil names for those positions. By comparing the positions in the Tamil kin term maps shown in fgure 11.1A and 11.1B with the Tamil kinship map of fgures 10.1 and 10.2, it can be seen that, with one exception, every position and every operation in 10–1 corresponds to a position and connecting arrow in 11.1A, and every position and every operation in 10–2 corresponds to a position and connecting arrow in 11.1B. Read’s maps have only one position in the +1 generation for “brother” of appa and of amma, whereas the kinship maps have two. The kinship maps include a distinction between the terms used to refer to genealogical elder brother and the term used to refer to genealogical younger brother of father since this was a distinction that Tamil speakers made during the elicitation of their terminology. The kin term maps do not make this distinction.

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The Tamil terms peri appa and cittiappa are not like the English terms uncle and father in that an English speaker who properly refers to a man by the term uncle does not refer to that man as father. In Tamil, by contrast, a man referred to as peri appa or cittiappa may be referred to as appa. In addition, in English son of uncle is cousin and is not brother, whereas in Tamil “son” of peri appa/cittiappa is “ascending/descending brother,” thus the kin term appa determines the usage of the terms peri appa and cittiappa, that is, peri appa and cittiappa are like older brother and younger brother in English and not like the English kin term uncle. The terms peri appa and cittiappa, then, appear to be variants of appa that are recognized in the Tamil language as terms alternative to appa for genealogical father’s brother. Not including them in the kin term map does not mean rejecting them as kin terms; rather it refects the hypothesis that these terms do not appear to be a direct consequence of the generative logic of the Tamil terminology, but are variants added to the terminology. Whether this hypothesis is correct or not is determined by working out the generative logic of the Tamil terminology and then seeing whether these two terms are derived directly from the logic of the terminology or not. In fact, they are not.

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WORKING OUT THE GENERATIVE LOGIC Before taking up Tamil, Read had already shown that at least some kin term maps with the same terminology for a male speaker as for a female speaker, including English, can be generated by an algebra using only an ascending line of kin terms: self, parent, parent of parent, and so on. The second step, in this case, is to generate a descending line: self, child of self, child of child, and so on. Gender identifcations are then added to all the parent/child relations in a third step, so that “parent” becomes “father” and “mother” and “sibling” becomes “brother” and “sister.” Specifc kin term product computations that Read describes as “structural equations” stipulate how these positions should be understood, and therefore also how the rest of the kin term map will be generated. For the American English kin term map, three important structural equations are child of parent = sibling (this is the basis for creating collateral descent lines), parent of child = self (which defnes parent and child to be reciprocal kin terms), and father of father-in-law = 0 (which indicates that father of father-in-law does not compute to a culturally recognized kin term). Including “0” (read as naught or zero) as a symbol introduces a formal way to express “not a kin term” as the result of a possible kin term product within the system. Tamil cannot be generated in this manner, for two main reasons. First, because the gender-marked terms cannot be created simply by gender-marking

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a single structure of parent–child terms. Second, because Tamil does not have collateral lines that go on indefnitely, but rather all lines end and come together at the +2 and −2 generation levels. For Tamil, it is necessary to defne a generative core structure for the male speaker and a separate generative core structure for the female speaker, and then to link them. A very important discovery Read made in the course of fguring this out was that for Tamil and other systems corresponding to Morgan’s “classifcatory” type, parent–child terms cannot be the only incrementing terms. A sibling term must also be included as an incrementing term. For the ascending core, this would be what is usually rendered as “elder brother,” but since it is an incrementing term for the ascending core Read concluded that it was conceptually more accurate to think of this position as “ascending brother.” These core ascending structures use three critical structural equations. Focusing only on the male structure and using English translation of Tamil kin terms, they are “brother” of “brother” = “brother” (which structurally defnes “brother” to be a sibling term), “father” of “brother” = “father” (which structurally defnes “father” to be a lineal ascending kin term with respect to “brother”), and “father” of “father” of “father” = “father” of “father,” which bounds the depth of the ascending structure of male terms to +2 generations. (Variants on this last equation are possible, such as “father” of “father” of “father” = 0.) Then generate the ascending structure by forming all possible kin term products of the generating terms with themselves and with each other and reducing these kin term products where possible with the three structural equations. That is, the computations are computed to their upward limit (“father” of “father” of “father” = “father” of “father”) and to their horizontal limit (“brother” of “brother” = “brother”). Second, the descending structure is generated as a mirror image of the ascending structure, which means that for each generating term for the ascending structure there is a corresponding generating term for the descending structure. The male self term is kept unchanged since the descending kin terms have the same “male self” reference as do the ascending kin terms. The mirror image of “father” will be a new kin term “son.” But what about “brother”? If we use the same term, “brother,” for the descending structure of male kin terms, then since the descending “brother” generator will be the reciprocal of the ascending generating term, “brother,” then “brother” of “brother” = male self must be introduced as the structural equation that makes “brother” a self-reciprocal generating term. But then we have both the equation “brother” of “brother” = “brother” from the ascending structure of male terms and “brother” of “brother”= male self in order for “brother” to be a self-reciprocal generating term. Together, these two equations would imply that “brother” = male self. But “brother” cannot be male self, so in the mirror

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image of the ascending generating terms, the mirror image of “brother” must be a kin term other than “brother.” Thus, there must be an “ascending brother” term and a different, “descending brother” term, which is factually the case. In other words, the “ascending”/“descending” distinction for “brother” is a logical consequence of the generative logic for a classifcatory terminology and is not an attribute added to a “brother” kin term, hence the occurrence of distinct terms for “ascending brother” and “descending brother” rather than kin term names that are modifcations of the “brother” kin term name, such as older brother and younger brother in English. The Tamil terminology has the terms annan (“ascending brother”) and tambi (“descending brother”). The same logic that leads to the two “brother” kin terms, annan and tambi, in the Tamil terminology applies as well to other classifcatory terminologies. Thus, we have uncovered the structural logic leading to the inclusion of two “brother” (or two “sister”) terms, conventionally (but misleadingly) translated as “elder brother” and “younger brother.” The distinction has to do with a relation—an ascending relation—one already has upon one’s own birth, and a relation—a descending relation—that one has after one’s own birth. For convenience in notation, we will now use “Brother” (or the symbol B+) to denote the “ascending brother” term and we will use “brother” (or the symbol B−) to denote the “descending brother” term. The reciprocity principle requires that “father” and “son” be reciprocal terms, hence the structural equation “father” of “son” = male self must be included and “Brother” of “brother” = male self must also be included to make “Brother” and “brother” into reciprocal kin terms. In general, the minimal form of the structural equation(s) for the reciprocals of generating terms is Ascending Generating Term of Descending Generating Term = (male/ female) Self. In order for the descending structure of male terms to be the isomorphic mirror image of the ascending structure of male terms, the mirror image of each ascending structural equation must be included as a descending structural equation. This implies that the equations “brother” of “brother” = “brother,” “son” of “brother”= “son,” and “son” of “son” of “son” = “son” of “son” will be structural equations for the descending structure of male terms. In addition, the isomorphic mirror images of “father” of “son” = male self and of “Brother” of “brother” = male self, namely, “son” of “father” = male self and “brother” of “Brother” = male self, respectively, must also be included. The reciprocity principle also implies that the reciprocal equation for “son” of “brother” = “son,” which is (reciprocal of “brother”) of (reciprocal of “son”) = “Brother” of “father” = (reciprocal of “son”) = “father,” will be included as a structural equation. Similarly, for the ascending structural equation, “father” of “Brother” = “father,” its reciprocal equation, “brother” of “son” =“son” will be included.

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Finally, from the equation “Brother” of “brother” = male self, it follows, by taking the kin term product of “father” with the left side and with the right side of this equation, that, for the left side, “father” of “Brother” of “brother” = “father” of “brother” and for the right side, “father” of male self = “father,” hence, since the left side of the equation is equal to the right side of the equation, it follows that “father” of “brother” = “father.” This equation will be included as a structural equation, as well as its reciprocal equation, “Brother” of “son” = “son.” The mirror (isomorphic) equation of “Brother” of “son” = “son,” namely, “brother” of “father” = “father” will also be included as a structural equation. To sum up, “Brother”/“brother” of “father” = “father” and “son” of “Brother”/“brother” = “son” are logically determined to be structural equations for the ascending and descending kin terms for the Tamil terminology. From the equations “Brother”/“brother” of “father” = “father” it follows that “son” of (“Brother”/“brother” of “father”) = “son” of “father” = “Brother”/“brother,” or, in words, “the son of the brother of my father is my brother.” We have now established the logical basis for grouping children of the brother of one’s father with own siblings. We now have the solution—the only solution and the defnitive solution— for the “Dravidian problem” that Morgan’s division between classifcatory and descriptive systems presented. This crucial computation is what gives Tamil the characteristic that Morgan saw as “classifcatory,” namely, the identifcation of father with father’s brother. It has nothing to do with family structure or the evolution of matriarchy. It has nothing to do with marriage. It has nothing to do with genealogy. It has nothing to do with evolving mental capacity. It is purely a matter of internal computational logic arising from including the sibling term, “brother,” as a generating term for the ascending structure of male terms, and the same result will apply to all the classifcatory terminologies with “brother” as a generating term for the ascending structure of male terms. All of this is duplicated for the female terminology in order to generate the ascending and descending structure of female terms. The third step is to link the two structures, one centered on male self and the other centered on female self. “Linking,” in this case, means that the two structures, each composed of ascending and descending kin terms, are connected with a computational rule. So far, we have generated the kin terms used by a speaker having the same sex as the sex marking of the generated kin terms, that is, we have generated both the ascending and descending structure of male kin terms to be used by a male speaker and separately the ascending and descending structure of female kin terms to be used by a female speaker. Now we need to include the ascending and descending kin terms whose sex marking is opposite to the sex of speaker into kin terms from the perspective of that speaker. This is done by a computational rule

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that states how the kin terms in one structure, as understood from the perspective of a speaker of one sex, are to be understood from the perspective of a speaker of the opposite sex. For Tamil, this is done by frst pairing the male I (male self) with the female i (female self) to make the single “neutral” cover term [I, i] (self) that we see in fgure 11.1A–B. This means that a male self adopts the perspective of a female self to generate his female consanguineal relations and a female self adopts the perspective of a male self to generate her consanguineal male relations. Hence, the term for each position for a male speaker is matched by the same position being named the same way for a female speaker (compare fgure 11.1A with fgure 11.1B), with the exception that, with respect to female self, even though makan/makal (“son”/“daughter”) of “brother” is makan/ makal for male self, makan/makal of ‘brother’ cannot be makan/makal with respect to female self, and so must be named by a different pair of kin terms. In fact, makan/makal of “brother” is marumakan/marumakal (“nephew/ niece”) from the perspective of female self. Similarly, the female terms initially defned with respect to female self are now defned with respect to self, hence with respect to male self since self is a covering term for male self. The same exception occurs for male self, namely, that makan/makal of “sister” = makan/makal cannot be makan/makal for male self. Instead, makan/makal of “sister” = marumakan/marumakal (commonly represented in English as “nephew/niece”) from the perspective of male self. For this reason, the terminology differs from the perspective of male self versus female self with regard to makan/makal (“son”/“daughter”) of “sibling,” which can be expressed by saying that makan/makal (“son”/“daughter”) of same-sex sibling is makan/makal and makan/makal (“son”/“daughter”) of opposite-sex sibling is marumakan/marumakal (“nephew/niece”). The last step is to generate the affnal positions: relations by marriage. Affnal relations are introduced by also joining together two structures. One structure is the structure that has just been generated and centered on self (sometimes referred as a structure of consanguineal relations, though not in the literal sense of consanguineal relations being blood relatives), and the other is an isomorphic structure centered on spouse, which can be referred to as an affnal structure. That is, for the affnal structure, any structural position identifed by a kin term in the consanguineal structure, such as appa/amma (“father”/“mother”), for example, has a corresponding position, namely, in this case, appa/amma of “spouse” in the affnal structure, and vice versa. Since the consanguineal structure is internally consistent, the isomorphic copy of it is also internally consistent. The affnal structure is, then, an isomorphic copy of the consanguineal structure showing the consanguineal positions defned with respect to spouse. In order to indicate how the two structures are linked together, consider that

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the affnal structure is a mirror image of the consanguineal structure, and assume we draw (for convenience) the consanguineal structure with the paternal kin terms to the left of [I, i] and the maternal kin terms to the right of [I, i]. In the affnal mirror image of the consanguineal structure, we will have [spouse of I, spouse of i] in place of [I, i] and we will have the maternal kin terms to the left of [spouse of I, spouse of i] and the paternal kin terms to the right of [spouse of I, spouse of i]. More precisely, for any position, X of [I, i], in the consanguineal structure, we will have, at the corresponding position in the affnal structure, X of [spouse of I, spouse of i]. In other words, the affnal structure from the perspective of self will just be the consanguineal structure from the perspective of spouse. We link the consanguineal and the affnal structures together as follows. Link each position in the consanguineal structure to the corresponding position in the affnal structure by letting each position in the affnal structure be the kin term product of spouse with the corresponding position in the consanguineal structure, that is, for the term X in the consanguineal structure, spouse of X will be linked to the corresponding term in the affnal structure, namely, to the term, X of [spouse of I, spouse of i]. Thus, under this linkage, frst of all, the position [I, i] in the consanguineal structure will be linked to spouse of [I, i] = [spouse of I, spouse of i] = [“wife,” “husband”] in the affnal structure, that is, the self pair, [I, i], is linked to the spouse pair, [“wife,” “husband”]. Then, the position X of [I, i] = [X of I, X of i] in the consanguineal structure is linked, via spouse of X of [I, i] = [spouse of X of I, spouse of X of i] to the position X of [spouse of I, spouse of i] = X of [“wife,” “husband”] = [X of “wife,” X of “husband”], hence the linkage implies that spouse of X of I = X of “wife” and spouse of X of i = X of “husband.” It follows that each position in the consanguineal structure is linked to the position, of the opposite sex, in the affnal structure with the same kin term relation to [“wife,” “husband”] as the position in the consanguineal structure has to [I, i] with a paternal kin term relation changed to a maternal kin term (Leaf and Read, 2012: Chapter 8). Thus for Tamil, the generative method frst has to generate an all-female version and an all-male version and then link them together into a single structure by defning the marriage relation. Marriage comes last. By contrast, consider the Kariera terminology from Australia. In the Kariera terminology the linkage is through the sibling terms in the two structures (see Leaf and Read, 2012). Read then shows that the Kariera marriage rule is required if the terminology is to have four lines of kin terms from the +2 to the −2 generations determined by the kin terms, and this provides a model—recognized by the Kariera but not by all Australian groups—for a kinship organizational structure in the form of sociocentrically defned sections. So, as Read says in his 2010 article, in Kariera the marriage rule

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is a core generative principle of the terminological structure, but in Tamil the same marriage rule (male self marries “mother’s brother’s daughter” or “father’s sister’s daughter” and spouse of “sibling” = opposite-sex “crosscousin” due to the linkage between speaker’s consanguineal terms and spouse of speaker’s consanguineal terms) is an emergent result that appears through the linkage of the male and female kin term maps (see Read, 2010 for details). This implies that while both the Kariera and the Tamil have a marriage rule saying that a man marries a woman he refers to by the “female cross-cousin” kin term, this is a surface similarity and the marriage rules differ conceptually at a deep structure level. Thus, working out the generative logic of the Kariera terminology and of the Tamil terminology brings out a striking conceptual difference in their respective kinship ideas that heretofore has not been recognized. Read briefy notes further variations on the Kariera generative logic that lead, frst of all, to the Trobriand terminology and, second, that lead, via the way the structure of male terms and the structure of female terms are joined together, to the Polynesian terminologies, as shown by his analysis of the Tongan terminology (Bennardo and Read, 2007) and by working out a historical reconstruction of the Polynesian terminologies that builds on both the structural variants among the Polynesian terminologies and a historical linguistic reconstruction of proto-terminologies based on changes in the morphology of kin terms (Read, 2013). In the Polynesian terminologies, the male structure and the female structures are joined together by transforming female self into “sister” of male self, and since female self is not differentiated into ascending versus descending female self, the male speaker identifes with female self as “sister” but not as “ascending sister” or “descending sister,” so for a male speaker there are “ascending and descending brother” terms, but only a “sister” term, and vice versa for a female speaker (2010:section 5.3). Terminologies like this occur throughout Polynesia and are linguistically unrelated to both Kariera and Tamil. These observations imply that the Polynesian terminologies are not simple Kariera-like terminologies where an older/younger distinction among opposite-sex siblings has been erased, as if the older/younger distinction is a surface level attribute that can be added or removed without taking into account how this distinction relates to the generative logic of the terminology. Note that in the Kariera system, as described by Radcliffe Brown and represented in fgure 2.2, there actually is no ego position and so it is a diagram of kin terms, not of kintypes, although he refers to it as a genealogical diagram. But if you look closely you can see that a self position for the diagram of kin terms is implied within the zero generation where one fnds the “ascending brother/ascending sister” positions. The invisible position from which ascending and descending “brother” and “sister” are determined must be self.

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Radcliffe Brown’s explanation and other descriptions make it clear that the Kariera actually do have a self-concept, although it would have been more diffcult for Radcliffe Brown to diagram the terminology to include a position for it. Either way, however, the basic point remains that the Kariera terminology is so constructed that a man marries a woman he refers to as his ñuba (“mother’s brother’s daughter” or “father’s sister’s daughter”), regardless of her biological or genealogical relationship to him, in order for the terminology to be consistent with having four vertical lines of kin terms. There is no other way. Of course not all rules are followed at all times in practice, but if a man marries a woman he did not refer to as ñuba before marriage, he will do so after marriage. There are several ways to describe what this analysis accomplishes. One is to say that it provides a formal proof to support what users and analysts consistently recognize, namely, that although there are distinct male and female kinship maps, they do indeed ft together as a single coherent logical system. Another is to say that it shows that the evolution of such idea systems must have been shaped by the logical consistency required in order for these systems to be used and shared in a coherent and self-sustaining manner. Still another is to show that by working out a system of defned relations that can be consistently used reciprocally among members of a communicating group, human beings necessarily developed the underlying logic required by any generative system with such reciprocal relationships without any need to consciously articulate such a logic—just as people developed languages thousands of years before they developed linguistic theories of languages. Another is it shows the connection between two domains that heretofore have been assumed to be independent. One domain is that of one’s kin: How is that groups are defned, structured, and organized as system of kin relations through the kinship relations expressed through kin terms? The second domain has to do with marriage and the formation of families and the way the formation of families is structured by rules about who can or cannot marry. Yet another is that it provides a way to give substance to claims such as “culture is a constructed reality” without ending up by confusing material reality with conceptual reality. What Read’s mathematical analysis shows is how kinship terminologies are both constructed through a generative logic and real—real in the sense of being seen as objective and seen as if they refer to “something out there” by the users of the terminology. This is not an arid topic with no relevance to the “real world” concerns of those who use this system, just as it would not be meaningful to say that the grammar of a language does not have any “real world” relevance for those who speak the language. Kinship terminologies present their users with a coherent worldview that defne for them who are their kin, how their domain of kin is conceptually organized, and this affects how kin interact with one

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another as part of the social domain. The kinship algebra, that is to say the mathematical structure of the culturally determined system of kin term relations, is the structure of their kinship worldview in the deepest possible sense. It is the logical basis of its coherence and generative power.

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Kin Term Maps and Kinship Algebras We can visually represent the structure of the kinship algebra for the system of kin term relations forming a kinship terminology with kin term maps. Whereas the kinship map focuses on the elicitation process for obtaining the kin terms making up a kinship terminology, the kin term map focuses on the way the kin terms are interlinked through kin term products, hence the way the terminology, viewed as a kinship algebra, is generated from primary kin terms through the kin term product. The shape of the structure shown visually in a kin term map, and the relations among the terms making up that structure, refect the kinship ideas embedded within a kinship terminology and are made analytically accessible through working out how the terminology is generated as a kinship algebra. This means we can view the kin term map and its structure as a way to show visually how the kinship ideas underlying the kinship relations lead to the features of the kinship terminology. Analytically, we determine how the structural form of the kin term map is determined through structural equations for the kin term products that express the kinship ideas that are part of the kinship terminology. This implies that kin term maps enable visual and analytic comparison of the conceptual organization of one kinship terminology with that of another terminology. The comparison makes visually evident where the structural aspects of terminologies are similar and where they are different and what are the kinship ideas that lead to these differences. As we will also see, the comparison of kin term maps also makes evident ways in which the kinship ideas underlying the structure of the terminology relate to features of social organization. Kinship, Logic, and Mathematics In this section we illustrate the use of kin term maps to bring out both structural features of a terminology generated through the kin term product and what can be determined about kinship systems by making structural comparisons of their respective kinship terminologies through kin term maps. We will do this with the Iroquois, the Kariera, the Crow, the Hopi, the Omaha, and the Purum terminologies discussed in this and previous chapters. The kin term map for the Tamil, the other group we have discussed, has already been presented and discussed in this chapter.  

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We begin with the Iroquois kinship terminology (see fgure 11.2 ) because it is the simplest classifcatory terminology in the sense that all of the features of the terminology that puzzled Morgan, such as a man referring to his father’s brother’s son by the same term he uses for his genealogical son, derive directly from the aspect of the classifcatory terminologies that analytically distinguishes them from other terminologies. As discussed above, what distinguishes the classifcatory terminologies is cultural recognition that sibling terms are generating terms. For the Iroquois terminologies, there is no external constraint on kin term products that a terminology must have in order for it to be an Iroquois terminology other than a boundary condition for limiting the vertical extent of the terminology. The boundary condition is that the kin term product of the ascending generating term with itself becomes refexive, starting with the product of that term with the product of that term with itself, that is, the ascending generating term ha’nih (“father”),

Figure 11.2A  Kin Term Map for Iroquois Terminology (Male Speaker). Source: Dwight W. Read.

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Figure 11.2B  Kin Term Map for Iroquois Terminology (Female Speaker). Source: Dwight W. Read.

for example, satisfes the refexive equation: ha’nih of (ha’nih of ha’nih) = ha’nih of ha’nih. From the kin term map for the Iroquois terminology, we identify a structural discordance between the structure of the Iroquois terminology and the structural organization of a society with unilineal, exogamous social units. This leads us to consider two transformations that remove this discordance between the terminology structure and the social organization structure. The transformation also changes the Iroquois terminology into a conceptually more complex classifcatory terminology. The frst transformation we consider changes the Iroquois terminology into the Kariera terminology that has played a prominent in role in Claude LéviStrauss’s theorizing about the so-called elementary kinship structures. The second transformation leads to the Crow and Omaha terminologies that have long been problematic in kinship theorizing. Each of these terminologies is

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derived from the Iroquois terminology by adding a single structural equation to the generative logic for the Iroquois terminology. The Crow and Omaha terminologies are referred to in the anthropological literature as (genealogically) “skewed” terminologies, which means that a single kin term is used to refer to genealogical relations in adjacent generations. The Crow terminologies are associated with kinship groups based on matrilineal descent and the Omaha terminologies with patrilineal descent. Further modifcation of the Crow terminology through the way affnal terms relate to consanguineal kin terms takes us from the Crow terminology structure to the Hopi kinship terminology. The Hopi social unit referred to as a people (see chapter 8) then corresponds, for the My People social unit defned with respect to mother of speaker and for the My Father’s People social unit defned with respect to father of speaker, to the structural distinction between matrilateral and patrilateral kin terms that is introduced, as we will show, by the transformation of an Iroquois terminology into a Crow terminology. Lastly, we compare kin term maps to show that the long-standing practice of defning the Omaha (and Crow) terminologies through genealogical equations leads to classifying terminologies as Omaha terminologies that actually have completely different generative logics.

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Iroquois Terminology Kin Term Map The kin term maps for the Iroquois terminology, one for male speaker and one for female speakers, are shown in fgure 11.2A and B (compare with fgures 10.3 and 10.4 showing the kinship map for Seneca). For clarity of the diagram, upward arrows paralleling the downward arrows and showing kin term products with no’yeh (“mother”) and ha’-nih (“father”) are not shown. Differences between the two kin term maps can be seen in the downward “child” arrows from 0 generation to the −1 generation kin terms and in the −1 generation kin terms for “child” of “opposite-sex sibling.” The set AM of male ascending generators for the Iroquois terminology is AM = {male self, ha’nih (“father”), ha’-ga (“ascending brother”)} and for female terms the set AF of female ascending generators is AF = {female self, no-yeh (“mother”), ka’ga (“ascending sister”)}. The set DM of male descending generating terms is DM = {(male self, ha-ah’wuk (“son”), ha’-je (“descending brother”)} and for female terms the set DF of female generating terms is DF = {female self, ka-ah’wuk (“daughter”), ah’je (“descending sister”)}. As has already been discussed, the inclusion of sibling terms as generating terms is what gives the Iroquois terminology the structure of a classifcatory terminology. For the parent and child kin terms, the structural equation making ha’-nih (“father”) and ha-ah’wuk (“son”) into reciprocal terms is ha’-nih of haah’wuk = male self, and for no-yeh (“mother”) and ka-ah’wuk (“daughter”) it is no-yeh of ka-ah’wuk = female self. The equations ha’-ga of ha’-je = male

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self = ha’-je of ha’ga and ka’ga of ah’je = female self = ah’je of ka’ga are the structural equations making the “ascending”/“descending” sibling terms into reciprocal terms. No marriage rule is implied by the generation of the Iroquois terminology, hence whether a group with an Iroquois terminology has a marriage rule is facultative. Overall, the Iroquois terminology is the simplest of the classifcatory terminologies in that no properties external to the terminology (other than the boundary condition discussed above) need be included to act as constraints on the generative logic for the terminology. The female kin terms connected by ka-ah’wuk (“daughter”) arrows have been identifed with bold arrows in fgure 11.2 for two sequences of female terms in each of the two kin term maps, one beginning with oc’sote (“paternal grandmother”)—the paternal female version of the kin term oc’sote—and the other beginning with oc’sote (“maternal grandmother”)—the maternal female version of the kin term oc’sote. For a female speaker (see fgure 11.2B) the two sequences are as follows:

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(1) oc’sote (“paternal grandmother”) → ah-ga-huc (“father’s sister”) → ahgare-seh (“female cross-cousin”) → ka-ah’wuk (“daughter”) → ka-ya-da (“granddaughter”) and (2) oc’sote (“maternal grandmother”) → no-yeh (“mother”) → [ka’ga, ah’je] ([“ascending sister,” “descending sister”]) → ka-ah’wuk (“daughter”) → ka-ya-da (“granddaughter”). In both diagrams the two sequences intersect. They intersect at ka-ya-wanda (“female cross-cousin”) for male speaker and at ka-ah’wuk (“daughter”) for female speaker. This implies that, in a unilineal kinship system with an Iroquois terminology, the paternal lineage A with speaker’s genealogical father and genealogical father’s sister as members and the maternal lineage B with genealogical mother and genealogical mother’s brother as members, there can be members of lineage A and members of lineage B that are both referred to as ka-ya-wan-da by male speakers and by ka-ah’wuk by female speakers. Thus, the terminology does not distinguish between speaker’s father’s lineage and speaker’s mother’s lineage in a consistent way, hence in a unilineal system the terminology is not consistent with exogamous lineages that are disjoint from each other. This is not a structural inconsistency, but instead shows that there is lack of concordance between the structural properties of a unilineal form of social organization and the structure of the kinship terminology. Whether the lack of concordance is problematic or not depends on whether, for the persons involved, an absolute distinction between a speaker’s father’s lineage and the speaker’s mother’s lineage needs to carry over to the kinship terminology.

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Next, we consider two ways that the Iroquois terminology may be structurally changed to remove this discordance between the terminology and a unilineal kinship system. The frst is by interchanging the ending terms for the “child” arrows for the male ah-gare-seh and female ah-gare-seh terms and the second is by introducing structural equation that either makes the kin term product of “daughter” with “sister” of “father” refexive or the kin term product of “son” with “brother” of “mother” refexive, which leads to the Kariera terminology. Transforming Iroquois to Kariera

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The intersection of the two lines of kin terms shown in fgure 11.2A, B can be removed through a two-step transformation: (1) interchange the starting points for the downward “son”/“daughter” arrows from male ah-gare-seh and from female ah-gare-seh with each other (keeping the termination points for

Figure 11.3A  Kin Term Map for Kariera Structure (Male Speaker) Derived from Iroquois. Source: Dwight W. Read.

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Figure 11.3B  Kin Term Map for Kariera Structure (Female Speaker) Derived from Iroquois. Source: Dwight W. Read.

the arrows fxed) and (2) expand each of the two terms in the ±2 generations to two terms (thus separating matrilateral from patrilateral terms) so as to form a matrilateral–patrilateral opposition within each of these two generations. The structural changes introduced by this two-part transformation are shown in fgure 11.3A and B. Though the kin position names are still those of the Iroquois terminology, the structure is now that of the Kariera terminology. What were two intersecting sequences in the Iroquois terminology have now been changed into two sequences that do not intersect. Thus, the Iroquois terminology has been changed into the Kariera terminology with a structure that models an exogamous, moiety form of social organization, as has been noted by numerous authors. The transformation also leads to introduction of the marriage rule that a Kariera man marries a woman he refers to as ñuba (“cross-cousin”) (ñuba is the Kariera kin term for the position labeled ah-gare-seh in fgure 11.3). The

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reason the marriage rule needs to be introduced is that, for a male speaker, the frst step of the transformation changes “son”/“daughter” of “female cross-cousin” = “nephew”/“niece” (see fgure 11.2A) to “son”/“daughter” of female “cross-cousin” = “son”/“daughter” (see fgure 11.3A). But it will only be consistent for a male speaker to use the kin terms “son”/“daughter” to refer to the offspring of a woman he refers to as “cross-cousin” if that woman is his wife. Consequently, the marriage rule expresses the kin relation a woman must have to a man before marriage, namely, that he refers to her by the kin term ñuba, for there to be consistency between the “son”/“daughter” kin term relations established through marriage, and the “son”/“daughter” kin term relations through “cross-cousin” as they are expressed in the kinship terminology. If he does marry a woman he does not refer to as “cross-cousin” before marriage, he will refer to her as “crosscousin” after marriage, which also changes the kin relation he has to her parents and other relatives. Transforming Iroquois into Crow We will now assume, as is the case for the Iroquois society, a matrilineal form of social organization along with an Iroquois terminology. The assumption is not critical as the same argument can be used with a patrilineal society with an Iroquois terminology, except that we would replace male terms in the argument by female terms and female terms by male terms. We will show how the intersection of the two sequences in the Iroquois terminology may be removed by introducing the structural equation

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(1) ka-ah’wuk (“daughter”) of ah-ga-huc (“sister of father”) = ah-ga-huc (“sister of father”) that makes the product of ka-ah’wuk with ah-ga-huc into a refexive product. The effect of this equation is to truncate what otherwise would be a sequence of female terms into a single female term, namely, ah-ga-huc. We also introduce an equation implied by Equation (1) and reciprocal equations for Equation (1), the frst based on Equation (1) for a male speaker and the other the reciprocal equation for Equation (1) for a female speaker. The result will be a kin term map showing the structural form of a Crow terminology. (If we began with an Iroquois terminology for a patrilineal society then we would derive an Omaha terminology, which is the mirror image of a Crow terminology.) The equation implied by Equation (1)is derived by frst changing kaah’wuk (“daughter”) in Equation (1) to ha-ah’wuk (“son”) by means of the kin term product equation: “brother” of “daughter” = “son.” To do this, form the kin term product of the kin terms ha’ga (“ascending brother”) and ha’je

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(“descending brother”) with each side of Equation (1), thus forming the equation: (1’) ha’ga/ha’je (“ascending/descending brother”) of ka-ah’wuk (“daughter”) of ah-ga-huc (“sister of father”) = ha’ga/ha’je (“ascending/descending brother”) of ha’nih (“father”) = ah-ga-huc (“sister of father”). Since ha’ga/ha’je (“ascending/descending brother”) of ka-ah’wuk (“daughter”) = ha-ah’wuk (“son”), (1’) reduces to: (2) ha-ah’wuk (“son”) of ah-ga-huc (“sister of father”) = ha’nih (“father”). Next, introduce the two possible reciprocal equations for Equation (1), one for a male speaker and the other for a female speaker. For a male speaker, write Equation (1) as ka-ah’wuk (“daughter”) of ah-ga-huc (“sister of father”) (Male Speaker) = ah-ga-huc (“sister of father”) (Male Speaker). The reciprocal of the kin term product ka-ah’wuk (“daughter”) of ah-ga-huc (“sister of father”) (Male Speaker) is ha-ah’wuk (“son”) of hoc-no-neh (“brother of mother”) (Female Speaker). The reciprocal of ah-ga-huc (“sister of father”) (Male Speaker) is ha-ah’wuk (“son of brother”) (Female Speaker). Thus, the reciprocal of Equation (1) for a male speaker is: (3) ha-ah’wuk (“son”) of hoc-no-neh (“brother of mother”) (Female Speaker) = ha-ah’wuk (“son of brother”) (Female Speaker). Similarly, the reciprocal equation for Equation (1) for a female speaker is:

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(4) ha-ah’wuk (“daughter”) of hoc-no-neh (“brother of mother”) (Female Speaker) = ka-ah’wuk (“daughter of brother”) (Female Speaker). Next we use Equations (1)–(4) to replace the kin term products in the kin term map that match the left side of one of these four equations by the right-hand side of the matching equation, and redraw arrows as needed. We also remove any kin terms that are isolated after doing the reduction of kin term products using Equations (1)–(4). Figure 11.4A, B shows how these four equations transform the Iroquois terminology structure. The result is the structure for a Crow terminology. The kin term maps make it visually clear that the structural effect of adding Equations (1)–(4) is to “hollow out” the “cross-cousin” kin terms from the right side of the kin term maps for male speaker and for female speaker, respectively, by introducing Equation (1) that changes ka-ah’wuk (“daughter”) of ah-ga-huc (“sister of father”) into a refexive kin term product. By making this kin term product into a refexive kin term product, the line of

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female kin terms starting on the upper left side of fgure 11.3B (see dashed arrows in fgure 11.3B) is truncated, which both leads to what is referred to as skewing in the Crow and Omaha terminologies and to removal of the two intersecting lines of female terms shown in fgure 11.2A, B. Transforming Crow to Hopi

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The transformation of the Crow terminology into the Hopi terminology will be shown for a female speaker. The transformation for a male speaker is similar. We begin with fgure 11.4B. Replace the Iroquois kin term names with equivalent Hopi kin term names (see fgure 11.5A). Next, introduce a matrilateral-patrilateral kin term distinction in the +2 generation by bifurcating the sex marked kin terms, itaha and iso’o, in the +2 generation into matrilateral and patrilateral versions of these two kin terms.

Figure 11.4A  Deriving Crow Structure (Male Speaker) from Iroquois. Source: Dwight W. Read.

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Figure 11.4B  Deriving Crow Structure (Female Speaker) from Iroquois. Source: Dwight W. Read.

We can express this bifurcation by dividing itaha into itahaM and itahaP and dividing iso’o into iso’oM and iso’oP. The “brother”/“sister” connection between itaha and iso’o is carried over to the kin terms itahaM and iso’oM and to the kin terms itahaP and iso’oP. That is, “sister” of itahaM = iso’oM and “brother” of iso’oM = itahaM and similarly for itahaP and iso’oP. The two pairs of “brother”/“sister” terms added to the +2 generation form a matri- patrilateral opposition (see fgure 11.5B). Next, the itahaP/iso’oP pair of terms is connected by iti’i (“child”) arrows to the ina’a (“father”) and ikya’a (“father’s sister”) pair of terms. Similarly, the itahaM/iso’oM pair of terms is connected by iti’i (“child”) arrows to the itaha (“mother’s brother”) and ingu’u (“mother”) pair of terms (see fgure 11.5B). In the –1 and −2 generations, we do the same thing. The terms, (male) imuyi and (female) imuyi will be divided into the pairs, (male) imuyiM and

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(male) imuyiP, and imuyiM and (female) imuyiP, respectively, thus forming the imuyiM/imuyiM maternal pair of “brother”/“sister” terms and the imuyiP/imuyiP paternal pair of “brother”/“sister” terms (see fgure 11.5B). In the −1 and −2 generations, each pair of “brother”/“sister” terms is replaced by a neutral covering term (see fgure 11.6A), with the exception that, for illustrative purposes, the covering term for the (male) iti’i (“son”) and (female) iti’i (“daughter”) pair of terms in the −1 generation is shown by [iti’i (“son”), iti’i (“daughter”)] in order to illustrate the next, and last, change in the kin term map. In fgure 11.6A, the right most sequence of female terms connected by (female) iti’i (“daughter”) kin term products is the lineal female kin term positions that determine the kin term relations structuring females in speaker’s My People. The male kin terms linked to these terms by (male) iti’i (“brother”)

Figure 11.5A  Crow Structure (Figure 11.4B) with Hopi Kin Terms. Source: Dwight W. Read.

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Figure 11.5B  Consolidating Transformation of Crow Structure to Hopi. Source: Dwight W. Read.

kin term products structure the males in speaker’s My People. The kin term positions determined by kin term products of iti’i (“child”) with these male kin terms are not kin term positions in speaker’s My People. Figure 11.6A as fgure 11.6A shows clearly the line of female kin terms that structure speaker’s My People, starting at iso’o (“mother’s mother”) and ending at imuyi (“grandchild”). Figure 11.6A also shows that the Hopi use a single kin term, imuyi (“grandchild”), to label all kin term products of iti’i (“child”) with male kin terms when the kin term product does not determine a kin term position in speaker’s My People. Of particular interest is the fact that the redrawn kin term map in fgure 11.6A shows how the line of female terms starting at iso’o (“mother’s mother”) and ending at imuyi (“grandchild”) contrasts with a line of female terms starting at iso’o (“father’s mother”), continues to ikya’a and

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then continues refexively by going back to ikya’a. This second line of female kin terms provides the structure for speaker’s My Father’s People. Thus, the skewing introduced into the terminology has the effect of creating an opposition between a line of female, matrilateral kin positions that form the terminological kin term structure for speaker’s My People, and a line of female, patrilateral kin positions that form the terminological kin term structure for speaker’s My Father’s People. This implies that for the Hopi terminology, what is being formed through the skewing equations that have been added to an Iroquois terminology and then modifed to make a Hopi terminology is not what has been called a semicomplex alliance structure, but a restructuring of the kinship terminology that creates an opposition between speaker’s My People and speaker’s My Father’s People.

Figure 11.6A  Hopi Lineage Generation. Source: Dwight W. Read.

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Figure 11.6B  Purum Asymmetric Lineage Generation. Source: Dwight W. Read.

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Purum: How to Generate “Skewing” Figure 11.6B shows the kin term map for the Purum for a male speaker. The Purum terminology is said to be an Omaha terminology, hence it should be the mirror image of a Crow terminology, but it is immediately evident that fgures 11.6B and 11.4A are not mirror images of each other. Instead, the Purum terminology has a structure comparable to that of the terminology for the Thongan pastoralists of South Africa (see Junod, 1913 for an ethnographic account of the Thonga and Read, 2018 for an account of the generative logic of the Thongan terminology). What structurally distinguishes the Thongan terminology, hence the Purum terminology, is a division of kin terms into male kin terms with structure similar to that of male terms in an Iroquois terminology (compare male terms, left side of fgure 11.2A with the male terms,

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left side of fgure 11.6B), but female terms for which the primary female terms that generate female kin terms have been reduced to just female self. The female terms, rather than being generated from primary female terms, are generated from male terms, such as “wife” of “father” = “mother” generates the “mother” kin term, rather than “mother” being a primary kin term. This leads to an asymmetric terminology (compare the structure for the female terms in the −1, −2 generations in fgure 11.6B with the structure for the male terms in the same generations). The skewing of the Purum terminology, shown by the equation ka-shnau-pa (“son”) of ka-pu (“mother’s brother”) = ka-pu, is not derived by modifying a kinship terminology (as is the case for the canonical Crow and Omaha terminologies), but results, as shown for the Thonga terminology (Read, 2018), from the generative logic for the terminology. Though the Thongan and the Purum terminologies have essentially the same structure, they differ strikingly in other aspects of their social organization. A Purum male is expected to marry his maternal genealogical crosscousin (or, alternatively, a female in the sib of his mother’s brother), whereas a marriage like this would be incestuous for the Thongans. Consequently, the marriage rule for the Purum does not derive from the kinship ideas from which their terminology is generated, as is the case for the Kariera and the Tamil terminologies, but is, instead, an external constraint imposed for reasons independent of the generative logic of the terminology. This raises the ethnographic question: Why do the Purum have a rule specifying marriage with genealogical cross-cousin? The answer to this question is not the one offered by Needham, namely, the Purum terminology is supposedly a canonical example of Lévi-Strauss’s model of a circular marriage connubium, but Das does not provide the ethnographic data we would need to answer this question. He does provide data showing the pattern for the wife-giver/wifereceiver relationship among the sibs. On the basis of what he considered to be “terms of address” Das reconstructed what he believed are “the marital relationship that existed among the different sibs before the latter were supplanted by the subsibs.” He presented these in his IX, listing what boys from each sib called girls in each sib and

Figure 11.7  Purum Wife Exchange. Source: Dwight W. Read.

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what girls in each sib called boys in each sib. Figure 11.7 summarizes this list in graphic form. The names are the sibs, the arrows go from wife-giver to wife-taker. No sib is in both a wife-giver and a wife-receiver relationship with another sib, hence the marriage rule implies that brothers and sisters do not obtain spouses from the same sib. Figure 11.7 shows that consistent application of their asymmetric matrilateral cross-cousin marriage rule does not require a circular arrangement of wife-givers with wife-receivers, as argued by Needham. The only marriage-in-a circle in fgure 11.7 is the sequence going from Makan to Thao to Marrim to Parpa and back to Makan, with a subcircle from Parpa to Thao to Marrim and back to Parpa. The Kheyang sib is not involved in any marriage-in-a-circle. While Das noted that the consequence of the marriage rule would be that each named sib is in a wife-giving/wife-receiving relation with (at least) one other sib, he also said that at the time of his feldwork sibs were giving way to subsibs. So, while some of the genealogies he collected showed that brothers and sisters did not marry into the same sib, for others this was only true of subsibs. Assuming that Das’s descriptions of the Purum genealogies and the address usage are both correct, the problem is to explain how both can exist side by side at the same time. Chapter 9 provided one answer, and it is not that sibs are breaking up. It is that the focus of kin relations is not actually the sib as a whole but the increasingly distinct descent line of each male within it. The kin term analysis complements this. What it shows is that the generative logic for the kinship terminology does not structurally recognize a matrilateral sib with respect to speaker. The kin terms that would otherwise be part of a matrilateral sib for speaker’s genealogical mother from the perspective of a male speaker are the terms “grandmother,” “mother,” “ascending/descending sister,” “niece,” and “grandchild” that would be generated by female primary terms. But these terms are not generated from primary female terms and are not vertically linked through kin term products with “daughter.” Instead, they are generated by being horizontally linked to the vertical line of male terms on the left side of fgure 11.6B and it is only with the male terms that there is a vertical line of kin terms connected by kin term products with the kin term “son.” So, the logic of the kin term analysis of the Purum terminology shown in the kin term map (see fgure 11.6B) supports the semantic and social analysis of the kinship map. When we compare the kin term map for the Purum with the kin term map for the Hopi, we see a strikingly different structural arrangement in the kin term map for the Hopi kinship terminology. As discussed above, the Hopi kin term map structurally identifes both My People for speaker’s genealogical mother and My Father’s People for speaker’s genealogical father, hence from the structural arrangement shown in the kin term map that is introduced by the transformation going from an Iroquois terminology to the Hopi terminology,

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we would expect both My People for speaker’s genealogical mother and My Father’s People for speaker’s genealogical father would be of importance in the kinship domain for speaker, as in fact is the case (see chapter 8). What the kin term maps for the Purum and the Hopi show is that the structure of a kinship terminology cannot be assumed to be derived from features of the social organization of a group with that terminology, as has often been assumed. Instead, there is a dynamic relationship between the kinship ideas through which the kinship terminology is generated and the kinship ideas relating to the social organization of the group with that terminology. Thus whereas the “skewness” of a terminology has been taken as a kinship property that needs to be accounted for, what we have shown here is skewness is an emergent property and what needs to be accounted for is, for cases like the Hopi, the equation that is introduced that leads to the emergence of skewness, or for cases like the Purum, the kinship ideas upon which the generative logic of the terminology is based that leads to skewness.

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THE KINSHIP ANALYSIS EXPERT SYSTEM (KAES) As noted, Read has formalized the process of constructing and checking kin term maps as a set of instructions that can be followed by a computer, the Kinship Analysis Expert System (KAES). It allows any user to enter a kin term map using the same ideas of position and operations that Read uses in his mathematical analyses and then reduce it to its minimal generative elements using a set of predefned logical steps. Figure 11.8 is a screen shot of the opening screen of KAES, called “mainframe.” Figure 11.9 is a screen shot of the same screen after the program has loaded a complete representation of the Tamil kinship map for a male speaker. The positions are entered one at a time, beginning with self. To enter a new position, the user clicks on “New Term” in the drop-down menu activated by clicking on the Operations button. A rectangle appears in the area of the display for the kin term map. The term is entered in the box. (The text “Click to enter kin term” has to be removed manually.) The user then goes to the left lower menu box just below the main rectangle to enter gender. The choices are neutral, male, or female. The box to the right of the gender box is to indicate whether this position is a generator. Although this has to be set by the analyst, it is not always easy for the analyst to identify the generators simply from the kinship map elicitation. Commonly, some of the direct kin are generators, but not all. It may take some experimentation to see which they are for any given kin term map. If the analyst clicks on the box to indicate the term is a generator, a further set of choices appears: ancestor, descendant, collateral + (elder or ascending

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Figure 11.8  KAES Front Page. Source: Dwight W. Read.

Figure 11.9  KAES Tamil, Male Speaker, Ready to Simplify. Source: Dwight W. Read.

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sibling), or collateral—(younger or descending sibling). The little box on the right of name entry window is to indicate whether the position is an “etc.” position, meaning a position like English “great grandfather” that is associated with a rule for ongoing continuation in the same manner. And fnally, the user clicks on “ok” on the far right to complete the entry. The windows for attributes close and little colored dots appear above, below, and to the sides of the name. The box can then be dragged to an appropriate location and connected to other positions by arrows. The program connects the arrows to the appropriate large and small colored dots on the other positions that have already been entered, and color-codes them. Dark red means a female ancestor and light red a female descendant, dark blue means a male ancestor and light blue a male descendant, dark green means a male collateral+, light green a male collateral−, and dark yellow means a female collateral+ and light yellow means a female collateral−. The top side of the rectangle is the ascendant side, the bottom side is the descendant side, the left side is the collateral+ side and the right side is the collateral− side. Arrows between equal marks mean husband of (blue) or wife of (red). Black or gray is used for neutral generating terms. Arrows start at a disk either with a dark or a light color and end at a disk with a light or dark color on the opposite side of the ending rectangle in comparison to the starting rectangle. Thus, the disk above the term name is dark blue and is for the start of an arrow for a male ancestral position. Disks below the term name are for the start of descendant arrows. Disks to the side are for connections for using collateral arrows. After the mouse is used to drag from the starting disc to the ending disc, the arrow is attached to the dot near the starting disk and is “hooked into” the ending disk. Once connected, the arrows signify incrementing kin terms that have been defned as generators: female ancestor of, female descendant of, female sibling of, and so on. For example, since amma has been defned as a female ancestor and a generator, a red arrow going upward in this Tamil map points to “amma of.” So, a red arrow from self to amma means amma is the immediate female ancestor of self, that is, it means amma of self = amma. The red arrow from amma to patti means amma of amma = patti, which is a female term. The red arrow from patti to kollu patti means amma of patti = kollu patti, which is a female term. As the kin term map is built up, the defnitions of the terms are stored as an xml fle. In this terminology, although the self position is linked to both a husband and a wife position, the links between siblings and children are only shown for a male speaker. The wife of self has to be included so the program will recognize wife as a generating term that can be applied to the male terms. To determine if all of the connections between kin terms using the generator terms have been entered and so the map is complete, use the pull-down

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menu in the box headed Map Operations and click on Map Operations > Test Map Completeness. Even before the map is complete, it can be simplifed to see how much of the generative core of the terminology has been entered in the kin term map. Whether the kin term map has been simplifed to a generative core can be determined by using Map Operations > Test Map Simplicity. Before the algebraic analysis of the kin term map can begin, the kin term map must be reduced to a simplifed form. The steps in the reduction are arranged in a sequence that appears in the pull-down menu in the box headed “Map Operations.” The reduction steps can be done in any order, but will be discussed here sequentially, starting with the topmost reduction. Simplify Structurally Similar. In a terminology such as the English Terminology, the kin term mother and the kin term father can be collapsed together to form the kin term indicated by [mother, father], which is a covering term for mother and father. In fact, this is a term recognized in the English terminology since this kin term is named parent. Structurally, this collapsing together is consistent with the pattern of arrows going to or from the kin term mother and to or from the kin term father since every outward arrow from mother is equivalent to an outward arrow from father and vice versa, while inward arrows to mother and to father are only “almost equivalent” in that the arrow directions match but not the gender of the arrow and so the gendered inward arrows become a neutral inward arrow after the collapsing together takes place. For example, in the English kin term map there will be an inward arrow showing that son of grandfather equals father but the son arrow from grandfather to father is not matched by a son arrow from grandfather to mother, hence the inward arrow to father is not matched by an equivalent inward arrow to mother. However, there is a male inward arrow to father (from grandfather) and there is a female inward arrow to mother (from grandfather). When father and mother are “combined together” to form parent, the son and daughter arrows from grandfather to father and to mother, respectively, become a child arrow and child maps grandfather to father and maps grandfather to mother. Thus, father and mother can be combined together to form parent as a covering term for father and for mother in a manner consistent with the pattern of arrows outward from father and mother and inward to father and mother. This simplifcation is central to the simplifcation of the English Kinship terminology and suggests that parent and child are the generating terms for the English terminology. The English and similar European terminologies are not the common pattern for all kinship terminologies, however. Many terminologies do not have any terms that combine together in this manner, or only have one or two terms that combine together. Simplify Same Sex (male)/Simplify Same Sex (female). These two reductions reduce the kin term map to male marked terms (female marked terms)

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according to whether the kin term can be reached from self using kin term products with just male marked (female marked) generating terms. For example, in a terminology where the kin term for “brother” of “mother” is not the same as the kin term for “brother” of “father,” the kin term “brother” of “mother” cannot be reached from self using just male generating terms. Remove Descendants/Ascendants. These two procedures remove the descendant (ascendant) kin terms from the kin term map. The descendant (ascendant) kin terms are the kin terms that are reached from self by frst using a descendant (ascendant) generating term. Remove Right (Younger)/Remove Left (Older). These two procedures remove the collateral− (collateral+) generating terms and any kin terms reached by going from Self through a collateral− (collateral+) kin term. The last three operations in this menu each activate 3–5 operations, depending on the menu item that is selected. The additional operations remove affnal terms from the kin term map, replace a kin term for which a kin term product is one-to-many by two or more versions of the kin term with each version matching just one of the one-to-many kin term products. For example, father of frst-cousin-once-removed in the English kinship terminology can either be frst cousin or great uncle, so this kin term product is changed to the two kin term products, father of frst-cousin-once-removed-A is frst cousin and father of frst-cousin-once-removed-B is great uncle. To summarize, the reduction steps include removing either male or female positions, removing ascending or descending positions (ascending meaning all positions arrived at by frst going from self to an ascending generating term), and removing the collateral positions. Different terminologies may require different reduction steps and the reduction steps for any terminology may be analyzed in more than one sequence. For example, one can begin by frst eliminating all the male terms or all the female terms and then remove the descendant terms, or one can begin by removing the descendant terms and then eliminating all the male terms or all the female terms. As parts of the map are removed, the kin term map becomes simpler. Figure 11.10 is the simplifed map for Tamil, created by removing female terms, descending terms, and affnal terms. As the reduction proceeds, the program can tell the user if the map has yet been fully simplifed. This is the generative core. Once it has been simplifed, the analyst can now seek the steps to regenerate it algebraically. Usually the reduction sequence follows the order in which the reduction steps are shown in the pull-down menu, but not always. It depends on the logic of the map. The frst step in trying to algebraically generate the kin term map is to algebraically generate the simplifed, core structure. The structural equations used to do this will be shown in the equations window and a structural diagram

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Figure 11.10  Tamil Generative Core for Figure 11.9. Source: Dwight W. Read.

of the generated algebra will be shown in the diagram window on the upper right. The next steps, each with substeps, are to generate the sibling structure if there are collateral generating terms, the descendant structure, the reciprocal structure, the sex structure, additional equivalences, and fnally the affnal structure. At each step the program generates an algebra whose structure can be displayed as a system of nodes and links. The program then compares this structure to the kin term map originally entered. If the two structures are isomorphic (i.e., their respective nodes and links correspond in a one-to-one manner), so that the generated nodes and links match those in the original diagram that is stored in memory, the program will apply the kin term names to the newly generated positions otherwise shown symbolically. If the nodes as computed do not match, the program will identify the terms for which it could not fnd a match between the generated algebraic structure and the kin term map. The English, Punjabi, and Hopi kinship maps given here have also been entered, reduced, and regenerated with KAES. For Tamil, this was done for the male and female kinship maps separately. KAES has not yet been developed to have the capacity to implement the way to join the two maps. Experience so far has shown that this can be done in several ways, and there is no reason yet to think that these are the only ones possible. So, for now, fnding how it is done in any particular case cannot be reduced to a defnite set of instructions for all cases that could be written for a computer program. As more researchers become involved and we learn the full range of ways kinship maps vary, it is quite possible that this will change.

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THE LIMITATION OF POSSIBILITIES IN KINSHIP MAPS Kinship maps are so fundamental to the way human beings objectivize their biosocial families and use these objectifcations to create patterns of mutual support and cooperation that we have to conclude that in the last phases of human physical evolution, the evolution of our heads and faces, occurred at least in part as adaptations to their articulation and use. This means that there has been no frst or original form of kinship within the life of our species; there has only been change of form. Changing a kinship map in a community while that community is using it has to be a highly constrained process, and within any user community at any point in time such constraints necessarily limit what kinds of changes can be agreed upon. Yet there is no doubt that such change occurs. People use the ideas of their kinship map to form relations to solve practical problems, and they are well aware that they do so. We have seen it in every case described here: Purum shifting marital identifcation from “sib” to “subsib” as well as the lack of chronological specifcation of “age,” Hopi rejection of anthropological interpretations of their kinship ideas as including lineages and phratries, Tamil fexibility in their use of the ideas of elder (ascending) and younger (descending) siblings to allow for marriageability, and so on. Anthropologists have long recognized that what are called the Crow and Omaha types of kinship terminologies are essentially the same thing adapted to matrilineal and patrilineal descent groups, respectively. They have described specifc groups making this change, for a variety of economic, legal, and political reasons. Fred Eggan described changes in the Choctaw kinship system from Crow to Omaha in 1937. The argument is still a classic. He compared descriptions of the terminology at several points in time from 1830 on. He also compared the ideas associated with them. These included ideas of descent, social organization (including the importance of clans), the division of labor, and the organization of the household. His conclusion was that the change responded to the Choctaw adoption of white American political and educational institutions. He compared the Choctaw changes over this period to changes in the other major related groups who had also been in Southeast and were, with a few exceptions, also later removed to Oklahoma: Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, Yuchi, and Chitimacha. His argument was that all of these originally had a Crow type terminology and the extent to which they change to the Omaha type terminology corresponded directly to their degree of “acculturation” to American society. The Choctaw were the most acculturated and made the most complete change.

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With respect to our current theory of kinship, one of the most signifcant parts of Eggan’s conclusion is that these changes occurred with little or no changes in the actual words used to name the kinship positions. Rather, the changes occurred in the meanings assigned to them. In his words:

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In this study we have not been concerned primarily with kinship terminology, but with the patterns and principles which may be abstracted from native usage. In the systems of the tribes considered there have been few lexical changes; terms have changed primarily in regard to their applications. Thus, we fnd different patterns for grouping relatives at different periods. Kinship terminology and the kinship patterns may vary independently: the terms may change without affecting the pattern, as when a simple substitution occurs or the pattern may change without affecting the terminology, or both may change. (Eggan, 1937:49)

In our words, he is saying that the terms have largely stayed the same but the kinship map and associated ideas have changed. Similarly, Shimkin (1941) described differences among kinship terminologies in ten languages in the large Uto-Aztecan group and suggested possible reasons for some of them. There are many other instances like this. Since the present theory provides a much more complete conception of what a kinship terminology system is, we can now be more systematic in saying how it changes. First, we can break the analysis of the limitation of possibilities into changes in the kinship map and the kin term map. We can readily see how many changes in the kinship map can be under some kinds of conscious social control, as already noted. It is much more diffcult to see how this could happen in changes in the underlying generative structure that shows up more clearly in the kin term map. At both levels, however, the principle works stochastically. That is, there is not one fxed list of possible options for all kinship maps and all kin term maps, but rather there are a few major possibilities and whichever is chosen, this, in turn, opens a few new ones, and so on. At both levels and at all times, the frst and most critical constraint that shapes what is possible is the necessity for the kinship map to be logically consistent from the point of view of every user. A second constraint is the logical necessity for a rule of incest, as described in chapter 6. The third constraint is the demographic size of the community from which one can draw a spouse at any point in time, which is also the size of the community that has to come to agreement on any change. The fourth is that since there has to be an incest prohibition that says who cannot procreate, there also has to be a contrasting defnition or recognition of who can. This must be consistent with the incest prohibition but need not be limited to it. But it does have to be

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a “rule of the road” that everyone can agree on and apply to themselves and all others. These constraints all operate simultaneously, and each narrows the options available when making changes in the terminology.

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THE LIMITATION OF POSSIBILITIES IN KIN TERM MAPS There are also logical constraints limiting the possible ways to form the kin term structure that underlies kinship maps. These have pervasive effect on the kinship maps as conceptual wholes that interact with or infuence their specifc distinctions, such as the meaning of the sister–brother relation in contrast to parent–child. And since they would be much harder for a community of users to change by explicit community agreement or by changing what seems “right” or desirable in a shifting community consensus, it seems very likely that they mark long-standing historical types. All of this is a new topic and we are just at the beginning stages of exploring it. Read’s 2013 article synthesizes the results up to that point in time. After reviewing the typologies up to Murdock’s six types as we have in chapter 2, plus a few subsequent qualifcations, the article provides comparative discussions that include the kinship map for Punjabi as in fgure 3.1, algebraic kin term maps for English corresponding to the kinship map of fgure 5.4, for Shipibo, and Kariera corresponding to the kinship map of fgures 2.2 and 2.3, for Polish as partly represented in fgure 2.1, for a reconstruction of Proto-Polynesian, and for Tamil as in fgure 11.1. We have not provided enough background to review the details of the argument here, but the general conclusion should be understandable. The “typology” this leads to is not simply a static exercise in classifcation. His main groups are as for kinship maps: “descriptive,” “classifcatory,” and “other.” Descriptive and classifcatory distinguished by the same features we have recognized for kinship maps: separate descending collateral lines contrasted with more inclusive classes of siblings. “Other” is a category where the distinction does not apply. In each case he explains why an example of one type, such as Kariera, could not be changed into another of a different type, such as English, in the same way English, for example, could be transformed to another in the same category, such as Punjabi. Basically, the reason is that the necessary change would be so fundamental it would require creation of a whole new system. And if these features are so deeply buried and diffcult to change, they must tell us something about evolutionary relationships. The kinship maps and kin term maps are at the bottom. The key generative features leading to them are the small drawings in the middle, repeated from the individual discussions.

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Figure 11.11  Read’s Kinship Typology. Source: Dwight W. Read.

This is not an evolutionary tree; it is a generative tree. The levels from top to bottom indicate increasing specifcation of the generative process. The top level is kinship terminologies—meaning all kinship terminologies, not the frst kinship terminology. The second level has four divisions, according to the terms that make up the basic generating set for the ascending structure in Read’s algebraic analysis, as confrmed with the KAES program. From left to right they are: (1) generating set is a parental term, (2) generating set is a parental term plus sibling term, and (3) generating set is the parental term and one sibling term—older or younger. The way the generators generate a terminology is stated by what Read calls “structural equations.” A structural equation is a statement such as father of father = grandfather for English. Having generated ascending positions, a descending generator (or pair of generators) that mirrors the ascending generator(s) generates the descending positions, so the descending and ascending relations are reciprocals of one another. The structural equation that establishes that two relations are reciprocal is (ascending generator term) of (descending generator term) = self (2013:12). This is a major difference between the algebraic analysis and the elicitation of the kinship map using the direct kin as a cultural frame. The direct kin have the idea of reciprocity built into it. It is implied in the confguration of direct kin. But this means that reciprocity is being represented

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as the consequence of the generative logic of a terminology and not as part of that generative logic. To do the later, the notion of kin terms being reciprocal to each other has to be given an analytic defnition so that the logical consequences of reciprocity of kin terms can be part of the generative logic for a kinship terminology. Thus, the algebraic analysis requires the analyst to introduce the concept of reciprocity through the structural relation that is involved for one kin term to be the reciprocal of another kin term. For the generating terms, the structural relation is expressed through the structural equation of the form (ascending generating term) o (descending generating term) = self, for example, for English speakers parent and child are reciprocal generating terms since parent o child = self. The order in which the kin term product is computed is critical since if we write the kin term product in the other order, we would have child o parent and child o parent = sibling for English speakers. Within each type, one kinship map (terminology) can be transformed into another by changing the structural defnitions. But a terminology in one type cannot be transformed into a terminology in another type in this manner. This can only be done by changing the generative elements themselves (Read, 2013:12). The lines descending from the second row of distinctions to the specifc kin term maps represented at the bottom show the main additional choices that are involved in the generative process. In the frst group, represented by English, there is no difference between the terms of a relative linked through a female, such as mother and through a male, such as father. So, the generators are self and a generic parent—not sex marked. This generates a structure of collateral lines indicated in the frst diagram, to which sex marking is added to generate the fnal diagram. The second line of development in the table leads to Polish. This also has collateral lines, like English, but cannot be generated in the same way because Polish has father’s and mother’s sides, like Punjabi, and in Polish a relative on the father’s side has a different term from a structurally isomorphic relative on the mother’s side. So, generators are a male self and male parent, which generates a male structure and a mirror-image female self and female parent that generates a female structure with the same shape but different terms. The two are joined by a cover term that equates the two, which can be semantically rendered as a male taking the position of his wife and vice versa, to create all of the terminologically recognized combinations. The third line, with two sublines, starts from the top with two branching collateral lines, like Polish, representing a set of mother’s side relations and a set of father’s side relations. But they come together in the generations below ego in different ways, generated by the second set of equations.

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The second main branch, using a sex-marked self, sex-marked parent, and sex-marked ascendant (or elder sibling) to generate parallel male and female core structures, leads to different types of classifcatory systems, depending on how the two structures are linked. The table gives the equations that are involved in each case. Here is Read’s summarizing conclusion: The kin term products that culture-bearers use in computing kin relationships make it evident that there is structure to the terms in a kinship terminology independent of mapping kin terms onto genealogical positions. We make that structure visually evident through a kin term map. We then work out whether there is a generative logic for the kinship terminology structure. If so (and this has been the case for all terminologies considered to date), we are determining, through generating terms, structural equations, and structural ways to join distinct structures into a single structure, the structural properties that give rise to the structural form of a terminology through kin term products. This provides us with the foundation for working out a typology of kinship terminologies based on the properties responsible for the structural differences among kinship terminologies, hence to a typology that ensures that the terminologies grouped together in the typology are homogeneous with respect to the structural properties that determine the form of a kinship terminology. . . . This makes possible a more meaningful, cross-cultural comparison of kinship terminologies and provides a sounder foundation than has been available previously for working out the relationship between terminology structure and form of social organization as discussed above.

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And here is where his argument implicitly addresses the limitation of possibilities, where diachronic comparison means comparison at different points in time: Structural comparison invites diachronic and not just synchronic comparison. Some changes in structure are more plausible than others; e.g., dropping the rule in the AKT for terms where sex marking is preserved could, from a structural viewpoint, easily be dropped, thereby leading to a terminology with all kin terms sex marked. Changing a Kariera-like terminology with terms that incorporate an ‘older/younger‘ distinction for sibling regardless of the sex of speaker to a Polynesian-like terminology in which that distinction only occurs among samesex sibling terms is not a matter of “erasing” the distinction on opposite-sex sibling terms, but requires restructuring the way the structure of male terms and the structure of female terms are joined together to form a single structure, hence is a structurally more complex transformation. Just as evolutionary patterns can be worked out linguistically from changes in word forms, evolutionary patterns can be worked out from changes in structural forms, as Read (2013) has shown

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for the Polynesian terminologies. Even more broadly, working out the structural logic of a terminology makes explicit what is meant by the oft-repeated claim that culture is a constructed reality, for the kin relations expressed through a kinship terminology are both “real” for the users of the terminology, yet constructed through a generative logic acting on the cultural knowledge embedded in a kinship terminology. (2013:21–23)

Although Read did not use explicitly the idea of the limitation of possibilities, this addresses the same process. At each point in time, a kinship map and its underlying kin term map have a few features that are relatively easy to change, others that are more diffcult, and others that cannot be changed at all without using entirely different generative principles. So, in this way, both kinship maps and kin term maps shape their own development. The process parallels divergent and convergent evolution in biological organisms. But there is a stunningly important difference. In the case of biological evolution, the process is material, as are the constraints. Here, the process and the constraints are very largely conceptual and logical. The things that are diverging and converging are systems of reciprocal ideas organized into very defnite formal arrangements.

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CONCLUSION Mathematicians and logicians often become convinced that there is something like a “force of reason” in the universe that is quite comparable to the force of gravity or the laws of motion. It is not something we can alter by changing a defnition; it is something we must obey. Many philosophers have made similar claims. The alternative is simpler and more in accord with what is observable: the force of reason is not “out there,” it is “in here.” It is built into reasoning itself, and reasoning itself is built into our social life. It is our ability to recognize when two ideas are the same or different together with our ability to look ahead at the implications of an idea and see if they are heading for a self-contradiction or some other kind of confusion. This prevision is not perfect; no one can instantaneously see all possible ways an idea can be self-consistent or self-contradictory. Nor is it private. People often disagree about it. But we also discuss these disagreements and we often can come to agreement. If we do, it exists in consensus, not just in the privacy of our “own” minds. The force of reason is that which allows us to do this, and it is that which such discussions and agreements establish. A kin term product can be formalized algebraically as a binary operation. The idea of a binary operation—a way of expressing the idea that there is a means by which two entities are connected to a third entity, is the minimal

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way of expressing a causal relation: A acts on B to produce C. This is well tested as a minimal element of generative thought that can be used to build up systems of interrelated concepts and defnitions without self-contradictions or other confusions, such as ambiguities or vagueness. That is, thought can create a hypothetical future world based on models for behavior, rather than thought being limited to look back on an empirical past described through models of past behavior. Thought can produce models for behavior and not just models of behavior. The sine qua non of coherent social systems is the predictability of behavior. This is provided by models for behavior. We do not mean just theoretical models of outside analysts. We mean the ongoing models of participants, the indigenous “actors” who are also, of course, reasoners, designers, cooperators, and communicators. In this sense, the terminology generated in the manner discussed here is central to the formation of cohesive and coherent social relations. What we have demonstrated here is a procedure that lets us rewrite the terms and structure revealed by eliciting kinship maps. This makes it possible to show the underlying logic through which the terms and their structure refect the force of reason in the sense discussed here and thereby culturally forms a constructed reality within which social interaction takes place. In this constructed reality, shared meaning arises through the generative logic for the defnition and structural organization of kinship relations. This is an enormous advance in the analysis of kinship systems and social organization in general. In a more direct way than almost anything else that has been proposed heretofore, it lets us see why human beings had to develop the mental capacity they have in order to have the kinds of fexible, pluralistic, and all-encompassing communicable social organization that they have. Of course, one did not come before the other; they had to be developed together. In chapter 4 we described the elements of the “revolution of the Upper Paleolithic,” when Homo sapiens emerged as the single dominant form of the genus Homo. Along with more complex tools, the revolution is recognized as involving many of our most distinctive cultural forms: music, dance, sculpture, painting, bodily decoration, and, we have argued, philosophy, kinship, and pluralistic social organization based on the use of multiple social idea systems. But underneath all of this, and making it all possible, we should also include the discovery of the force of reason in the sense of the collective development, in communication, of shared systems of thought based on the principle of self-consistency. The basic binary operations involved in Read’s analysis and implemented in the Kinship Analysis Expert System must be taken in the most abstract and formal sense possible, as Read emphasizes. Only then can they be stripped

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of our cultural content in order to become carriers for the cultural content we are trying to represent. We can illustrate this with the concept of siblings. As indicated, siblings may be conceptualized in two broadly different ways. For English speakers, your siblings are the children of your parents other than yourself. For English speakers, then, the sibling relation is a derived and not a primary relation. It is derived from “self,” “parent,” and “child.” But this is not universal. As one kinship theorist has phrased it, in some cultures, the speaker perceives that (s)he “shares . . . common ascent with his[/ her] siblings” (Dziebel, 2007:233), that is, siblings are those persons who share parents in common. Empirically, groups with this conception of sibling have classifcatory terminologies (Dziebel, 2007). The underlying structural explanation for this empirical fnding can be seen in how we generated the Tamil kin term algebra. When siblings are conceptualized as those persons who share the same parent, then sibling is being conceptualized as a generating term, and so the generating terms for the male ascending structure are male self, “brother” and “father,” or equivalently, the generating terms for the female structure are female self, “sister,” and “mother.” Thus, under this concept of sibling, the ascending and descending structure for the terminology will be generated in the same manner as for the Tamil terminology, hence the resulting terminology will be a classifcatory terminology. It is this difference in how siblings are conceptualized—in a descent sense from parents or in an ascent sense to parents—that determines whether the terminology will be descriptive or classifcatory. Our job, then, is to “go native,” in the sense of seeing the kinship world through their concepts and the logical implications of their concepts. But it is also to understand how we have done so and to explain it to others. In most cases the local counterparts to our ideas have been established by consensus on how to translate between our respective languages, such as Morgan’s locally established “translations.” Such consensus is often built up through intercultural communication that has been going on for generations. NOTE 1. Terminologies examined to date with kin term maps (identifed by the name of a group) include American-English (1984), Burushko (Read n.d.), Crow (this chapter; Read 2019a), Hadza (Read 2019b), Fanti (Read 2016), Hokha Chin (Read n.d.), Kariera (Leaf and Read 2012), !Kung San (Read 2019b), Omaha (Read 2019a), Polish (Read 2013), Punjabi, Purum (this chapter), Shipibo (Read and Behrens 1990, this chapter), Tamil (Read 2010), Thonga (Read 2018), Tonga (Bennardo and Read 2007), Trobriand (Read and Behrens 1990).

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Conclusion

Human beings live by cooperating with one another. Central to that cooperation is participation in organizations. Humans in a community maintain many organizations in mind collectively while switching between them in going from one situation to another individually. Organizations are created through the common use of idea systems that are transmitted and developed through the use of language in practical circumstances. Many other species also live in organized communities and communicate, but as far as we know no other species uses idea systems and grammatical spoken language and no other species maintains anything even beginning to approximate the human level of organizational pluralism. Anthropologists have always recognized the association among human kinship, language, and social organizations. The problem has been to form an empirically sound conception of what each of them are and how they relate to one another. Attempts to solve this problem have differed profoundly, drawing on two entirely different views of human knowledge. One view revolves around experimental science with skepticism as its philosophical expression. The other revolves around dogmatic philosophy, mainly as represented by the long-running dispute between idealism and materialism. In the nineteenth century, the balance of authority between empiricism and dogmatism was shifted strongly in favor of experimental science by the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. This provided a powerful stimulus for a range of new social and behavioral sciences in the new research universities, including psychology and anthropology. At the same time however, new versions of the argument between idealism and materialism gained popularity in a swelling stream of pseudo-scientifc political movements outside the universities: socialism, communism, and positivism. 289

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Academic anthropology began frmly in the Kantian tradition, beginning around 1860 (Leaf, 1979:106–29). But conceptions based on positivist philosophy became steadily more prominent in the feld from about the beginning of the twentieth century, beginning with academic sociology. By the 1980s, this perspective dominated kinship studies and culminated in the kinship apocalypse. One of the two most important arguments in this development had recognized that the specifc part of language that was most relevant to understanding kinship organizations was what they called “kinship terminology.” But their positivistic assumptions made it impossible for them to understand what terminologies actually were. Two such assumptions were especially destructive. One was the idea that scientifc theory had to be deterministic and rule out human free will and choice. The other was that science could not recognize ideas as observable phenomena. It is true that almost nothing is unambiguously observable without experimental methods to constrain and limit the observation, but once such methods are developed all sorts of things become observable with calculable precision, and ideas are among them. We have described here a renewed anthropology of kinship based on the epistemology, methods, and procedures of experimental science. In Human Thought and Social Organization, we described this as a “new science” (Leaf and Read, 2012). When one reviewer said he could not understand what this meant as it was explained in the book, we addressed his misunderstanding in an additional article that was even clearer (Leaf and Read, 2014). If anyone reading this has doubts about the present description of what science is, the best way to address them would be to become knowledgeable in one of the experimental sciences that already exists, at least well enough to understand articles written by the practitioners of that science and published in the disciplinary journals. If this is not feasible, a viable alternative is to consult the literature in the history of science that developed in the 1960s to counter the positivist misrepresentations. This was developed primarily by historians of science who also held Ph.D.s in the sciences they were describing. One of the most important was Peter Galison’s Image and Logic: a Material Culture of Micro Physics (1997). Another, which more directly addresses the kinds of issues that concern the social sciences, was Shapin and Schaffer’s 1985 Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985). For anthropology specifcally, the issues were described in Leaf’s 1979 Man Mind and Science: a History of Anthropology. There is also more background in Human Thought and Social Organization (Leaf and Read, 2012). The formal/empirical analysis discussed here is accurately described as a new science for two main interrelated reasons. The frst is that it identifes two new types of phenomena, not previously recognized. One is the kinship

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map, along with other idea systems with similar generative structures that are used in human communities to create organizational charters. The other is the kin term map. The second reason is that it describes distinctive experimental procedures that expose and delineate these new phenomena, just as Mendel’s pea experiments exposed “genes” as the units of inheritance and Priestley’s mercury experiment provided a way to identify and separate out different atmospheric gasses. For the kinship map, this is the elicitation method based on discovered cultural frames. For the kin term map, it is the method of generating the kin term map as an analytic structure isomorphic to the kinship map, but from the minimal possible number of indigenous concepts by an explicit and replicable series of steps. The method for eliciting kinship maps is to identify what people in the community recognize as their direct kin, arrayed around a “self,” and to use this as the eliciting frame to obtain the rest of the map. The elicitation process involves identifying an appropriate group, agreeing upon appropriate symbols with them, making a drawing of the direct kin that they recognize as correct, and then adding additional positions by extending the drawing outward until they say that the boundaries of the system have been reached, following the principle that each distinct, named relation should be represented in the drawing only once. Of course, the process should be repeated with other groups and the analyst should predict kinship usages based on the map and check those predictions (Leaf, 2008). The same basic elicitation method can be used for all other types of social ideas systems. It is only necessary to fnd out how their core generative ideas are defned and proceed according to its own internal logic. Once the crucial idea system has been elicited, additional ideas reported as connected to this foundation can be elicited in the same way. That is, after the kinship map is elicited in a society it may be determined that some kinship organizations are defned with an idea of property. The analyst can then ask what this idea of property is. This might be done by the same method or additional methods, such as analyzing wills or observing ceremonies of property transfer. In every case however, the process should amount to creating a series of interconnected experiments that both uses and tests the idea that such a system of ideas exists, that it is established in consensus, and that it has a generative structure. In the case of kinship and in every known society, attached ideas always include conceptions of birth, marriage, and death. Others are less universal, although in any given society they may be pervasively important. Such more localized ideas include the Purum ideas of age, the Hopi idea of a people, the Seneca idea of village center and forest, and the Tamil ideas of caste, property, and social rank. Many ideas are associated with specifc kinship

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organizations. Examples described here include the Hopi ideas of household and kiva, the Seneca idea of a family, Tamil ideas of cast occupation and household division of labor, the American legal contrast between a domicile and a workplace, and the Kariera idea of a clan totem that links a person to a specifc territory. And some ideas mark the progression of individuals through their kinship organizations: the ideas of the stages of life, birthdays, name changes associated with the birth of one’s children, and so on. Since previous approaches to kinship did not recognize kinship maps, they had no starting point from which to trace out the rest of the kinship idea system as a coherent whole. So they also had no way to distinguish kinship behavior or kinship organizations from other kinds of behaviors associated with other kinds of organizations. Instead, they built up classifcations based on partial views of kinship maps and arbitrary assumptions about what kinship had to be based on—mainly genealogy in some form. It was not possible for this type of approach to lead to an integrated description of kinship even though many who struggled with this task have shared our conviction that a primarily obligation of anthropology was to represent, rather than discount or demean, indigenous thought. We have cited Titiev and Whitely for the Hopi. We should also note Robert McKinley’s 1971 article on the Crow/Omaha distinction, urging that anthropologists

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begin to consider the ideological roles of these systems: that we consider them not merely as passive and imperfect mirrors of the social system but rather as active elements which are often working to fll the gaps in the social system as it exists. (1971:408)

We agree, and Read has in fact worked out the generative structure of the Crow/Omaha kin term ideology (Read, 2018) using the same methods as for Tamil (Read, 2010) and Kariera (Leaf and Read, 2012). But once we understand this, we should also see that we can obtain a more complete and accurate understanding of any given society by using these more appropriate methods, bypassing inherited incomplete categorizations and confusions by using a cultural frame analysis to elicit the indigenous ideas directly. CLASSIFICATIONS OF KINSHIP SYSTEMS Classifcation has a fundamental role in all the physical sciences, but it is not that classifcation must precede experiment. It is because classifcations have to embody experimental results. It took chemists nearly a century to develop the frst periodic table, and it is still growing. Scientifc classifcations arise through careful empirical analysis and incorporate its results. They do not rest

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on the selection and classifcation of objects by features that may be superfcial. They rest on demonstrations of what features are crucial. First, we have the three general divisions between terminologies according to their most basic generators: ascendant term/concept only, ascendant term/ concept plus sibling, and ascendant term/concept sibling term/concept, and an older younger term/concept. Each of these has further variations introduced as their generative steps are further specifed. But as we have also shown, these features do not go together lockstep. Several features, such as different types of what anthropologists have identifed as cross-cousin marriage, that occur early in the generative logic of some types of kin term maps are addons that can be considered fairly superfcial in others. So of course we could also classify kin term maps for such specifc features, depending on what problems we wanted to investigate. For kinship maps, by contrast, a binomial system suggests itself based on language, community, and shape. This is roughly the way anthropologists have described terminologies in the previous theoretical dispensations, as when Lowie described the Hopi terminology as “bifurcate merging.” With a clear understanding that “terminologies” are actually kinship maps, we can be much more precise about how to do it. Shape means topological shape, in the sense of the way their boundaries are defned, the types of defned nodes they have, their attributes, and their interconnections to one another. Once we draw them, their similarities and differences are obvious. We have noted that the English kinship map is the same shape as Czech, except that Czech distinguish male from female cousins by terminological endings indicating gender. The same is true of most of the other Indo-European languages of central and western Europe. This means that their terms are direct translations of one another and they all have the same underlying concepts of what kinship itself is. Similarly, we have noted that Punjabi and Hindustani have the same shape and their terms are direct translations of one another. To this group, we can add all the other IndoAryan languages of North India: Gujarati, Marathi, Rajasthani, Kashmiri, Nepali, and Bengali, with some variations. For South India, the Tamil kinship map topologically matches Telugu and Kannada among others. There is no need at this time to say how many groups of such clearly similar kinship maps there are. But there are many more than six. Understanding kinship maps also allows us to extract and accurately classify specifc features, as we have done. We can speak specifcally about kinship maps that differ for male and female speakers as against those that do not. We can focus on kinship maps that distinguish father’s brother from father. We can speak about maps that end with specifc generations, and we can describe the way they end. Either they specify a single ancestral level, as Punjabi and Purum do in different ways, or they envision permanently

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distinct decent lines like Kariera, and so on. We can clearly distinguish kinship maps in which spouse positions are defned by a descent relationship or where spouse positions are not defned as also related some other way. We can separate out kinship maps in which positions can be extended indefnitely horizontally, as with the North Indian languages such as Punjabi, or where they can be extended indefnitely vertically, as English and the Western European languages, or where they defne closed systems, like Tamil. These specifc features can include the underlying generative patterns that connect male and female perspectives. It already seems clear that they underlie groups of languages related linguistically, like English and Czech in contrast with Tamil and Telugu. Moreover, as should now be clear, we can fnd kin term maps with the same generative techniques in unrelated languages. And since this is so, we now have a new way to investigate with precision the historical evolution of important organizational systems independently of language (see, for example, Read, 2013). On the basis of the analyses described here and similar work to date, we recommend a polynomial nomenclature like that of biology. The terms should be descriptive and presented in a fxed order. In biology, the most common order is genus, species, then possibly variety. But there is no problem adding higher-level categories at the beginning or more varietal information at the end. We can use the same idea here. The three main terms we recommend are language, region, and cultural community. Using this system, the main kinship maps we have described here, in order, would be: Pama-Nyungan Kariera, Indo-Aryan Punjabi, English North American, Indo-European Czech, UtoAztecan Hopi, Sino-Tibetan Old Kuki Purum, Dravidian Tamil (standard), Iroquoian Seneca, and Dravidian Tamil (Nanjilnattu Vellalar). Individual characterizations can be changed without causing confusion. For example, we could describe English North American as Indo-European English North American, or Indo-Aryan Punjabi as Indo-Aryan Eastern Panjab Punjabi. As with biology, there is no need to specify all possible categories in advance. We can add as we proceed, based on what we fnd. Languages and geographical regions both provide bases for natural hierarchies. Juxtaposing the classifcation of kinship maps based on language family and shape with the typology of generative systems that emerges from the analysis of kin term maps provides a systematic way to organize and prioritize a wide array of problems across most of the social and behavioral sciences. First of all, of course, we have been asking and now can ask more systematically if the three features co-occur? Do shapes vary by language? Do shapes vary by community? Second, we can ask questions like “Do linguistic structures—such as how nouns are assembled—affect shape?” Third, there are questions that arise from looking at regional patterns. Purum is like Chin and Kachin in shape, and they are Sino-Tibetan. Purum

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is unlike Bengali in shape but a lot like Tamil, which is not Sino-Tibetan. We have good evidence that the Dravidian languages formerly extended to the Himalayas and into what is now Baluchistan, before the Indo-Aryan languages spread across the Indo-Gangetic plains. They probably also bordered the Sino-Tibetan speaking areas further east. So, is the resemblance in shape (and semantics) between these Sino-Tibetan terminologies and the Dravidian terminologies a legacy of this contact before the Indo-Aryan intrusion, which was about 1700 BP? Or are does it respond to similar demographic circumstances, such as small intermarrying communities? Fourth, we can return to the question of the logical reasons for common forms in unrelated languages in many new ways and at many levels, and there are many more.

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WHAT DOES KINSHIP EXPLAIN? If we restore kinship to its previous place as a central concern of anthropological theory, what can we expect it to explain? Evolutionary questions of Morgan’s kind are still dead. There is no reason to expect that different kinds of kinship systems refect different levels of evolutionary development, either in the social or individual sense. There is no reason to think any system surviving today is the frst system. There is no reason to think that any system is more “descriptive” than another as a refection of what kinship really is, or more precise as a type of human thinking. There is no reason to think different systems refect or require different levels of mental development. There is no reason to think that any one society, no matter how technologically simple, has ever been based entirely on kinship; there are very strong reasons for thinking this is impossible. Human societies are and probably always have been pluralistic organizationally. There is therefore also no reason to think that a most primitive kinship system must also have been the frst religion, the frst government, or what have you. All of this is ethnocentric conceit; it is an appeal to our willingness to think of ourselves as more sophisticated, culturally complex, and even more human than those we claim to describe. So now that we see what the study of kinship is as a truly experimental science, have we also stripped it of the questions that made it attractive? Probably for some, but not in fact. Anthropology has always been part of the larger public debate for or against racial, ethnic, and cultural prejudice and for or against democracy. Kinship was a central topic because understanding it is a necessary part of this struggle. One of our most important tasks now, as a species, is to expand law and the reach of justice. Every society with kinship has a de facto system of family

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law. This includes concepts of what an individual is, one or more kinds of family organization, what kinds of property they are associated with, and what kinds of rights and obligations are associated with this property. But such family law is often out of accord with the formal law of the nation-states within whose boundaries, or across whose borders, these communities live. It follows that many nation-states, probably most, have the problem of extending their system of written laws enforced by courts to all of these cultural communities in a way that is just, practical, and promotes political stability and the development of democracy. In some cases the family law of a cultural community, built into its kinship system, is inconsistent with basic principles of human rights as articulated in national constitutions and international statements such as the United Nations’ Declaration on Human Rights. This happens, for example, if there is a system of marriage that compels people to marry who are below the legal age of consent, or that forces anyone to marry against their will or into familial situations that amounted to involuntary servitude. Such customs are often alleged as a right by those who defend them and as a violation of rights by those who oppose them. But without a clear way to determine what the kinship map is, what groups are organized with it in genuine social consensus, and what rules actually are applied within these groups, there is no way to evaluate these claims or negotiate alternatives. This theory allows such analysis and negotiation. Of course, it does not determine the outcome. In a very different vein, it is widely recognized that certain types of kinship-based property regimes discourage investment in land in ways that will increase agricultural production. In West African villages, for example, land is controlled by the village as a whole as represented by its “elders” or “headman.” A newly married couple seeks permission from them to occupy and farm land for themselves. As their family grows their land may also grow. But if their family shrinks or breaks up the land will revert to the village. They do not own it and cannot sell it. In consequence, no family has an incentive to invest in the land itself, and the productivity of land remains at an ecological minimum. With increasing population this is an increasing problem throughout the region. Land rights have to change, and in order to change them it is frst of all important to know what they are precisely and who to involve in deciding what the change should be. A contrary problem also exists. Other property regimes, often based on radical conceptions of individual ownership that exclude family and more extended kinship rights, discourage or prevent families and larger local communities from exercising oversight that would prevent individuals or companies from engaging in agricultural or other productive practices that are socially and environmentally destructive. These, too, need to be better

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described in order to be better adjusted in a democratic manner enforceable by courts under a rule of law. We now have the means to do this as well. Yet another area where we see an urgent need for better understanding concerns the role of the family in fundamental socialization. In the nineteenth century and the beginning of twentieth, many governments, including democratic governments, thought they had problems with culturally different ethnic minorities that they could resolve through cultural assimilation. So they designed programs for forcibly removing children from their parents for a large part of their early lives in order to send them to boarding schools or foster homes. These institutions were supposed to raise them under what were commonly seen to be much better and more modern conditions, thus painlessly ending the process of perpetuating values and social organizations that were not in their interest and assuring their future well-being. It is now recognized on all sides that such programs failed. They created alienation and hostility. They were culturally destructive. They were socially destructive. And they were individually destructive. Families cannot be replaced in this way as nurturing organizations. Despite their differences, as far as we can see, every historically evolved kinship system teaches those who grow up within it what they need to become an effective functioning member of all other types of organizations in that society as well. There is much more to human social organization than what can be taught in formal schools. The present analysis lets us begin to see what that is. What families teach begins literally from birth and includes the most fundamental concepts that make us human, and that we all share. They teach us concepts such as I and thou, reciprocity, the difference between egocentric and sociocentric social conceptions, and all the things that clothe our personal feelings of hunger, thirst, the need to be hugged, the yearning for affection, the yearning to love, joy in the company of others, irritation with behaviors that disturb others, and so on. They give our fundamental biosocial character its frst cultural and linguistic forms that allow us to expand what we learn in these early familial settings to all of the many other social organizations we participate in thereafter, whether of “our own” culture or others. This familial function must be preserved, and there is no reason to think that there is any society with a kinship system where these most fundamental ideas cannot be reconciled with the political and legal values of any civilized nation that respects basic human rights. But again, to preserve and support this basic social function that all kinship systems perform, we must be able to understand exactly what such kinship systems are, in every case. It is doubtless true that Native Americans, Canadian First Nations, Tribal communities in India and Pakistan, Tibetans in Chinese Tibet, Hill Tribes in Burma, indigenous Amazonians, and Australian Aborigines among many

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others have been victims of prejudice and misrepresentation by dominant societies. It is true that some of this has happened even though better understanding was available. There has been conscious and willful brutality. There has been genocide. But there are also many cases where persecuted minorities are not purely victims of the imbalance of power. They are much more the victims of ignorance that the imbalance of power allowed those with power to act upon. In such cases, better social science can provide the way out. It can provide the common ground for people of good will on all sides to work from. Finally, cultural minorities are not the only groups in the world today concerned with moral, legal, and ethical problems in the conceptualization of kinship. America, and “the West,” has its problems with same-sex marriage, LGBTQ rights, views of kinship entangled in religious dogma, limits on religious tolerance, women’s rights, parental rights, and all sorts of familyrelated policy matters relating to education, health, and welfare. China had its problems with limiting births; now it has problems with the consequences. Countries with large Muslim populations (and some others) have problems with deciding whether or not polygamy should be legal, and so on. Kinship is here to stay. It is important to have an accurate and verifable way to say what it is in any given case, and what it is not.

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WHAT EXPLAINS KINSHIP? Finally, we come to the problem of understanding kinship itself. Why do we do it? Why is it so central to what we are as a species and how have we been shaped by it both as a species and as individuals? First of all in an ontological sense, the explanation depends on the fact that the kinship map is complete and coherent, as demonstrated both visually and mathematically through the kin term map. The coherence of kinship organizations, and in a larger sense of kinship institutions, depends on and is caused by the fact that we (human beings) have a coherent and consistent framework of defned reciprocal relationships, into which we can insert additional content, such as ideas of rights, specifc social roles, ideas of gender, and of course ideas of descent and marriage. So, one explanation of kinship is coherence. All living things that move in nature must see their surroundings as coherent. The problem to overcome in becoming human was to recreate that coherence in the imagination, conceptually, as a property of the ideas that we use to create and communicate objective social relationships. In an organizational sense, the answer is that kinship enables a new form of social organization-based systems of social relations that transcend the limitations of the face-to-face forms of social interaction that characterizes the

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nonhuman primates (Leaf and Read, 2012; Read, 2012). It provides a socially recognizable way for a man and woman to be linked together to produce and rear children in a biosocial system where a fundamental unit is the woman and her children, where men are attached to such women pairwise, and where the women and men also cooperate with one another in ways that will assure the survival of all. Human kinship, in contrast to that of chimpanzees, gorillas, and all other primates does this in a way that supersedes isolated primate groups and enables male–female pairs and their offspring to form aggregates for cooperation whose size and shape is not limited by physiology, biological relatedness, or their immediate awareness of each other’s physical presence (Voorips, Read and Gabora, 2020). It is limited only by their imaginations and communicative abilities. This involves creating societies based not only on kinship but also on organizational pluralism. Kinship can only exist conceptually in contrast with nonkinship. There is no human society that has ever been described that has only kinship organizations, and there is no evidence that there has been any such society in the past for our species, Homo sapiens. Many of the types of organizations that make up our social pluralism are now global: universities, businesses, militaries, professions are but a few. They are worldwide and a person from any one country can go to the same type of organization in almost any other country as a recognizable member. This organizational reach makes an important contribution to our present dominance as a species. This kind of pluralism created the conditions for the last stage of human physical evolution. Pre-Homo sapiens social organization created conditions in which individuals with greater mental capacity and capacity for language had advantages over those with less, and groups with such individuals had advantages over groups without them. At some point, groups emerged with the profle of conceptual and communicative capacities we now see in human societies. At that point, in the Upper Paleolithic and apparently for Homo sapiens only, we see the emergence of ideas of “self,” “us,” and “other” not only as singularities but as pluralities. We see the idea that individuals have varieties of self, us, and other—multiple conceptualized roles to take on, multiple conceptualized life changes to go through. And it is also at this time, especially in what we recognize as art, that we also see the beginning of the idea of ideas. We have said in chapter 4 that the artifacts and art of the upper Paleolithic embody the crucial formal concepts needed to conceptualize kinship maps and their uses in forming kinship organizations: ideas of an individual, a class, of classes of classes, and the recognition that you can go on in such a hierarchy indefnitely if you can keep it all in mind. We have described the ways each of these appears in kinship maps: the idea of a self as an individual,

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the idea of a kinship position as a class of one or many, the idea of classes of classes such as all kinship positions of the same generation, all relations of a “side,” or even just all kin, and the idea of extending relationships outward by horizontal or vertical computations as shown through the kin term map. This knowledge is acquired progressively through innumerable interactions with others over many years. As individuals begin to learn kinship, they frst learn one-to-one mappings: “such and such a face goes with the idea of my mother,” “such and such a face goes with the idea of my father,” and so on. But at about age fve, we begin to recognize the idea of reciprocity, that that if am your father you must be my son. We now learn the parallel construction of the grammatical category of person in general language and that “I” can put myself in “your” position. After that, over at least another fve years, the ideas of reciprocity, space and time in the kinship map join with, and reinforce, the ideas of reciprocity, place, and time built into language itself. Thereupon, the conceptions of kinship space built through the kin term map (Read, Fischer, and Chit Hlaing, 2014) can be joined to the ideas of social space represented by the “I” and “you” of language and the idea of physical space and time represented by grammatical categories like tense and proximity to allow cultural actors to see and speak of themselves as “in” institutions and organizations or not in them, and to speak of organizations and institutions as here and there, now and then. And this is the idea that permits us to learn and use, like a competent adult, the full kinship map and all of its associated ideas, which in turn is what allows kinship to serve as the gateway to all other types of social relations. In the introduction, we described Kant’s idea of the “synthetic a priori,” and said that the present analysis expands what it encompasses. We have done so in two ways. First, we have shown how and why the kinship ideas we have described have the properties of Kant’s synthetic a priori in the societies that use them: they appear to be true by defnition, and yet they also apply to and describe fundamental properties of nature. Second, the description itself is synthetic a priori in the same sense. And this, precisely, is what makes this a new science.

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Glossary

Affnity:  In the nineteenth century, relation by marriage. Anthropology “Subfelds”: Cultural anthropology. This term is referred to self-designate several lines of mainly American anthropologist who are inclined to defne anthropology as the science of culture and see it as the study of the way culture determines behavior. In the early twentieth century in the United States there were two main schools. One was those who were initially trained by Franz Boas at Columbia and continue to agree with his perspective. Another was those who were initially trained by Boaz but disagreed with his perspective and shifted instead to that of Clark Wissler at the American Museum of Natural History. Boaz’s perspective was Kantian. Wissler’s perspective was positivistic. Robert Lowie’s History of Ethnological Theory (1939) construed the history of anthropology from a positivist perspective only. The comparable work documenting and applying Boaz’s actual perspective was the textbook General Anthropology published by Boaz and others in 1938. Anthropology “Subfelds”:  Archaeology. Literally the study of beginnings. Originally taken to mean the reconstruction of historical societies for which we do not have written records. Over the last century, archaeology has been increasingly used in the reconstruction of historical societies as a supplement to written records. Anthropology “Subfelds”: Descriptive linguistics. The study of extent languages by direct observation and analysis communities that use them. Anthropology “Subfelds”: Ethnology. The study of human communities, customs, and practices. In practice, this usually means non-Western communities and until World War II was confned to societies defned as “primitive” or “preliterate.” In both cases what was meant was communities independent of industrial technology and not relying on written records 301

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in their internal procedures of social control. Those who describe themselves as ethnologists often intend thereby to avoid the claims for cultural and social determinism associated with the labels “cultural anthropology” and “social anthropology.” Of the three labels “ethnology” is the nearest to the sense of the German term Volkerkunde, the study of peoples, which was formulated in a strongly Kantian conceptual framework, focusing on the relationship between consciousness and choice. Anthropology “Subfelds”:  Linguistics study of languages in the production and use of speech. includes many divisions such as philology, descriptive linguistics, and sociolinguistics. Anthropology “Subfelds”:  Philology. The study of historical relationships among languages past and present. Anthropology “Subfelds”:  Social Anthropology. This term is preferred to self-designate a line of mainly British anthropological studies descending from AR Radcliffe Brown drawing on the ideas of assumptions of European sociology. Radcliffe Brown described it as comparative sociology. A major proponent in the twentieth century was E. E. Evans Pritchard and his students. Social anthropologists did not see any necessity to assure that their work was consistent with the work of physical anthropologists, linguists, and archaeologists, and did not see social anthropology as divided into the four felds the cultural anthropologists often insisted on. Social anthropologists often also had little interest in psychology or psychological explanation. As comparative sociology it was mainly concerned with showing how behavior is in “socially determined,” meaning determined by the structure or structural principles of society. Anthropology “Subfelds”:  Sociolinguistics. The study of the social uses of language in a relationship between linguistic meaning and social context. Anthropology:  Formerly often defned as “the whole science of man.” Now generally stated as the science of humankind. Those who do not think it can be a science prefer descriptions like the study of humankind. In its full sense, the term includes what American anthropologists generally described as “the four felds” of anthropology, namely, linguistics, physical anthropology, technology or cultural social sociocultural anthropology, and archaeology. Many other “subfelds” are recognized in different contexts. These include paleoanthropology, marine archaeology, sociolinguistics, and applied anthropology. Birthright:  A right or property obtained from a parent or parent’s relative from birth or from conception as reckoned back from the time of one’s birth. Clan:  A descent group with a single, known, ancestor at some time in the past. The clan is usually eponymous, meaning that it is named after the ancestor.

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Classifcatory terminology: Kinship terminology that groups children of parents’ siblings with one’s own brothers and/or sisters. Consanguinity: Literally “common blood” but understood as meaning related through birth or descent. Cross-cousin: The child of one’s parent’s opposite-sex sibling. Contrasts with parallel-cousin. Descent:  relationships through birth. Eponymy:  Naming a group after an individual. Endogamy:  “In-marriage” a rule or custom that one must marry a person from within one’s own group. Ethnonym:  A label a group of people applies to themselves. Exogamy:  “Out-marriage” a rule or custom that one must marry a person from outside one’s own group. Inheritance:  A right, power, or property obtained from a parent or parent’s relative on the basis of one’s relation to that person. Kinship terminologies: The distinctive system of interrelated terms in a community used to designate a person’s relations by birth or marriage, as indigenously defned. Laterality:  Matrilateral. On the side of the mother. Usually refers to any relation connected to self through the mother but not the father. Laterality:  Matri-Patri lateral. “On the side of the mother and the father.” Usually refers to a relation connected to self through both mother and father. Laterality:  Patrilateral. On the side of the father. Usually refers to any relation connected to self through the father but not the mother. Lineage:  A group of people with a common ancestor in the present or recent past. Lineal:  In the line of. Usually refers describes a rule of inheritance of property or group membership. May be matrilineal, patrilineal, ambilineal, or matri-patrilineal. Lithic Period:  Mesolithic. Middle Stone age. Period after the paleolithic characterized by a wide variety of tool types including blade and fake tools, but not microliths intended for hafting. Lithic period:  Neolithic. New Stone Age. Tools in the Neolithic are still made predominantly of stone but the dominant technology that the tools are used in is agriculture, not hunting. The type tools of the Neolithic are microliths, small blades designed to be hafted into bone and wood knives, sickles, and other such cutting instruments. Neolithic tools also include axes made of polished stone used for cutting down trees. The Neolithic began around 10,000 years ago in the Middle East and spread rapidly outward.

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Lithic period:  Paleolithic. Old Stone Age. The time in human history when tools and weapons were primarily made of stone. It is usually divided into lower, middle, and upper. The periods are partly defned by time but more importantly by types of tools. Paleolithic is distinguished from Mesolithic and Neolithic. Moiety:  From the French for “half.” Moieties exist when the descent groups of a tribal society are divided into two distinct sets, usually for marriage purposes, such that a person in one group must marry a person from the other. Parallel-cousin: The child of a parent’s same-sex sibling. Contrasts with cross-cousin. Phratry:  Group of related clans. Selective pressure.  Any constraint that reduces or raises the proportion of a given gene in a population from one generation to the next. Skewing rules:  Anthropological term for a pattern of defnitions in a terminology that uses the same term for a sibling of one parent or the other and for that sibling’s child, thus obscuring the difference of generation in favor of emphasizing that they are in the same descent group or line.

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Vespa, Jonathan, Jamie M. Lewis, and Rose M. Kreider. 2013. America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2012. Population Characteristics. US Census Bureau. Issued August 2013. Vlasich, James A. 2005. Pueblo Indian Agriculture. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Wallace, Anthony F. C., and John Atkins. 1960. “The meaning of kinship terms.” American Anthropologist 62:58–80. White, Harrison. 1970. Chains of Opportunity: Systems Models of Mobility in Organizations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. White, R. 1992. Beyond art: Toward an understanding of the origins of material representation in Europe. Annual Review of Anthropology 21:537–564. ———. 1996. La naissance de l’art. Archéologue -- Archéologie Nouvelle 17:17–20. ———. 1997. Structure, signifcation, and culture: Different logics of representation and their archeological implications. Diogenes 45:97–113. ———. 2001. Personal Ornaments from the Grotte du Renne at Arcy-sur-Cure. Athena Review 2:41–46. Whiteley, Peter M. 1986. “Unpacking Hopi “clans,” II: Further questions about Hopi descent groups.” Journal of Anthropological Research 42(1):69–79. http://www​ .jstor​.org​/stable​/3630380. ———. 1988. Bacavi, Journey to Reed Springs. Flagstaff: Northland Press. ———. 1996. “The end of anthropology (At Hopi)?” Journal of the Southwest 35(2):125–157. ———. 2008. The Oraiyvi Split: a Hopi Transformation. Part I: Structure and History. New York: Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, Number 87. Wilson, Robert A. 2016. “Kinship past, kinship present: Bio-essentialism in the study of kinship.” American Anthropologist 118(3):570–584. Zilhão, J. 2007. “The emergence of ornaments and art: An archaeological perspective on the origins of “behavioral modernity”.” Journal of Archaeological Research 15:1–54.

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Index

Acoma pueblo, 164 additions to the kinship map, 125 affnity: Morgan’s concept, 19 Agamemnon, 154 age: Purum concept, 197, 198; Purum importance, 197; Purum inaccuracy, 197 aging, 158 agricultural communities, 137 agriculture: Bali wet rice, 138; Hopi, 169; Purum, 194; Seneca, 236; shifting, 138; wet rice, 138 alliance theory, 193; history of, 35; proponents, 29 American Ethnological Society, 42 American family law, 149 ancestral property, 146; in Hindu law, 147 Anthropologists’ Clan vs. Hopis’ Clan, 179 anti-positivism, 42 Area Files: Yale, 27 Atkins, J., 29 australopithecines, 73, 74 Bahn, P. and Vertut, J.: cave art, 86 Bali: farming system, 138; kinship, 139 Basin and Range Province, 167 bifurcate merging, 25, 26, 174, 293

binary operations, 286 biological essentialism, 44 biosocial family, 13, 72, 76, 100 biosocial organization, 76, 81, 99, 101 bipedalism: and human family, 73 Black Mesa, 170 Blombos, 82, 98, 102 Boas, F., 2, 6, 26 bonobos, 75, 76 boundaries: of kinship maps, 109 brain size, 77; energy cost, 78 Breuil, H., 87 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 166 burial of the dead, 96 burials: Homo sapiens, 98 Burnyeat, M., 7 Capitan, L., 97 cause and effect, 7, 148 Censor: Roman offce, 145 central symbol, 41 cerebral cortex, 78 ceremonies, 60; as model instantiations, 63 ceremony: as enacted charter, 66 Chafe, W., 224 Chauvet Grotto, 80, 85, 86, 88, 102 check-dams, 170, 171 Chiefs’ Talk, 184 315

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316

Index

chimpanzees, 73, 74, 75, 76, 299 Cibola, 163 clan, 59; in descent theory, 35; in Durkheim, 37; Hopi terms rendered as, 181; in segmentary societies, 34 classes of classes, 85, 91, 92, 96, 100, 117, 299 classifcations of kinship systems, 292 classifcatory kinship systems: contrast with descriptive, 20; Read’s analysis, 119 Collier, John, 167 Colorado Plateau, 167 commerce and mass production, 140 common law, 149 communication theory, 47 comparative method, 18, 19 componential analysis, 2, 27, 41; advocates of, 28 Comte, A., 4; and Geertz, 43 concept of classes, 84 connotation, 28 consanguinity: Morgan’s concept, 19 conscious abstraction, 93 consensus, 11, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 84, 102, 105, 124, 134, 142, 185, 281, 285, 287, 291, 296; making and expressing, 66 Coronado expedition, 164 corporations, 141 cross cousin: not Tamil concept, 226; Seneca concept, 233 cross-cousin marriage, 38, 189 cryptopositivism, 42 cultural anthropology: post-Schneider, 43 cultural assimilation, 167, 297 cultural frame analysis, 122; general description, 105 cultural frame elicitation, 106 cultural idea systems, 53 cultural information systems, 53 Curr, E. M., 36 Das, T. C., 193 defnition of the situation, 63

denotation, 28 descent groups, 133; and descent theory, 33 descent theory: proponents, 29, 30 descriptive and classifcatory, 20 descriptive kinship systems: contrast with classifcatory, 20 determinism: in positivism, 290 developmental cycle of domestic groups, 148 developmental psychology, 12, 83, 91, 117 diffuse enduring solidarity, 41, 141 direct relations: defned, 57; Purum, 207 documentary method, 63 domestic group, 148, 178 domestic groups, 143 domestic partnership, 125 dowry: in India, 229 Doxtator, D., 235 Dravidian: kinship system, 21; languages, 224; problem, 241 Dravidian languages, 21 Dravidian problem, 223, 251 Dravidian terminology, 14 dualism, 39, 131, 195 Dumont, L., 29 Durkheim, E., 6, 36, 133 economic concepts, 56 Eggan, F.: on Choctaw, 280 egocentric, 55, 56, 159, 160, 183, 235, 239, 297 elder: in Purum society, 198 elementary structures, 37 elicitation as experiment, 109 empirical theory: defned, 9 encomienda system, 164 endogamy, 125, 126, 128; defned, 130 entropy, 48 epic poetry, 153 ethnography of communication, 64 ethnology: defned, 6 ethnomethodology, 63 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 134

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Index

exogamy, 125, 126, 128; most basic rule, 127 experiment, 7; defned, 7 experimental science, 290

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face, brain, and language, 77 factions, 154 family property, 145, 147, 149, 150, 156 fction: kinship in, 152 fctional genres: and ceremonies, 157 “fctive” kinship: ethnocentrism, 192 Five Property Regimes, 136 Flute ceremony, 188 formal science, 8 formal speech: defned, 105 Fortes, M., 148 Frazer, J.: magic, 67 French Civil Code, 150 Freud, S., 128 Friedrich, P.: on Geertz, 42 fundamental proclivity of the human mind, 39, 196 Galison, P., 290 Garfnkel, H., 63 Geertz, C., 41; meaning of symbol, 42; subjectivism, 42 genealogical relations, 15, 27, 34, 121, 174, 238, 245, 259 genealogy: reality of, 120 genealogy, family, lineage, 160 generative idea systems: and consensus, 105; defned, 105 generative logic, 242, 248 generative systems, 52, 53, 115, 241 generative tree, 283 genna: Purum concept, 199, 215 Gilgamesh, 140 Goffman, E., 63 Goldenweiser, A.: on totemism, 133 Good, A., 230 Goodenough, W., 27 Goody, J., 148 gorillas, 74, 75, 299 Gough, K., 224, 229 grave goods, 98

317

group marriage, 20, 22, 24, 35, 135 hand axe, 74, 82 Handler, R., 42 Hanuman, 154 Harris, M., 6 Harvard Department of Social Relations, 5, 28, 41 Hegel, G. W. F., 35 hill tribes: defned, 194 Hindu joint family, 145, 147 Hindu law, 139, 143, 145 historians of science, 290 historical particularism, 6 Holmes, O. W., 9 Homans, G., 40 Homo erectus, 74, 75, 78 Homo sapiens: burials, 98; one species, 287; pluralistic social organization, 299; systems of production, 136 Hopi, 163; adoption, 183; childbirth, 179; cross-cousin marriage question, 188; division of labor by sex, 173; household, 184; oral history, 182; pluralism, 173; reservation, 173; village concept, 184 Hopi maize, 169 Hopimomngwit: Hopi concept, 185 Hopi reservation, 167, 169 Hopitutskwa: Hopi term for Hopi country, 163 household: Hopi, 184; organizations of, 62; in United States, 62 house-plan: Purum, 211 human biosocial organization, 72 Human Figures and Social Categories, 86 Hume, D.: and Kant, 7 hunting and gathering societies, 137 idea of ideas, 80, 84 idea systems: contrasting Tamil and Seneca, 223; include values, 66; Purum, 198 Iliad, 140, 153 imaginary space, 13, 52, 55, 62

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Index

incest: defned, 127; logical explanation of prohibition, 128 incest and exogamy, 126; extensions, 129 incrementing relation, 107 indigenous concepts: objectivity of, 4 individuals, 65 industrialization, 140 informal vs. formal, 105 information theory, 47 inheritance, 12, 18, 125, 126, 134, 136, 139, 141, 145, 146, 149, 154, 185, 213, 229, 291 instantiation, 62, 68, 80, 116, 126, 161, 227; defned, 62 institution: defned, 65 interpretivism: James, W., 9, 44. See also Geertz, C.

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Jati: Indian social group, 146 joking relations, 31 KAES, 15, 118 Kant, I., 7, 289 Kariera, 30, 281 Kariera section system, 32 Karve, I., 224 Keller, A. G., 26 Kinship Analysis Expert System, 2, 15, 118, 242, 246, 273, 287; data entry, 275; data simplifcation, 276; map regeneration, 278 kinship apocalypse, 13, 26, 40, 45, 120, 128, 237, 290; and collapse of Positivism, 6 kinship ceremonies: occasions for, 61 Kinship idea system: Purum, 200 kinship maps, 62, 105; additions to, 125; change, 283; Czech, 111; defned, 57; English, 109; frst described by Leaf, 3; Hopi, 174; Punjabi, 58; Purum, 200; Seneca, 231; Tamil, 225; Tamil, female speaker, 227; ubiquity of change, 279

kinship map typology: by generative logic, 282 kinship terminology, 3, 4, 14, 15, 17, 18, 27, 29, 33, 44, 118, 119, 139, 174, 175, 200, 205, 221, 238, 243, 256, 258, 260, 263, 269, 271, 272, 273, 277, 280, 283, 284, 285, 290, 303; defned, 105 kin term map, 242; defned, 105; developed by Read, 4; Hopi, 267; Iroquois (Seneca), 257; Purum, 270; relevance to Purum marriage pattern, 271; Tamil, 246; transforming Seneca to Crow type, 263; transforming Seneca to Kariera, 261 Kin Term Maps and Kinship Algebras, 256 kin term product, 239; defned, 107; general form of question, 107 kin term relations, 15, 107, 238, 245, 246, 255, 256, 263, 267 kintypes, 27 kiva organization, 184 Kiva Organizational Charter, 186 Köhler, J., 35, 132; and Durkheim, 37 Kuki-Chin languages, 194 Kuper, A., 43 kyaam: Hopi relationship, 190 Laetoli footprints, 73 La Ferrassie, 96 Lansing, S., 138 Las Casas, B., 165 law of three stages: in Positivism, 5 Leach, E. R., 40 League of the Iroquois, 17 Leiberman et. al., 78 Lévi-Strauss, C., 35; and totemism, 133 limitation of possibilities: defned, 223; kin term maps, 281 linguistic messages: as construction, 51 listwise method, 24 Little Colorado, 167 Lowie, R., 25, 174

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Index

Mahabharata, 154 maksa: best type, 220; group composition, 220 maksa and Apu, 216 maksas: ceremonal roles, 218 male-female pair-bonding, 77 Malinowski, B., 2, 6, 67; and ceremonies, 66 mancipatio: ceremony, 144 Manipur State, 194 marriage in a circle, 195 marriage rules, 35, 36, 131, 139 matriarchy, 19, 251 Matrix (flm), 157 MBD prescription, 37 McLennan, J. F., 132 Mead, G. H., 93 meaning: Pragmatic theory of, 9 meat-eating, 74, 75, 78 meetings, 66, 68, 100, 111, 180, 215 Mellars, P., 94, 98 message source, 48, 49, 53 Mill, J. S., 5; and meaning, 27; and Tylor, 34 Mitakshara, 139, 229 modern society: defned, 124 Moencopi, 172 Mogollon Rim, 168 Morgan, L. H., 14, 17, 20, 36, 45, 115, 119, 130, 134, 143, 189, 223, 233, 234, 251, 288 mother’s brother’s daughter marriage, 38, 39 moveable art: and classes of person, 89 murai, 227, 231 Murdock, G. P., 26 music and time, 92 myths: kinship in, 152 myths and movies, 152 Nadel, S. F., 134 Navajo reservation, 167, 172 Neanderthal, 78, 79, 82, 83, 84, 93, 94, 96, 98, 100, 301; burials, 96; social organization, 96

319

Needham, R., 14, 193 Nequatewa, E., 182 New Oraibi, 170 new science, 2, 47, 53, 290, 300 Newton, I., 8 Notes and Queries in Anthropology, 25, 193 Nungchungba: Purum village god, 199 Odyssey, 140, 153 offce, idea of, 55 Olympus: Gods of, 153 Oñate, Juan, 164 opposed purposes; subversive activity, 64 Oraibi, 170 organizational charter, 60, 61, 68 organizational pluralism, 11, 92, 93, 95, 289, 299 organizational Rubicon of the Upper Paleolithic, 79, 100 panchayats: in South Asia, 159 pangal, 226, 231 parietal art, 80, 89, 90, 91, 102 parietal cortex, 93 parivar: Indian concept, 147 Parkin, R., 45 Parsons, E. C., 174 Parsons, T., 6 pastoralism, 139 patria potestas, 19, 143, 144, 145, 149 patriarchal extended family, 143 patrilineal inheritance: Purum, 213 Peirce, C. S., 9 Perceiver and Perceived, 92 personal ornamentation, 98 Pettit, B., 96 Peyrony, D., 97 physiographic zones: Arizona, 167 Piaget, J., 12, 83, 84, 91, 96, 99 place of business: legal concept, 141 pluralism, 95, 99, 101, 195, 216, 295, 299

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320

Index

polynomial system, 294; for classifying kinship maps, 294 portable art, 80 portrait heads, 90, 91 positivism, 2, 4, 5, 35 postmodernism, 43 pragmatism: defned, 9; and experiment, 9; origin of name, 9 preemption, 146 prescriptive marriage alliance, 193, 217; illustrated, 38 Priam, 153 primate social organization: and reproductive behavior, 75 primitive communism, 135 probability: and meaning, 48 property, 134; ancestral, 227; defned, 135; family, 145 psychic unity of man, 10 psychoanalysis: relation to Positivism, 6 pueblo: defned, 163 Pueblo rebellion, 165 Punjabi, 58, 281 Purum, 14, 193; elicitation of kinship ideas, 202; house and village, 214; idea system of the domicile, 211; meat and zu, 214; terms of address, 207; village assembly hall, 198; village council functions, 200; village idea system, 198; village offcials, 215 Purum Concept of Age, 197 Purum kinship map and age marking, 207 Qafzeh, 98, 101, 301 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 30 radical empiricism: and Pragmatism, 9 Ramayana, 154 Read, D., 4 reciprocity: idea of, 93 reference relation, 107 referent: as meaning, 9 referential theory of meaning, 26, 44

religion vs. magic, 67 residence: legal concept, 141 residentially mobility, 94 Revolution of 1848, 8 rites of passage, 159, 160 Rivers, W. H. R., 25 Roman law, 18, 143, 144, 145 rule of inheritance, 59 rules of descent, 126 sagei: Purum group, 196 Sahlins, M., 43 same sex marriage, 125 Savigny, K. F., 18 Schneider, D. M., 2, 14, 23, 41, 115, 141, 193, 304 Schusky, E., 45 seasonal mobility, 94 segmentary societies, 33 Self-awareness, 80 self-conception, 81, 82, 93 self position, 107 semantic systems, 53 Seneca, 14, 17, 22, 134, 137, 174, 223, 231, 233, 234, 291, 294; additional kinship ideas, 235; longhouse, 235; world view, 236 Seneca Kinship Map, 232 Sepulveda, J., 165 Sextus Empiricus, 7 sexual dimorphism, 75 Shapiro, W., 44 shell beads, 98, 101 Shipibo, 281 sib and tribe: Purum idea-system, 209 Sidhupur Kalan, 146 Snake dance, 187 social charter: relation to organizational charter, 61 social Darwinism, 5 social idea systems, 81; defned, 54 socio-centric, 55, 56, 158, 159, 160, 179, 183, 208, 209, 221, 297 sociology: and Positivism, 5 sorcerer of Trois Frères, 86

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321

sorcerers: Upper Paleolithic, 86 Soyal ceremony, 184 space-time, 88 spatial imagery, 12, 88, 92 speech ability, 78, 79 Spencer, H., 5 Star Wars (flms), 157 Stauffer, S., 27 stone tools, 74, 81, 84 St. Simon: socialism, 5 subcaste endogamy, 229 Subject and Object, 92 Sungir burials, 99 symbolically recorded information: in Upper Paleolithic, 80 synthetic a priori, 11, 12, 300; defned, 8 system of ideas: defned, 51

totemism, 36, 132 trade, 137 traditional society: defned, 123 traditional versus Modern Society, 123 Turner, V., 159 Tusayan, 163, 165, 169, 171 two-heart: Hopi concept, 190 Tylor, E. B., 34, 37; and Comte, 35; denial of free will, 35

Tamil, 14, 224, 281; kin term map, 246; kin term map construction, 249 technical idea systems: defned, 59 Telugu: relation to Tamil, 224 terms of relationship, 18 theory of mind, 80, 81, 98 Thunder Over Arizona: humdrum Western, 155 Titiev, M., 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 185, 189, 292 total social analysis, 39 totemic clans: theories of, 132

Wallace, A. F. C., 29 Weber, M., 6 Westermarck, E., 24 Western (flm), 153; adult, 156 Whiteley, P., 181, 184 Wilson, R. A., 44 working memory, 83, 96 wungwa: Hopi suffx, 181

unity of science: as Positivist goal, 5 Upper-Paleolithic Revolution, 79 Vatuk, S., 58 Venus fgures, 89, 90 Vienna Circle positivism, 6 vigas, 172, 185 village offcials: Purum, 215

Yale, 26 You are what you eat, 40

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Zeus: family of, 153, 154

Leaf, Murray J., and Dwight Read. Introduction to the Science of Kinship, Lexington Books, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2020. Lexington Books. All rights reserved. Leaf, Murray J., and Dwight Read. Introduction to the Science of Kinship, Lexington Books, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2020. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

About the Authors

Murray J. Leaf (PhD, University of Chicago) is emeritus professor of Anthropology and Political Economy at the University of Texas at Dallas. His previous books include Information and Behavior in a Sikh Village: Social Organization Reconsidered (1972), Song of Hope (1984), Pragmatism and Development: The Prospect for Pluralism in the Third World (1998), Human Organizations and Social Theory (2009), An Anthropology of Academic Governance and Institutional Democracy: The Community of Scholars in America (2018), two volumes on the world religions, and Human Thought and Social Organization: Anthropology on a New Plane (2014), coauthored with Dwight W. Read. He has served as the senior social scientist on USAIDsponsored development projects in India and Bangladesh and as a reviewer for numerous agencies and journals. Leaf’s work has been consistently aimed at developing an entirely empirical theory of social organization, including the relationships between language and other code systems, institutional pluralism, individual choice and rationality, the human imagination, and evolutionary adaptation. His method has been to develop an armamentarium of analytic techniques to display and model the various very different properties of a wide range of different types of cultural and social phenomena and the ways they are brought together in organizations. Dwight W. Read received his PhD at UCLA in mathematics, doing research on properties of abstract algebras. He is a Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology and publishes in all the subdisciplines that comprise a fourfeld anthropology (transition from biological to cultural evolution, theory and method of artifact classifcation, mathematical representation of cultural constructs, especially kinship terminologies). His current research focuses 323

Leaf, Murray J., and Dwight Read. Introduction to the Science of Kinship, Lexington Books, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,

324

About the Authors

Copyright © 2020. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

on the interrelationship between the material and the ideational domains in human societies. He had a visiting scientist affliation with the IBM Los Angeles Research Center from 1986 to 1989 and a visiting professor position with Kent University (UK) in 1999. He has edited two Special Issues of the Journal of Quantitative Anthropology, a Special Issue of the Journal of Artifcial Societies and Social Simulation, and coedited (with Fadwa El Guindi) three Kinship Special Issues of the eJournal Structure and Dynamics. His book publications include Artifact Classifcation: A Conceptual and Methodological Approach (2007), How Culture Makes Us Human: Primate Evolution and the Formation of Human Societies (2012, Key Questions in Anthropology: Little Books on Big Ideas, Left Coast Press), and (with Murray J. Leaf) The Conceptual Foundation of Human Society and Thought: Anthropology on a New Plane (2012).

Leaf, Murray J., and Dwight Read. Introduction to the Science of Kinship, Lexington Books, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,