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Morgan and his informants' interpretation of Australian social categories as 'marriage classes' has survived in Dumont's (and Viveiros de Castro's) distinction of a 'local' (Dravidian systems) and a 'global' (Australian systems) formula. This paper explains that the 'global formula' is neither a necessary nor an applied device in Australian kin category determination, even when genealogical memory is short and when there is a non-limitation of range in the extension of categories. Instead, a heuristic model, which is called the relational triangle, is proposed. This model depicts the procedure through which Australian people pragmatically determine and extend kin categories. Moreover, it also offers a visualisation of the cognitive schema and processes framing discourse and behaviour in relation to kinship and draws some parallels with Greenberg's hypotheses on markedness in kinship classes. Key words: Australia, Aborigines, cognitive anthropology, kinship, markedness, It is common sense that the advancement of science is cumulative, that each generation builds upon the findings of previous ones, and that revealed mistakes are revised rather than repeated. [...]

Anthropological writing about the new reproductive technologies has focused on how they undermine presumed links between nature and culture in kinship. Surrogate motherhood in particular is said to show that [...]

This article explores how marriage patterns and practices changed over the course of 60 years in Willow Pond Village (a pseudonym), a rice-farming community on the Yangzi Delta, 50 km [...]

Migration histories of villagers from Pulau Langkawi, Malaysia, show extensive demographic movement. These histories can be linked to local notions of kinship in which the acquisition of attributes and relationships in the present and future is of greater importance than links to dead forebears. The fragmentary nature of memories of migration recalls a wider phenomenon in Southeast Asian kinship, often labelled 'structural amnesia', and analysed in negative terms. However, forgetting one's ancestors can be understood more positively when placed in a regional context and linked to historical features of Southeast Asian polities. The conclusion takes up the wider anthropological debate on individual and social memory and the relation between narrative and memory, and argues that closer attention should be paid to the process of forgetting., In his well-known essay; 'Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?', Ernest Renan writes: the essence of a nation is that all the individuals hold many things in common, and also that all of [...]

Ever since W. D. Hamilton pointed out that cooperation is facilitated by genetic relatedness (1), kin selection has held a central place in the study of social behavior. Although most [...]

ABSTRACT The Motu-Koitabu are the traditional inhabitants of the site of Papua New Guinea's capital city, Port Moresby, and well represented in a body of literature, from the 1870s on, [...]

This article, based on research in Scotland, discusses reunions between adults who have been adopted in infancy and their birth kin. Although the distinction between 'biological' and 'social' kinship, which [...]

Department of Social and Cultural Studies, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 International Journal of Comparative Sociology Vol. 36 (1996) p. 219 Through a comparative framework that includes state policies [...]