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INTRODUCTION by Raymond Firth I PART ONE Commentaries RIVERS AND KROEBER IN THE STUDY OF KINSHIP by David M. Schneider 7 RIVERS ON OCEANIC KINSHIP by Raymond Firth 17 PART TWO Kinship and Social Organization by W. H. R. Rivers ORIGINAL PREFACE 38 LECTURE I (Classificatory Terminology and Cross-Cousin Marriage) 39 LECTURE 2 (Classificatory Terminology and Other Forms of Marriage) 55 LECTURE 3 (The Classificatory System and Forms of Social Organization) 75 THE GENEALOGICAL METHOD OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL INQUIRY 97 LIST OF WORKS CITED IN THE INTRODUCTION AND COMMENTARIES 110 INDEX 113

This thesis was submitted for the award of Master of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London This research explores the experience of Thai female immigrants who are working in the kitchens of Thaitime restaurant at both the Wandsworth and Wimbledon branches. Through analysis of the life stories of the chefs, it is clear that both economic and cultural factors are primary reasons for transnational migration. Isan is the birthplace of seventy percent of the chefs and the region is considered one of the poorest parts of Thailand, with low-income rates and high rates of out-migration. The chefs follow existing gendered role expectations by participating in transnational migration and sending remittances back to their parents. The chefs from Isan mostly immigrate via a spouse visa or work permit, while the chefs from central Thailand mostly start their journey with a student visa. As an ethnographic study, the primary tool of data collection has been through participant observation of the chefs’ working routines. These observations revealed that the kitchens have two parallel dynamics. On one hand, kitchens are operated in terms of commercial restaurant standards. On the other hand, they work in relation to Thai family structures, where chefs in higher positions tend to employ the idealistic stereotype of ‘mother’. This is accomplished by performing the maternal role of nurturing children through the act of cooking and feeding. Thaitime kitchens are one of the places where Thai social structures and cultural practices are exercised. However, when the chefs go into the world outside, they continue to limit themselves to places that hold cultural and emotional connections to their homeland. The majority of visits center around accommodations, the Thai temple, ethnic grocery shops, Thai massage shops, and the betting shops. The ethnography and narratives discussed in this research suggest that Thai female migrants cannot simply be stereotyped as dependent spouses. Rather, their lives are complex and include many different aspects apart from married life. The chefs also participate in the labor market and engage with London’s urban setting, constructing social relations, negotiating identities and situating themselves in the context of the United Kingdom.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 5 I. INTRODUCTION by Raymond Firth General Considerations, I I The Problem and the Origin of the Study, 21 Method, 23 II. KINSHIP IN SOUTH BOROUGH 33 by Raymond Firth and Judith Djamour The Background (H.B.B.), 33 Households, 34 Recognition of the Kinship Principle, 36 The Kinship System, 37 Knowledge of Kin, 37 Kinship Grouping, 40 Differentiation among Kin, 42 Social Relationships between Kin, 46 Empirical Data: the Ingles Case, 48 Indices of Kin Contacts, 51 Factors influencing Social Relations with Kin, 58 Summary and Conclusions, 62 III. KINSHIP ORGANISATION OF ITALIANATES IN LONDON 67 by Philip Garigue and Raymond Firth The Social Background, 67 Kin and Status, 69 Selection of Informants, 70 Households, 71 The Structure of the Kinship System, 73 Range of Kin Knowledge, 73 Social Relations between Kin, 83 Factors affecting Kin Relationship, 88 Summary and Conclusions, 92 BIBLIOGRAPHY 94

The so-called new kinship studies, inspired by David Schneider, are shown to be mistaken in arguing that non-Western kinship notions are not grounded in native appreciations of procreation. The argument is sustainable mostly by an almost complete neglect of the pertinent kinship terminologies. Attention to such terminologies, by contrast, shows that close procreative kin, even when superficially classed with others, including non-kin, are in fact subclassed as the semantically central members of their respective classes. It is further shown that evidence for this argument has been in the ethnographic literature for more than a century and has by now reached a point where it is nothing short of overwhelming.

Despite the long history of kinship studies, we still lack agreed theories capable of explaining the connection between terminological systems and kinship practice. This article argues for a cognitive approach centering on two distinct but complementary aspects of identity. It is argued that patterns of shared identity are implied by terminology and combine with other factors to motivate practice—in a feedback loop which transmits influences between terminological systems and political and economic institutions. The argument is illustrated by statistical and historical analyses of an aspect of European kinship.

Genes shared through common ancestry are among the oldest social bonds. Despite these ancient roots, humans often co-opt the psychology of genetic relatedness and extend it to genetically unrelated others through culturally-acquired kinship systems. We investigate how genealogical relatedness and kinship norms might mutually support or oppose each other within a known kin network in Yasawa, Fiji. Yasawans' reliance on intensive, kin-based cooperation for daily life makes Yasawan kinship an interesting test case to compare the effects of genealogy and kinship norms. Confirming qualitative ethnographic claims, we find that Yasawan kin terms can be described in two dimensions of respect/closeness and joking/authority. Individual players use different strategies for genealogical relatives and non-relatives by making economic game choices that are increasingly beneficial to partners who share a higher percentage of genes through common ancestry. However, pairs of players are most successful in coordinating their game choices despite conflicting self-interests based upon kinship norms relevant to hierarchy. Thus, while genealogical relatedness may boost generosity, the extra behavioral structuring from kinship norms facilitates more productive but difficult coordinated action even when communication is not possible.

Kinship is a most significant organizing principle of human grouping, the basic matter of social categories in archaeological and ethnographic societies, and an important concept universally. However, its significance has rarely been adequately incorporated within archaeology’s theoretical and interpretative practice. This article aims to not only show the potential of bringing kinship into social archaeology, but also argue that archaeology can make important contributions to wider social research. Grounded on prehistoric data, spanning from the 8th to the 4th millennium bc, and drawing on cross-cultural discussions, it explores how understandings and practices of kinship might have been constructed and enacted in the first farming communities through architecture, time, material products, burials, and rituals. In doing so, the article addresses key issues of common interest in archaeology and anthropology, inviting interdisciplinary dialogue.

In every human society, kinship is one of the most basic principles of social organization. Keywords: anthropology; Christianity; classical civilization; cultural history; deviance and social control; family; gender; kinship and social organization; social history

This article examines the practices of ‘flexible kinship’ used by Chinese migrants in colonial Tahiti. ‘Flexible kinship’ draws attention to the strategic uses that are made of kinship in the context of migration and diaspora: the adjustments to cultural, political, and legal borders that lead to changes in family forms and in the relations between kin. Using a multi-generational perspective, I examine how families were shaped by successive changes and reversals in legal-political and economic events and conjunctures over the long twentieth century. I argue for the importance of addressing transnational border-crossing practices that involve not just a spatial extension of networks but also legal strategies within the host locality. I further show that if it is true that the Confucian hierarchical order has conditioned transnational practices of flexible kinship, then this hierarchy has not only bent to the circumstances, it has to a great extent been weakened. Finally, I argue that the history of familial adjustments has shaped a habitus that maximizes economic and legal security, especially among women.

This article examines female protagonists in Rabindranath Tagore’s stories and novellas – specifically Charu (A Broken Nest, 1901), Mrinal (The Wife’s Letter, 1914), Kamala (Musalmani, 1941), Anila (House Number 1, 1917), Chandara (Punishment, 1893) and Boshtomi (Devotee, 1916) – from a social anthropological viewpoint, focusing on gender and time-based kinship relations. Here, kinship is defined as an extension of familial relationships to the community (common ethnic-social life, locality and religion) in such a way as to achieve progressively higher levels of social integration and extensive social networks through marriage alliances and lines of descent. Studying how the characters placed the universality of family and kinship structures into question, I argue that parameters of kinship organisation need to be redefined, with plurality and difference as the basis of inquiry rather than universality.

This paper addresses one of the most controversial issues in cultural anthropology: the conceptual foundations of kinship and the apparent inevitability of ethnocentrism in kinship studies. The field of kinship studies has been in turmoil over the past few decades, repeatedly pronounced dead and then again rising from the ashes and being declared central to human affairs. As this paper argues, the conceptual confusion surrounding ‘kinship’ is to a large extent due to the lack of a clear and rigorous methodology for discovering how speakers of the world’s different languages actually navigate their kinship systems. Building on the author’s earlier work on kinship but taking the analysis much further, this paper seeks to demonstrate that such a methodology can be found in natural semantic metalanguage theory (developed by the author and colleagues), which relies on 65 universal semantic primes and on a small number of universal “semantic molecules,” including ‘mother’ and ‘father’. The paper offers a new mo...

In this article, I reconsider bio-essentialism in the study of kinship, centering on David Schneider's influential critique that concluded that kinship was “a non-subject” (1972:51). Schneider's critique is often taken to have shown the limitations of and problems with past views of kinship based on biology, genealogy, and reproduction, a critique that subsequently led those reworking kinship as relatedness in the new kinship studies to view their enterprise as divorced from such bio-essentialist studies. Beginning with an alternative narrative connecting kinship past and present and concluding by introducing a novel way of thinking about kinship, I have three constituent aims in this research article: (1) to reconceptualize the relationship between kinship past and kinship present; (2) to reevaluate Schneider's critique of bio-essentialism and what this implies for the contemporary study of kinship; and (3) subsequently to redirect theoretical discussion of what kinship is. This concluding discussion introduces a general view, the homeostatic property cluster (HPC) view of kinds, into anthropology, providing a theoretical framework that facilitates realization of the often-touted desideratum of the integration of biological and social features of kinship. [bio-essentialism, kinship studies, homeostatic property cluster kinds, Schneider, genealogy]

As Indian women's rights organizations address violence against women, they rely heavily on mediation practices such as family counseling. At one counseling center in Jaipur, Rajasthan, family counselors operated in an environment saturated with transnational discourse about human rights and gendered violence. Yet counselors addressed household harm through arguments about kin-based care and interdependence, referred to as seva. Through their discussions of seva, counselors challenge scholarly assumptions about an insurmountable opposition between the demands of kinship and women's rights as autonomous subjects. Instead of presenting independence as a solution to disordered homes, they reordered household dependencies, subtly reworking ideologies of patriarchal kinship. Via ethnographic attention to the complex connections between kinship, care, and interdependence in counseling, I demonstrate the central role of kinship in localizing transnational arguments about rights. [kinship, care, dependence, gender, domestic violence, India]

Kinship systems cannot be analysed as straightforward translations of the ‘facts of nature’ when those facts are limited to the production of a child by a heterosexual couple. Based upon analyses of three New Guinea societies (Gimi, Daribi, and Iatmul), I suggest that kinship systems take account – often by denying – certain ‘facts’ of human reproduction when those facts are extended beyond coitus and parturition to include both the very long period of infantile dependence upon one significant caregiver (always the mother in the societies in question and nearly universally) and the subsequent requirement for the child to be extracted from a dyadic maternal universe. Separation from mother is as critical to the survival and development of the individual as is the original prolonged and intense attachment to her. The question, then, is not whether indigenous peoples accurately understand coitus and conception – they do – but rather the ways in which they manipulate that knowledge in rules and rites of kinship in order to manage the growth and development of a child long after parturition. Rules of kinship and social relations neither ignore nor exist apart from theories of procreation as many anthropologists now claim. Rather, it is precisely because theories of procreation indicate and idealise the flow of bodily substance during coitus and pregnancy that they serve as organisational premises for social relations. The fact that kinship is a symbolic construction does not mean that it is wholly ideological nor, like a language, free to vary in ways that are arbitrary and unconnected to the ‘facts of life’ as Westerners understand them. Even when interlocutors openly deny such understanding and knowledge, especially of the male role in coitus and conception, evidence to the contrary is abundantly provided in myth, ritual, and indigenous theories of procreation. What kinship systems often do show, however, is a strategic denial of the role of the mother who, upon deeper understanding of indigenous concepts of procreation, turns out to be a ‘sterile vessel’ or without substantial contribution to her child. I illustrate this premise by extending earlier analyses of Gimi kinship and reexamining certain materials on neighbouring Daribi provided by Roy Wagner and on Iatmul peoples of the Sepik River as originally described in Naven by Gregory Bateson eighty years ago.

The two failed orientations to kinship, nurture and fitness, are transcended as this collection of original kinship work moves forward, building on the rich theoretical and ethnographic past of kinship study to a reinvigorated future of new data, reconceptualization of paradigms, fresh debates and new theory. Using kinship to anthropomorphize nonhuman primates is rejected. Contributions from 18 distinguished scholars of kinship cover the four-field, cross-cultural science of anthropology. Issues in kinship study are explored through marriage, kin terms, space, incorporation, ritual, primate studies, and contributions from Russia. This collection carries kinship study into the future.

The study of kinship offers a rich opportunity for historians of early America to examine impositions of colonial power, subtle acts of resistance, and cultural adaptations evident in quotidian encounters between indigenous peoples and European American colonists. In Spanish and Mexican Alta California, colonial implementation of compadrazgo (Catholic godparentage) and the use of family metaphors, as well as the presence of Christian Indian auxiliaries from previously colonized regions, reveal colonial social hierarchies and evolving constructions of race, ethnicity, and class. While colonists and indigenous Californians both invested significant meaning in consanguineal and affective bonds, including spiritual kinship, Native peoples struggled to preserve and express precontact family values that included more fluid practices in marriage. Spanish-Mexican settlers and Franciscan missionaries attempted to impose a kinship system that would further goals of conquest and acculturate indigenous peoples by eradicating such fluidity. Spanish Mexican settlers, however, also exhibited an expansive understanding of kinship and family obligations, invoking them to function as a social safety net, as needed, and incorporating newcomers into existing networks. Thus, kinship is a useful measure of social relations and economic conditions and helpful for unraveling the scope and limitations of colonial rule in Alta California.

In modern life commodification has become a widespread phenomenon. A prime example of unique object commodification is commercial motherhood surrogacy motherhood, within which maternity turns from “the women’s social mission” into a service where human life is a final product of monetary transaction. According to Igor Kopytoff, violation of the border between commodities and unique objects leads to the undermining of social order [Kopytoff 2006]. Nevertheless, the existence of commercial surrogacy does not bring disorder, and therefore, the question is: how can this commercial service be functional and legitimate in society? The study is based on the analysis of 14 interviews with staff members of Moscow reproduction clinics and agencies providing the legal support services for surrogate mothers. The authors show that identification of the child’s status, selection of potential parents and surrogate mothers, as well as the regulation of relations between them by staff members, are formed in a way to fit the notion of kinship in accordance with the Euro-American theory of David Schneider [Schneider 1980]. The theory has at its core the idea that kinship relations are primarily determined by common genetic substance and secondarily by social relationships based on specific behavior patterns in the family. This leads to the priority of genetic kin in the creation of kinship ties perception and the decreasing significance of the gestational relationship. Thus, staff members’ recognition of the genetic ties as dominating above all allows for legitimation of commercial surrogacy as a whole and in its organizational aspects through decommodification of the child, who is no longer considered an object of market transaction.

Theoretical developments in sociocultural anthropology have transformed the study of kinship. Here, we review these theoretical developments, consider their influence on bioarchaeological kinship research, and propose an alternative framework for studying relatedness in antiquity. We find that broader, more flexible conceptions of relatedness have grown increasingly prevalent in 21st-century bioarchaeology, but kinship research largely continues to emphasize methodological improvement and identification of biological kin in archaeological contexts. By approaching kinship as a multiscalar dimension of social identity, bioarchaeologists can leverage complex conceptions of relatedness with diverse types of data to gain nuanced perspectives on family-based social organization in the past.

This article complicates the idea that lesbian and gay kinship is based primarily on friendship, voluntarism and being free from duty and obligation. It also offers a more nuanced understanding of wills as a rich source of evidence for making claims about kinship, family and relationships. It analyses conversations about will-writing with fifteen older lesbians and gay men, taken from interviews which formed part of a wider socio-legal study on the intersection of ageing, gender and sexuality (Westwood in Ageing, Gender and Sexuality: equality in later life. PhD thesis, School of Law, University of Keele, UK, 2015). The analysis identifies a wide range of kinship formations and composition going beyond “family of choice” narratives, and also both connections and disconnections between ties of love and affection and disposal of assets in wills. Participants’ will-writing reflected four types of prioritisation: prioritising children; prioritising friends; prioritising siblings; mixed priorities. In contrast with accounts of “families of choice” as being duty-free, a sense of duty, especially towards biological family members, was evident in a number of interviews. I suggest that wills can sometimes be a rich source of evidence about kinship, but only when analysis takes into account the complexities and contingencies which can be involved.

This special issue deals with the making of kinship through medical, political, affective, and legal technologies. While this primarily refers to the creation of kinship through medically assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization or gamete donation, it also includes further techniques of making kinship such as marriages, the establishment of so-called ‘donor siblingship’, and more general ways of creating belonging and an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991 [1983]). We understand technology as a device which assists the making of kinship that is situated in political, legal, and affective spheres and which therefore should be understood in a much broader way than just referring to the biotechnological manipulation of body substances. The term assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) refers to the technological means of manipulating gametes in order to conceive a child. Probably the best known of these techniques is the so-called ‘in vitro’ (Latin: ‘in glass’) fertilization or IVF. By isolating reproductive substance from the human body and enabling its cultivation in a petri dish, ‘IVF has changed scientific understandings of what life is’ (Franklin 2013 referring to Maienschein 2003) but also of what kinship is. In contemporary Euro-American thinking 1 , kinship is considered as the domain that is based on the ‘natural facts of life’ (Strathern 1992) – such as sex difference, generational succession, pregnancy and birth. Therefore, by intervening at the core of the making of a new life by dividing reproduction from sexual intercourse and taking it out of the human

This article deals with the notion of equality in Louis Dumont’s work, specifically relative to ideology and sex distinction in kinship terminology. It provides a new reading of his writings on kinship, analyzing his discussion of South Indian terminology and marriage, the contrasting value of affinity and consanguinity in caste society, and equality of the sexes. Dumont’s works on kinship are used to open a comparative examination of sex distinction in kinship terminology. This article seeks to extend this analysis of equality and hierarchy in kinship to other societies and ideologies, in order to explore the applicability of this approach to understanding of contemporary transformations in kinship relationships.

5th International Conference on New Horizons in Education (INTE) -- JUN 25-27, 2014 -- Paris, FRANCE, WOS: 000383740201115, Family and kinship are one of the most important values of cultural heritage in our literature. Therefore; Samiha Ayverdi, who is one of the most important women writersfrom the Repuclican Period, gives an important place to the family and kinship tie in her works. Ayverdi, whose sufistic sideoutweighes, tries to instill people to shapen in Islamic style in her books. Considered the importance family and kinship tie in Islam, the question that why she uses these terms so often is answered in that way. In that research, we have focused on the use of these terms in her works such as; Human and Demon, Fire Tree, Mesihpasha Imam, The Last Range, the Sun Not Going Down in search of family and kinship tie in our society by detecting the frequence of the use of words and word - comparison. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Based on a reconstruction of Proto-Philippine kinship and social organization terminologies, this article characterizes early Philippine kinship as bilateral with possible quasi-lineages. These features support the reconstruction of the Proto–Malayo-Polynesian system made by George Peter Murdock (1949) rather than that of Robert Blust (1980). In terms of leadership, the early Philippine community is described as dualistic in nature, allowing achieved and ascribed or hereditary chiefdom—thus deviating from the ancestral concept of hereditary leadership in the Proto–Malayo-Polynesian system. Changes in the Philippine kinship system are traced to show innovations in nomenclature and behavior toward certain kin.

This paper discusses the expression of kinship in Paluai (Baluan-Pam, ISO 639-3: blq), an Oceanic language spoken on Baluan Island, Manus Province, Papua New Guinea. Based on data gathered during extensive fieldwork, the authors first consider the formal characteristics of nominal possessive constructions that are relevant to the kinship system. Subsequently, the set of consanguineal and affinal kinship terms is presented, followed by a detailed discussion of social organization on Baluan Island and the role of the kinship system therein, and how this may fit in with the different forms of nominal possession that various terms can take. All kin terms except four (pên ‘daughter’, pwai ‘cousin’, kauwat ‘in-law’ and polam ‘in-law’) can only enter in direct possessive constructions. The final part of the paper is dedicated to the use of kinship terms in a changing cultural context, including the use of birth order terms,which are a relatively rare phenomenon, and the partial replacement of the system by terms from the creole language Tok Pisin. This paper discusses the expression of kinship in Paluai (Baluan-Pam, ISO 639-3: blq), an Oceanic language spoken on Baluan Island, Manus Province, Papua New Guinea. Based on data gathered during extensive fieldwork, the authors first consider the formal characteristics of nominal possessive constructions that are relevant to the kinship system. Subsequently, the set of consanguineal and affinal kinship terms is presented, followed by a detailed discussion of social organization on Baluan Island and the role of the kinship system therein, and how this may fit in with the different forms of nominal possession that various terms can take. All kin terms except four (pên ‘daughter’, pwai ‘cousin’, kauwat ‘in-law’, and polam ‘inlaw’) can only enter into direct possessive constructions. The final part of the paper is dedicated to the use of kinship terms in a changing cultural context, including the use of birth order terms, which are a relatively rare phenomenon, and the partial replacement of the system by terms from the creole language Tok Pisin.

This chapter examines rock art as cultural expressions of social relationships and kinship. More specifically, it considers the type(s) of relationships that exist or emerge in Indigenous contexts and how appreciation of these relationships can elucidate the meaning, symbolism, and significance of rock art. It first explores the relational contexts of rock art by citing examples involving sorcery before discussing the social embeddedness of rock art and the network of relationships that rock art operates within. It then analyzes the regional relatedness and social connectedness of rock art and shows that the breadth of relationships into which rock art is embedded involves ontology and epistemology. The chapter uses a series of case studies drawn primarily from rock art research with Yanyuwa, a maritime-oriented Indigenous language group in northern Australia’s southwest Gulf country, supplemented with examples from the American Southwest and other areas within Australia.

This article examines discourses on kinship and reproduction in the forensic crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000–). I argue that the programme stages a visual materialization of genetic kinship in order to assert its importance as a crucial type of forensic evidence, which evokes the traditional Darwinian framework of genealogy for understanding biological kinship as a substantial and enduring trace between generations. However, I show that CSI also participates in contemporary bioethical debates about new genetic and biomedical technologies that increasingly allow us to interfere in the human reproduction process. The programme engages with an emergent post-genomic re-spatialization of genealogy and acknowledges that the concept of kinship is increasingly being redefined, but it is still heavily invested in a normative understanding of sexual reproduction as a ‘natural fact of life’ and inadvertently constructs the nuclear family structure as an ideal framework for procreation.

In a recent two-part article on the nature of kinship, Marshall Sahlins maintains that performative criteria for kin-reckoning are at least as salient as procreative ones, and that, at conception, an individual is endowed with a wide circle of kin, including the ancestral dead. For both reasons, he argues, there is no warrant for granting privileged status to what anthropologists have called ‘primary’ kinship. The contentions here are that performative criteria are modeled upon procreative ones; that ties to ancestral figures are seen as antithetical to procreative ties; and that, therefore, all kinship constructs are derived from nuclear family relationships. Evidence in support of these contentions is provided from the Mae Enga, Fiji, the Trobriands, and Aboriginal Australia.

Various anthropologists have alleged that cultural constructions of kinship are at odds with Darwinian understandings of the same phenomena. The argument here is that this is not at all the case if attention is paid to the semantic structure of kinship categories, which reveals that the central members of these categories are indeed close procreative kin. Attention is also drawn to supporting research in cognitive psychology.

Kinship has been an “essentially contested concept” in social and cultural anthropology. Nevertheless, linguistic and anthropological linguistic studies of kinship terminologies, grammar, and pragmatics have developed in parallel with anthropological ones. Lacking, however, is a broad overview of the range of linguistic variation across languages that would build a bridge between the linguistics and anthropology of kinship. Toward that end, this article explores the role of language in the constitution of kinship. It asks, on what linguistic resources do people of different cultures and languages draw in order to constitute kinship as an institution?

This article uses the analytical tool of divine kinship to explore political charisma across Indian and Venezuelan democratic social revolutions. In both contexts, charismatic elected political leaders build their image of strength and action on a wide repertoire of cultural and religious resources that are legitimated by divine kinship. The juxtaposition of the Indian and Venezuelan political ethnographies shows how charismatic kinship inflects lived understandings of popular sovereignty and opens up spaces for holding personality politics accountable. © Stichting Focaal and Berghahn Books.

Comment on SAHLINS, Marshall. 2013. What kinship is—and is not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

For Jews in postcolonial, post-Holocaust France, integration into the French “Republican” cultural order meant espousing French culture, especially in naming practices. Babies born after decolonization and the exodus of North African Jews to France now bear the burden of French Republicanism: a French first name is a political allegiance, as if the “Republic” was a godmother. This chapter presents ethnographic material on naming practices among French Jews of North African origin to show how the analysis of spiritual kinship may be extended beyond the personal relationship of godparents to that of the community amidst major historical changes such as transnational and transcultural migration.

Language is systematically structured at all levels of description, arguably setting it apart from all other instances of communication in nature. In this article, I survey work over the last 20 years that emphasises the contributions of individual learning, cultural transmission, and biological evolution to explaining the structural design features of language. These 3 complex adaptive systems exist in a network of interactions: individual learning biases shape the dynamics of cultural evolution; universal features of linguistic structure arise from this cultural process and form the ultimate linguistic phenotype; the nature of this phenotype affects the fitness landscape for the biological evolution of the language faculty; and in turn this determines individuals’ learning bias. Using a combination of computational simulation, laboratory experiments, and comparison with real-world cases of language emergence, I show that linguistic structure emerges as a natural outcome of cultural evolution once certain minimal biological requirements are in place.

This chapter contends that while anthropological kinship theory has historically been rooted in church institutional practices that distinguish between consanguineal, affinal, and spiritual kinship, this division has proved inadequate to analytic and comparative purposes. The idea of spiritual kinship encodes not just an anti-Jewish polemic, for example, but a deep structural opposition between spirit and flesh that simply cannot be presumed in other settings. As an alternative, I suggest that spiritual kinship is just one variation on a much broader attempt by the Abrahamic communities to reconcile genealogical and non-genealogical grounds of relatedness. Readings in contemporary ethnography as well as Aristotle and Maimonides are marshaled to support the idea of kinship as an ethical relation.

This paper was concerned with the changing nature of adoptive kinship. The analysis was located in the context of current sociological and anthropological theory and parallels were drawn with other alternative family forms i.e. gay and lesbian families, and families formed by new reproductive technologies. Adoption as a family form has largely been neglected in sociological and anthropological literature, yet the changing nature of adoption, particularly in relation to open adoption and gay and lesbian adoption, means that it has an important contribution to make to new discourses of kinship. Adoption is far more likely to feature in psychological and child welfare literature than that on the family and kinship, yet it is a unique addition to the heterogeneous family landscape with a profound impact on cultural definitions of family and kinship. By considering contemporary adoption practice through a social construction and kinship theory lens, the paper argues that new kinship studies are helpful in conceptualizing adoptive kinship. Adoption also has a valuable and significant contribution to make to contemporary kinship theory.

Savosavo kinship terminology is remarkable in that it covers fifteen generations, a feature unique in its immediate geographical context, the Solomon Islands, and rare cross-linguistically. The aim of this paper is to present the kinship terminology system of the easternmost Papuan language from both an anthropological and a linguistic perspective, thus providing a comprehensive account of the terms, the system they form, their morphosyntactic and pragmatic features, and how they are used in everyday life. Both consanguineal and affinal kin are considered.

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

In order to navigate the social world, children need to understand and make predictions about how people will interact with one another. Throughout most of human history, social groups have been prominently marked by kinship relations, but few experiments have examined children's knowledge of and reasoning about kinship relations. In the current studies, we investigated how 3- to 5-year-old children understand kinship relations, compared to non-kin relations between friends, with questions such as, “Who has the same grandmother?” We also tested how children expect people to interact based on their relations to one another, with questions such as “Who do you think Cara would like to share her treat with?” Both in a storybook context and in a richer context presenting more compelling cues to kinship using face morphology, 3- and 4-year-old children failed to show either robust explicit conceptual distinctions between kin and friends, or expectations of behavior favoring kin over friends, even when asked about their own social partners. By 5 years, children’s understanding of these relations improved, and they showed some expectation that others will preferentially aid siblings over friends. Together, these findings suggest that explicit understanding of kinship develops slowly over the preschool years.

This paper explores the intricate concept of kinship in Anglo-Saxon society during the Middle Ages. At a time when bloodshed was frequent and wergilds a norm, there were few law enforcing mechanisms that maintained social order. By interpreting the role of kinship in various contexts, including relational, social and legal settings, this paper identifies kinship as a significant and highly complicated approach to resolving disputes and maintaining social peace.

Traditional human societies are organised around kinship, and use kinship networks to generate large scale community projects. This is made possible by a combination of linguistic kin recognition, a uniquely human trait, which is mediated by the reliability of kin as collaborators. When effective fertility falls, this results in two simultaneous effects on social networks: there are fewer kin that can be relied on, and the limiting effect of the local kin-clustering becomes stronger. To capture this phenomenon, we used a model of kinship lineages to build populations with a range of fertility levels combined with a behavioural synchrony model to measure the efficiency of collective action generated on kin networks within populations. Our findings suggest that, whenever effective cooperation depends on kinship, falling fertility creates a crisis when it results in too few kin to join the community project. We conclude that, when societies transition to small effective kin networks, due to falling fertility, increased relative distance to kin due to urbanisation or high mortality due to war or epidemics, they will be able to remain socially cohesive only if they replace disappearing kin networks with quasi-kin alternatives based on membership of guilds or clubs.

Kinship relations are blood relations or those relations which are created naturally. Kinship is a method of acknowledging relations and it is a social bond initiated by blood or genetic as well as marriage. Kinship is important in all cultures and in all human interaction. Kinship is important to anthropology because anthropology is the study of human behaviour and human behaviour is variable. According to M.Lamp[12] to understand fully the nature of kinship systems it is necessary to understand what kind of linguistic elements these are, and what kind of linguistic relationships. The kinship terminology of any language is a natural meeting point for the disciplines of anthropology and linguistics [6]. Like other languages of the world, Nepali kinship terms are also common for Nepali Language. Nepali 1 or Nepalese (नपाली ) is a language in the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. It takes its root from Sanskrit, the classical language of India. This paper explores the area of kinship terms in Nepali language, and its outlines the standard kinship relations, associated set of terms in the language. The formations of such terms are also elaborated with grammatical analysis. Kinship terms form a considerable part of the WordNet in any language because the kinship terms interacts each other with different relational characteristics of WordNet. Nepali is a morphologically rich language and Kinship terms form an important aspect in morphology of Nepali Language. There are many number of morphological studies in Nepali but most of them are descriptive in nature. Morphology of Nepali has not yet been fully analyzed from computational perspective.