A Kinship Parable[1]

Dwight Read (UCLA)

Eager Graduate student (EG for short), tired of taking courses that seemed only to be interested in navel gazing asked himself in confusion, after one of his classes. “Surely there must be something better!” A fellow graduate student suggested that he attend the Summer Workshop on Quantitative Methods and Modeling.[2] EG went to the workshop and learned about semantic domains and cultural consensus analysis.[3]

EG then went to the field to apply what he had learned in the Workshop. He quickly made friends with the men in his village and discovered they had 6 terms Tabu, Tama, Luta, Tuwa, Bwada and Latu that they used to refer to males. EG decided to see how the terms relate to each other as a semantic domain. So he set up a series of frames of the form: “If I use ______ to refer to X, and X uses _______ to refer to Y, then I should use _________ to refer to Y.” This worked extremely well and he got back statements such as “If I refer to X as Bwada and X refers to Y as Tama then I refer to Y as Tama”.

EG put all of his data into neatly drawn tables. Then he applied the ideas of cultural consensus analysis and discovered a high degree of concordance among his informants. This was, indeed, a cultural domain.

Armed with his field data, EG went back to Research University to talk with Prof. Silverback. Prof. Silverback looked at EG’s notes and tables and asked EG: “Don’t you realize you have been getting kin terms? EG said “No. What are kin terms?” Prof. Silverback rolled his eyes upward and thought to himself: “Why should EG know about kin terms? We no longer teach classes on kinship and some of my fellow anthropologists have said that there is no such thing as kinship.” Prof. Silverback asked EG if he had used the genealogical method[4] for getting information on what the terms mean. EG looked puzzled. Prof. Silverback explained: “When you elicit kin terms, you need to find out from your informants the kin terms you can use for your genealogical relatives, beginning with genitor and genetrix.”

“Even if they don’t have a term for genitor,” he told EG, “insist on them telling you what term to use for the person who is one’s genitor, and similarly for genetrix.[5] Without that information we can’t analyze the 6 terms you have written down.” EG was genuinely puzzled and asked “Why can’t we just treat these 6 terms as part of a semantic domain and analyze them just like any other semantic domain?” Prof. Silverback smiled, for he knew that EG was referring to his work on semantic domains.

Prof. Silverback then told EG that he had gotten a new computer program, called Kinship Algebra Expert System (KAES),[6] that might be able to do something with his 6 terms. Prof. Silverback thought, though, that it was hopeless since EG did not have the genealogical definition of any of these terms.

Prof. Silverback turned on his computer and told EG that they had to make a kin term map showing the linkages among the terms based on the information he had elicited from his friends. After drawing the kin term map on the computer screen, Prof. Silverback pressed the Analyze button and several windows appeared. EG looked at the first window labeled Graph and said with amazement: “Even though I did not ask the women about terms, on one side of the graph are the 6 terms I elicited, and on the other side are 6 more terms that look like they should be the terms used by females!”

The computer now showed a list of terms and the set of genealogical positions that would be included under each term. “Amazing!” said EG. “How did the computer figure out that all of these terms and their genealogical definitions? I couldn’t even get anyone to provide a term that meant genitor!”

A new screen appeared with the graph of an idealized genealogy with ego at the center and a kin term listed for each position in the genealogy. It was Prof. Silverback’s turn to express amazement, for he had been sure that nothing would come of trying to analyze EG’s 6 terms. “This is remarkable! We have the complete terminology right before us, along with the genealogical definition of each kin term. But how can this be?” he wondered to himself. “EG did not get ask about genealogical definitions and did not ask anyone about the terms they use for genitor or genetrix. All he did was ask them about how the 6 terms relate to each other in the form of triadic frames.”

By now Prof. Silverback was almost visibly shaken. “Is it possible that kin terms provide a conceptual system that is not simply a classification of sets of kin types? Could it be that while people do trace out genealogical linkages, it is also true that the kin terms form a separate conceptual system, with its own internal logic, one that is more basic than the definition of kin terms using genealogical kin types? Is it really possible to predict correctly the genealogical definitions of kin terms?”

After EG left, Prof. Silverback hurried to his bookshelf and pulled out a dusty back issue of the American Anthropologist.[7] “I know that I have seen that terminology before,” Prof. Silverback said to himself. “Yes. Here it is. Let’s see. Here is the list of kin terms in the article along with their genealogical definitions, just as they should be listed. Surely it cannot be the case that the KAES program actually generated the complete terminology and all of the genealogical definitions of the kin terms.” Prof. Silverback checked the computer generated definitions against the terms in the article and exclaimed, “It’s exactly the right list! Must be pure coincidence, or a lucky guess, for some of the definitions are bizarre.” Prof. Silverback was looking at the genealogical definition of Tabu given in the article – ff, fm, mf, mm, mmb, fz, fzh, fzd, fzdd, ss, sd, ds, dd, man’s zds, man’s zdd, woman’s bs, woman’s bd, man’s wife’s brother son, man’s wife’s brother’s daughter, woman’s mbs, woman’s mbd, woman’s mmbs, and woman’s mmbd. “Now how could the KAES program ever figure out that list?” Prof. Silverback mumbled to himself. “Let’s see what is on the computer screen for Tabu –ff, fm, mf, mm, mmb, fz…” By this point Prof. Silverback was beginning to feel very uncomfortable, as if he was faced with a fact that he was desperately trying to hide from himself. “…, fzh, fzd, fzdd…” he stammered, slowly realizing that there was no difference between the list on the screen and the list in the article, except that the screen included other, more distant genealogical positions not mentioned in the article. Quickly, and almost as if in desperation, Prof. Silverback turned to the other terms. “Surely there must be one disagreement someplace!” When Prof. Silverback reached the end of the list without finding any errors he sank back into his chair and spoke as if to someone. “But this can’t possibly be! We’re talking about people, not machines! Machines may be predictable, but people aren’t. Kinship has to do with flesh and blood, real people, not cold symbols and mathematical-like relations.[8] There must be at least one error in here someplace!” Prof. Silverback kept looking at the screen and slowly it began to dawn on him. “Maybe this is telling us something fundamental about human cognition and something about what we mean by culture. Maybe this is even telling us something about what it means to be human!” With that thought, Prof. Silverback turned off the computer, then turned out the lights, and left his office, a puzzled smile on his face.

1 Research sponsored in part by NSF Subcontract Y702129 (Biocomplexity Proposal).

2 NSF Summer Institute for Research Design and Methods in Cultural Anthropology

3 Romney, A. Kimball, Susan C. Weller, and William H. Batchelder. (1986) Culture as Consensus: A Theory of Culture and Accuracy. American Anthropologist 88: 313-338

4 Rivers. W.H. R. 1910, The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Inquiry. Sociological Review 3:1-12.

5 “I was able to make the natives understand very thoroughly that I wanted the ‘proper father’” Rivers, W. H. R. 1900, A Genealogical Method of Collecting Social and Vital Statistics. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3:74-84.

6 KAES program discussed in Read, D. and C. Behrens. 1990. KAES: An Expert System for the Algebraic Analysis of Kinship Terminologies. J. of Quantitative Anthropology 2:353-393; see also Read, D. 2001 What is Kinship? In The Cultural Analysis of Kinship: The Legacy of David Schneider and Its Implications for Anthropological Relativism, R. Feinberg and M. Ottenheimer eds. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Pp. 78-117. KAES Program initially written in Turbo Pascal by Dwight Read and Cliff Behrens. Rewritten in Java by Michael Fischer in conjunction with Dwight Read. Copy of the Java version may be obtained from the author or from Michael Fischer (M.D.Fischer@ukc.ac.uk).

7 American Anthropologist 1965 67(5) Part 2: 142-185.

8 Paraphrase of an anonymous reviewer comment on a manuscript, 2001