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Anthropological Theory The whole history of kinship terminology in three chapters: Before Morgan, Morgan and after Morgan Thomas Trautmann Anthropological Theory 2001; 1; 268 DOI: 10.1177/14634990122228728 The online version of this article can be found at: Published by: Additional services and information for Anthropological Theory can be found at: Email Alerts: Subscriptions: Reprints: Permissions: Downloaded from at Jagiellonian University on November 22, 2008 Anthropological Theory Copyright © London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi Vol 1(2): 268–287 [1463-4996(200106)1:2;268–287;017340] The whole history of kinship terminology in three chapters Before Morgan, Morgan, and after Morgan University of Michigan Abstract The article questions the current consensus that kinship terminologies evolve from something like the Dravidian to something like the English terminology, examining it over three time periods. Before Morgan the study of kinship terminology was embedded within a comparative study of core vocabularies to determine historic relations among nations (e.g. Leibniz). Morgan’s breakthrough was to disembed the terms of kinship from the vocabulary list and conceptualize them as a set. His vision of their evolution had two phases. Before the revolutionary expansion of ethnological time in the mid-19th century, he developed an evolutionary view of the Indo- European kinship terminology that was very acute but tied to a short chronology for world history that the time revolution shortly exploded; after the time revolution he conceived the Iroquois and the English (as types of the Classificatory and the Descriptive) terminologies as an evolutionary series caused by successive reformations of the marriage rule. After Morgan, Dravidian and its structural neighbors have come to play the role of evolutionary starting-point. The article concludes with reasons to be skeptical of the current consensus and ways to move forward. Key Words Dravidian • evolution • history of anthropology • kinship • kinship terminology • Leibniz • Morgan • time • time revolution The invention of kinship was virtually the invention of anthropology itself; and kinship terminology was at the heart of that inventing. Kinship and kinship terminology as anthropological objects of study once were privileged sites of theorizing and have never entirely disappeared, although they had declined greatly following the skeptical essays of Needham (1971) and Schneider (1972, 1984), which called their coherence into question. The new kinship studies of the 1980s and 1990s have made up a lot of the 268 Downloaded from at Jagiellonian University on November 22, 2008 TRAUTMANN The whole history of kinship terminology lost ground. But it is my belief that anthropology’s brainchild will only thrive when it grows beyond anthropology and makes effective alliances with other disciplines. The study of kinship, and of kinship terminologies, has uncovered an order of facts that is of the first significance for the understanding of human social life. In uncovering these facts, anthropology, and anthropology alone, has made a contribution of permanent value. But anthropology’s breakthrough understanding of kinship, as that which includes the family but also something else that lies beyond and among families, has a value for other disciplines that is still to be realized. My own interest in kinship and kinship terminology was from the perspective of the deep history of India. The Dravidian kinship terminology of South India and Sri Lanka is a classic type whose geographical distribution correlates approximately with that of the Dravidian language family – setting aside, for the moment, the many instances of this type of kinship terminology in Oceania and the Americas. What makes the Dravidian terminology so pleasing is the clarity with which it associates a rule of marriage – that of cross-cousin marriage – with the semantic organization of the terms themselves. The basic organizing principles of Dravidian systems are two. The first is shared with Iroquois systems, and was noted by Morgan when he said of the Iroquois that ‘the father’s brother is equally a father’, and the mother’s sister a mother; that is, the father-word is applied to the father’s brother, and the mother-word to the mother’s sister. This is true of Dravidian languages, except that the father’s brother is called ‘big’ or ‘little’ father, the mother’s sister ‘big’ or ‘little’ mother, according to their age relative to the father or mother. A consequence is that the child of such fathers and mothers are ego’s brothers and sisters and are unmarriageable; moreover the children of these same-sex sibling pairs are the sons and daughters of both, and are siblings to one another. Following Lounsbury, we call this the principle of same-sex sibling merger (Lounsbury, 1964b). If we imagined English transformed into Dravidian by the application of this rule, we could say that the thickened categories of father, mother, sister, brother, son and daughter that result constitute the set of parallel kin that overrides and replaces the distinction in English of lineal and collateral kin. The second principle of Dravidian systems is not shared with Iroquois: it is the prin- ciple of cross-cousin marriage. By it, though a brother-sister pair may not marry, their children should marry. The consequences of this are many. In combination with the rule of same-sex sibling merger, we may imagine English transformed into Dravidian with the formation of a category of cross kin, consisting of the uncles and aunts (minus those who have become fathers and mothers through same-sex sibling merger), cousins (minus those who have become siblings through the same principle), and nephews and nieces (minus Figure 1. The whole history of kinship terminology diagram. 269 Downloaded from at Jagiellonian University on November 22, 2008 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 1(2) those who have become sons and daughters through the same principle). But the cross- kin category is thickened by addition of the affines: father- and mother-in law become uncle and aunt; spouses and spouse’s siblings become cousins; children’s spouses become nephews and nieces. The pleasing simplicity of this terminological system – its evident logical integrity and the difference of that logic from that of English kinship terminology – makes it an ideal starting point for discussion of kinship terminology, and there has been an abundance of ethnographic reports on terminologies of this kind from around the world. But it is of special strategic value for studying the deep history of Indian civilization, for the many ethnographic instances across South India and Sri Lanka can be shown to be so many variations on a single theme; and the anthropological record of the present can be joined up with evidence from ancient lawbooks, chronicles and inscriptions to show that the pattern of Dravidian kinship is traceable for the better part of two thousand years and is remarkably durable and resistant to change. Joining the anthropological study of kinship terminology with a rich historical record leads us to think that the structures of kinship terminology may be very slow to change and resistant to effects of changed political, economic or social circumstance, or to the calculated interests of individual actors. Kinship terminologies, these findings suggest, are not, after all, sensitive indicators of changes in other aspects of social organization or modes of production or forms of politi- cal association. For that very reason they are especially useful as traces of distant origins, like languages themselves. Though South Indians are in every way participants in a general Indian cultural pattern, including many aspects of family organization and lan- guage, their language and kinship terminology nevertheless remain discoverably differ- ent from those of North India and of those belonging to the Munda language family. The lesson of history is that kinship terminology is very conservative and resistant to the effects of other levels. It was L.H. Morgan who invented the study of kinship terminologies, or what he called ‘nomenclatures of relationship’, and in doing so served to create the field of kinship by framing it as an object of study containing various different, but coherent and logical, systems of relationships, the differences among which constituted a problem worthy of close study. Kinship terminology was the site of the anthropologi- cal breakthrough, destabilizing the idea of the family as an effect of nature and having a fixed character, as Maurice Godelier (1995) has said. If kinship and , a fortiori , kinship terminology have suffered from thinking small, it is worth revisiting Morgan’s concep- tion to re-examine it in a larger, three-century context of before and after. That is what I wish to do in this paper. The central issue will be to comment on an unpublished text of Morgan from the first draft of the Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity (Morgan, 1870). This will be the middle part of the three natural divisions into which the history of kinship terminology (and indeed anthropology) falls: Before Morgan, Morgan, and After Morgan. Fast forwarding through history at this terrific rate will have the effect of caricature, the virtue of which will be to draw into relief the gross features of the topic by blurring the detail. My purpose in doing so will be to subject a current consensus to critical scrutiny. There is a remarkable uniformity of tendency among theorists in the 20th century to assume that the beginning point for the evolution of kinship terminologies was a system something like the Dravidian, and that the overall directionality of change in terminologies 270 Downloaded from at Jagiellonian University on November 22, 2008 TRAUTMANN The whole history of kinship terminology is toward something like the kinship terminology in English. At the beginning of the new century it is worth examining that assumption skeptically, to probe its strengths and weaknesses, and ascertain whether it will be serviceable for the future. My strategy for gaining purchase on the problem will be to throw the present consensus in relief by going back to the manuscript of L.H. Morgan just mentioned, written in about 1865 but never published in full, on the evolution of kinship terminology, which expounds an alternative to the current consensus. I will then consider the grounds on which the current consensus stands, and reasons for skepticism. In narrativizing the history of anthropology, one has, at the outset, to make a choice about whether to stress continuity or discontinuity. To a degree the choice of a narra- tive strategy is arbitrary. But I think that there are a number of good reasons why it is useful to think of anthropology as we know it originating all at once, as the result of a Big Bang, in around 1860. This Big Bang was what I have called the Revolution in Ethnological Time; the revolution, that is, by which the short, Biblical chronology for human history suddenly gave way to a very much lengthened chronology. In England this collapse of the short chronology was especially associated with the excavation of human artifacts in association with extinct fossil species at Brixham Cave by William Pengelly and Hugh Falconer, and announced dramatically by Charles Lyell at the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1859, the year as well of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (Gruber, 1965; Trautmann, 1992). The crisis that was provoked by the sudden immense lengthening of human history had several effects. The most dramatic was that the Bible and the Greek and Latin clas- sics, the oldest written records known to Europeans, in short, no longer gave a picture of humanity’s ‘primitive’ or original state; and the vast new territory of ‘prehistory’ (the very word was invented in this period), which came suddenly into being, required filling by prehistoric archaeology. The most important result, perhaps, was the constituting of ‘primitive man’ as a concept. Hitherto, ‘savages’ were thought of as feral humans who had lost the arts of civilized life with which God had fitted them in Eden (Hodgen, 1936); now the contemporary savage was seen not through the lens of a theory of degen- eration but as a prolongation of the primitive state into the present. ‘Primitive man’ was born, the first child of the time revolution (Trautmann, 1992). The time revolution divided the scholarly activity of the generation of Morgan, Darwin and Marx in two. In the case of Morgan, I have recovered the greater part of a first draft of the Systems from among the Morgan Papers at the University of Rochester, and have shown that the first draft is under the reign of the short chronology, while the published version has been revised to accommodate the interpretation to the suddenly lengthened time frame for human history. Thus Morgan’s study of kinship terminology begins before the Big Bang, and is revised in the light of the Big Bang. The middle term of our three-chapter history of the study of kinship terminology, therefore, will be sub- divided into Morgan A and Morgan B, before and after the Big Bang. BEFORE MORGAN Briefly, as to the ‘before’ part of the picture. Morgan did not create kinship terminology as an anthropological object out of the blue, but from within a long-standing tradition of linguistic ethnology, the project of which was to determine the historical relations among nations by determining the relations among their languages. This is a very 271 Downloaded from at Jagiellonian University on November 22, 2008 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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