Classificatory Systems of Relationship.

Kroeber, A. L.

doi:10.2307/2843284

Cited by 158 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Anthropologists in Britain turned to conceptualizing kinship in terms of its functions and structural features, while American anthropologists, following Franz Boas, opted for understanding kinship systems in terms of the framework of cultural relativism. All parties dismissed the idea of universal, progressive stages of evolution: Malinowski (1913Malinowski ( , 1930 and his followers, following Westermarck (1903Westermarck ( [1891), emphasized the functional nature of the nuclear family as the foundation of social systems, while Boas's followers, such as Kroeber (1909) and Lowie (1919), questioned the nature of kinship universals.…”

Section: A Brief History Of the Study Of Kinship In Anthropologymentioning

confidence: 97%

The Rebirth of Kinship

Shenk

Mattison

2011

Hum Nat

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Kinship was one of the key areas of research interest among anthropologists in the nineteenth century, one of the most hotly debated areas of theory in the early and mid-twentieth century, and yet an area of waning interest by the end of the twentieth century. Since then, the study of kinship has experienced a revitalization, with concomitant disputes over how best to proceed. This special issue brings together recent studies of kinship by scientific anthropologists employing evolutionary theory and quantitative methods. We argue that the melding of the evolutionary theoretical perspective with quantitative and ethnographic methodologies has strengthened and reinvigorated the study of kinship by synthesizing and extending existing research via rigorous analyses of evidence.

show abstract

Section: A Brief History Of the Study Of Kinship In Anthropologymentioning

confidence: 97%

The Rebirth of Kinship

Shenk

Mattison

2011

Hum Nat

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The prescient brilliance of Westermarck's critique (1903) is based upon a variety of empirical and logical considerations. In my opinion, however, the most profound counter-argument is the gravamen of Kroeber's (1909) classic piece on 'classificatory systems', viz., that all systems of kin classification are ipso facto classificatory, so that Morgan's descriptive/classificatory distinction is meaningless, Even more important, such systems are independent of external institutional causation; instead, they reflect the independent creativity of the human mind. This latter was too extreme a conclusion, and Kroeber later modified it to take account of demonstrable cases of social causation (W. Shapiro 2009a).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

The Nuclear Familyversusthe Men's House? A re-examination of Mundurucú Sociality

Shapiro

2011

Anthropological Forum

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Kin terminologies reveal the working of the kinship part of the mind with exceptional clarity. Across cultures, there are regularities in which kin types are terminologically merged and separated, or otherwise linguistically unmarked and marked, that implicate a common conceptual structure underlying local vagaries in theories of relatedness and procreation (Jones 2010 (Greenberg 1966(Greenberg , 1990Jones 2010;Kroeber 1909;Lévi-Strauss 1969).…”

Section: Kinship and Conceptual Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some kin types are cognitively prototypical, especially father and mother, as shown by patterns of linguistic markedness (Greenberg 1966(Greenberg , 1990; Shapiro Chapter 1). Kin terms differ from one another in distinctive features, and across cultures the number of such features is limited-probably not many more than the eight proposed by Alfred Kroeber (1909). These features rarely include quantities like 'more than 10 years older' (but see Gould 2000: 138-42 for an exception in Samoan), or important information like 'richer'.…”

Section: Kinship and Conceptual Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Kinship in Mind: Three Approaches

Jones¹

2018

Focality and Extension in Kinship: Essays in Memory of Harold W. Scheffler

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Social anthropologists mostly study kinship as a principle of social organisation. But there is also a psychological and cognitive side to human kinship, involving questions like: How do people recognise others as kin of one sort or another? What do kin categories mean and how are they related to one another? What, if anything, distinguishes thinking about kinship from other varieties of social cognition? Different schools of anthropology offer very different answers to these questions. Here I review three approaches to the psychology of kinship. One has its roots in evolutionary theory and human/nonhuman comparisons. The second is concerned with symbolism, culture, and the natives' explicit theories of procreation and kinship. These approaches are likely to be familiar to students of evolution and human behaviour, and cultural anthropology, respectively. The third approach stems from recent developments in cognitive science, especially in the study of specialised domains of cognition. This approach is newest, and probably least familiar to most anthropologists and even to most cognitive scientists, so it receives most attention here. I argue that human beings have a specialised cognitive system-which can be called 'kinship core cognition' or 'kinship conceptual structure'-comprising a set of universal building blocks for organising knowledge of kin and kin categories in an abstract kinship space. Much of the success of formal methods in the study of kin

show abstract

Classificatory Systems of Relationship.

Cited by 158 publications

References 0 publications

The Rebirth of Kinship

The Rebirth of Kinship

The Nuclear Familyversusthe Men's House? A re-examination of Mundurucú Sociality

Kinship in Mind: Three Approaches

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About