Early Austronesian Social Organization: The Evidence of Language [and Comments and Reply]

Blust, Robert; Aberle, David F.; Allen, Nicholas; Barnes, Robert; Chowning, Ann; Faublée, Jacques; Fox, James J.; Grace, George W.; Mabuchi, Toichi; Maddock, Kenneth; Pawley, Andrew

doi:10.1086/202430

Cited by 54 publications

(35 citation statements)

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“…Ancestral kinship patterns have been inferred (i) through reconstruction of kin terminologies in ancestral proto-languages using the linguistic comparative method and (ii) through geographical or distributional arguments based on the comparative patterns of kin terms and ethnographic kinship 'facts ' (e.g. Murdock 1949;Blust 1980;Mallory 1997). We stress that these approaches are detailed and carefully described, and valuable to the study of prehistory.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Your place or mine? A phylogenetic comparative analysis of marital residence in Indo-European and Austronesian societies

Fortunato

Jordan

2010

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Accurate reconstruction of prehistoric social organization is important if we are to put together satisfactory multidisciplinary scenarios about, for example, the dispersal of human groups. Such considerations apply in the case of Indo-European and Austronesian, two large-scale language families that are thought to represent Neolithic expansions. Ancestral kinship patterns have mostly been inferred through reconstruction of kin terminologies in ancestral proto-languages using the linguistic comparative method, and through geographical or distributional arguments based on the comparative patterns of kin terms and ethnographic kinship ‘facts’. While these approaches are detailed and valuable, the processes through which conclusions have been drawn from the data fail to provide explicit criteria for systematic testing of alternative hypotheses. Here, we use language trees derived using phylogenetic tree-building techniques on Indo-European and Austronesian vocabulary data. With these trees, ethnographic data and Bayesian phylogenetic comparative methods, we statistically reconstruct past marital residence and infer rates of cultural change between different residence forms, showing Proto-Indo-European to be virilocal and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian uxorilocal. The instability of uxorilocality and the rare loss of virilocality once gained emerge as common features of both familie

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Your place or mine? A phylogenetic comparative analysis of marital residence in Indo-European and Austronesian societies

Fortunato

Jordan

2010

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…The spread of the Austronesian-speaking peoples was both rapid and comparatively recent, and the details of that history are being filled in by the work of archaeologists, linguists, geneticists, and ethnologists. The time depth of the Austronesian dispersal is sufficiently shallow and knowledge of Austronesian languages sufficiently developed for the partial reconstruction of PAN and the kinship terminology of the early daughter language, PMP (Blust 1980a). …”

Section: Kinship Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are two established views on the PMP kinship system. Following Blust (1980a), I refer to the first of these interpretations as the "bilateral hypothesis." Alfred Kroeber (1919) was the first anthropologist to propose a bilateral interpretation of what would now be called PMP or, perhaps, Proto-Philippines kinship.…”

Section: The Transformation Of Malayo-polynesian Kinship Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following Blust (1980a), on whose linguistic reconstructions it is based, I refer to this as the "prescriptive alliance theory." There is only one region in the Austronesian-speaking world in which systems of prescriptive alliance predominate, Eastern Indonesia.…”

Section: The Transformation Of Malayo-polynesian Kinship Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…He notes that Murdock (1949) established that sibling classification systems like this are negatively correlated with organization in terms of bilateral kindreds or demes and concludes that "early Austronesian society" was organized in terms of some form of descent groups. Blust (1976Blust ( , 1980a) also reconstructs a PAN word *Rumaq ("family dwelling" but also "house," as in "house of Windsor"), which, he argues, was applied to the lineage or some other Prescriptive alliance with three patrilineal groups. In a system of prescriptive alliance or asymmetric exchange, a male Ego marries a woman equivalent to his MBD.…”

Section: The Transformation Of Malayo-polynesian Kinship Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Kinship Matters: Structures of Alliance, Indigenous Foragers, and the Austronesian Diaspora

Turner

2013

Human Biology

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The study of kinship systems has direct relevance for the field of human genetics and the study of microevolution in human populations. Some types of postmarital residence rules-rules requiring a married couple to live with or near relatives of the husband or wife-will have consequences for the distribution of mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome lineages. Rules that proscribe or encourage marriage with close kin will also have consequences for allele frequency. A preference for marrying at a distance, both socially and geographically, creates alliances that can have survival value for individuals and groups in an environment of periodic or unpredictable scarcity. This article considers the nature of early contact between the indigenous foraging populations of the Philippines and Austronesian speaking settlers who began arriving ~4,500-4,000 BP. It argues that when the first Austronesians arrived they brought with them a kinship system based on symmetrical exchange between descent-based groups. It considers why such a system was gradually changed into the bilateral kinship systems that characterize the various peoples of the Philippines today, "negrito" and non-negrito alike. Abstract The study of kinship systems has direct relevance for the field of human genetics and the study of microevolution in human populations. Some types of postmarital residence rules-rules requiring a married couple to live with or near relatives of the husband or wife-will have consequences for the distribution of mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome lineages. Rules that proscribe or encourage marriage with close kin will also have consequences for allele frequency. A preference for marrying at a distance, both socially and geographically, creates alliances that can have survival value for individuals and groups in an environment of periodic or unpredictable scarcity. This article considers the nature of early contact between the indigenous foraging populations of the Philippines and Austronesian speaking settlers who began arriving ~4,500-4,000 BP. It argues that when the first Austronesians arrived they brought with them a kinship system based on symmetrical exchange between descent-based groups. It considers why such a system was gradually changed into the bilateral kinship systems that characterize the various peoples of the Philippines today, "negrito" and non-negrito alike.

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Diaspora and Identity in Archaeology: Moving beyond the Black Atlantic

Lilley¹

2007

A Companion to Social Archaeology

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Early Austronesian Social Organization: The Evidence of Language [and Comments and Reply]

Cited by 54 publications

References 0 publications

Your place or mine? A phylogenetic comparative analysis of marital residence in Indo-European and Austronesian societies

Your place or mine? A phylogenetic comparative analysis of marital residence in Indo-European and Austronesian societies

Kinship Matters: Structures of Alliance, Indigenous Foragers, and the Austronesian Diaspora

Diaspora and Identity in Archaeology: Moving beyond the Black Atlantic

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