Language in the Constitution of Kinship

Abstract

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?

Introduction: Strings of Connectedness in Ian Keen’s Scholarship

“…Having used Searle's speech act theory in his doctoral dissertation, the important links between language and sociality are apparent in Knowledge and Secrecy, and were developed in subsequent publications (Keen 1995(Keen , 2011. However, it is only now, post-retirement, that he has been able to develop this interest to its fullest extent, with two recent publications (Keen 2013b(Keen , 2015, and more on the way.…”

How Crow-Omaha Skewing Spreads

“…If social technology is to prove heuristic, understanding how nomenclatures operate and change over time is essential. Linguistic aspects are frequently omitted from formalist, evolutionist, and sociological explanations of kinship (Keen 2014). Both linguistic structures and ethnolinguistic communities have histories, including relationships with neighbors.…”