Terminological correlates of cross-cousin marriage

Coult, Allan D.

doi:10.1163/22134379-90002972

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…In both these instances, the kinship systems reflect who may be available for marriage. Coult () finds correlations between, on the one hand, Omaha cousin terms, patrilineal descent , and preferential matrilineal cross‐cousin marriage and, on the other hand, Crow terms, matrilineal descent , and preferential patrilineal cross‐cousin marriage . Iroquois terms (cross‐ and parallel‐cousins are discriminated on both parent’s side) correlate with preferential bilateral cross‐cousin marriage in his sample.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Practice and Shared History, Not Social Scale, Structure Cross‐Cultural Complexity in Kinship Systems

Rácz

Passmore

Jordan

2019

Topics in Cognitive Science

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Human populations display remarkable diversity in language and culture, but the variation is not without limit. At the population level, variation between societies may be structured by a range of macro‐evolutionary factors, including ecological and environmental resources, shared ancestry, spatial proximity, and covarying social practices. Kinship terminology systems are varying linguistic paradigms that denote familial social relationships of kin and non‐kin. Systems vary by the kinds of salient distinctions that are made (e.g., age, gender, generation) and the extent to which different kinds of kin are called by the same term. Here, we explore two kinds of explanations for an observed typology of kin terms for cousins. The first one derives the typology from a learning bottleneck linked to population size. This would lead to a correlation between community size and the type of kinship system. The second one derives it from a set of social practices, particularly marriage and transfer of resources that might shape kinship systems. Using a global ethnographic database of over a thousand societies, we show that marriage rules and shared linguistic affiliation have a significant influence on the type of kinship system found in a society. This remains true if we control for the effect of spatial proximity and cultural ancestry. By combining cognitive and historic approaches to this aspect of kinship, we suggest broader implications for the study of human social cognition in general.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Practice and Shared History, Not Social Scale, Structure Cross‐Cultural Complexity in Kinship Systems

Rácz

Passmore

Jordan

2019

Topics in Cognitive Science

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“…Anthropologists have hypothesized that the characteristics of these terminologies (such as the differentiation between cross-cousins and parallel cousins, i.e. the children of mother's sister/father's brother and mother's brother/father's sister) have co-evolved with features of the social structure such as marriage taboos (for an overview and a critical perspective see Coult 1965). Comparative analyses using language phylogenies have found little support for most of these hypotheses (Passmore and Jordan 2020).…”

Section: Moving Forwardmentioning

confidence: 99%