The Grapevine Forest: Kinship, Status, and Wealth in a Mediterranean Community (Selo, Croatia)

Milicic, Bojka

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511896620.004

Cited by 3 publications

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“…The capacity for metaphorical thought implies partial overlap between two semantic domains (Kronenfeld 1996;Lakoff and Johnson 1980;) and a 'blended space' (Lakoff 2009;Pecher, Boot and Van Dantzig 2011). Many cultures use metaphors of creeping plants such as 'grapevines' (Milicic 1998), or other winding objects, to think about kin groups. This metaphorical usage is based on image schemata-mental associations between two referents based on similarity and important for grounding abstract concepts (Lakoff 1990: 106).…”

Section: Kinship Metaphorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Shapiro¹

2018

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Hal Scheffler was one of the world's great anthropologists and, without question, its foremost authority on human kinship. These considerations in themselves would be quite enough to merit a collection of essays in his memory, but his work also touches upon certain larger issues in our appreciation of the human condition, as well as current social controversies.It was for his extensionist position on kinship terminologies-what he liked to call 'systems of kin classification'-that he was best known. In a nutshell, Scheffler would come to raise two questions: (1) What is the primary meaning-what he called the focus-of kinship terms like English 'mother', 'father', 'brother', 'sister' etc.? (2) By what procedures do people extend these meanings from their foci to others? His answers, based upon meticulous analyses of kinship terminologies in various parts of the world, were that focal membership is supplied mostly by nuclear family relationships, from which relationships it is extended to peopleeven to things-outside the nuclear family; and that these extensions are accomplished by ordered sets of rules that have considerable generality cross-culturally. Choiseul Island kinshipScheffler's first publication on kinship, based upon his doctoral dissertation, was his book-length treatment of sociality on Choiseul Island (Scheffler 1965), now part of the independent Solomon Islands. Two things deserve special emphasis in Scheffler's Choiseul analysis. First, there are rich data on distinctions made by the Choiseulese themselves. Second, Choiseulese ideas about kinship are not so different from our own. 1 We are especially indebted for this personal information from Jan Simpson, Hal's widow, her secretary Mary Smith and Ray Kelly, his Yale colleague. 5 INTRODUCTIONWith regard to the first point, even though more distant kin are superficially classed with one's parents, siblings, children, and other close kin, these latter are said, in native parlance, to be the 'true' members of their respective kin classes (Scheffler 1965: 75, 81). The singling out of focal membership by words translatable as 'true' (or 'real') is typical of a very large number of kinship terminologies throughout the world-a point Hal Scheffler would repeatedly make in subsequent analyses (e.g. Scheffler 1972b: 354; Scheffler 1973: 766; Scheffler and Lounsbury 1971: 43) and which probably supplies the most frequently encountered evidence in the ethnographic literature for the extensionist position (Shapiro 2016(Shapiro , 2017. With regard to the second point, Scheffler notes an expression in the Choiseul language that he translates as 'kin', which implies that they idiomise kinship in ways that are entirely familiar to English speakers. Towards a general theory of human kinshipA year after the publication of his Choiseul analysis, Hal Scheffler put forward nothing less than a general statement on human kinship. In this important but neglected essay Scheffler lays the groundwork for his general position on human kinship, to wit: [D]ifferent socie...

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Section: Kinship Metaphorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A loza is a bilateral localised kin group with an apical ancestor, male or female, associated with a house. Its loza name is added to all individual names, since many have identical first and last names (Milicic 1998). There are about 15 'grapevines' with living members.…”

Section: Kinship Metaphorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Shapiro¹

2018

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“…The capacity for metaphorical thought implies partial overlap between two semantic domains (Kronenfeld 1996;Lakoff and Johnson 1980;Pinker 2007) and a 'blended space' (Lakoff 2009;Pecher, Boot and Van Dantzig 2011). Many cultures use metaphors of creeping plants such as 'grapevines' (Milicic 1998), or other winding objects, to think about kin groups. This metaphorical usage is based on image schemata-mental associations between two referents based on similarity and important for grounding abstract concepts (Lakoff 1990: 106).…”

Section: Kinship Metaphorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Creeping Plants and Winding Belts: Cognition, Kinship, and Metaphor

Milicic¹

2018

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

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“…Within the village, individuals were most often identified at the level of the broadest kin category, a 'grapevine' (loza). A 'grapevine' is a bilateral, localized kin group with an apical ancestor, male or female, whose name is associated with a house and is added to all individual names since many have identical first and last names (Milicic 1998). There are about 15 'grapevines' with living members.…”

Section: Kinship Terminologies Are Good To Think Withmentioning

confidence: 99%

Talk Is Not Cheap: Kinship Terminologies and the Origins of Language

Milicic

2013

Structure and Dynamics: eJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences

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Kinship terminology is a human universal, a kind of cultural knowledge circulated through language. In this paper I explore the possibility that the need for social rules prompted the development of fully syntactic language via kinship terminologies. In other words, kinship terms are at the core of modern language. They require uniquely human cognitive features such as symbolic reference and recursiveness, which in turn require a cognitive capacity beyond that of non-human primates. The conceptualization of kinship types was crucial in the transition from non-human primate to human social organization and the 'invention' of kinship terms facilitated this transition. The heuristics used in kin classification could have provided the decisive cognitive leap that introduced the essential tools for organizing and expanding social relationships and increasing the chances for survival. Thus kinship terms could have been the original nucleus of human language.

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The Grapevine Forest: Kinship, Status, and Wealth in a Mediterranean Community (Selo, Croatia)

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

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

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

Creeping Plants and Winding Belts: Cognition, Kinship, and Metaphor

Talk Is Not Cheap: Kinship Terminologies and the Origins of Language

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