Calculating Kin: Analyzing and Understanding Cultural Codes
Michael D. Fischer
Introduction
One of the goals of social anthropology is to gain an understanding of how and why
people interact with each other and with their environment. One important idea that
contributes to this understanding is culture. One of the many many ways that anthropologists
use culture is to refer to systems of shared ideas among a group of people.
By systems we mean that there is some regularity to the way that ideas, information
and concepts are shared. There are several possible ways this sharing could happen.
One would be to imagine a very large corpus of ideas, which everyone carefully memorizes.
No doubt there is a lot of simple memorization going on, but it is unlikely to account
for all culture sharing.
While we could just about accept this for simple lists of vocabulary in language,
one of the marked properties of human culture (and human language as a part of that
culture) is that as large as the number of memorized ideas is, the number of things
and situations these can apply to is much larger.
Take for example the idea of animal. This is one term, and can apply to a
large number of varieties of animal. Even given that most languages have a large
number of terms for specific kinds of animal, there are always more than one possible
referent for a given term, e.g. more than one dog, cat or rat. Only if each individual
organism in the experience of a group were given a unique term would the number ideas
equal to the number of referents of those ideas. Given that different people have
different specific experiences, this would make sharing the list very difficult indeed.
This idea we have encountered over the course of the year as classification, a powerful
aspect of human thought which permits us to assign some common knowledge to a large
number of things rather than have to learn it over and over for each new individual
thing or organism we might encounter. Besides classifying different things to a common
term or idea, an order can be imposed which supplies yet another term that generalises
a larger set of more specific terms, e.g.
animals = dog, cat, rat, ...
or
animals = mammals, reptiles, amphibians, ...
But culture is capable of even more powerful reduction of information required to
deal with the world, at the expense of greater complexity. One of the responsibilities
of the anthropologist is to identify these systems of reduction and organisation,
these indigenous models of the world and their experience in the world, and to attempt
to understand the basis by which these models are constructed.
Return to Kinship Systems