Calculating Kin: Analyzing and Understanding Cultural Codes

Michael D. Fischer

Kinship Terminologies

Kinship is one of these more complex systems of culture. All human groups have a kinship terminology, a set of terms used to refer to kin. Many parts of life are impacted by kinship, and in most societies kinship relations influence things like who one can and can not marry, who one must show respect to, who one can joke with, and who one can count on in a crisis.

Kinship terminologies vary in different societies from as few as twelve to more than fifty terms. English kinship terminology is in the middle, and contains the following principal terms:

mother, father, son, daughter, brother, sister
uncle, aunt, nephew, niece
cousin (differently elabourated in different English speaking cultures)
grandfather, grandmother, grandson, granddaughter
granduncle, grandaunt, grandniece, grandnephew (in many dialects)
plus
great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother etc
and
great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather etc

there are also the affinal terms:

wife, husband, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, mother-in-law and father-in-law as well as uncle and aunt.

Anthropologists have learned many interesting things about kinship terminologies. In terms of our topic today, how cultural ideas are organised, kinship terminologies are organised in at least two important ways.

Firstly, they provide a means of classifying relationships with other people, for every person in the society. When different kinds of genealogical relationships are merged into one category, such as (in English terminology) all male siblings being denoted as brother, or all mothers of parents being called grandmother, this reduces the information that might have been needed (many terminologies have different terms for male siblings, often based on relative age, and many have different terms for father's mother and mother's mother) to describe kinship relationships. Thus genealogical relationships are different from kinship relationships. There are a large number of genealogical relationships. For example, in a society of 1000 individuals, there may be nearly one million genealogical relationships, though this number will more typically be a few hundreds of thousands .

In most kinship terminologies this large number of genealogical relationships can be denoted with the 12 to 50 terms that make up human kinship terminologies. What makes this possible is using a limited number of classificatory criteria to define terms, limiting the distance that counts as a denotable kinship relationship, and the fact that the use of these terms is relative to each individual in the socieity. That is, every person in a society will denote a different person as mother, father etc.

Kinship terminologies are thus systematically limited by classificatory restrictions and relative application.

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