Yesenkulova N.M, Urazbayev K.B.
Yassawi University, Turkestan, KAZAKHSTAN
Some
Notes of Kinship and Modeling of Kinship Terminology
Kinship is one of 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 society’s 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 elaborated 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 as: wife, husband, brother-in-law,
sister-in-law, mother-in-law and father-in-law
as well as uncle and aunt.
The scientific study of kinship terminology as they
say began with the publication of Lewis Henry Morgan's Systems of Consanguinity
and Affinity of the Human Family, published in 1870. It is noted that Morgan
had amassed a huge amount of data on kinship terminology, and using this he
worked out a classification of kinship systems. Morgan assumed that human
society had evolved through a series of stages from primitive savagery to
civilization, and he saw kinship terminologies as reflecting these stages.
Primitive promiscuity, for example, is signaled by a Hawaiian type of kinship
nomenclature. Morgan made two major criterial distinctions between kinds of
kinship terms: classificatory terms, which subsume a relatively large number of
biological kin types, and descriptive terms, which subsume relatively small
numbers of types - preferably having unique referents. He imposed this scheme
on whole terminological systems. He then fitted the typological scheme to his
evolutionary framework, where he said that "primitive systems were
classificatory, whereas civilized systems were descriptive. He ignored the
problem of how to analyze degrees of extension, or the how to discover the
semantic criteria by which people made distinctions between kindred [1].
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 [2; 3].
The modeling of genealogies is an ideal task for
computer assistance [4; 5]. Genealogical applications are among the earliest
applications of computers to ethnographic data attempted by anthropologists,
dating from Kunstadter's work on the interaction of demographic structure and
marriage preference (Kunstadter 1963) and more explicitly by Coult and
Randolph's discussion of computer-based methods and models of genealogical
space (Coult and Randolph 1965).
Despite this initial interest, there is no generally
available computer application for modeling given genealogical links in 'real'
populations. There is commercial software for assisting with the compilation of
'family trees', but these generally fall into the domain of programs for data
entry and retrieval. Where some calculation of relationships is performed,
these are under assumptions which are unacceptable to most anthropologists.
Anthropologists have written programs for this purpose, but most of these are
unpublished, and many of these contain assumptions which are specific to their
field material, such as tracing only patrilineal links [6; 7; 8].
There are, however, occasions where the simple ability
to establish the kinship links between individuals or finding the individuals
who stand in a specific relationship or set of relationships to ego would be
useful in the context of manual analysis. There are also potential computer
applications which would be useful in the collection and maintenance of
genealogical information in the field (Weinberg and Weinberg_2 1972; Chagnon
1974; Davis 1984b). For example:
·
translating an ego specific genealogy to a general, normalised, format.
·
consolidating two or more egocentric genealogies to a normalised form.
·
checking consistency of two or more egocentric genealogies which
overlap.
·
figuring genealogical links using different descent criteria
·
selectively including, excluding or limiting different kinds of links in
terms of generation, affinity or collaterality.
·
evaluating alternative structures based on ambiguous data, such as vital
events records.
·
translating terminological notation to 'etic' notation and vice versa.
Each of these auxiliary operations depends on the
capacity to establish links between individuals.
If we look at the terms used in English Kinship
Terminology (EKT), 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, there are two basic
classificatory distinctions being made, sex and generation. Most kinship
terminologies make use of these in some part of the terminology, and not in
others. EKT is no different.
Some of the importance of defining terms in terms of
other terms is that a) if possible this indicates structure that we can expect
to find in the culture of native thinkers, and b) it reduces the amount of
actual information required for this system to work in a real society. For
example, in the examples above, we need only supply genealogical data about
children, males and females. All the remaining relationships can be calculated
based on this data. We could have chosen parent as a basic category, and
identical results would occur. A more detailed analysis would indeed permit us
to find that parent is more likely the basic category, but in our simpler
approach here there is no way to decide which is more basic [9; 10].
There are other relationships, the affinal
relationships, e.g. spouse, wife,
husband, uncle, aunt, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, father-in-law,
mother-in-law. In our approach we must specify data for spouses, but in
conjunction with our earlier analysis, the remaining terms can all be defined
in terms of spouse, child, male and female. You should construct these as an
exercise.
Anthropologist Robin Fox states that "the study
of kinship is the study of what man (sic) does with these basic facts of life -
mating, gestation, parenthood, socialization, siblingship etc." Human
society is unique, he argues, in that we "are working with the same raw
material as exists in the animal world, but [we] can conceptualize and
categorize it to serve social ends." [11] These social ends include the
socialization of children, and the formation of basic economic, political, and
religious groups.
Broadly, kinship patterns may be considered to include
people related by both descent (one's social relations during development), and
by marriage. Human kinship relations through marriage are commonly called
"affinity" in contrast to the relationships that arise in one's group
of origin, which may be called one's "descent group". In some
cultures, kinship relationships may be considered to extend out to people an
individual has economic or political relationships with, or other forms of
social connections. Within a culture, some descent groups may be considered to
lead back to gods [12; 13] (see mythology, religion), or animal ancestors
(totems). This may be conceived of on a more or less literal basis.
Kinship can also refer to a principle by which
individuals or groups of individuals are organized into social groups, roles,
categories, and genealogy by means of kinship terminologies. Family relations
can be represented concretely (mother, brother, grandfather) or abstractly by
degrees of relationship (or kinship distance). A relationship may be relative
(e.g., one is a father in relation to a child), or reflect an absolute (e.g.,
status difference between a mother and a childless woman). Degrees of
relationship are not identical to heirship or legal succession. Many codes of
ethics consider the bond of kinship as creating obligations between the related
persons stronger than those between strangers, as in Confucian filial piety [14;
15].
In a more general sense, kinship may refer to a
similarity or affinity between entities on the basis of some or all of their
characteristics that are under focus. This may be due to a shared ontological
origin, a shared historical or cultural connection, or some other perceived
shared features that connect the two entities. For example, a person studying
the ontological roots of human languages (etymology) might ask whether there is
kinship between the English word seven
and the German word sieben. It can be
used in a more diffuse sense as in, for example, the news headline
"Madonna feels kinship with vilified Wallis Simpson", to imply a felt
similarity or empathy between two or more entities. In biology, it typically
refers to the degree of genetic relatedness or coefficient of relationship
between individual members of a species. It may also be used in this specific
sense when applied to human relationships, in which case its meaning is closer
to consanguinity or genealogy.
Literature: