Context and Variation in Koya Kinship Terminology1

Abstract

The analysis of kinship terminologies has traditionally operated only with the genealogical denotata of the nominal stems of kin terms, with little reference to the social and linguistic contexts in which kin terms are used. Such analysis has usually resulted in the delineation of a single, unitary structure. Problems of variation are seldom systematically accounted for; one reason for this failure is that an explanation of it requires information on the social and linguistic environments as well. Focusing on variation indicates that there is no single, unitary structure of kin terms defined solely on the basis of genealogical components. This implies that typological analysis or formal analysis based on genealogical criteria alone is apt to obscure important data. It also indicates that the traditional “genealogical method” is an inadequate field method—if the ethnographic aim is to predict “who will be called what.”

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.