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“Brother” and “Uncle“: An Analysis of Rules, Structural Contradictions, and Meaning in Vietnamese Kinship
Author(s) -
LUONG HY
Publication year - 1984
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.1984.86.2.02a00050
Subject(s) - vietnamese , kinship , meaning (existential) , sociology , sociocultural evolution , representation (politics) , epistemology , action (physics) , linguistics , brother , order (exchange) , genealogy , history , anthropology , law , political science , philosophy , politics , physics , finance , quantum mechanics , economics
This paper analyzes the meanings of Vietnamese kinship terms on the basis of the rules that regulate their referential and nonreferential uses. These rules are not completely consistent with one another. They constitute contradictory models of and for sociocultural reality at a certain level. The structural contradictions among these models render “fuzzy” even the definitions of the prototypical uses of Vietnamese kin terms. The coexistence of alternative models makes the use of a linguistic form both a goal‐directed action and the representation of an order.