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Unthinkable Categories and the Fundamental Laws of Kinship
Author(s) -
Hage Per
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.1997.24.3.652
Subject(s) - kinship , perspective (graphical) , sociology , interpretation (philosophy) , fictive kinship , epistemology , genealogy , linguistics , computer science , anthropology , philosophy , history , artificial intelligence
In L'Exercice de la parenté, Héritier develops a general theory of kinship systems based on two “fundamental laws.” These laws depend for their proof on a sociological explanation of two logically possible but empirically unrealized terminologies in the classifications of Lowie and Murdock. Following Greenberg's cognitive‐linguistic theory of kinship classification, I interpret these unrealized terminologies in the first instance as special cases of a universal tendency to avoid disjunctive categories. In developing this interpretation I introduce an evolutionary perspective that has been absent from most discussions of kinship theory fora long time. The structural models for this analysis are, as always, graph theoretic, [kinship theory, cognition, linguistics, graph theory]