The Genius of Kinship: The Phenomenon of Human Kinship and the G ...

of kin terminological patterns can be described as the intersection of the following parameters: affinal equations, bifurcation and merging of “horizontal” categories, sibling nomenclature, cross-generational equations, and grammatical principles. While our knowledge of these aspects of kin classification is uneven and naturally incomplete, it seems that these parameters exhaust the cognitive-linguistic variation of human kinship systems.

In the following, I will take the reader to the dawn of kinship studies in the 19th-century Western science, in order to elicit the wider context of anthropological interest in kinship systems and the interdisciplinary salience of the phenomenon of kinship. As my point of departure, I will focus on the founder of kinship studies in anthropology, American lawyer and Iroquois ethnographer, Lewis Henry Morgan, and the circumstances of his life that generated his interest in human kinship. From this micro-historical jumping board, I will venture into the intricacies of scientific and quasi-scientific debates in the 19th century. I will treat 19th-century science as embedded in a myth featuring divinity, humanity, and animality as principle characters. My account is divided into four sections each of which is structured as a triad (philosophy, psychology, and physiology; logic, semiotics, and reproduction; religion, hermeneutics, and evolution; law, grammar, and speech) representing the three characters in the myth of 19th-century science. This far-reaching historical journey will enable us to formulate an idea of what human kinship might be all about, especially in the light of the widespread uncertainties about this question, caused by the constructivist turn in anthropology. It will also identify the set of problems with the existing formulations of human origins, which directly reflect the founding logical difficulties inherent in the 19th-century myth.

I will skip a recapitulation of basic kinship theory and reduce to a minimum the historiography of kinship studies in the 20th century. Extensive accounts can be found in several well-known summaries (see, e.g., Barnard & Good, 1984; Buchler & Selby, 1968; Harris, 1969; Keesing, 1975a; E. Müller, 1981; Parkin, 1997; Schusky, 1965).