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2001 1: 268Anthropological TheoryThomas R. Trautmann

Morgan, and after MorganThe whole history of kinship terminology in three chapters: Before Morgan,

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268

Anthropological Theory

Copyright SAGE PublicationsLondon, Thousand Oaks, CA

and New DelhiVol 1(2): 268287

[1463-4996(200106)1:2;268287;017340]

The whole history ofkinship terminology inthree chaptersBefore Morgan, Morgan, and after Morgan

Thomas R. TrautmannUniversity of Michigan

Abstract

The article questions the current consensus that kinship terminologies evolve from

something like the Dravidian to something like the English terminology, examining it

over three time periods. Before Morgan the study of kinship terminology was

embedded within a comparative study of core vocabularies to determine historic

relations among nations (e.g. Leibniz). Morgans breakthrough was to disembed theterms of kinship from the vocabulary list and conceptualize them as a set. His vision

of their evolution had two phases. Before the revolutionary expansion of ethnological

time in the mid-19th century, he developed an evolutionary view of the Indo-

European kinship terminology that was very acute but tied to a short chronology for

world history that the time revolution shortly exploded; after the time revolution he

conceived the Iroquois and the English (as types of the Classificatory and the

Descriptive) terminologies as an evolutionary series caused by successive reformations

of the marriage rule. After Morgan, Dravidian and its structural neighbors have come

to play the role of evolutionary starting-point. The article concludes with reasons tobe skeptical of the current consensus and ways to move forward.

Key Words

Dravidian evolution history of anthropology kinship kinship terminology

Leibniz Morgan time time revolution

The invention of kinship was virtually the invention of anthropology itself; and kinship

terminology was at the heart of that inventing. Kinship and kinship terminology asanthropological objects of study once were privileged sites of theorizing and have neverentirely disappeared, although they had declined greatly following the skeptical essaysof Needham (1971) and Schneider (1972, 1984), which called their coherence intoquestion. The new kinship studies of the 1980s and 1990s have made up a lot of the

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lost ground. But it is my belief that anthropologys brainchild will only thrive when itgrows beyond anthropology and makes effective alliances with other disciplines. Thestudy of kinship, and of kinship terminologies, has uncovered an order of facts that isof the first significance for the understanding of human social life. In uncovering these

facts, anthropology, and anthropology alone, has made a contribution of permanentvalue. But anthropologys breakthrough understanding of kinship, as that which includesthe family but also something else that lies beyond and among families, has a value forother disciplines that is still to be realized.

My own interest in kinship and kinship terminology wasfrom theperspectiveof thedeep history of India. The Dravidian kinship terminology of South India and Sri Lankais a classic type whose geographical distribution correlates approximately with that ofthe Dravidian languagefamilysettingaside, for themoment, themany instancesof thistypeof kinship terminology in Oceania and the Americas. What makesthe Dravidianterminology so pleasing istheclarity with which it associatesaruleof marriage that ofcross-cousin marriage with thesemanticorganization of thetermsthemselves.

The basic organizing principles of Dravidian systems are two. The first is shared withIroquois systems, and was noted by Morgan when he said of the Iroquois that the fathersbrother is equally a father, and the mothers sister a mother; that is, the father-word isapplied to the fathers brother, and the mother-word to the mothers sister. This is trueof Dravidian languages, except that the fathers brother is called big or little father, themothers sister big or little mother, according to their age relative to the father ormother. A consequence is that the child of such fathers and mothers are egos brothersand sisters and are unmarriageable; moreover the children of these same-sex sibling

pairs are the sons and daughters of both, and are siblings to one another. FollowingLounsbury, we call this the principle of same-sex sibling merger (Lounsbury, 1964b). Ifwe imagined English transformed into Dravidian by the application of this rule, wecould say that thethickened categoriesof father, mother, sister, brother, son and daughterthat result constitute the set of parallel kin that overrides and replaces the distinction inEnglish of lineal and collateral kin.

The second principle of Dravidian systems is not shared with Iroquois: it is the prin-ciple of cross-cousin marriage. By it, though a brother-sister pair may not marry, theirchildren should marry. The consequences of this are many. In combination with the rule

of same-sex sibling merger, we may imagine English transformed into Dravidian with theformation of a category of cross kin, consisting of the uncles and aunts (minus those whohave become fathers and mothers through same-sex sibling merger), cousins (minus thosewho have become siblings through the same principle), and nephews and nieces (minus

TRA UTMANN The whole history of kinship terminology

269

Figure 1. The whole history of kinship terminology diagram.

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those who have become sons and daughters through the same principle). But the cross-kin category is thickened by addition of the affines: father- and mother-in law becomeuncle and aunt; spouses and spouses siblings become cousins; childrens spouses becomenephews and nieces.

Thepleasingsimplicityof thisterminological systemitsevident logical integrityandthedifferenceof that logic from that of English kinship terminology makesit an idealstarting point for discussion of kinship terminology, and there has been an abundanceof ethnographic reportson terminologiesof thiskind from around theworld. But it isof special strategicvalueforstudyingthedeephistory of Indian civilization, for themanyethnographic instancesacrossSouth India and Sri Lankacan beshown to beso manyvariationsonasingletheme; and theanthropological recordof thepresent can bejoinedup with evidencefrom ancient lawbooks, chroniclesand inscriptionsto show that thepattern of Dravidian kinship istraceablefor thebetter part of two thousand yearsand isremarkablydurableandresistant tochange. Joiningtheanthropological studyof kinshipterminology with arich historical record leadsusto think that thestructuresof kinshipterminology may be very slow to change and resistant to effects of changed political,economic or social circumstance, or to the calculated interests of individual actors.Kinship terminologies, thesefindingssuggest, are not, after all, sensitiveindicators ofchangesin other aspectsof social organization ormodesof production or formsof poli ti -cal association. For that very reason they areespecially useful astracesof distant origins,like languages themselves. Though South Indians are in every way participants in ageneral Indian cultural pattern, including many aspectsof family organization and lan-guage, their languageand kinship terminology neverthelessremain discoverably differ-

ent from thoseof North Indiaand of those belonging to theMunda language family.Thelessonof history isthat kinship terminology isvery conservativeand resistant to theeffectsof other levels.

It was L.H. Morgan who invented the study of kinship terminologies, or what hecalled nomenclatures of relationship, and in doing so served to create the field ofkinship by framing it as an object of study containing various different, but coherentand logical, systems of relationships, the differences among which constituted aproblem worthy of close study. Kinship terminology was the site of the anthropologi-cal breakthrough, destabilizing the idea of the family as an effect of nature and having

a fixed character, as Maurice Godelier (1995) has said. If kinship and, a forti ori, kinshipterminology have suffered from thinking small, it is worth revisiting Morgans concep-tion to re-examine it in a larger, three-century context of before and after. That is whatI wish to do in this paper. The central issue will be to comment on an unpublished textof Morgan from the first draft of theSystems of Consanguini ty and Affini ty(Morgan,1870). This wil l be the middle part of the three natural divisions into which the historyof kinship terminology (and indeed anthropology) falls: Before Morgan, Morgan, andAfter Morgan. Fast forwarding through history at this terrific rate will have the effectof caricature, the virtue of which will be to draw into relief the gross features of the

topic by blurring the detail.My purpose in doing so will be to subject a current consensus to critical scrutiny.There is a remarkable uniformity of tendency among theorists in the 20th century toassume that the beginning point for the evolution of kinship terminologies was a systemsomething like the Dravidian, and that the overall directionality of change in terminologies

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is toward something like the kinship terminology in English. At the beginning of thenew century it is worth examining that assumption skeptically, to probe its strengthsand weaknesses, and ascertain whether it will be serviceable for the future. My strategyfor gaining purchase on the problem will be to throw the present consensus in relief by

going back to the manuscript of L.H. Morgan just mentioned, written in about 1865but never published in full, on the evolution of kinship terminology, which expoundsan alternative to the current consensus. I will then consider the grounds on which thecurrent consensus stands, and reasons for skepticism.

In narrativizing the history of anthropology, one has, at the outset, to make a choiceabout whether to stress continuity or discontinuity. To a degree the choice of a narra-tive strategy is arbitrary. But I think that there are a number of good reasons why it isuseful to think of anthropology as we know it originating all at once, as the result of aBig Bang, in around 1860. This Big Bang was what I have called the Revolution inEthnological Time; the revolution, that is, by which the short, Biblical chronology forhuman history suddenly gave way to a very much lengthened chronology. In Englandthis collapse of the short chronology was especially associated with the excavation ofhuman artifacts in association with extinct fossil species at Brixham Cave by WilliamPengelly and Hugh Falconer, and announced dramatically by Charles Lyell at the BritishAssociation for the Advancement of Science in 1859, the year as well of the publicationof DarwinsOrigin of Species(Gruber, 1965; Trautmann, 1992).

The crisis that was provoked by the sudden immense lengthening of human historyhad several effects. The most dramatic was that the Bible and the Greek and Latin clas-sics, the oldest written records known to Europeans, in short, no longer gave a picture

of humanitys primitive or original state; and the vast new territory of prehistory (thevery word was invented in this period), which came suddenly into being, required fillingby prehistoric archaeology. The most important result, perhaps, was the constituting ofprimitive man as a concept. Hitherto, savages were thought of as feral humans whohad lost the arts of civilized life with which God had fitted them in Eden (Hodgen,1936); now the contemporary savage was seen not through the lens of a theory of degen-eration but as a prolongation of the primitive state into the present. Primitive man wasborn, the first child of the time revolution (Trautmann, 1992).

The time revolution divided the scholarly activity of the generation of Morgan,

Darwin and Marx in two. In the case of Morgan, I have recovered the greater part of afirst draft of theSystemsfrom among the Morgan Papers at the University of Rochester,and have shown that the first draft is under the reign of the short chronology, while thepublished version has been revised to accommodate the interpretation to the suddenlylengthened time frame for human history. Thus Morgans study of kinship terminologybegins before the Big Bang, and is revised in the light of the Big Bang. The middle termof our three-chapter history of the study of kinship terminology, therefore, will be sub-divided into Morgan A and Morgan B, before and after the Big Bang.

BEFORE MORGANBriefly, as to the before part of the picture. Morgan did not create kinship terminologyas an anthropological object out of the blue, but from within a long-standing traditionof linguistic ethnology, the project of which was to determine the historical relationsamong nations by determining the relations among their languages. This is a very


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old European project; but for our purposes it will suffice to pick up the story at thebeginning of the 18th century, during which we see the standardized vocabulary listemerging as the simple-seeming method by which history was to be derived from com-parative study of languages. Nowhere was this more important than in America, where

ancient written sources of history were lacking, since it was believed that language com-parison could uncover historical relationships among Indian nations that had no ancientwritten sources from which to recover them. Thomas Jefferson, no less, was the formu-lator of such a standardized questionnaire, which, in the hands of his protg and suc-cessor as president of the American Philosophical Society, Stephen du Ponceau, laid thefoundations of Americanist historical linguistics (Jefferson, c. 1782; Du Ponceau, 1838;see Trautmann, 1987: 807). At about the same time, Sir William Jones in Calcutta wasadumbrating the idea of the Indo-European language family on the basis of such lists,and Catherine of Russia was inaugurating a plan for the study of the worlds languages,beginning with those of her own vast empire, through an elaborate vocabulary list sentto her officials in every region, and to distant correspondents who included GeorgeWashington (Jones, 1788; Pallas, 178689).

The discovery of new and unexpected families of languages thoroughly revolution-ized the deep history of the world. The standard vocabulary lists that were to uncoverhistorical relations among nations were taken around the world on the tide of Europeanimperial expansion, and they created an utterly new ethnological map of the world anda new universal history. Many new, unexpected and counter-intuitive groupings werediscovered, such as the Indo-European language family, which united two widely sepa-rated blocs of peoples, in Europe on the one hand, and in Iran and India on the other,

or the far-flung Malayo-Polynesian group ranging from Madagascar to Hawaii.Thestandardized vocabulary that wastheprincipal tool of this revolution in ethno-

logical knowledgelookstobeasimplecommonsenselisting; but in fact it restsonspecificassumptionsand isahighly theorized structurebased on ideasthat underliemuch 18th-century discussion of language, often implicitly, sometimes breaking into expression.Within theshort, Biblical timeframeforhuman historyandtheeven shorter timespanof about 4000 years since the Confusion of Tongues at Babel some original or stocklanguages have survived more or less unchanged. Mixed languages have formed throughborrowing; but borrowing occurs among the words of science or art that a people need

when they have passed the primitive stage. At the heart of a language, then, is a corevocabulary of the words that every language must have from the start; words expressingthose primitive notions and naming those things which are at the minimum thresholdof human life and speech. The vocabulary list focuses on that primitive core.

Leibniz published a simple list in 1718 that appears to have been a very influentialmodel, perhaps the model for subsequent lists (Leibniz, 1718). Many, perhaps most ver-sions of the standardized vocabulary list that are so heavily in use in the 18th and 19thcenturies go back to this list. It is a very interesting list in which kinship terms figureprominently, along with numbers, parts of the body, words for foodstuffs and utilitarian

objects, heavenly bodies, weather, animals and actions.The list and the project it encodes set up a number of oppositions: primitive v. recent;simple v. refined; native v. foreign, borrowed. A great deal of interpretation is built intothis tool, whose purpose is to find the indigenous core of a language in order to find itsnearest of kin.


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This project, which was well under way by the 18th century, continues in the 21stcentury; and an impressive number of the 18th-century findings remain current amongthose who are supposed to know about these things, the historical linguists. Themapping of the world by comparison of word-lists has been remarkably successful. Even

though one can no longer believe that the core vocabulary captures the state of a lan-guage at the beginning of human history, or that history began only about 6000 yearsback, it appears that there is enough truth in the notion that a core vocabulary is deeplyconservative to account for this success. Thus, to take an example from Indo-European,the following Sanskrit words for kinship terms are surprisingly close to their Englishcounterparts: pitr. (father), matr. (mother), svasa(sister), bhratr. (brother), duhitr. (daugh-ter); though the word putra(son) is quite different, the more archaic word sunuis arecognizable cognate of English son.

The other aspect of this European project of understanding the relations amongnations through the relations among languages is not so obvious from the vocabularylist itself. That is the underlying ethnological framework within which are interpretedthe similarities among languages revealed by the vocabulary list. This framework is theTree of Nations, or as I call it, because its model is found in the Book of Genesis attrib-uted to Moses, the Mosaic Ethnology (Trautmann, 1998: ch. 2). The Mosaic Ethnol-ogy is a branching tree connecting the different nations through descent from theirfounding patriarchs, the descendants of Noah and his three sons after the universal flood,after whom, in Genesis, they are named the Hebrews from the patriarch Eber, theGreeks from Javan (i.e. Ionians), and so forth. This Tree of Nations has a shape thatEvans-Pritchard taught us to call a segmentary lineage; what the Mosaic Ethnology imag-

ines is a world made of nations who are related, not as Self and Other, but closer or moredistant (unilineal) relations of kinship forming a single extended segmentary lineageuniting the human family.

This was the ethnological framework within which new ethnological knowledge waslocated and interpreted, not only by Europeans, but by all the Peoples of the Book, soto say, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, for several thousand years. And, in a sense, it con-tinues today in the cladistic maps of relationships figuring in current works of historicallinguistics, though its Biblical model is forgotten, or lingers only marginally in nameslike Semitic and Hamitic (from Sem or Shem and Ham, sons of Noah).

MORGAN

Through this widely-dispersed project of linguistic ethnology, kinship terms were col-lected from many parts of the world for a long time before Morgan, but they had nospecial existence as a set until Morgan abstracted them from the larger vocabulary list inwhich they were embedded and treated them as a set. The move by which kinship termswere constituted as a set was rather complex. Adopting the realist, pre-Saussurian dis-course of words and things that prevailed at the time, the vocabulary list had been createdto elicit the words that name a standardized list of things identified by their Latin,

English or French names. Comparison of languages, then, was a matter of comparingnames, holding things constant through the standardization of the questionnaire.Morgan did not simply isolate the kinship terms from the larger set of the vocabu-

lary list. He wanted to argue, rather, that the terminology of kinship constituted not avocabulary or lexicon but a set of a different kind: a semantic set, a set of meanings or


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classes of things. That is, he recognized that the underlying things of kinship are them-selves culturally organized into differing logics, and are not a fixed set of real things exist-ing everywhere in the world and to be held constant. Comparison in Morgan became amatter of examining the patterning of names in order to find distinctive configurations

of culturally constituted things.The breakthrough move came in two steps, boiling down a complex story to its mainelements. The first was the recognition that for the Iroquois the fathers brother isequally a father, or, as we might say, the word for father was extended to the fathersbrother (Morgan, 1851: 857). This classificatory logic of same-sex sibling mergeroperated throughout the Iroquois terminology, creating large classes of relatives thatclassed or merged relatives held distinct in English. The simple vocabulary list wouldnot evoke facts of that order, and a special schedule or questionnaire was required.

The second step was the discovery that Ojibwa had kinship terms with very similarclassificatory mergers of kin, similar enough to lead Morgan to conclude that he hadshown through this new instrument for ethnology what linguistic ethnology could not,that the Iroquois and the Ojibwa were historically related even though their languageswere so different that they could not be shown to be linguistically related. Kinship wouldbe a more powerful tool for history than philology was, Morgan believed, because itdirected its analysis to an archaic and deeply conservative core of language (Feeley-Harnik, 1999; Trautmann, 1987: 928).

Morgans breakthrough led to his masterwork, theSystems of Consanguini ty and Affin-ity of the Human Family(1870), in which all the kinship terminologies of the worldknown to Morgan are put in one of two families, the classificatory, including Iroquois,

and the descriptive, including English. The project of the work was to deliver a proof,through comparison of kinship terminologies, of the unity and Asiatic origin of theAmerican Indians. His proof consisted in showing that all kinship terminologies of theworld known to him, and collected into three massive tables in the Systems, could beassigned to one of two families, the classificatory and the descriptive. Classificatorysystems, in which relations of lineal and collateral were classified or merged (such as thefathers brother with the father), are logically integrated but different from descriptivesystems, in which the lineal and collateral lines are held distinct, and not merged. Theymap onto two large contiguous world regions: descriptive for Europe and the Near East,

classificatory in Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Q.E.D. Much the most valuable aspectof the book, however, is not the proof itself but the creation of kinship terminology asan anthropological object, and the fact that Morgan devised much, perhaps most, of thetools and basic categories used in subsequent kinship work.

In the draft of theSystems, prior to the time at which the time revolution reachedMorgan, he interpreted the descriptive/classificatory binary as the difference betweenkinship systems that are natural v. those that are artificial. For Morgan the descriptivesystem followed the nature of descents by observing the boundary between lineal andcollateral kin; it followed the tutelage of nature. The classificatory system, by contrast,

was artificial. I t was a stupendous work of art, Morgan thought, in that it departed fromthe tutelage of nature by forming vast classes of kin that overrode the lineal/collateralboundary; and the design, once formed, was perpetuated by its own logical integration(Trautmann, 1987: ch. 6).

The time revolution, which reached Morgan as he was completing his masterwork,


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allowed him to reconceptualize the relation between descriptive and classificatorysystems not as two parallel, contemporary formations but as successive stages in a longseries of evolutionary stages from primitive promiscuity to modern Euroamericanmonogamy, as we shall shortly see. Let us first examine Morgan A, before the Big Bang,

before going on to examine the reconceptualization in Morgan B, after the Big Bang, inwhich kinship comes to play a role in the consolidation of the idea of modernity.What follows is a summary of one of the most fascinating of the unpublished texts

in the Morgan Papers, a suppressed chapter of the first version of theSystems, on thegrowth of nomenclatures of relationship, that is, a kind of natural history of kinshipterminology. This is Morgan A.

MORGAN A

The text in question is Morgans manuscript on the growth of kinship terminologies or,as he calls them, nomenclatures of relationship, in the Morgan Papers (Morgan, c.1865).This text was to have been Chapter Six, Part I of his great summa on kinship, theSystemsof Consanguini ty and Affini ty of the Human Family(Morgan, 1870). Much of the text ofthe first version Morgan wrote and submitted to the Smithsonian has been preserved inthe Morgan Papers at the University of Rochester, and comparison of the first versionwith the published version shows a number of significant changes. Changes were madeto accommodate the not unreasonable demand of the Smithsonian to shorten the text(the published version is over 600 pages) and to take account of a much lengthened con-ception of human history, having to do with the revolution in ethnological time: thebreaking open of the short, Biblical time frame for human history, according to which

(in the Ussherite system, one of many variants of Bible-based world chronology) theCreation occurred about 6000 years ago (at 4004 BC) and the ethnological variety ofthe world even more recently, about 4000 years ago, following the unpleasantness at theTower of Babel (details in Trautmann, 1992). It is important in what follows to keep itin mind that this first-version text of Morgan is a pre-time-revolution text, whosehorizon for human history is still supplied by the short Biblical chronology, and to notehow the time revolution upset the assumptions of the argument he made in it.

Let us examine, then, Morgans pre-time-revolution idea about the evolution ofterminologies. The draft chapter referred to focuses on the pattern of variation in the

kinship terminologies of the descriptive system, especially the Indo-European languagefamily and, given its assumptions, the argument is very acute. It asks how a systemoriginally purely descriptive could naturally grow and the probable causes of its develop-ment. The causes Morgan finds to be of a logical and cognitive nature.

The analysis turns on the fact that his comparative table revealed that the words forlineal kin are more or less stable in the various languages of the Indo-European family.There are exceptions, of course; we have already seen that the ordinary Sanskrit wordfor son (putra) is not cognate with English son, although a more archaic cognate (sunu)is known, and we could easily add that Latin words for son and daughter (filius, filia)

and Greek for brother (adelphos) do not fit the pattern. But overall there is a consider-able incidence of evident cognates among Indo-European words for the lineal kin,F,M,Z,B,S,D. To this list Morgan adds the words for husband and wife, consideringthese the primary kin, and taking them to belong to the primitive core of the language.

For kinship terms beyond this central core, Morgan finds little of the consistency in


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the patterning of words from one Indo-European language to another. His leadingexample is the words for nephews, nieces and grandchildren. Cognates of Greek neposare found in all the Indo-European languages of his table, but their meaning variesbetween nephew and grandchild, even in English. Thus in his will, Shakespeare

bequeathed a hundred pounds to his niece Elizabeth Hall, who was, however, his daugh-ters daughter, showing that the word meant granddaughter as well as siblings daughterin earlier forms of English. This is confirmed in a table of the degrees of kinship andconsanguinity in the important compendium of English law, Coke upon Littleton, inwhich one finds the lineal nephew and niece (i.e. grandchildren) together with thecollateral nephew and niece (Coke, 1817; Trautmann, 1987: 136). This differencebetween the relatively stable lineal terms and the relatively unstable collateral and moredistant terms Morgan attempts to explain by a conjectural history of how kinship termsdeveloped from the very beginning, and in doing so he implies a belief that the Indo-European origin is near the origin of human history, thought to be but a few thousandyears ago.

Morgans idea of how kinship terminologies develop is that a core vocabulary con-sisting of primary kin terms is formed first. After their invention the more distantrelationships could for a time be readily described by the juxtaposition of terms, such asmothers brother. Progress beyond this stage would be the result of generalization andclassification or merger.

To indicate collateral relationships there were three alternatives: to invent new terms;to continue to generate descriptive terms through the juxtaposition of existing terms;or, by a false generalization . . . to classifiy the collateral with the primary relatives, as

uncles with the father, aunts with the mother, & cousins with the brother as in the clas-sificatory system. Morgan considers the middle method, that of pure description (i.e.the generation of phrasal terms), to be too inconvenient, so there would be a tendencyfor the invention of special terms for the near collateral kin; but a terminology ampleenough to express all collateral relationships would be even more inconvenient, so weshould expect new terms to be limited to the nearest degree of collateral kin the terms,that is, for uncle, aunt, cousin, nephew and niece. He continues, each new term wouldbe apt to be used in a general sense, until it became restricted in its application, by theintroduction of additional terms, so that kinship terminology would develop from the

center (ego) outward, from the primary terms to the secondary, and from lineal tocollateral kin, each additional term to be devised lessening the semantic scope of theexisting terms.

After thecoretermshad been invented, thenext stagewould probably betheinven-tion of a general term for nephew, grandson and perhaps cousin. In Indo-Europeanthe cognates of nepos, from their universality, must have existed in the primitivespeech but in a widesense. Since (aswill be shown) it is older than terms for grand-father and grandmother, uncle and aunt, it must have existed without a reciprocal inthe form of a special term. The semantic scope and variation of the evidence of this

word in the different Indo-European languages leadsto the conclusion that this wordwas thefirst to have been introduced into the Indo-European kinship terminology toindicate relationshipsbeyond thoseexpressed by theprimary terms, and that at first itwas used in a more comprehensive sense than at present (Morgan, c.1865: 78). Thenepos-word, then, had awiderangeof meaning that wasnarrowed down differently in


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the different Indo-European languages, as more words were invented to designate theouter band of non-primary kin.

With the progress of discrimination by which the several degrees of relationship weremade distinct, and by the invention or introduction of new terms, neposand its cog-

nates were restricted in usage and new terms occupied part of its original semantic space.In Sanskrit, Latin, Spanish and Portuguese it was restricted to grandson. In English,Flemish, Norman, French and German it became restricted to the son of a brother orsister, and, having no original term for grandson, these languages fell back upon descrip-tive phrases for it, except for German, which developed a new term (Enkel). In Anglo-Saxon, Italian and Dutch thenepos-word was used generally for nephew and grandson,and in the last for cousin as well.

Terms for grandfather and grandmother, and for uncle and aunt, would next berequired. Herethevariation is even wider, and patternsform and conflict. It is at leastcertain for Latin that avus, avia(grandfather, grandmother) wereformed earlier than theterm for maternal uncle, avunculus, which ismadebyaddingadiminutive: littlegrand-father (and thesourcefor English uncle). Thetwo relationswereperhapsformerly one,and reciprocal (Morgan calls them correlative) to nepos. Further, the relationships ofuncle and aunt in theconcrete donot appear to havebeen discriminated in theprimi-tiveIndo-European languagesincetheyaresovariousfromoneIndo-European languageto another. Many of the Indo-European termsfor theserelationshipsare derivativesofwordsfor father and mother such astheset pitr. vya(Skt.), patruus(Lat.), patros(Gk.) forfathersbrother, andmatula(Skt.)matertera(Lat.) andmetros(Gk.) for mothersbrotherswife, and the lack of terms that have cognates through all the branches of the family (or

in other wordstheheterogeneity of thelexicon) indicatesstrongly that descriptivetermswereused for theserelationshipsat theperiodof theseparationof thelanguagesfromoneanother.For theremainingunclesandaunts, thedifferent branchesof theIndo-Europeanfamilyexhibit agreat varietyof terms,showingthat thetermscameintobeingat theperiodof separationof theIndo-European languages,not before. Oncetherelationshipsof uncleandaunt werefullydiscriminatedbymeansof special terms, theseparationof therelation-shipof nephewandgrandsonbymeansof special termsordescriptivephraseswould soonfollow, and thesewould each befurnished with aproper correlative(reciprocal).

The term for cousin would be the last invented, it being the most remote collateral

relation discriminated by means of a special term. The English word cousin is based ona generalization of four distinct relationships, the children of a fathers brother and sister,and those of a mothers brother and sister. The absence of a common term among theIndo-European languages, and the presence of several borrowed terms for this relation-ship, shows that the original method for designating the relationship of cousin wasdescriptive (e.g. fathers brothers son, etc.). English cousin and its cognates are fromLatin consobrinus, -a, coming from conplussoror, sister, meaning the children of two ormore sisters, which in English is extended to cousins of all four kinds.

Morgan summarizes his view of the process by which the terminologies of the Indo-

European family became very diverse in vocabulary, while remaining quite similar insemantic structure, in a passage that gives the rationale of this most important aspect ofhis thought, for it is the point at which the analysis of kinship terminologies takes on alife of its own separate from that of philology, and becomes a new science of its own. Itis worth quoting the passage in full:


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The great diversity of modes which now exist in the several Aryan [i.e. Indo-Euro-pean] languages for the same objects, and many of them the most common, mustfind its chief explanation in the theory of development from root forms after theseparation of those languages became complete. We can hardly suppose that [the

words for cousin] consobrinusand vetteror amitaand muhmeexisted contempora-neously in the Latin and German while the two languages were yet associated asdialects of a common speech; and that the Latin perpetuated one, the German theother, while several of the remaining original Aryan dialects lost both. A dialectcannot arise without the isolation of the community in which it originates. Whenthe separation from the mother tongue has become so complete as to produce a welldefined dialect, from that moment an amount of divergence has arisen sufficient toestablish, in effect, an independent language with its full inheritance of root forms,grammatical organism, and ethnic life. It lives from thenceforth, in the brains of thepeople. Any outgrowth of words, or forms, become a distinct creation of the nascentlanguage; and if such new words were borrowed by other dialects they must passthrough the ordinary process of naturalization. The real cause of the diversity ofwords which finally becomes so apparent, must be sought in the falling out of use ofold terms, which may, or may not, have had synonyms, and the substitution of newlycoined words in their places; and the original formation of a large class of words tokeep pace with the advance of experience and knowledge. (Morgan, c.1865: 54)

To summarize: around a largely unchanged primitive core vocabulary of primary kinterms, the Indo-European languages developed terms for more distant collateral and

lineal relationships, earlier inventions such as theneposword first denoting larger seman-tic spaces which shrank as new terms were invented to make finer discriminations.

The interpretation is interesting and acute, but it is by no means the only interpre-tation possible. In particular, Morgan might have made the argument that in the olderIndo-European languages, as in Iroquois and Dravidian, the fathers brother is equallya father, that is, the fact that the word for fathers brother is evidently a derivative of thefather word could have been seen as a kind of classification or merger, as could other ofthese phenomena:avuswithavunculus;matula/matertera/metroswith the word for mother;and the expansion ofconsobrinusto all the cousins. In short, he could have denatural-

ized Indo-European and seen that it is as artificial as the Iroquois or the Dravidian.

MORGAN B

The effect of the time revolution, which intruded itself on Morgans consciousness as hewas revising his manuscript for publication, was to incapacitate his theory of the originand growth of kinship terminology based on Indo-European; for no matter how acutehis analysis, the beginning of Indo-European could not go back in time more than a fewthousand years, and certainly not to the newly remote beginning of human history. Thusthe text in question never saw print or rather, it survived only in severely reduced form,

as a pair of long footnotes (Morgan, 1870: 35 fn, 37 fn).We have seen that Morgan A read the descriptive and classificatory systems as simul-taneous and parallel but differing developments at the beginning of human history.Morgan B offered a completely new interpretation, which served to put the two systemsin chronological series, making the classificatory system ancestral to the descriptive. The


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means by which he did so was to devise a theoretical series of marriage rules and reformsstretching from the zero of primitive promiscuity (recycled from the classics) to modernEuropean and Euroamerican monogamy, with matriarchal and patriarchal stages amongthe stages in between. As I have shown elsewhere, the whole interpretive scheme sprang

from a suggestion of a friend (the Rev. Joshua Hall McIlvaine; see Trautmann, 1987:15872) and was offered tentatively. Morgan B has a decided feel of being added on toa book that was originally conceived upon the assumption of the short, Biblical chronol-ogy for human history.

Morgans origin myth for the natural development of kinship terminology is that itgrows outward like a crystal from a central core of primary terms, consisting of namesfor naturally given things immediate to consciousness and needing no explanation. Theaccount is a good one for the patterning of similarity and variation among kinship termsof the Indo-European languages, assuming that the Indo-European comparisons leadone back to the originary condition of mankind at the start of its history, to mans primi-tive state, which of course they do not.

Two things separate origin myths devised by anthropologists of the 20th century fromthis text: the central place the Dravidian system comes to occupy, and the assumptionof a much longer chronology so much longer that the beginnings of the Indo-Europeanlanguages come to be thought to be much too recent to carry us back to the beginningsof language and of humanitys primitive state. The time revolution, as I have said, over-took Morgan soon after he wrote this text, and it prompted him to adopt an entirelynew interpretation of the relation between the descriptive and the classificatory systems;dropping the idea that the first was natural and the second artificial, he now interpreted

the second as a stage ancestral to the first. This became the practice of time that struc-tured the published version of theSystemsand of his great synthesis of social evolution,Ancient Society. By this move the contemporary savage became a primary source(Morgan, 1877) for knowledge of mans primitive state, which now was moved so farback as to be out of reach of the oldest written sources in Latin and Greek and in theBible. The savage became the primitive, in the new sense of being contemporary, butculturally of an earlier era. What Johannes Fabian calls the denial of coevalness (Fabian,1983) was the immediate fruit of the time revolution and the source of coherence forthe new science of anthropology that was born from this Big Bang.

AFTER MORGAN

The new practice of time and its new creation, primitive man, was a new interpretativeframe that had an empty slot into which the Dravidian system quickly dropped and hassince remained. That slot occupied a place at or near the zero of development, as a stagesome time in the distant past, and most distant structurally from the kinship system ofEurope. Within that frame, Dravidian appeared to be within or in the vicinity ofhumanitys primitive state. This has become so generally believed as to be more or lessunquestioned. I suggest that the time has come to question it.

Morgan himself prepared the way for this development by identifying Dravidian withIroquois and opposing them as examples of the classificatory system to the descriptivesystem of Europe and the Near East. The identity of Dravidian and Iroquois was longaccepted, till Lounsbury published a classic article drawing attention to differences inthe ways Iroquois and Dravidian extend the cross/parallel distinction (Lounsbury,


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1964a). Analysis shows, I argue, that this difference stems from the fact that whileIroquois and Dravidian have in common the principle of same-sex sibling merger,Iroquois lacks the second principle of Dravidian classifications, cross-cousin marriage,so that Iroquois has a separate terminology for affines (i.e. they are not merged with cross

kin) (Trautmann, 1981: 4762; Viveiros de Castro, 1998: 35264). The relation ofDravidian and Iroquois to one another was an especially fruitful question for theoreti-cal development at the 1993 Paris round table on Dravidian held in the Maison Sugerand published in theTransformati ons of Kinshipvolume, in papers by Trautmann andBarnes, Tjon Sie Fat, Ives, Hornberg, Parkin, Kryukov, Allen, Vivieros de Castro andGodelier (in Godelier et al., 1998).

Morgan failed to recognize the role of cross-cousin marriage in the Dravidian system,and he was particularly obtuse about it, since his suppliers of information on theDravidian system made clear the rule and its connection with the terminology. It is afateful coincidence, as I have argued, that Morgan himself married, as it happens, hismothers brothers daughter, a cross cousin in systems with such a rule (Trautmann,1987: 2435); which, I believe, accounts for his blind spot on this subject when dealingwith the Dravidian, wrongly identified with the Iroquois.

However that may be, the logic of the Dravidian system quickly became apparent toother analysts, for whom it became a classic site for kinship theory-formation. ThusDravidian figures prominently in an important early article of E.B. Tylor on kinship ter-minologies, and centrally in W.H.R. Rivers kinship book, which effectively renewed andrevived the work of Morgan (Tylor, 1889; Rivers, 1914). Lvi-Strauss Elementary Struc-tures of Kinship(1949, 1969) is shot through with instances of Dravidian or similar type.

The same may be said of Needham and many recent theorists of the big picture ofkinship terminology, especially N.J. Allen and Michael Kryukov (Allen, 1998; Kryukov,1998) in theTransformati ons of Kinshipvolume from the Maison Suger round table onDravidian (Godelier et al., 1998).

Lvi-Strauss great work on kinship, dedicated to Morgan, has rather little of kinshipterminologies in it, to be sure, and is directed rather toward rules of marriage. More-over, Lvi-Strauss by no means encourages historical or evolutionary readings of hisstructuralist analysis of regimes of marriage, and is skeptical of history in several ways,identifying it as the surface of things, while structure is identified with the depths. Never-

theless the analysis lies well within the practices of time that established anthropologyin the era of Morgan. Thus the elementary systems of direct, indirect and delayedexchange in Lvi-Strauss, based on a positive rule of marriage, all of them directlyexemplified by variants of the Dravidian system, are opposed to complex systems, havingonly a negative marriage rule, exemplified by modern European systems, with Crow-Omaha systems occupying the transition from elementary to complex. The argument isboth structural and historical or evolutionary. One can scarcely not read it so it isnearly impossible to take it as a pure structuralism without evolutionary significance.And the whole is set in motion by a preliminary visit to ground zero, the beginning of

the incest tabu, which is taken to be the beginning of culture as such; a scientific originmyth, in short Morgan brought up to date. The second masterpiece of kinship studiesis in this important respect perfectly aligned with the terms of the first.

N.J. Allens tetradic theory (Allen, 1986, 1989, 1998) is an exceptionally elegantexample of more recent theoretical work that illustrates the overall directionality I have


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been speaking of. Unlike Lvi-Strauss theory of marriage, Allens tetradic theory isdirectly concerned with kinship terminology, specifically with discovering the simplestimaginable terminology. This is found to be a terminology with only four terms, whencethe name tetradic. The four terms are divided along two axes, which we may translate

roughly as generation A v. generation B, and cross v. parallel (or eight, taking accountof gender, which is left out of the analysis). This tetradic system is the theoretical start-ing-point of all further developments, and it is very strikingly similar to the Dravidiansystem, having the characteristic Dravidian equations such as MB=FZH=SpF; theequations (Morgans classification) of different kinds of consanguines and affines intoa few large classes gives the tetradic model its great compactness and elegance.

Allen derives all other types of kinship terminology from the tetradic starting-pointby breaking the equations of kin. For example, the Dravidian equation MB=FZH=SpFobtains in the tetradic system, but is broken open in Iroquois, and in English for thatmatter, by the existence of a separate set of affinal terms. The tetradic theory aims toderive all possible kinship terminologies from the tetradic model, positing it as the pointof origin and showing how all other terminologies can be derived by the loss of the manyequations making up the tetradic mother of them all. The result can be read in a weakform as a structuralist analysis or in a strong form as an evolutionary or developmentalsequence, taking the tetradic model as the starting-point.

Reading the sequence as an evolutionary one, how do we know that the directional-ity of change in the model corresponds to what happens in history?Allen offers a mostinteresting argument: it is easy to imagine the tetradic equations being undone, but itis hard to imagine a society without them deliberately making the tetradic equations.

This argument transforms a structural typology of kinship terminologies into an evolu-tionary sequence of stages, running, roughly, from systems of Dravidian and similar typeto something more like the English. Even without it, the tetradic theory would remaininteresting as a structural analysis, though here again, it is hard not to read it in thestronger, evolutionary way, and it can be asked whether the structural analysis is notalready implicitly an historical one.

Inadequate though it is, this brief characterization of the study of kinship and ofkinship terminologies after Morgan in our three-chapter history of the study of kinshipterminologies must suffice, and I leave it to readers to supply the complications for them-

selves; for it is necessary, now, to consider what the future may hold, and why the waywe go from here may require a shift of direction.

WHAT NEXT?

As we have already suggested, the practices of time that undergird the consensus afterMorgan are under challenge, notably by Johannes Fabians book. The figure of primi-tive man that anthropology constructed, and that constructed anthropology, in the wakeof the time revolution made contemporary savages into ancestors of the modern,Western, lenses into the past that saw more deeply than the oldest writings would allow,

deeply beyond the literature of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Hebrews. A sudden post-modernist skepticism about the story of the rise from mans primitive state to civiliz-ation, that is, about the story of modernity itself, which anthropology did so much tocreate through kinship studies among other things, can itself take stronger and weakerforms, and one need not entirely reject the notion that complexity of economies and


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polities is acquired only incrementally through history to be skeptical about the currentconsensus concerning the evolutionary location of Dravidian and to suspect that its rolein the story of modernity is overdetermined from the start, that it dropped into a pre-viously fashioned slot in the interpretative machinery.

Reason for skepticism no. 1: the non-correlation of kinship terminologies with econ-omic or political forms or stages. Kinship terminologies, like languages, seem not to cor-relate with stages of economic or political development. The non-correlation of languagewith economic or political stages of development has been a central tenant of linguisticanthropology from Sapir (1921); the non-correlation of kinship terminology with suchstages has taken longer to become established, but seems equally certain. After years oftrying to insert kinship and language into the story of modernity by main force, it seemsnecessary to recognize that the evidence, after all, has enough strength to resist our bestefforts to press it into preformed molds.

This seems especially true of Dravidian. In its classic terrain, India and Sri Lanka, theDravidian system is found associated with economies and polities of the widest variety,from forest peoples practicing shifting agriculture or hunting and gathering to the largestates and empires built upon economies of wet rice cultivation in the great river deltas;and we can go to hunting bands of Ojibwa-speakers thinly distributed across vast terri-tories in North America, or to many societies of Amazonia, to extend the range of econ-omic and political associations of societies with kinship terminology of Dravidian type.The first reason for skepticism, then, must be that the current consensus seems to restoreto Dravidian by other means the indexical status in the story of modernity that allkinship terminologies have, at length, been released from.

Reason for skepticism no. 2: The mechanism Allen proposes to give directionality tochange in kinship terminologies is just not sustained empirically. The argument thatmovement away from equations is imaginable while the reverse is not seems a good one,but many counter-examples could be given. We can even find them in the text of Morganwe have been considering. Morgan, as we have seen, shows how theneposwords of Indo-European languages once were based on the equation SbS=ChS, nephew plus grandson,which later broke down, the cognates becoming specialized as the word for one relation-ship but not the other. This agrees with the posited directionality of change. But theEnglish word cousin, Morgan says, is probably from Latin con+ sobrinus, which had

indicated only the children of sisters before being broadened to cover all cousins, imply-ing a movement toward greater equations or, as Morgan puts it, classification. Other ofhis Indo-European examples are the extensions of the father word to the fathers brother,and the mother word to the mothers brothers wife, in Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, atleast as Morgan sees it.

There is a more general consideration why we should not buy into the idea that equa-tions are a one-way street leading away from the tetradic model. Kinship terminologiesare strongly areal in character; that is, world regions seem to have a limited repertoire ofkinship terminological types within them, and a high degree of recurrence. This is cer-

tainly true of Dravidian South India, whereas there are other world regions from whichDravidian is practically unknown, such as Europe, the Near East and Africa. That beingso, any group that happens to move into the Dravidian south of India is likely to takeon the characteristics of the dominant type over time. We can hardly doubt that this hashappened, for example, in the cases of Arab merchant groups settled on the Kerala coast


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(Gough, 1961), or the many Brahmin communities of South India that are Dravidianin kinship but are thought to be ultimately of North Indian origin (Trautmann, 1981:30215), or the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka, whose language derives from North India butwhose kinship system is Dravidian (Yalman, 1962, 1967). Counter-examples tending to

show that the direction of change can go toward equations must be abundant, but wewill be satisfied to have given a few. If there is a net tendency of kinship terminologiesto change in a single direction it must be a very weak one.

A thought experiment: suppose a group having a kinship terminology of Eskimo typeshould become highly developed economically and politically, and should conquer andsettle far distant places, bringing the Eskimo type wherever it went. Would there not besome likelihood that the Eskimo type would propagate itself wherever colonies wereestablished, and would have an influence on other kinship terminologies where its rulewas established?But of course this thought experiment has already been performed byhistory, for the British have a system of Eskimo type; and it leads, in Morgan and afterMorgan, to a story of kinship in which the Eskimo type becomes the apex of civilizationand the objective of historical directionality.

A different thought experiment: suppose that the Chola empire of 12th-centurySouth India, having expanded southward into Sri Lanka, northward into Central Indiaand eastward toward Malaysia and Indonesia, had been able to continue its expansionuntil it had constituted itself a large empire extending across continents. Would not theDravidian system have followed wherever its people settled, and have had an influenceon other systems wherever its rule established itself?Would not some Dravidian Morganhave explained the association of Dravidian kinship with civilization by a story of kinship

the reverse of the modern consensus?Isnt the current consensus influenced, conditionedby, the course of world history?And dont such theories reimport what has been rejected,the correlation of kinship terminological types with stages in the scale of civilization?

My sense of what is most needed for the study of kinship terminologies to have afuture is a good dose of deep history. This is best achieved through broad, detailedsurveys of the worlds regions similar to the kind I provided for Dravidian in South Asiasome years back. While studies of particular societies will continue to bring forth newtypes of kinship terminology not known before for in kinship studies the age of dis-covery is not over what is more likely to be fruitful at this stage is examination of the

patterning of contiguous systems worldwide, and a consideration of the causes ofunevenness of spread. Such area surveys need to be explicitly historical in character,which is not to say evolutionary, but concerned with seeing the in-region variation as afield of movement within a time frame of the last couple of thousand years.

It is this time frame that is most weakly developed in anthropology today. At its birth,anthropology was to have provided the new universal history for the vastly expandedchronology revealed by the revolution in ethnological time. To a degree, anthropologyhas been delivering on that promise over the years, but the coverage is uneven. Deep,deep history is addressed by evolutionary anthropology; and cultural anthropology, com-

mitted to the phenomenology of contemporary life, increasingly sees its field in largerhistorical contexts of colonialism and post-colonialism. But the deep history that liesbetween, say, the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the Victorian era, is notthickly populated by anthropologists, especially cultural anthropologists, with notableexceptions such as Jack Goody, Marshall Sahlins, Eric Wolf, and Sidney Mintz. For all


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the contemporary commitment of cultural anthropology to history, the deeper past isgreatly neglected.

So what?In the case of kinship terminologies, I would argue that studies confined tothe ethnographic present and lacking access to the deep history of this most interesting

of anthropological objects can entirely miss its most interesting feature: the durability,conservatism and language-like lack of correlation with political and economic regimes.Clinging to the ethnographic surface of history and without access to this truth, anthro-pologists have imagined, to the contrary, that kinship terminologies change rapidly withchanges of residence rules and other aspects of social structure, as Murdock (1949)believed, or through the aggregated manipulations of interested individuals according topractice theories inspired by Bourdieu (1977). Both views I believe are profoundlyflawed, and can only have arisen because of a more or less complete lack of access toactual historical data on kinship terminologies. Studies of kinship terminologies in EastAsia (Kryukov, 1998) and in India (Trautmann, 1981) show what may be learned ofkinship terminologies by bringing the historical record into relation to the ethnogra-phies of the present.

Thanks to Morgan and all the anthropological collection of terminologies that fol-lowed in his wake, the data needed to accomplish this project are at hand, and need onlyto be assembled and surveyed in a manner he would have appreciated, with an open-ness to alternative explanations and a skeptical view of the consensus that has been builtup after Morgan. The examination of his suppressed text on the growth of kinship ter-minologies is worth revisiting, not indeed that we can restore that earlier interpretationas he formulated it the time revolution has swept it away forever but to encourage

us to reimagine a history of kinship terminologies in which there is not a single sequencefrom A to Z, but many parallel developments coexisting from the start and surviving astraces of a deep past.

Note

The title is inspired by that of a comprehensive history of sailing from the time of Noahsark, attributed to John Locke: The Whole History of Navigation from its Original to ThisTime(1704), in The Works of John Locke, new edn, 10 vols., London: printed for ThomasTegg, 1823, vol. 10, pp. 357512. It was prefixed to Churchills Collection of Voyages.

Kinship terminology, of course, begins before Noahs ark and the invention of naviga-tion, but the formal study of it begins with Morgan in the 19th century.

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Trautmann, Thomas R. and R.H. Barnes (1998) Dravidian, Iroquois, andCrow-Omaha in North American Perspective, in Maurice Godelier, Thomas R.Trautmann, and Franklin Tjon Sie Fat (eds) Transformati ons of Kinship, pp. 2758.Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

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Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (1998) Dravidian and Related Kinship Systems, inMaurice Godelier, Thomas R. Trautmann and Franklin Tjon Sie Fat (eds)Transformati ons of Kinship, pp. 33285. Washington, DC: Smithsonian InstitutionPress.

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THOMAS R. TRAUTMANN is author ofDravidian Kinship(Cambridge, 1981), Lewis Henry Morgan and

the Invention of Ki nship(California, 1987) and is co-editor (with Maurice Godelier and Franklin Tjon Sie Fat)

ofTransformations of Ki nship(Smithsonian, 1998). He also writes on ancient India and Orientalism, notably

in his book Aryansand British India(California, 1997) and other current work, focusing on language and

race. Address: Department of History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. [email:

[email protected]]


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