Passmore Sam, Jordan Fiona M
Department of Anthropology & Archaeology, University of Bristol, UK.
Evol Hum Sci. 2020 Aug 3;2. doi: 10.1017/ehs.2020.41.
Kinship terminologies are the semantic systems of language that express kinship relations between individuals: in English, 'aunt' denotes a parent's sister. Theoretical models of kinship terminology diversity reduce over 10 billion possible organisations to six key types, each of which are hypothesised to be aligned with particular cultural norms of descent, marriage or residence patterns (Murdock, 1949). Often, terminological type is used to infer social patterns in past societies based on these putative relationships between kinship terminologies and social structure, and these associations are staples of 'Anthropology 101'. However, these relationships have not been scrutinised using modern comparative methods. Here we show that kinship terminologies vertically track language phylogeny in Austronesian, Bantu, and Uto-Aztecan, three languages families of different time-depths and environments. We find no unidirectional or universal models of evolution in kinship terminology. Of 18 existing anthropological coevolutionary theories regarding kinship terminology and cultural practices across 176 societies, we find only patchy support, and no evidence for putative universal drivers of evolution in kinship terminologies.
亲属称谓是语言的语义系统，用于表达个体之间的亲属关系：在英语中，“阿姨”指父母的姐妹。亲属称谓多样性的理论模型将超过100亿种可能的组织形式简化为六种关键类型，每种类型都被假设与特定的文化世系、婚姻或居住模式规范相一致（默多克，1949）。通常，基于亲属称谓与社会结构之间的这些假定关系，术语类型被用来推断过去社会的社会模式，而这些关联是“人类学基础课程”的主要内容。然而，这些关系尚未使用现代比较方法进行仔细研究。在这里，我们表明，在南岛语系、班图语系和犹他-阿兹特克语系这三个具有不同时间深度和环境的语系中，亲属称谓在垂直方向上追踪语言系统发生。我们没有发现亲属称谓单向或通用的进化模型。在关于176个社会的亲属称谓和文化习俗的18种现有人类学共同进化理论中，我们只发现了零散的支持，没有证据表明亲属称谓存在假定的通用进化驱动因素。
