Our World’s 7 Kinship Systems

CC BY and public domain credits for images, fonts and sfx. Sources and notes for claims made.

Images
The Asantehene representation was inspired by a comparison of photos and figures:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Asantehene#/media/File:Ashanti_M
onarchy.png
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Prempeh_II#/media/File:PrempehII
.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Asantehene_figure,_Asante_people,_King
dom_of_Ashanti_-_Naturhistorisches_Museum_N%C3%BCrnberg_-_Nuremberg,_G
ermany_-_DSC03984.jpg

Ban Zhao modified from:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ban_Zhao.jpg

Ashanti flag:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Ashanti.svg

United Kingdom flag:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_United_Kingdom.svg

Sources

General remarks
My general thoughts on kinship terminology were shaped over the last couple
months by reading and taking notes on Morgan, Murdock, Dumont, Sahlins,
Bennardo, Read and other kinship authors. I've been able to access both Morgan's
"Conjectural solutions" and Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity to get a handle
on where this research started. Part 1 of Fortes' Kinship and the Social Order
provided me with a handy orientation, starting with Morgan and Radcliffe-Brown.
Schwimmer's helpful pages at the University of Manitoba site offered me early
big-picture guidance. As I move through specific points tracking the animation
timeline, I'll be writing "kinship systems" and even "kinship" rather than "kinship
terminologies" or "kinship terminology systems" or "kin term systems" because it's
shorter, simpler and reflects how the classification of terminologies historically took
center stage in study of kinship.
It's worth remembering that the terms focused on here are basic terms used in a
language. Languages can get at finer distinctions, sometimes by creating or
borrowing terms, but these aren't treated as representative of the core system in
the literature. Systems can also make distinctions not covered here, such as
different Maya words for child of a mother vs a father. All that said, let me share
specific sources following beats along the video's timeline.

Specific claims
Samoan uso vs tuafafine. Firth describes the Samoan sister terms within "Sibling
terms in Polynesia". These terms (along with the complementary "tuagane") can
also be obtained by twisting your favorite translation app's arm, since it currently
includes Samoan.

Asante Akan cousin-fathers. I'll have many citations for the Asante when discussing
Crow systems below. I first met this sidestory on Schwimmer's site (linked above).

Thousands of languages around the world. Exact counts are disputed. Among the
most cited totals is Ethnologue's roughly 7000.

There may only be a handful of kin systems. I caught a line in Mcconvell &
Dousset's "Tracking the dynamics of kinship and social category terms with AustKin
II" that left me with an intuition for a key observation at the heart of this field:
"From Morgan (1997 [1871]) on, it has been remarked that there is a limited set of
ways in which kinship terminologies vary."

"Inuit". The normal term for this system is "Eskimo" in US scholarship, following
Morgan (page 267 of Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity) and seen in
Schwimmer's guide. "Inuit kinship" is preferred in Canada and follows the usage of
the Inuit Circumpolar Council.

Is Inuit kinship actually "Inuit"? One helpful source, Twitter user @MagnumMuskox,
who is originally from Nunavut, warns that Inuit kinship is sorely misunderstood
because "[t]here haven't been many anthropological studies done on the Inuit by
the Inuit themselves, or by people who have spent significant enough time among
them" and "most studies done prior to Norman Hallendy's 2015 book An Intimate
Wilderness are severely lacking in correct information." In particular, the Inuit
"namesake kinship system" is poorly described. To compare kin vocabulary among
languages, see this lesson page. The implication for our story today is that, even if
the lineal/collateral distinction is relevant, Inuit kinship does not follow this system
despite anthropologists taking and applying the name. While Parkin's "Kinship as
classification" calls Inuit and English kin terms a "famous near-match", Trott's
"Ilagiit and Tuqłuraqtuq" charges that "Murdock's famous classification of cousin
terminologies" mistakenly packs together English and Inuit: "Dailey and Dailey
(1961:45-50) long ago demonstrated that whatever Murdock's classification might
mean, it had nothing to do with Inuit."

Traditionally the world's languages are grouped into six kinship systems. Morgan
distinguished systems by name, though his work heavily focused on a "descriptive"
vs "classificatory" axis, so that "[i]n a general sense there are but two" (Systems of
Consanguinity and Affinity, page 468). As Matthew Timothy Bradley comments on
his post about the six-part typology, Spier and Murdock left us with the six systems
explored here. (Notes on Dravidian will come later.) Read summarizes the history of
this typology in the intro to "A New Approach to Forming a Typology of Kinship":

“Subsequently, Murdock (1949), building from the cross-cousin distinctions

used by Lowie (1928) to form a typology of kinship terminologies, focused on
the differences in kin terms for genealogically close kin in ego’s generation.
He added Sudanese and Eskimo terminologies to the four terminology
types—Hawaiian, Iroquois, Crow and Omaha—discussed by Lowie. Murdock’s
six types are based on differences in kin terms for genealogical sibling and
cousin relations, with each type named for an exemplar society having that
kind of terminology.”

Inuit lineal-collateral distinction. Edmonson outlines this distinction clearly and gives
English as an example of a "North Sea" language with "an absolute distinction of
lineal from collateral relatives" in section 6 of "Kinship terms and kinship concepts".

No lineal/collateral distinction in Hawaiian kinship. This is true for the basic terms,
as can be seen in the Elbert & Pukui dictionary or wehewehe.org. The information
indicating sibling age and "sameness" (my term for the feature shared by
kaikua'ana/kaikaina) is also retrievable from the dictionary.

Latin kin terms. I spotted these terms on Schwimmer's site and they matched my
memory. I double checked the terms using Perseus Tufts Latin word study tools and
en.wiktionary.org, both of which draw heavily on Lewis & Short. I assigned the
"patruēlis" and "matruēlis" family members different colors because even though
they share the same lexical form, they have different grammatical genders.

Chinese kin terms. I ended up relying on the Wikipedia entry on Chinese kinship,
but ran checks against dictionary.writtenchinese.com and cojak.org.

Using computers to find paths between kin terms. The paper displayed at this point
in the video is "The shortest kinship description problem" by Chao Xu & Qian Zhang.
The authors affirm the complexity of Sudanese: "Our algorithm handles the
Sudanese system, the most complicated one."

Iroquois, Crow and Omaha systems. Also known as "bifurcate merging", I think
Iroquois receives definitions and attention by all the authors I listed at the start of
general thoughts for these sources. Bennardo mentions its differential treatment of
maternal and paternal kin, along with its grouping of each parent's same-sex sibling
with the parent, when discussing the "Typology of Kinship Terminology Systems" in
the paper "Space in kinship: Frames of reference and kinship terminology systems".
Bennardo's characterization of Crow and Omaha focuses on the asymmetry
resulting from using the same term for parent's sibling and parent's sibling's child.
Schwimmer's site digs more into the mechanics and terminology in the pages for
"Akan kin terms" and "Igbo kin terms".

Iroquois is linked to cross-cousin marriage. This is the common explanation,

summarized at the top of Schwimmer's page on "Yanomamo kin terms".

The British misunderstood Asante kinship. After finding unclear references scattered
among primary and later sources, I nearly set this suplot aside. I have an exchange
with a Twitter user to thank for unearthing some good research. Foster's Education
and Social Change in Ghana mentions on page 7 that "Maclean ... concluded a
treaty with the Asantehene in 1831 which resulted in two young Ashanti 'princes'
(Ansa, the son of the former Asantehene [Tutu Kwamina] and Inkwantabissa, the
son of the incumbent [Okutu]) being sent to England for education. ... Their
anticipated role as educated chiefs, acting as intermediaries between the British
and the Ashanti, never developed, for reasons that will be indicated in later
paragraphs." The next page reports: "Most Europeans seem not to have been
conscious of the fact that matrilineal inheritance among the Akan automatically
excluded the sons of chiefs from the assumption of chiefly office. Sons were not
members of the royal lineages of their father..." (page 61). Bodwich offers a
contemporary account that confirms the kinship system and raises questions about
European ignorance: "Saï Apokoo, brother of Saï Tootoo, was next placed on the
stool. Had there been no brother, the sister's son would have been the heir; this
extraordinary rule of succession, excluding all children but those of a sister..." (page
234 of Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (Cambridge Library Collection
edition)).

Akan Twi kin terms. These were constructed from data on Schwimmer's page on
Akan kin terms, plus the online Twi dictionary at twi.bb.

It's rare for terms to cut across generations like this. As depicted here, other
systems do not have this property. Schwimmer's page summarizing the six kinship
terminologies notes that Omaha cross-cousin terms are "quite peculiar and cut
across generational divisions".

Dravidian kinship looks like another Iroquois system. Morgan's "Conjectural

solution" saw Dravidian as identical to Iroquois apart from "two or three
unimportant particulars" (455). Per Hage notes in "Dravidian kinship systems in
Africa" that "Dravidian and Iroquois have often been conflated because they have
the same cross-parallel classification of close relatives." The dramatic reveal of
Dravidian's wider scale was influenced by Loundsbury's and Dumont's addition of
the system to the six cited earlier.

Dravidian crossness and distinction from Iroquois. Per Hage spells out and tabulates
the crucial differences between Iroquois and Dravidian in a short section titled
"Dravidian and Iroquois Kinship Systems" within the paper "Dravidian kinship
systems in Africa". The helpful heuristic quoted in the video comes from that
section. In his challenge to Dumont, Good's "On the non-existence of 'Dravidian
kinship'" lists Kondaiyankottai Maravar terms. Good argues that Dumont's and
Trautman's "Dravidian" kinship is not the norm across South India, and is in fact not
"a kinship system" (from the conclusion). The Tamil kinship entry at
everyculture.com has a crash-course overview of Tamil kin terms and cross-cousin
marriage.

Dravidian tree. My final choices of how to build the Dravidian tree were informed by
deciphering and comparing kin type compounds in papers, especially Per Hage,
"Dravidian Kinship systems in Africa" table 1. I cropped the tree in half instead of
showing mother's father's side and father's mother's side as well to avoid cluttering
the tree more than it is. Those halves are predictable from the statements made at
this point in the video, but would show up with flipped placement of second cousins
vs third siblings the way they're arranged on my chart. Table 1 gives MMZDC,
MFBDC, FMZSC, FFBSC, MMBSC, MFZSC, FMBDC, FFZDC as parallel in Dravidian,
while MMBDC, MFZDC, FMBSC, FFZSC, MMZSC, MFBSC, FMZDC, FFBDC are cross.

What about systems that are hybrids, don't quite fit, or are even seemingly
untranslatable? This uneasiness is already reflected in many of the writings
mentioned above, but it's on full display in "Kinship terminology in
English-Zulu/Northern Sotho dictionaries" by Prinsloo & Bosch. The in-video quote
about "56 terms" for "parents, grandparents and great grandparents" comes from
the last sentence in section 3. The very next sentence at the start of section 4 is
equally intriguing: "There are frequent instances where a suitable translation
equivalent is not available." Schwimmer's page on "Igbo kin terms" admits that
terms in that language "do not easily conform to a standard pattern".

Where did these systems come from? There are a few paths that led me to the
question of origins. On the old-fashioned and controversial side was Morgan's
speculative attempt to tie systems to a scale of marriage practices evolving from
more primitive ones like Hawaiʻian to sophisticated ones like Sudanese. That's all
readable in the lengthy way he winds down his "Conjectural solution". A very
different angle opened up in Bennardo's "Space in kinship", which reports a
psychological correlation between kinship systems to spatial systems in cultures.
What if these terms aren't really about genealogy and ancestry? The first author to
open this line of questioning for me was Read. Read et al. open "The cultural
grounding of kinship" with this sentence: "From its inception, virtually all work in
the field of kinship studies assumes that marriage and reproduction, represented
through genealogical relations, are fundamental to the definition of kinship." Sahlins
spilled many words championing a reconceptualization in a lengthy essay aptly
named "What kinship is—and is not", where part 2 bears the title, "What Kinship Is
Not—Biology". Read's "A new approach to forming a typology of kinship terminology
systems" laments that "the assumption of genealogy as the basis of kinship took on
the aura of definition" and pulls us to recognize "a logic that organizes kin terms
into an idea system that does not derive from genealogical relations."

Kin term explorer. The app is live, and I shared the link with patrons in a post on
April 26, 2018. The live build shown in the screen recording has at least one typo in
the Hawaiʻian terms, where an instance of "kaikunāne" is missing a medial "n".

I do think some of these would make a great followup. Even the sidestories and the
specifics about a particular system are intriguing. Thank you for watching!

Music
I created the outro theme, the guitar music that plays during Hawaiʻian kinship and
the softsynth music during Omaha. The rest of the music is by these fine creators!

Thatched Villagers, Thinking Music, The Path of the Goblin King v2,
Silver Flame, Arid Foothills, Vadodora Chill Mix, Sardana
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Happy Ukulele, Sneaky Snooper

Jason Shaw (audionautix.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Dragons and Fireworks

Darren Curtis (https://www.darrencurtismusic.com)
Materials Release license provided

Crazy Glue, Tickled Pink

Josh Woodward (Free download: http://joshwoodward.com/)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Fonts
JSL Ancient, JSL Ancient Italic, JSL Blackletter by Jeff Lee.
http://www.shipbrook.net/jeff/typograf.html

Architect's Daughter by Kimberly Geswein, commercial use license purchased.

http://www.kimberlygeswein.com/commercial-use/

Alegreya by Juan Pablo del Peral.

https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/alegreya

Perspective Sans and Daniel by Daniel Midgley.

http://goodreasonblog.com/fontery/

Kelvinch by Paul Miller, SIL Open Font License 1.1.

https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/kelvinch

Noto Sans used under SIL Open Font License v1.10.

https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/noto-sans

Charis used under SIL Open Font License 1.1.

http://software.sil.org/charis/

cwTeX-q Kai licensed by Tsong-Min Wu,Tsong-Huey Wu, Edward G.J. Lee, Chen-Pan
Liao under SIL Open Font License 1.1.
https://github.com/l10n-tw/cwtex-q-fonts

SFX
(from www.soundbible.com and www.pdsounds.org)
Woosh, Mark DiAngelo
Swoosh 1, man
Swooshing, man
Blop, Mark DiAngelo
Mouth pop, Cori Samuel
Wind Storm, Mark DiAngelo
Dragon Wheeze, Gregory Weir
Dull thud, Gregory Weir
Turning a page, John Rose
Page turn, planish
Old book noises, Cori, pdsounds.org
Ting experiment, Thore
I recorded the writing/chalk sounds and the shooshes/hushes.

(from http://en.soundeffect-lab.info)
head-stroke1
head-write1