Hybrid Format

The Global Variability & Recurrence of Kinship Terminology

Samuel Passmore
Research Group: Kinship Inequalities, September 05, 2023

Abstract

Family is perhaps the most universal and unique human phenomena. Every person has a family, and every family is different. But underneath the distinctiveness of each family lies the normative behaviours of a society. The constraints of social norms mean despite the particular differences, there are structural regularities in family organisation within cultural groups. The centrality of normative kinship systems to broader social structure has been a perpetual anthropological interest, but how much kinship systems vary between societies is a question yet to be quantitatively answered. Kinship terminology offers a window into the variability and regularity of kinship systems around the world. Using a new database of 1,229 kinship terminology (Kinbank), I transpose a global set of kinship terminology into a continuous morphospace, or kinspace. I use the kinspace to ask three major questions: 1) what are the major clusters of kinship terminology diversity, 2) what languages make up those clusters and how similar are they? And finally, 3) how do the clusters relate to each other? Using a combination of clustering and dimensionality reduction techniques I show that the number of recurring types in kinship terminology is much higher than the putative six category typology, and that within-type variability is an important dimension to consider when examining kinship terminology diversity. Using the data-discovered types, I show that all types can be joined through a network of change, suggesting languages change through a limited subspace of structural possibility, which may limit kinship diversity and explain the global recurrence of kinship terminology structure.

Biography

Sam Passmore is a Research Fellow with the Evolution for Cultural Diversity Initiative at the Australian National University. Sam is an interdisciplinary researcher who has worked in fields such as Anthropology, Psychology, and Linguistics. His research focuses on cultural macro-evolution and diversity using quantitative and statistical methods. Sam has used cultural macro-evolution to understand the movement and history of a variety of cultural phenomena such as kinship, language, and music.