Междинни перспективи: теоретизиране на отношението между родствена терминология и практика
Intermediate perspectives: theorising the interface between kinship terminology and practice

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I address a tacit boundary within the socio-cultural anthropology of kinship – namely that between terminology people and practice people. The former tend to stress the internal logic of terminological systems, while being rather cautious about their implications for practice. The latter, if they attend to terminology at all, tend either to highlight ad hoc associations, or to focus on large-scale intercultural comparisons in which particular terminological features or short-hand classifications (Eskimo, Hawaiian, Dravidian, Crow-Omaha) are correlated with residence, inheritance and marriage patterns. Though crude, these do provide evidence that terminology and practice are linked. I will review the main explanations for these statistical associations that have been offered from the practice viewpoint – asking whether some general principles can be extracted from them, and whether these can be related to the internal logics described by terminology theorists. The aim is to identify some “intermediate perspectives” that might help us understand how terminological systems and patterns of practical interaction adjust to each other.

• Details
• Contents