David B. Kronenfeld

Regions Based on Social Structure

Boas argued that anthropologists should make historical comparisons within well-defined regional contexts. A century later, we have many improvements in the statistical methodologies for comparative research, yet most of our regional constructs remain without a valid empirical basis. We present a new method for developing and testing regions. The method takes into account older anthropological concerns with relationships between culture history and the environment, embodied in the culture-area concept, as well as contemporary concerns with historical linkages of societies into world systems. We develop nine new regions based on social structural data and test them using data on 351 societies. We compare the new regions with Murdocks regional constructs and find that our regional classification is a strong improvement over Murdocks. In so doing we obtain evidence for the cross-cultural importance of gender and descent systems, for the importance of constraint relationships upon sociocultural systems, for the historical importance of two precapitalist world systems, and for strikingly different geographical alignments of cultural systems in the Old World and the Americas.

Mindscapes and Science Theories [and Comments and Reply]

Four causal metatypes in science theories correspond to four cognitive/cogitative/perceptual types which vary from individual to individual. In any given culture, all individual types exist, but their percentage distribution varies from culture to culture. The four metatypes are (1) nonreciprocal causality (either probabilistic or deterministic), (2) independent events as most basic, (3) reciprocal causal loops, change-counteracting (either probabilistic or deterministic), (4) reciprocal causal loops, change-amplifying (either probabilistic or deterministic). They correspond to the following cognitive/cogitative/perceptual types: (1) H mindscapes: homogenistic, hierarchical, classificational; (2) I mindscapes: heterogenistic, individualistic, random; (3) S mindscapes: heterogenistic, interactive, homeostatic; (4) G mindscapes: heterogenistic, interactive, morphogenetic. Available data on cross-cultural migrants indicate that some aspects of mindscapes are formed in childhood and become irreversible at the age of around ten. A person with one mindscape type may learn to understand, by some intellectual process, a theory conceptualized in other mindscapes, but the results of such attempts tend to be highly distorted or psychologically artificial. Examples of successes and failures in overcoming mindscape barriers among scientists are given.

An Algebraic Account of the American Kinship Terminology [and Comments and Reply]

Although componential and transformational analyses are the generally recognized domains for the study of kinship terminology structure, neither procedure completely elucidates the structure formed by kin terms as a system of terms. Both procedures ignore that kin terms, via a kin terms product, form a structure separate from the structure imposed on a genealogical space through definition of kin terms as sets of kin types. Separation of these levels shows that the structure of kin terms is an inherently algebraic form and suggests universal algebras, whose subject matter is the properties of formal structures, as the appropriate domain for the representation and analysis of kin term structure. The American (English) kinship terminology is analyzed using this framework, and it is shown that the system of terms that constitutes it has structure that can be isomorphically represented in algebraic terms. More specifically, it is shown that the structure for the set of kin terms, including properties heretofore seen as problematic, has exact explication within the algebraic representation. The set of kin terms distinguished and their structural relations are shown to result from a consanguineal structure which has the form of an algebra known as an inverse semigroup, with affinal terms imbedded via the product of two consanguineal structures-one centered around Self and the other centered around Spouse-with sex distinctions made on the basis of Spouse relations. The algebraic argument shows what properties suffice to generate the complete kin term structure for the American kinship terminology and suggests the possibility of structural comparison of kinship terminologies at the level of properties defining the generation of structure.

Symmetry and Entropy: Mathematical Metaphors in the Work of Levi-Strauss [and Comments and Reply]

Evaluation de lapport de la theorie structuraliste de C. Levi-Strauss qui sinscrit dans la preoccupation croissante pour les mathematiques, la physique et la biologie dans la premiere moitie du siecle. Son effort pour combiner lapproche structurelle a la theorisation du desordre et du changement est un aspect essentiel de sa demarche. Suivi de divers commentaires et dune reponse de lA.

Mathematics in Structural Theory [and Comments and Reply]

Levi-Strauss, amongst other anthropological theorists, has argued for the incorporation of mathematical formalization into anthropological theorizing. The integration of mathematical formalization with anthropological theory is examined in this article through the structural analysis of fandango (wedding) ritual as it is practiced among the Zapotec in a small village near Oaxaca, Mexico. The correspondence that is found between the details of the ritual and the structural and formal analyses argues for the inherently mathematical character of the logic underlying ritual and other aspects of belief systems.

On language and culture: Another strand

Duranti’s review of anthropological linguistics (CA 44: 323–47) has omitted one important strand of anthropological linguistics—the study of word meanings in culture that began with the early ethnoscience work of Lounsbury, Goodenough, Conklin, and Frake and that has continued in contemporary work. His remarks on p. 38 touch on one aspect of this work but do not speak to its major thrust—basic issues of meaning (relations of opposition and inclusion [and the attributes that structure or reflect these relations]) and of reference (including semantic extension), both of which can involve marking relations. This work is highly relevant to the goals Duranti discusses because no accurate understanding of the social or political use of words can be based on an inadequate or naive view of meaning and reference. Berlin’s discussion of universal processes in the development of folk ethnobiological nomenclatural systems (1992) considers the effects of increasing social and technological complexity on that development; he explores the mechanisms by which such systems develop— including the role played by semantic extension and marking—and cognitive pressures toward simplification and communicative effectiveness. Ellen (1993) looks at the manner in which interaction among culture, cognitive processes, and the material world shape a particular culture’s system of animal categories. Medin and Atran (1999) bring together a range of contributions that explore how people perceive, categorize, and reason about living kinds. The collection not only sheds light on human nature but addresses the relationship of ethnobiology to the global economy and to related issues concerning the protection of our environment and of local cultures. These books, as well as other work by these and other researchers, do not simply and narrowly limit themselves to the content of these systems but consider the social and communicative role played by classification, the cognitive purposes served by it, the constraints that limit it, and the ways individuals actually use these systems. Kempton’s rigorous experimental study of words for ceramics in Mexico (1982) provides powerful evidence

Numerical Taxonomy: Old Techniques and New Assumptions [and Comments and Reply]

Numerical taxonomists in biology and scholars in other fields interested in similar classification tasks have used varieties of two techniques: hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling. They have tended to treat both kinds of techniques as all-purpose tools suited to all kinds of classification problems. Choices among techniques have been made in terms of which best accounted for inputted data matrices rather than with any attention to the formal properties of the techniques or the empirical problems to which they were being applied. Instead, the choice of technique should be based on the assumptions embodied in our theories of the processes that produce the distribution of the items in question. We should seek techniques that are capable of representing the regularities our theories assert to exist and that are immune to likely sources of error.

Kinship Terminologies: A Comment on Wierzbicka 2016

This note is a brief reaction to Wierzbicka’s (2016) characterizations of aspects of my work on kinship. I am happy to see my work noticed and am (as I have said in several places) not badly disposed toward the NSM (natural semantic metalanguage) project. But I am concerned to make sure that the portrayal of my work, goals, and claims is accurate. I have, inter alia, explored a wide variety of approaches to the formal analysis of kinship terminologies, and I have often used examples from English and from Fanti—the two systems for which my knowledge is most complete. My general view has been that different approaches tell us different things about the culture (and language) of the users of the kinship terminology in question, and I have tried to understand what it is that each tells us. Anthropologists (and linguists too) have too often written as if there should exist a single best analysis for any system—one that subsumes all that one might need to know about that system or its usage—and then that the analysis they are offering is that best one. I have tried, as opportunities have arisen, to detail what I see as the payoffs and costs of each different approach. Payoffs and potential payoffs have included (1) a best portrayal of native speakers’ kin term definitions and calculations in their own usage and language, (2) a best characterization of the features that distinguish terms from one another and thus enable a mapping of the terminological structure onto other aspects of kin term usage or kin behavior, (3) a portrayal of native speakers’ cognitive mapping of interterm relations (not, here, definitions), (4) an intersystem comparison of the logic or structure of different kinship terminological systems, (5) the cleanest portrayal of the logical structure that underlies a given kinship terminology, (6) a best embedding of kinship terminology in the broader semantic system of the language in question, and (7–) so on. For convenience, and in keeping with my Saussurean and Sapirean orientation, I have distinguished “semantic” approaches that classify the kin terms of a system according to the distinctive features (that distinguish them from one another) from