Introduction : kinship change in anthropology and linguistics

Patrick McConvell

    Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

    9 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    This essay is intended to inform readers about the background to the study of change and reconstruction of kinship in anthropology and linguistics. Most particularly, it aims to introduce linguists to the work in anthropology, anthropologists to the work in linguistics, and all others interested in social change and the history and prehistory of the family to what these disciplines have to offer. First, in section 1, the importance of kinship in social history and prehistory is stressed. Then, in section 2, the engagement of historical linguistics in kinship is introduced, followed in section 3 by the contribution of those areas of anthropology concerned with prehistory and ethnology (comparative anthropology) while remaining alert to the impact of linguistics in these fields. Section 4 deals at some length with a central nexus of theory and method that straddles anthropology and linguistics: semantics and the theory and method of semantic change. This then leads into section 5, on another area to which both linguistics and anthropology/ethnology contribute in their different ways, the reconstruction of past systems, their change, and their evolution, focusing initially on methods that use linguistic forms as a major part of the evidence. Section 6 shifts to looking at approaches in which system transformations are brought to the fore, including both hypotheses involving unilinear evolutionary schemes and those that reject or modify such approaches. Finally, the present book is brought into the spotlight: its origins, its contributions, and its overall significance in the current moment, when kinship studies are experiencing a renaissance in international and interdisciplinary scholarship.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationKinship Systems: Change and Reconstruction
    EditorsPatrick McConvell, Ian Keen, Rachel Hendery
    Place of PublicationU.S.
    PublisherUniversity of Utah Press
    Pages1-18
    Number of pages18
    ISBN (Electronic)9781607812456
    ISBN (Print)9781607812449
    Publication statusPublished - 2013

    Keywords

    • anthropological linguistics
    • kinship
    • language and culture

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