Author: Recent imbs_socdyn_sdeas items

Hal Scheffler, in arguing that native concepts about procreation provide the basis for kin reckoning universally, presented considerable evidence for his argument, in addition to the extension rules for which he is best known, This essay applies this e…

Back to Kinship III is the third Special Issue of the e-journal, Structure and Dynamics sponsored by the group, Kinship Circle. Each issue is dedicated to current kinship research.There are 5 articles in this Special Issue, covering a wide range of kin…

Cross-cultural research involves explanatory arguments framed at the meta-level of a cohort of societies, each with its own historical development as an internally structured and organized system. Historically, cross-cultural research on hunter-gathere…

Most scholars of tribal organization among the Bedouin of the eastern Arab world utilize a two-dimensional, hierarchical model of Bedouin kinship that represents only relations of descent and affinity. This model resembles a genealogy and shows how sma…

The reasons for the existence of Crow-Omaha terminologies have long been debated because of difficulties in associating them with specific features of social organization or practice. However, by going back to the theories of earlier authorities like J…

Here I report on Dwight Read’s theory for a paradigm change in kinship anthropology which entails kinship terminologies being interpreted as symbolic computational systems based on kin-term products. I also report on how Read argues that different conc…

This paper addresses the similarity between behavioural economics and social anthropology with respect to approaches on repeated reciprocity. The case at hand is the application of the Centipede game to Marcel Mauss’s concept of the Gift. In a Centiped…

The paper analyzes the current state of the world economy and offers a short-term forecast of its development. Our analysis of log-periodic oscillations in the DJIA dynamics suggests that in the second half of 2017 the United States and other more deve…

Marriage is not founded straightforwardly upon procreation.  Rather, marriage is universally — not withstanding groups such as the Mosuo of China lacking institutionalized marriage — a
contractua
l relationship legitimating a woman’s childbeari…

Here, I report the pervasive distribution in numerous Aboriginal language groups all over Australia, of kinship terms with similar phonetic shapes and meanings, such as kaka MB, FZH, EF. It is argued that this distribution is consistent with the antiqu…

Followers of David Schneider regularly claim that kinship in one or another community is not based upon native procreative notions. This claim has been shown to be wrong in several cases. But early childhood adoption might be thought to pose a speci…

Not only ritual, but also kinship, can be understood as self-generative and in fact
mutually
self-generative social phenomena. They are in this sense
foils
for each other’s production of social values, transformations, causes, and effect…

Ethnology traditionally guides most research on kinship practices. However, diachronic hypotheses are inadequately tested when using synchronic and normative information from limited periods of ethnological observations. Archaeological kinship analysis…

The two failed orientations to kinship, nurture and fitness, are transcended as this collection of original kinship work moves forward, building on the rich theoretical and ethnographic past of kinship study to a reinvigorated future of new data, recon…

The paper traces the origin of kinship studies as a subdiscipline of ethnography in Russia and the former Soviet Union. It identifies three long-term trends in the study of kinship (typological, ethnosociological and ethnocultural) in the region and…

How do kinship and ritual systems articulate with patterns of social organization? Among the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona, social organization has been described as conforming to two opposing patterns. Among the Eastern Pueblos of the Rio Grand…

This paper builds on earlier analyses of primary data on kinship in Qatar. Its conceptualization centers kinship as a highly structured universal human phenomenon in the study of humankind.  As lived practices, kinship forms a bounded, identifiable …

Pakistani politics are characterised by strong corporate social links through kinship and caste that impose reciprocal obligations and rights. Marital maps enable allow for accurate prediction of allegiances and decision making and contribute to a tran…

Patrilineal kinship structures are among the most complex manifestations of the impact of kinship on human social life. Despite the fact that such structures take highly diverse forms across cultures, that they are absent in many human societies and…

Thanks to new conceptual and computational tools, the analysis of kinship and marriage networks has advanced considerably over the past twenty-five years. While in the past, the discussion of empirical marriage practices was often restricted to a ca…

The content of the spatial relationships module has been extensively studied and a fundamental part of such content is the concept of frame of reference; that is, a set of coordinates that generates an oriented space within which relationships betwe…

This article draws on ethnographic field research in Buka, Bougainville, in order to address the question of multiple models in spatial orientation and the factors that constrain their relative salience. With respect to different Polynesian settings (T…

Marshallese wave navigation remains one of the least understood systems of traditional spatial orientation in Oceania. A sharp decline in voyaging during the historic era and continuing reluctance to share the surviving family-based knowledge of the wa…

The Trobriand language contains two spatial markers, o and wa, which designate types of space, space of the living and space of the dead. All geographic space in the Trobriand world is assigned into one or the other of these two categories. This essay …

Multiple disciplines offer diverse intellectual tool-kits that can be brought to bear on studies in any one. In this concluding article, I use elements of physics and cognitive psychology to analyze the material reported in this collection. In the case…