The whole history of kinship terminology in three chapters

Abstract

The article questions the current consensus that kinship terminologies evolve from something like the Dravidian to something like the English terminology, examining it over three time periods. Before Morgan the study of kinship terminology was embedded within a comparative study of core vocabularies to determine historic relations among nations (e.g. Leibniz). Morgan's breakthrough was to disembed the terms of kinship from the vocabulary list and conceptualize them as a set. His vision of their evolution had two phases. Before the revolutionary expansion of ethnological time in the mid-19th century, he developed an evolutionary view of the Indo-European kinship terminology that was very acute but tied to a short chronology for world history that the time revolution shortly exploded; after the time revolution he conceived the Iroquois and the English (as types of the Classificatory and the Descriptive) terminologies as an evolutionary series caused by successive reformations of the marriage rule. After Morgan, Dravidian and its structural neighbors have come to play the role of evolutionary starting-point. The article concludes with reasons to be skeptical of the current consensus and ways to move forward.