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The whole history of kinship terminology in three chapters: Before Morgan, Morgan, and after Morgan
Thomas R. Trautmann Anthropological Theory 2001 1: 268 DOI: 10.1177/14634990122228728 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ant.sagepub.com/content/1/2/268

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Anthropological Theory
Copyright SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi Vol 1(2): 268287 [1463-4996(200106)1:2;268287;017340]

The whole history of kinship terminology in three chapters

Before Morgan, Morgan, and after Morgan
Thomas R. Trautmann University of Michigan

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). Morgans 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 IndoEuropean 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 Classicatory 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. Key Words Dravidian evolution history of anthropology kinship kinship terminology Leibniz Morgan time time revolution

The invention of kinship was virtually the invention of anthropology itself; and kinship terminology was at the heart of that inventing. Kinship and kinship terminology as anthropological objects of study once were privileged sites of theorizing and have never entirely disappeared, although they had declined greatly following the skeptical essays of Needham (1971) and Schneider (1972, 1984), which called their coherence into question. The new kinship studies of the 1980s and 1990s have made up a lot of the
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TRAUTMANN The whole history of kinship terminology

lost ground. But it is my belief that anthropologys brainchild will only thrive when it grows beyond anthropology and makes effective alliances with other disciplines. The study of kinship, and of kinship terminologies, has uncovered an order of facts that is of the rst signicance for the understanding of human social life. In uncovering these facts, anthropology, and anthropology alone, has made a contribution of permanent value. But anthropologys breakthrough understanding of kinship, as that which includes the family but also something else that lies beyond and among families, has a value for other disciplines that is still to be realized. My own interest in kinship and kinship terminology was from the perspective of the deep history of India. The Dravidian kinship terminology of South India and Sri Lanka is a classic type whose geographical distribution correlates approximately with that of the Dravidian language family setting aside, for the moment, the many instances of this type of kinship terminology in Oceania and the Americas. What makes the Dravidian terminology so pleasing is the clarity with which it associates a rule of marriage that of cross-cousin marriage with the semantic organization of the terms themselves. The basic organizing principles of Dravidian systems are two. The rst is shared with Iroquois systems, and was noted by Morgan when he said of the Iroquois that the fathers brother is equally a father, and the mothers sister a mother; that is, the father-word is applied to the fathers brother, and the mother-word to the mothers sister. This is true of Dravidian languages, except that the fathers brother is called big or little father, the mothers sister big or little mother, according to their age relative to the father or mother. A consequence is that the child of such fathers and mothers are egos brothers and sisters and are unmarriageable; moreover the children of these same-sex sibling pairs are the sons and daughters of both, and are siblings to one another. Following Lounsbury, we call this the principle of same-sex sibling merger (Lounsbury, 1964b). If we imagined English transformed into Dravidian by the application of this rule, we could say that the thickened categories of father, mother, sister, brother, son and daughter that result constitute the set of parallel kin that overrides and replaces the distinction in English of lineal and collateral kin. The second principle of Dravidian systems is not shared with Iroquois: it is the principle of cross-cousin marriage. By it, though a brother-sister pair may not marry, their children should marry. The consequences of this are many. In combination with the rule of same-sex sibling merger, we may imagine English transformed into Dravidian with the formation of a category of cross kin, consisting of the uncles and aunts (minus those who have become fathers and mothers through same-sex sibling merger), cousins (minus those who have become siblings through the same principle), and nephews and nieces (minus

Figure 1. The whole history of kinship terminology diagram. 269

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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 1(2)

those who have become sons and daughters through the same principle). But the crosskin category is thickened by addition of the afnes: father- and mother-in law become uncle and aunt; spouses and spouses siblings become cousins; childrens spouses become nephews and nieces. The pleasing simplicity of this terminological system its evident logical integrity and the difference of that logic from that of English kinship terminology makes it an ideal starting point for discussion of kinship terminology, and there has been an abundance of ethnographic reports on terminologies of this kind from around the world. But it is of special strategic value for studying the deep history of Indian civilization, for the many ethnographic instances across South India and Sri Lanka can be shown to be so many variations on a single theme; and the anthropological record of the present can be joined up with evidence from ancient lawbooks, chronicles and inscriptions to show that the pattern of Dravidian kinship is traceable for the better part of two thousand years and is remarkably durable and resistant to change. Joining the anthropological study of kinship terminology with a rich historical record leads us to think that the structures of kinship terminology may be very slow to change and resistant to effects of changed political, economic or social circumstance, or to the calculated interests of individual actors. Kinship terminologies, these ndings suggest, are not, after all, sensitive indicators of changes in other aspects of social organization or modes of production or forms of political association. For that very reason they are especially useful as traces of distant origins, like languages themselves. Though South Indians are in every way participants in a general Indian cultural pattern, including many aspects of family organization and language, their language and kinship terminology nevertheless remain discoverably different from those of North India and of those belonging to the Munda language family. The lesson of history is that kinship terminology is very conservative and resistant to the effects of other levels. It was L.H. Morgan who invented the study of kinship terminologies, or what he called nomenclatures of relationship, and in doing so served to create the eld of kinship by framing it as an object of study containing various different, but coherent and logical, systems of relationships, the differences among which constituted a problem worthy of close study. Kinship terminology was the site of the anthropological breakthrough, destabilizing the idea of the family as an effect of nature and having a xed character, as Maurice Godelier (1995) has said. If kinship and, a fortiori, kinship terminology have suffered from thinking small, it is worth revisiting Morgans conception to re-examine it in a larger, three-century context of before and after. That is what I wish to do in this paper. The central issue will be to comment on an unpublished text of Morgan from the rst draft of the Systems of Consanguinity and Afnity (Morgan, 1870). This will be the middle part of the three natural divisions into which the history of kinship terminology (and indeed anthropology) falls: Before Morgan, Morgan, and After Morgan. Fast forwarding through history at this terric rate will have the effect of caricature, the virtue of which will be to draw into relief the gross features of the topic by blurring the detail. My purpose in doing so will be to subject a current consensus to critical scrutiny. There is a remarkable uniformity of tendency among theorists in the 20th century to assume that the beginning point for the evolution of kinship terminologies was a system something like the Dravidian, and that the overall directionality of change in terminologies
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TRAUTMANN The whole history of kinship terminology

is toward something like the kinship terminology in English. At the beginning of the new century it is worth examining that assumption skeptically, to probe its strengths and weaknesses, and ascertain whether it will be serviceable for the future. My strategy for gaining purchase on the problem will be to throw the present consensus in relief by going back to the manuscript of L.H. Morgan just mentioned, written in about 1865 but never published in full, on the evolution of kinship terminology, which expounds an alternative to the current consensus. I will then consider the grounds on which the current consensus stands, and reasons for skepticism. In narrativizing the history of anthropology, one has, at the outset, to make a choice about whether to stress continuity or discontinuity. To a degree the choice of a narrative strategy is arbitrary. But I think that there are a number of good reasons why it is useful to think of anthropology as we know it originating all at once, as the result of a Big Bang, in around 1860. This Big Bang was what I have called the Revolution in Ethnological Time; the revolution, that is, by which the short, Biblical chronology for human history suddenly gave way to a very much lengthened chronology. In England this collapse of the short chronology was especially associated with the excavation of human artifacts in association with extinct fossil species at Brixham Cave by William Pengelly and Hugh Falconer, and announced dramatically by Charles Lyell at the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1859, the year as well of the publication of Darwins Origin of Species (Gruber, 1965; Trautmann, 1992). The crisis that was provoked by the sudden immense lengthening of human history had several effects. The most dramatic was that the Bible and the Greek and Latin classics, the oldest written records known to Europeans, in short, no longer gave a picture of humanitys primitive or original state; and the vast new territory of prehistory (the very word was invented in this period), which came suddenly into being, required lling by prehistoric archaeology. The most important result, perhaps, was the constituting of primitive man as a concept. Hitherto, savages were thought of as feral humans who had lost the arts of civilized life with which God had tted them in Eden (Hodgen, 1936); now the contemporary savage was seen not through the lens of a theory of degeneration but as a prolongation of the primitive state into the present. Primitive man was born, the rst child of the time revolution (Trautmann, 1992). The time revolution divided the scholarly activity of the generation of Morgan, Darwin and Marx in two. In the case of Morgan, I have recovered the greater part of a rst draft of the Systems from among the Morgan Papers at the University of Rochester, and have shown that the rst draft is under the reign of the short chronology, while the published version has been revised to accommodate the interpretation to the suddenly lengthened time frame for human history. Thus Morgans study of kinship terminology begins before the Big Bang, and is revised in the light of the Big Bang. The middle term of our three-chapter history of the study of kinship terminology, therefore, will be subdivided into Morgan A and Morgan B, before and after the Big Bang.
BEFORE MORGAN

Briey, as to the before part of the picture. Morgan did not create kinship terminology as an anthropological object out of the blue, but from within a long-standing tradition of linguistic ethnology, the project of which was to determine the historical relations among nations by determining the relations among their languages. This is a very
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old European project; but for our purposes it will sufce to pick up the story at the beginning of the 18th century, during which we see the standardized vocabulary list emerging as the simple-seeming method by which history was to be derived from comparative study of languages. Nowhere was this more important than in America, where ancient written sources of history were lacking, since it was believed that language comparison could uncover historical relationships among Indian nations that had no ancient written sources from which to recover them. Thomas Jefferson, no less, was the formulator of such a standardized questionnaire, which, in the hands of his protg and successor as president of the American Philosophical Society, Stephen du Ponceau, laid the foundations of Americanist historical linguistics (Jefferson, c. 1782; Du Ponceau, 1838; see Trautmann, 1987: 807). At about the same time, Sir William Jones in Calcutta was adumbrating the idea of the Indo-European language family on the basis of such lists, and Catherine of Russia was inaugurating a plan for the study of the worlds languages, beginning with those of her own vast empire, through an elaborate vocabulary list sent to her ofcials in every region, and to distant correspondents who included George Washington (Jones, 1788; Pallas, 178689). The discovery of new and unexpected families of languages thoroughly revolutionized the deep history of the world. The standard vocabulary lists that were to uncover historical relations among nations were taken around the world on the tide of European imperial expansion, and they created an utterly new ethnological map of the world and a new universal history. Many new, unexpected and counter-intuitive groupings were discovered, such as the Indo-European language family, which united two widely separated blocs of peoples, in Europe on the one hand, and in Iran and India on the other, or the far-ung Malayo-Polynesian group ranging from Madagascar to Hawaii. The standardized vocabulary that was the principal tool of this revolution in ethnological knowledge looks to be a simple commonsense listing; but in fact it rests on specic assumptions and is a highly theorized structure based on ideas that underlie much 18thcentury discussion of language, often implicitly, sometimes breaking into expression. Within the short, Biblical time frame for human history and the even shorter time span of about 4000 years since the Confusion of Tongues at Babel some original or stock languages have survived more or less unchanged. Mixed languages have formed through borrowing; but borrowing occurs among the words of science or art that a people need when they have passed the primitive stage. At the heart of a language, then, is a core vocabulary of the words that every language must have from the start; words expressing those primitive notions and naming those things which are at the minimum threshold of human life and speech. The vocabulary list focuses on that primitive core. Leibniz published a simple list in 1718 that appears to have been a very inuential model, perhaps the model for subsequent lists (Leibniz, 1718). Many, perhaps most versions of the standardized vocabulary list that are so heavily in use in the 18th and 19th centuries go back to this list. It is a very interesting list in which kinship terms gure prominently, along with numbers, parts of the body, words for foodstuffs and utilitarian objects, heavenly bodies, weather, animals and actions. The list and the project it encodes set up a number of oppositions: primitive v. recent; simple v. rened; native v. foreign, borrowed. A great deal of interpretation is built into this tool, whose purpose is to nd the indigenous core of a language in order to nd its nearest of kin.
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TRAUTMANN The whole history of kinship terminology

This project, which was well under way by the 18th century, continues in the 21st century; and an impressive number of the 18th-century ndings remain current among those who are supposed to know about these things, the historical linguists. The mapping of the world by comparison of word-lists has been remarkably successful. Even though one can no longer believe that the core vocabulary captures the state of a language at the beginning of human history, or that history began only about 6000 years back, it appears that there is enough truth in the notion that a core vocabulary is deeply conservative to account for this success. Thus, to take an example from Indo-European, the following Sanskrit words for kinship terms are surprisingly close to their English counterparts: pitr tr s vasa (sister), bhra tr . (father), ma . (mother), . (brother), duhitr . (daughter); though the word putra (son) is quite different, the more archaic word sunu is a recognizable cognate of English son. The other aspect of this European project of understanding the relations among nations through the relations among languages is not so obvious from the vocabulary list itself. That is the underlying ethnological framework within which are interpreted the similarities among languages revealed by the vocabulary list. This framework is the Tree of Nations, or as I call it, because its model is found in the Book of Genesis attributed to Moses, the Mosaic Ethnology (Trautmann, 1998: ch. 2). The Mosaic Ethnology is a branching tree connecting the different nations through descent from their founding patriarchs, the descendants of Noah and his three sons after the universal ood, after whom, in Genesis, they are named the Hebrews from the patriarch Eber, the Greeks from Javan (i.e. Ionians), and so forth. This Tree of Nations has a shape that Evans-Pritchard taught us to call a segmentary lineage; what the Mosaic Ethnology imagines is a world made of nations who are related, not as Self and Other, but closer or more distant (unilineal) relations of kinship forming a single extended segmentary lineage uniting the human family. This was the ethnological framework within which new ethnological knowledge was located and interpreted, not only by Europeans, but by all the Peoples of the Book, so to say, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, for several thousand years. And, in a sense, it continues today in the cladistic maps of relationships guring in current works of historical linguistics, though its Biblical model is forgotten, or lingers only marginally in names like Semitic and Hamitic (from Sem or Shem and Ham, sons of Noah).
MORGAN

Through this widely-dispersed project of linguistic ethnology, kinship terms were collected from many parts of the world for a long time before Morgan, but they had no special existence as a set until Morgan abstracted them from the larger vocabulary list in which they were embedded and treated them as a set. The move by which kinship terms were constituted as a set was rather complex. Adopting the realist, pre-Saussurian discourse of words and things that prevailed at the time, the vocabulary list had been created to elicit the words that name a standardized list of things identied by their Latin, English or French names. Comparison of languages, then, was a matter of comparing names, holding things constant through the standardization of the questionnaire. Morgan did not simply isolate the kinship terms from the larger set of the vocabulary list. He wanted to argue, rather, that the terminology of kinship constituted not a vocabulary or lexicon but a set of a different kind: a semantic set, a set of meanings or
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classes of things. That is, he recognized that the underlying things of kinship are themselves culturally organized into differing logics, and are not a xed set of real things existing everywhere in the world and to be held constant. Comparison in Morgan became a matter of examining the patterning of names in order to nd distinctive congurations of culturally constituted things. The breakthrough move came in two steps, boiling down a complex story to its main elements. The rst was the recognition that for the Iroquois the fathers brother is equally a father, or, as we might say, the word for father was extended to the fathers brother (Morgan, 1851: 857). This classicatory logic of same-sex sibling merger operated throughout the Iroquois terminology, creating large classes of relatives that classed or merged relatives held distinct in English. The simple vocabulary list would not evoke facts of that order, and a special schedule or questionnaire was required. The second step was the discovery that Ojibwa had kinship terms with very similar classicatory mergers of kin, similar enough to lead Morgan to conclude that he had shown through this new instrument for ethnology what linguistic ethnology could not, that the Iroquois and the Ojibwa were historically related even though their languages were so different that they could not be shown to be linguistically related. Kinship would be a more powerful tool for history than philology was, Morgan believed, because it directed its analysis to an archaic and deeply conservative core of language (FeeleyHarnik, 1999; Trautmann, 1987: 928). Morgans breakthrough led to his masterwork, the Systems of Consanguinity and Afnity of the Human Family (1870), in which all the kinship terminologies of the world known to Morgan are put in one of two families, the classicatory, including Iroquois, and the descriptive, including English. The project of the work was to deliver a proof, through comparison of kinship terminologies, of the unity and Asiatic origin of the American Indians. His proof consisted in showing that all kinship terminologies of the world known to him, and collected into three massive tables in the Systems, could be assigned to one of two families, the classicatory and the descriptive. Classicatory systems, in which relations of lineal and collateral were classied or merged (such as the fathers brother with the father), are logically integrated but different from descriptive systems, in which the lineal and collateral lines are held distinct, and not merged. They map onto two large contiguous world regions: descriptive for Europe and the Near East, classicatory in Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Q.E.D. Much the most valuable aspect of the book, however, is not the proof itself but the creation of kinship terminology as an anthropological object, and the fact that Morgan devised much, perhaps most, of the tools and basic categories used in subsequent kinship work. In the draft of the Systems, prior to the time at which the time revolution reached Morgan, he interpreted the descriptive/classicatory binary as the difference between kinship systems that are natural v. those that are articial. For Morgan the descriptive system followed the nature of descents by observing the boundary between lineal and collateral kin; it followed the tutelage of nature. The classicatory system, by contrast, was articial. It was a stupendous work of art, Morgan thought, in that it departed from the tutelage of nature by forming vast classes of kin that overrode the lineal/collateral boundary; and the design, once formed, was perpetuated by its own logical integration (Trautmann, 1987: ch. 6). The time revolution, which reached Morgan as he was completing his masterwork,
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TRAUTMANN The whole history of kinship terminology

allowed him to reconceptualize the relation between descriptive and classicatory systems not as two parallel, contemporary formations but as successive stages in a long series of evolutionary stages from primitive promiscuity to modern Euroamerican monogamy, as we shall shortly see. Let us rst examine Morgan A, before the Big Bang, before going on to examine the reconceptualization in Morgan B, after the Big Bang, in which kinship comes to play a role in the consolidation of the idea of modernity. What follows is a summary of one of the most fascinating of the unpublished texts in the Morgan Papers, a suppressed chapter of the rst version of the Systems, on the growth of nomenclatures of relationship, that is, a kind of natural history of kinship terminology. This is Morgan A.
MORGAN A

The text in question is Morgans manuscript on the growth of kinship terminologies or, as he calls them, nomenclatures of relationship, in the Morgan Papers (Morgan, c.1865). This text was to have been Chapter Six, Part I of his great summa on kinship, the Systems of Consanguinity and Afnity of the Human Family (Morgan, 1870). Much of the text of the rst version Morgan wrote and submitted to the Smithsonian has been preserved in the Morgan Papers at the University of Rochester, and comparison of the rst version with the published version shows a number of signicant changes. Changes were made to accommodate the not unreasonable demand of the Smithsonian to shorten the text (the published version is over 600 pages) and to take account of a much lengthened conception of human history, having to do with the revolution in ethnological time: the breaking open of the short, Biblical time frame for human history, according to which (in the Ussherite system, one of many variants of Bible-based world chronology) the Creation occurred about 6000 years ago (at 4004 BC) and the ethnological variety of the world even more recently, about 4000 years ago, following the unpleasantness at the Tower of Babel (details in Trautmann, 1992). It is important in what follows to keep it in mind that this rst-version text of Morgan is a pre-time-revolution text, whose horizon for human history is still supplied by the short Biblical chronology, and to note how the time revolution upset the assumptions of the argument he made in it. Let us examine, then, Morgans pre-time-revolution idea about the evolution of terminologies. The draft chapter referred to focuses on the pattern of variation in the kinship terminologies of the descriptive system, especially the Indo-European language family and, given its assumptions, the argument is very acute. It asks how a system originally purely descriptive could naturally grow and the probable causes of its development. The causes Morgan nds to be of a logical and cognitive nature. The analysis turns on the fact that his comparative table revealed that the words for lineal kin are more or less stable in the various languages of the Indo-European family. There are exceptions, of course; we have already seen that the ordinary Sanskrit word for son (putra) is not cognate with English son, although a more archaic cognate (sunu) is known, and we could easily add that Latin words for son and daughter (lius, lia) and Greek for brother (adelphos) do not t the pattern. But overall there is a considerable incidence of evident cognates among Indo-European words for the lineal kin, F,M,Z,B,S,D. To this list Morgan adds the words for husband and wife, considering these the primary kin, and taking them to belong to the primitive core of the language. For kinship terms beyond this central core, Morgan nds little of the consistency in
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the patterning of words from one Indo-European language to another. His leading example is the words for nephews, nieces and grandchildren. Cognates of Greek nepos are found in all the Indo-European languages of his table, but their meaning varies between nephew and grandchild, even in English. Thus in his will, Shakespeare bequeathed a hundred pounds to his niece Elizabeth Hall, who was, however, his daughters daughter, showing that the word meant granddaughter as well as siblings daughter in earlier forms of English. This is conrmed in a table of the degrees of kinship and consanguinity in the important compendium of English law, Coke upon Littleton, in which one nds the lineal nephew and niece (i.e. grandchildren) together with the collateral nephew and niece (Coke, 1817; Trautmann, 1987: 136). This difference between the relatively stable lineal terms and the relatively unstable collateral and more distant terms Morgan attempts to explain by a conjectural history of how kinship terms developed from the very beginning, and in doing so he implies a belief that the IndoEuropean origin is near the origin of human history, thought to be but a few thousand years ago. Morgans idea of how kinship terminologies develop is that a core vocabulary consisting of primary kin terms is formed rst. After their invention the more distant relationships could for a time be readily described by the juxtaposition of terms, such as mothers brother. Progress beyond this stage would be the result of generalization and classication or merger. To indicate collateral relationships there were three alternatives: to invent new terms; to continue to generate descriptive terms through the juxtaposition of existing terms; or, by a false generalization . . . to classiy the collateral with the primary relatives, as uncles with the father, aunts with the mother, & cousins with the brother as in the classicatory system. Morgan considers the middle method, that of pure description (i.e. the generation of phrasal terms), to be too inconvenient, so there would be a tendency for the invention of special terms for the near collateral kin; but a terminology ample enough to express all collateral relationships would be even more inconvenient, so we should expect new terms to be limited to the nearest degree of collateral kin the terms, that is, for uncle, aunt, cousin, nephew and niece. He continues, each new term would be apt to be used in a general sense, until it became restricted in its application, by the introduction of additional terms, so that kinship terminology would develop from the center (ego) outward, from the primary terms to the secondary, and from lineal to collateral kin, each additional term to be devised lessening the semantic scope of the existing terms. After the core terms had been invented, the next stage would probably be the invention of a general term for nephew, grandson and perhaps cousin. In Indo-European the cognates of nepos, from their universality, must have existed in the primitive speech but in a wide sense. Since (as will be shown) it is older than terms for grandfather and grandmother, uncle and aunt, it must have existed without a reciprocal in the form of a special term. The semantic scope and variation of the evidence of this word in the different Indo-European languages leads to the conclusion that this word was the rst to have been introduced into the Indo-European kinship terminology to indicate relationships beyond those expressed by the primary terms, and that at rst it was used in a more comprehensive sense than at present (Morgan, c.1865: 78). The nepos-word, then, had a wide range of meaning that was narrowed down differently in
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the different Indo-European languages, as more words were invented to designate the outer band of non-primary kin. With the progress of discrimination by which the several degrees of relationship were made distinct, and by the invention or introduction of new terms, nepos and its cognates were restricted in usage and new terms occupied part of its original semantic space. In Sanskrit, Latin, Spanish and Portuguese it was restricted to grandson. In English, Flemish, Norman, French and German it became restricted to the son of a brother or sister, and, having no original term for grandson, these languages fell back upon descriptive phrases for it, except for German, which developed a new term (Enkel). In AngloSaxon, Italian and Dutch the nepos-word was used generally for nephew and grandson, and in the last for cousin as well. Terms for grandfather and grandmother, and for uncle and aunt, would next be required. Here the variation is even wider, and patterns form and conict. It is at least certain for Latin that avus, avia (grandfather, grandmother) were formed earlier than the term for maternal uncle, avunculus, which is made by adding a diminutive: little grandfather (and the source for English uncle). The two relations were perhaps formerly one, and reciprocal (Morgan calls them correlative) to nepos. Further, the relationships of uncle and aunt in the concrete do not appear to have been discriminated in the primitive Indo-European language since they are so various from one Indo-European language to another. Many of the Indo-European terms for these relationships are derivatives of words for father and mother such as the set pitr . vya (Skt.), patruus (Lat.), patros (Gk.) for fathers brother, and ma tula (Skt.) matertera (Lat.) and me tro s (Gk.) for mothers brothers wife, and the lack of terms that have cognates through all the branches of the family (or in other words the heterogeneity of the lexicon) indicates strongly that descriptive terms were used for these relationships at the period of the separation of the languages from one another. For the remaining uncles and aunts, the different branches of the Indo-European family exhibit a great variety of terms, showing that the terms came into being at the period of separation of the Indo-European languages, not before. Once the relationships of uncle and aunt were fully discriminated by means of special terms, the separation of the relationship of nephew and grandson by means of special terms or descriptive phrases would soon follow, and these would each be furnished with a proper correlative (reciprocal). The term for cousin would be the last invented, it being the most remote collateral relation discriminated by means of a special term. The English word cousin is based on a generalization of four distinct relationships, the children of a fathers brother and sister, and those of a mothers brother and sister. The absence of a common term among the Indo-European languages, and the presence of several borrowed terms for this relationship, shows that the original method for designating the relationship of cousin was descriptive (e.g. fathers brothers son, etc.). English cousin and its cognates are from Latin consobrinus, -a, coming from con plus soror, sister, meaning the children of two or more sisters, which in English is extended to cousins of all four kinds. Morgan summarizes his view of the process by which the terminologies of the IndoEuropean family became very diverse in vocabulary, while remaining quite similar in semantic structure, in a passage that gives the rationale of this most important aspect of his thought, for it is the point at which the analysis of kinship terminologies takes on a life of its own separate from that of philology, and becomes a new science of its own. It is worth quoting the passage in full:
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The great diversity of modes which now exist in the several Aryan [i.e. Indo-European] languages for the same objects, and many of them the most common, must nd its chief explanation in the theory of development from root forms after the separation of those languages became complete. We can hardly suppose that [the words for cousin] consobrinus and vetter or amita and muhme existed contemporaneously in the Latin and German while the two languages were yet associated as dialects of a common speech; and that the Latin perpetuated one, the German the other, while several of the remaining original Aryan dialects lost both. A dialect cannot arise without the isolation of the community in which it originates. When the separation from the mother tongue has become so complete as to produce a well dened dialect, from that moment an amount of divergence has arisen sufcient to establish, in effect, an independent language with its full inheritance of root forms, grammatical organism, and ethnic life. It lives from thenceforth, in the brains of the people. Any outgrowth of words, or forms, become a distinct creation of the nascent language; and if such new words were borrowed by other dialects they must pass through the ordinary process of naturalization. The real cause of the diversity of words which nally becomes so apparent, must be sought in the falling out of use of old terms, which may, or may not, have had synonyms, and the substitution of newly coined words in their places; and the original formation of a large class of words to keep pace with the advance of experience and knowledge. (Morgan, c.1865: 54) To summarize: around a largely unchanged primitive core vocabulary of primary kin terms, the Indo-European languages developed terms for more distant collateral and lineal relationships, earlier inventions such as the nepos word rst denoting larger semantic spaces which shrank as new terms were invented to make ner discriminations. The interpretation is interesting and acute, but it is by no means the only interpretation possible. In particular, Morgan might have made the argument that in the older Indo-European languages, as in Iroquois and Dravidian, the fathers brother is equally a father, that is, the fact that the word for fathers brother is evidently a derivative of the father word could have been seen as a kind of classication or merger, as could other of these phenomena: avus with avunculus; ma tula /matertera/me tro s with the word for mother; and the expansion of consobrinus to all the cousins. In short, he could have denaturalized Indo-European and seen that it is as articial as the Iroquois or the Dravidian.
MORGAN B

The effect of the time revolution, which intruded itself on Morgans consciousness as he was revising his manuscript for publication, was to incapacitate his theory of the origin and growth of kinship terminology based on Indo-European; for no matter how acute his analysis, the beginning of Indo-European could not go back in time more than a few thousand years, and certainly not to the newly remote beginning of human history. Thus the text in question never saw print or rather, it survived only in severely reduced form, as a pair of long footnotes (Morgan, 1870: 35 fn, 37 fn). We have seen that Morgan A read the descriptive and classicatory systems as simultaneous and parallel but differing developments at the beginning of human history. Morgan B offered a completely new interpretation, which served to put the two systems in chronological series, making the classicatory system ancestral to the descriptive. The
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means by which he did so was to devise a theoretical series of marriage rules and reforms stretching from the zero of primitive promiscuity (recycled from the classics) to modern European and Euroamerican monogamy, with matriarchal and patriarchal stages among the stages in between. As I have shown elsewhere, the whole interpretive scheme sprang from a suggestion of a friend (the Rev. Joshua Hall McIlvaine; see Trautmann, 1987: 15872) and was offered tentatively. Morgan B has a decided feel of being added on to a book that was originally conceived upon the assumption of the short, Biblical chronology for human history. Morgans origin myth for the natural development of kinship terminology is that it grows outward like a crystal from a central core of primary terms, consisting of names for naturally given things immediate to consciousness and needing no explanation. The account is a good one for the patterning of similarity and variation among kinship terms of the Indo-European languages, assuming that the Indo-European comparisons lead one back to the originary condition of mankind at the start of its history, to mans primitive state, which of course they do not. Two things separate origin myths devised by anthropologists of the 20th century from this text: the central place the Dravidian system comes to occupy, and the assumption of a much longer chronology so much longer that the beginnings of the Indo-European languages come to be thought to be much too recent to carry us back to the beginnings of language and of humanitys primitive state. The time revolution, as I have said, overtook Morgan soon after he wrote this text, and it prompted him to adopt an entirely new interpretation of the relation between the descriptive and the classicatory systems; dropping the idea that the rst was natural and the second articial, he now interpreted the second as a stage ancestral to the rst. This became the practice of time that structured the published version of the Systems and of his great synthesis of social evolution, Ancient Society. By this move the contemporary savage became a primary source (Morgan, 1877) for knowledge of mans primitive state, which now was moved so far back as to be out of reach of the oldest written sources in Latin and Greek and in the Bible. The savage became the primitive, in the new sense of being contemporary, but culturally of an earlier era. What Johannes Fabian calls the denial of coevalness (Fabian, 1983) was the immediate fruit of the time revolution and the source of coherence for the new science of anthropology that was born from this Big Bang.
AFTER MORGAN

The new practice of time and its new creation, primitive man, was a new interpretative frame that had an empty slot into which the Dravidian system quickly dropped and has since remained. That slot occupied a place at or near the zero of development, as a stage some time in the distant past, and most distant structurally from the kinship system of Europe. Within that frame, Dravidian appeared to be within or in the vicinity of humanitys primitive state. This has become so generally believed as to be more or less unquestioned. I suggest that the time has come to question it. Morgan himself prepared the way for this development by identifying Dravidian with Iroquois and opposing them as examples of the classicatory system to the descriptive system of Europe and the Near East. The identity of Dravidian and Iroquois was long accepted, till Lounsbury published a classic article drawing attention to differences in the ways Iroquois and Dravidian extend the cross/parallel distinction (Lounsbury,
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1964a). Analysis shows, I argue, that this difference stems from the fact that while Iroquois and Dravidian have in common the principle of same-sex sibling merger, Iroquois lacks the second principle of Dravidian classications, cross-cousin marriage, so that Iroquois has a separate terminology for afnes (i.e. they are not merged with cross kin) (Trautmann, 1981: 4762; Viveiros de Castro, 1998: 35264). The relation of Dravidian and Iroquois to one another was an especially fruitful question for theoretical development at the 1993 Paris round table on Dravidian held in the Maison Suger and published in the Transformations of Kinship volume, in papers by Trautmann and Barnes, Tjon Sie Fat, Ives, Hornberg, Parkin, Kryukov, Allen, Vivieros de Castro and Godelier (in Godelier et al., 1998). Morgan failed to recognize the role of cross-cousin marriage in the Dravidian system, and he was particularly obtuse about it, since his suppliers of information on the Dravidian system made clear the rule and its connection with the terminology. It is a fateful coincidence, as I have argued, that Morgan himself married, as it happens, his mothers brothers daughter, a cross cousin in systems with such a rule (Trautmann, 1987: 2435); which, I believe, accounts for his blind spot on this subject when dealing with the Dravidian, wrongly identied with the Iroquois. However that may be, the logic of the Dravidian system quickly became apparent to other analysts, for whom it became a classic site for kinship theory-formation. Thus Dravidian gures prominently in an important early article of E.B. Tylor on kinship terminologies, and centrally in W.H.R. Rivers kinship book, which effectively renewed and revived the work of Morgan (Tylor, 1889; Rivers, 1914). Lvi-Strauss Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949, 1969) is shot through with instances of Dravidian or similar type. The same may be said of Needham and many recent theorists of the big picture of kinship terminology, especially N.J. Allen and Michael Kryukov (Allen, 1998; Kryukov, 1998) in the Transformations of Kinship volume from the Maison Suger round table on Dravidian (Godelier et al., 1998). Lvi-Strauss great work on kinship, dedicated to Morgan, has rather little of kinship terminologies in it, to be sure, and is directed rather toward rules of marriage. Moreover, Lvi-Strauss by no means encourages historical or evolutionary readings of his structuralist analysis of regimes of marriage, and is skeptical of history in several ways, identifying it as the surface of things, while structure is identied with the depths. Nevertheless the analysis lies well within the practices of time that established anthropology in the era of Morgan. Thus the elementary systems of direct, indirect and delayed exchange in Lvi-Strauss, based on a positive rule of marriage, all of them directly exemplied by variants of the Dravidian system, are opposed to complex systems, having only a negative marriage rule, exemplied by modern European systems, with CrowOmaha systems occupying the transition from elementary to complex. The argument is both structural and historical or evolutionary. One can scarcely not read it so it is nearly impossible to take it as a pure structuralism without evolutionary signicance. And the whole is set in motion by a preliminary visit to ground zero, the beginning of the incest tabu, which is taken to be the beginning of culture as such; a scientic origin myth, in short Morgan brought up to date. The second masterpiece of kinship studies is in this important respect perfectly aligned with the terms of the rst. N.J. Allens tetradic theory (Allen, 1986, 1989, 1998) is an exceptionally elegant example of more recent theoretical work that illustrates the overall directionality I have
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been speaking of. Unlike Lvi-Strauss theory of marriage, Allens tetradic theory is directly concerned with kinship terminology, specically with discovering the simplest imaginable terminology. This is found to be a terminology with only four terms, whence the name tetradic. The four terms are divided along two axes, which we may translate roughly as generation A v. generation B, and cross v. parallel (or eight, taking account of gender, which is left out of the analysis). This tetradic system is the theoretical starting-point of all further developments, and it is very strikingly similar to the Dravidian system, having the characteristic Dravidian equations such as MB=FZH=SpF; the equations (Morgans classication) of different kinds of consanguines and afnes into a few large classes gives the tetradic model its great compactness and elegance. Allen derives all other types of kinship terminology from the tetradic starting-point by breaking the equations of kin. For example, the Dravidian equation MB=FZH=SpF obtains in the tetradic system, but is broken open in Iroquois, and in English for that matter, by the existence of a separate set of afnal terms. The tetradic theory aims to derive all possible kinship terminologies from the tetradic model, positing it as the point of origin and showing how all other terminologies can be derived by the loss of the many equations making up the tetradic mother of them all. The result can be read in a weak form as a structuralist analysis or in a strong form as an evolutionary or developmental sequence, taking the tetradic model as the starting-point. Reading the sequence as an evolutionary one, how do we know that the directionality of change in the model corresponds to what happens in history? Allen offers a most interesting argument: it is easy to imagine the tetradic equations being undone, but it is hard to imagine a society without them deliberately making the tetradic equations. This argument transforms a structural typology of kinship terminologies into an evolutionary sequence of stages, running, roughly, from systems of Dravidian and similar type to something more like the English. Even without it, the tetradic theory would remain interesting as a structural analysis, though here again, it is hard not to read it in the stronger, evolutionary way, and it can be asked whether the structural analysis is not already implicitly an historical one. Inadequate though it is, this brief characterization of the study of kinship and of kinship terminologies after Morgan in our three-chapter history of the study of kinship terminologies must sufce, and I leave it to readers to supply the complications for themselves; for it is necessary, now, to consider what the future may hold, and why the way we go from here may require a shift of direction.
WHAT NEXT?

As we have already suggested, the practices of time that undergird the consensus after Morgan are under challenge, notably by Johannes Fabians book. The gure of primitive man that anthropology constructed, and that constructed anthropology, in the wake of the time revolution made contemporary savages into ancestors of the modern, Western, lenses into the past that saw more deeply than the oldest writings would allow, deeply beyond the literature of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Hebrews. A sudden postmodernist skepticism about the story of the rise from mans primitive state to civilization, that is, about the story of modernity itself, which anthropology did so much to create through kinship studies among other things, can itself take stronger and weaker forms, and one need not entirely reject the notion that complexity of economies and
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polities is acquired only incrementally through history to be skeptical about the current consensus concerning the evolutionary location of Dravidian and to suspect that its role in the story of modernity is overdetermined from the start, that it dropped into a previously fashioned slot in the interpretative machinery. Reason for skepticism no. 1: the non-correlation of kinship terminologies with economic or political forms or stages. Kinship terminologies, like languages, seem not to correlate with stages of economic or political development. The non-correlation of language with economic or political stages of development has been a central tenant of linguistic anthropology from Sapir (1921); the non-correlation of kinship terminology with such stages has taken longer to become established, but seems equally certain. After years of trying to insert kinship and language into the story of modernity by main force, it seems necessary to recognize that the evidence, after all, has enough strength to resist our best efforts to press it into preformed molds. This seems especially true of Dravidian. In its classic terrain, India and Sri Lanka, the Dravidian system is found associated with economies and polities of the widest variety, from forest peoples practicing shifting agriculture or hunting and gathering to the large states and empires built upon economies of wet rice cultivation in the great river deltas; and we can go to hunting bands of Ojibwa-speakers thinly distributed across vast territories in North America, or to many societies of Amazonia, to extend the range of economic and political associations of societies with kinship terminology of Dravidian type. The rst reason for skepticism, then, must be that the current consensus seems to restore to Dravidian by other means the indexical status in the story of modernity that all kinship terminologies have, at length, been released from. Reason for skepticism no. 2: The mechanism Allen proposes to give directionality to change in kinship terminologies is just not sustained empirically. The argument that movement away from equations is imaginable while the reverse is not seems a good one, but many counter-examples could be given. We can even nd them in the text of Morgan we have been considering. Morgan, as we have seen, shows how the nepos words of IndoEuropean languages once were based on the equation SbS=ChS, nephew plus grandson, which later broke down, the cognates becoming specialized as the word for one relationship but not the other. This agrees with the posited directionality of change. But the English word cousin, Morgan says, is probably from Latin con + sobrinus, which had indicated only the children of sisters before being broadened to cover all cousins, implying a movement toward greater equations or, as Morgan puts it, classication. Other of his Indo-European examples are the extensions of the father word to the fathers brother, and the mother word to the mothers brothers wife, in Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, at least as Morgan sees it. There is a more general consideration why we should not buy into the idea that equations are a one-way street leading away from the tetradic model. Kinship terminologies are strongly areal in character; that is, world regions seem to have a limited repertoire of kinship terminological types within them, and a high degree of recurrence. This is certainly true of Dravidian South India, whereas there are other world regions from which Dravidian is practically unknown, such as Europe, the Near East and Africa. That being so, any group that happens to move into the Dravidian south of India is likely to take on the characteristics of the dominant type over time. We can hardly doubt that this has happened, for example, in the cases of Arab merchant groups settled on the Kerala coast
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(Gough, 1961), or the many Brahmin communities of South India that are Dravidian in kinship but are thought to be ultimately of North Indian origin (Trautmann, 1981: 30215), or the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka, whose language derives from North India but whose kinship system is Dravidian (Yalman, 1962, 1967). Counter-examples tending to show that the direction of change can go toward equations must be abundant, but we will be satised to have given a few. If there is a net tendency of kinship terminologies to change in a single direction it must be a very weak one. A thought experiment: suppose a group having a kinship terminology of Eskimo type should become highly developed economically and politically, and should conquer and settle far distant places, bringing the Eskimo type wherever it went. Would there not be some likelihood that the Eskimo type would propagate itself wherever colonies were established, and would have an inuence on other kinship terminologies where its rule was established? But of course this thought experiment has already been performed by history, for the British have a system of Eskimo type; and it leads, in Morgan and after Morgan, to a story of kinship in which the Eskimo type becomes the apex of civilization and the objective of historical directionality. A different thought experiment: suppose that the Chola empire of 12th-century South India, having expanded southward into Sri Lanka, northward into Central India and eastward toward Malaysia and Indonesia, had been able to continue its expansion until it had constituted itself a large empire extending across continents. Would not the Dravidian system have followed wherever its people settled, and have had an inuence on other systems wherever its rule established itself? Would not some Dravidian Morgan have explained the association of Dravidian kinship with civilization by a story of kinship the reverse of the modern consensus? Isnt the current consensus inuenced, conditioned by, the course of world history? And dont such theories reimport what has been rejected, the correlation of kinship terminological types with stages in the scale of civilization? My sense of what is most needed for the study of kinship terminologies to have a future is a good dose of deep history. This is best achieved through broad, detailed surveys of the worlds regions similar to the kind I provided for Dravidian in South Asia some years back. While studies of particular societies will continue to bring forth new types of kinship terminology not known before for in kinship studies the age of discovery is not over what is more likely to be fruitful at this stage is examination of the patterning of contiguous systems worldwide, and a consideration of the causes of unevenness of spread. Such area surveys need to be explicitly historical in character, which is not to say evolutionary, but concerned with seeing the in-region variation as a eld of movement within a time frame of the last couple of thousand years. It is this time frame that is most weakly developed in anthropology today. At its birth, anthropology was to have provided the new universal history for the vastly expanded chronology revealed by the revolution in ethnological time. To a degree, anthropology has been delivering on that promise over the years, but the coverage is uneven. Deep, deep history is addressed by evolutionary anthropology; and cultural anthropology, committed to the phenomenology of contemporary life, increasingly sees its eld in larger historical contexts of colonialism and post-colonialism. But the deep history that lies between, say, the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the Victorian era, is not thickly populated by anthropologists, especially cultural anthropologists, with notable exceptions such as Jack Goody, Marshall Sahlins, Eric Wolf, and Sidney Mintz. For all
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the contemporary commitment of cultural anthropology to history, the deeper past is greatly neglected. So what? In the case of kinship terminologies, I would argue that studies conned to the ethnographic present and lacking access to the deep history of this most interesting of anthropological objects can entirely miss its most interesting feature: the durability, conservatism and language-like lack of correlation with political and economic regimes. Clinging to the ethnographic surface of history and without access to this truth, anthropologists have imagined, to the contrary, that kinship terminologies change rapidly with changes of residence rules and other aspects of social structure, as Murdock (1949) believed, or through the aggregated manipulations of interested individuals according to practice theories inspired by Bourdieu (1977). Both views I believe are profoundly awed, and can only have arisen because of a more or less complete lack of access to actual historical data on kinship terminologies. Studies of kinship terminologies in East Asia (Kryukov, 1998) and in India (Trautmann, 1981) show what may be learned of kinship terminologies by bringing the historical record into relation to the ethnographies of the present. Thanks to Morgan and all the anthropological collection of terminologies that followed in his wake, the data needed to accomplish this project are at hand, and need only to be assembled and surveyed in a manner he would have appreciated, with an openness to alternative explanations and a skeptical view of the consensus that has been built up after Morgan. The examination of his suppressed text on the growth of kinship terminologies is worth revisiting, not indeed that we can restore that earlier interpretation as he formulated it the time revolution has swept it away forever but to encourage us to reimagine a history of kinship terminologies in which there is not a single sequence from A to Z, but many parallel developments coexisting from the start and surviving as traces of a deep past.
Note

The title is inspired by that of a comprehensive history of sailing from the time of Noahs ark, attributed to John Locke: The Whole History of Navigation from its Original to This Time (1704), in The Works of John Locke, new edn, 10 vols., London: printed for Thomas Tegg, 1823, vol. 10, pp. 357512. It was prexed to Churchills Collection of Voyages. Kinship terminology, of course, begins before Noahs ark and the invention of navigation, but the formal study of it begins with Morgan in the 19th century.
References

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Du Ponceau, P.S. (1838) Mmoire Sur le Systme Grammatical des Langues de Quelques Nations Indiennes de lAmrique du Nord. Paris. Fabian, Johannes (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Feeley-Harnik, Gillian (1999) Communities of Blood: The Natural History of Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America, Comparative Studies in Society and History 41: 21562. Godelier, Maurice (1995) Is Social Anthropology Indissolubly Linked to the West, its Birthplace?, International Social Science Journal 47: 14158. Godelier, Maurice, Thomas R. Trautmann and Franklin Tjon Sie Fat, eds (1998) Transformations of Kinship. (Papers of the Round Table on Dravidian Kinship, Maison Suger, Paris, 35 June 1993.) Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Gough, Kathleen (1961) Mappilla: North Kerala, in David M. Schneider and Kathleen Gough (eds) Matrilineal Kinship, pp. 41542. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Gruber, Jacob W. (1965) Brixham Cave and the Antiquity of Man, in Melford E. Spiro (ed.) Context and Meaning in Cultural Anthropology, pp. 373402. New York: The Free Press; London: Collier-Macmillan. Hodgen, Margaret (1936) The Doctrine of Survivals: A Chapter in the History of Scientic Method in the Study of Man. London: Allenson & Co. Ltd. Hornborg, Alf (1998) Serial Redundancy in Amazonian Social Structure: Is There a Method for Poststructuralist Comparison?, in Maurice Godelier, Thomas R. Trautmann and Franklin Tjon Sie Fat (eds) Transformations of Kinship, pp. 8186. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Ives, John W. (1998) Developmental Processes in the Pre-Contact History of Athapaskan, Algonquian, and Numic Kin Systems, in Maurice Godelier, Thomas R. Trautmann, and Franklin Tjon Sie Fat (eds) Transformations of Kinship, pp. 94139. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Jefferson, Thomas (c.1782) Notes on the State of Virginia. N.p., n. pub. (First Edition of the Notes on Virginia, found in the Bodleian Library, Oxford University). Jones, Sir William (1788) The Third Anniversary Discourse: On the Hindus, Asiatic Researches 1: 41531. Kryukov, M.V. (1998) The Synchro-Diachronic Method and the Multidirectionality of Kinship Transformations, in Maurice Godelier, Thomas R. Trautmann and Franklin Tjon Sie Fat (eds) Transformations of Kinship, pp. 294313. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von (1718) Desiderata Circa Linguas Populorum, ad Dn. Podesta, Interpretem Caesareum Transmissa. Otium Hanoveranum, ed. Joachimis Fridericus Fellerus. Leipsig: J.C. Marini. (Reprinted in G.W. Leibnitii opera omnia ed. L. Dutens, Geneva, vol. 6, part 2 (Collectanea etymologica), pp. 22831.) Lvi-Strauss, Claude (1949) Les Structures lmetaires de la Parent. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Lvi-Strauss, Claude (1969) The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Les Structures lmetaires de la Parent). Rev. ed. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer (tr.) and Rodney Needham (ed.). London: Eyre & Spottiswoode.
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Lounsbury, Floyd G. (1964a) The Structural Analysis of Kinship Semantics, in Horace G. Lunt (ed.) Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, pp. 107393. The Hague: Mouton. Lounsbury, Floyd G. (1964b) A Formal Account of the Crow and Omaha-type Kinship Terminologies, in W.H. Goodenough (ed.) Explorations in Cultural Anthropology, pp. 35193. New York: McGraw-Hill. Morgan, Lewis Henry (1851) League of the Ho-d-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois. Rochester, NY: Sage and Brother. Morgan, Lewis Henry (c.1865) Nomenclatures of Relationship. Morgan Papers, Rush Rees Library, University of Rochester (manuscript). Morgan, Lewis Henry (1870) Systems of Consanguinity and Afnity of the Human Family. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, vol. 17. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Morgan, Lewis Henry (1877) Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. Reprint with a foreword by Elisabeth Tooker 1985. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Murdock, George Peter (1949) Social Structure. New York: The Free Press; London: Collier-Macmillan. Needham, Rodney (1971) Remarks on the Analysis of Kinship and Marriage, in R. Needham (ed.) Rethinking Kinship and Marriage. (ASA Monographs, 11), pp. xiiicxvii. London: Tavistock. Pallas, P.S. (178689) Linguarum Totius Orbis Vocabularia Comparativa, 2 vols. St. Petersburg: Carl Schnoor. Parkin, Robert (1998) Dravidian and Iroquois in South Asia, in Maurice Godelier, Thomas R. Trautmann and Franklin Tjon Sie Fat (eds) Transformations of Kinship, pp. 25270. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Rivers, W.H.R. (1914) Kinship and Social Organisation. London: Constable & Co. Sapir, Edward (1921) Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Schneider, David M. (1972) What is Kinship all About?, in Priscilla Reining (ed.) Kinship Studies in the Morgan Centennial Year, pp. 3263. Washington, DC: The Anthropological Society of Washington. Schneider, David M. (1984) A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Tjon Sie Fat, Franklin E. (1998) On the Formal Analysis of Dravidian, Iroquois, and Generational Varieties as Nearly Associative Combinations, in Maurice Godelier, Thomas R. Trautmann and Franklin Tjon Sie Fat (eds) Transformations of Kinship, pp. 5993. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Trautmann, Thomas R. (1981) Dravidian Kinship. (Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology, vol. 36.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trautmann, Thomas R. (1987) Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Trautmann, Thomas R. (1992) The Revolution in Ethnological Time (the Marett Memorial Lecture 1991), Man n.s. 27: 37997. Trautmann, Thomas R. (1998) Aryans and British India. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
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Trautmann, Thomas R. and R.H. Barnes (1998) Dravidian, Iroquois, and Crow-Omaha in North American Perspective, in Maurice Godelier, Thomas R. Trautmann, and Franklin Tjon Sie Fat (eds) Transformations of Kinship, pp. 2758. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Tylor, E.B. (1889) On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions: Applied to Laws of Marriage and Descent, Journal of the Anthropological Institute 18: 24572. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (1998) Dravidian and Related Kinship Systems, in Maurice Godelier, Thomas R. Trautmann and Franklin Tjon Sie Fat (eds) Transformations of Kinship, pp. 33285. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Yalman, Nur (1962) The Structure of the Sinhalese Kindred: A Re-examination of the Dravidian Terminology, American Anthropologist 64: 54875. Yalman, Nur (1967) Under the Bo Tree. Studies in Caste, Kinship and Marriage in the Interior of Ceylon. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
THOMAS R. TRAUTMANN is author of Dravidian Kinship (Cambridge, 1981), Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (California, 1987) and is co-editor (with Maurice Godelier and Franklin Tjon Sie Fat) of Transformations of Kinship (Smithsonian, 1998). He also writes on ancient India and Orientalism, notably in his book Aryans and British India (California, 1997) and other current work, focusing on language and race. Address: Department of History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. [email: ttraut@umich.edu]

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