Crow-Omaha: New Light on a Classic Problem of Kinship Analysis

Notes

Notes Preface 1. Amerind Foundation Advanced Seminar “Transformative Kinship: Engaging the Crow-Omaha Transition,” held 27 February–3 March 2010 at the Amerind Foundation, Dragoon, Arizona; National Science Foundation grant, “Workshop on Transitions in Human Social Organization,” BCS-0938505. 2. Maurice Godelier participated in the seminar by telephone and contributed comments that are discussed in the concluding chapter of this book. Laura Fortunato presented a paper on residence patterns in Indo-European cultures but decided to publish elsewhere. Chapter 2 1. I do not like these ethnic labels because they suggest too much when what is wanted is precision. Previously I have called these Type A and Type B crossness . However, the Dravidian and Iroquois labels are too entrenched in usage to be dislodged. My way of controlling the semantic sprawl of these terms is to refer to the abstracted aspect of Dravidian and Iroquois kinship terminologies I intend as Dravidian and Iroquois crossness. 2. Burling and Lounsbury got together over these terminologies in 1965 at the University of Michigan. Lounsbury elicited Jinghpaw from La Raw Maran, a native speaker and linguist, in connection with a field methods class he was teaching . Burling got Maru kinship terms from fieldwork in Burma (Burling 1971, n 7, and personal communication). This excellent and unusual case of structurally identical kinship terminologies is hidden away in a paper devoted to untangling the historical relations among certain Tibeto-Burman languages, in a difficult-tofind publication. Chapter 3 1. Suggestions bearing on these (usually) patrilineal types apply mutatis mutandis to the (usually) matrilineal Crow types, so for brevity the latter are ignored here. 2. Even in modern Western society, the divergence is not complete: statistically, a social class is endogamous, and ego’s children belong within it. 3. This is not invariable: for instance, a conservative substrate culture may overwhelm an innovation brought by immigrants. 4. The affinal equations mem EF = EeB and iwi EM = EeZ are interesting because in related languages the roots mean only PF and PM. 300Notes 5. Sherpa retains at least one prescriptive equation, ani FZ = MBW, but although I looked for it, I found no clear evidence of a previous period of matrilateral prescription. 6. FFZSD marriage is mentioned several times in Tjon Sie Fat (1990), for example, pp. 114–15 (theory), 139 (ethnography), but the five-line version receives no special attention. 7. Admittedly, the full set of prohibitions applies only to males: a female marries into the line of her FM. 8. The pointer “plenty” covers fecundity, prosperity, health, or large number. Chapter 5 Author’s Note: Research for analyses and conclusions in this chapter was supported in part by a National Science Foundation grant, “Explaining CrowOmaha Kinship Structures with Anthro-informatics,” BCS-0925978. 1. Gould’s symbol variants are modified here to conform to our standard notation (in particular, ♂ for μ, ♀ for φ, and Ch for C). Chapter 6 Author’s Note: Research for analyses and conclusions in this chapter was supported in part by a National Science Foundation grant, “Explaining Crow-Omaha Kinship Structures with Anthro-informatics,” BCS-0925978. 1. Even extinct lineages can be thought of as leaves, if at a lower section of the tree. 2. It is hypothetical because we can never “know” if we have observed an ancestor and such a mathematical point need not have ever existed in nature. 3. For n taxa ≥ − ( ) − ( ) − 3 2 4 2 2 2 : ! ! n n n (Schröder 1870). 4. This class of problems is referred to as NP-complete in the computer science literature (Karp, 1972). 5. For each tree of n taxa, 2 2 3 n n ( )− − ( ). 6. This approach was pioneered by Platnick and Cameron (1977). 7. For Seminole, null values were recorded in the EA data set for variables 1–5. Rather than leaving these blank and unanalyzable, values from Creek were substituted , on the grounds that Creek and Seminole represent branches of the same society and culture historically: ethnographic present for the Creek data is 1750, whereas that for Seminole is 1940. Creek data values assigned to Seminole thus represent a hypothetical approximation. 8. As with the culture areas, we adhere to the EA’s classification of language families for the present purpose; these differ somewhat from the Handbook of North American Indians classification (e.g., Goddard 1997). Notes301 Chapter 8 Author’s Note: The arguments in this chapter are developed from a long-term inquiry into Fanti kinship...