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

2. Crossness and Crow-Omaha

2 Crossness and Crow-Omaha Thomas R. Trautmann Crow-Omaha kinship—by which I mean kinship terminologies containing skewing—invariably also contains crossness. But there are many terminologies that have crossness without skewing. Skewing is something that is added to (some) systems that have crossness; it is not something that exists independently of crossness, nor can it combine with other dimensions that occupy the structural location of crossness. The fact that skewing presupposes crossness (the evidence for which I give in this chapter) is an important datum. Because of it, we can advance our understanding of Crow-Omaha by advancing our understanding of crossness, which in practice will mean locating it comparatively in space, in time, and in structure. Conversely, if we want to find cases of skewing, we will find them among terminologies that contain crossness. Morgan’s surprise that among the Iroquois the father’s brother “is equally a father” and the mother’s sister a mother was the impulse that led him from an ethnographic study of the Iroquois to a large-scale ethnological comparison of kinship systems. Crossness or the cross– parallel distinction contrasts with the principle in Morgan’s AmericanEnglish kinship terminology called lineality (following Lowie—see later discussion) or the contrast between lineals and collaterals, which occupies the same structural location. Because of the sameness of location , we can make a simulacrum of Iroquois terminology in English translation by turning lineality into crossness, such that father, mother, sister, brother, son, and daughter are now parallel kin, and uncle, aunt, cousin (f.), cousin (m.), nephew, and niece are now cross-kin (figure 1.1). Mapping Crossness Morgan’s great comparative study of kinship, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871), was intended to locate the difference between Iroquois and English (crossness versus lineality) in a worldwide map of kinship systems. The two cases fall within the two 32 Thomas R. Trautmann large categories Morgan constructed called classificatory and descriptive systems, the classificatory so called because it classified or merged FB with F, MZ with M, and so forth. Lowie (1928) and Kirchoff (1932) doubled Morgan’s typology by taking into consideration the treatment of MB as well. This created a four-term field for the patterning of mergers or nonmergers of F, FB, and MB, as in table 2.1. The four terms of the Lowie-Kirchoff typology correspond to the four ethnic names of the terminology types recognized by Murdock: Iroquois, Sudanese, Hawaiian, and Eskimo. The types refer not to whole terminologies but to a single dimension of terminologies. We do not have a general name for the dimension in question—should we call it laterality? I will use that name until a better one comes along. We need an agreed-on name so that we can immediately correct what has just been said. This is not a typology of terminologies as wholes but of modes of laterality in terminologies. This fourfold set is a list. But we can take the analysis further, following Kryukov, who formed four modes in a ring (1998), and order the list as a two-by-two grid formed by the intersection of two distinctions, as in table 2.2. In this analysis the four terms occupy four sectors of a space. The space is ordered such that it takes a structural “walk” of only one step (or one transformation) to get from any given type to the two neighbors with whom it shares a border, and two steps to reach the fourth, noncontiguous type. There is no beginning or end or overall directionality, Table 2.1 Typology of kinship in Morgan, Lowie, and Murdock Kintype mergers Morgan Lowie Murdock F  FB  MB Classificatory Generational Hawaiian F  FB MB Classificatory Bifurcate merging Iroquois F FB MB Descriptive Bifurcate collateral Sudanese F FB  MB Descriptive Lineal Eskimo Source: Trautmann 1981:84. © 1982 Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission. Crossness and Crow-Omaha 33 all of which would be needed to turn it into a series of evolutionary stages or a pathway of development over time. Bifurcate merging is another name for crossness; Iroquois and CrowOmaha fall into this sector. English falls in the Eskimo sector, at a maximal structural distance from Iroquois. One can readily show that these two sectors are inversely distributed. Crossness is abundant in the Americas; South, Southeast, and East Asia; Oceania and Australia; and Africa, where Eskimo is marginal. The opposite...