Fanti Kinship And The Analysis Of Kinship Terminologies

A collection of the author's papers, published during the past 30 years, on the subject of Fanti kin terminology and implications for the study of semantics, pragmantics, and the relationship of language and culture.

This book examines Fanti kinship terminology from a variety of analytic and formal perspectives. Based on work with a broad number of informants, David B. Kronenfeld details and analyzes internal variation in usage within the Fanti community, shows the relationship between terminology and social groups and communicative usage, and relates these findings to major theoretical work on kinship and on the intersections of language, thought, and culture. The terminological analysis in this study employs a great variety of formal approaches, assesses the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, and covers a wide range of types of usage. This work also performs a systematic, formal analysis of behavior patterns among kin, joining this approach with the analysis of a kinship terminological system. Rather than treating kinship terminology as a special, isolated piece of culture, this study also ties its analysis to more general semantic and cultural theoretical issues. Including computational and comparative studies of kinship terminologies, this volume represents the fullest analysis of any kinship terminological system in the ethnographic record.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture presents the first comprehensive survey of research on the relationship between language and culture. It provides readers with a clear and accessible introduction to both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies of language and culture, and addresses key issues of language and culturally based linguistic research from a variety of perspectives and theoretical frameworks. This Handbook features thirty-three newly commissioned chapters which cover key areas such as cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, cognitive anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and sociolinguistics offer insights into the historical development, contemporary theory, research, and practice of each topic, and explore the potential future directions of the field show readers how language and culture research can be of practical benefit to applied areas of research and practice, such as intercultural communication and second language teaching and learning. Written by a group of prominent scholars from around the globe, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture provides a vital resource for scholars and students working in this area.

The power of Gould’s analytic system reveals new insights into the Fanti kin terminology. It demonstrates the effectiveness of collective cognitive constraints vs. repeated individual constraints, and the role of distinctive features in dividing relative-product-based super-class structures into actual kinterms.

When we think of kinship, we usually think of ties between people based upon blood or marriage. But we also have other ways—nowadays called ‘performative’—of establishing kinship, or hinting at kinship: many Christians have, in addition to parents, godparents; members of a trade union may refer to each other as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’. Similar performative ties are even more common among the so-called ‘tribal’ peoples that anthropologists have studied and, especially in recent years, they have received considerable attention from scholars in this field. However, these scholars tend to argue that performative kinship in the Tribal World is semantically on a par with kinship established through procreation and marriage. Harold Scheffler, long-time Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, has argued, by contrast, that procreative ties are everywhere semantically central, i.e. focal, that they provide bases from which other kinship ties are extended. Most of the essays in this volume illustrate the validity of Scheffler’s position, though two contest it, and one exemplifies the soundness of a similarly universalistic stance in gender behaviour. This book will be of interest to everyone concerned with current controversy in kinship and gender studies, as well as those who would know what anthropologists have to say about human nature. “The study of kinship once ruled the discipline of anthropology, and Hal Scheffler was one of its magisterial figures. This volumes reminds us why. Scheffler’s powerful analyses of kinship systems often conflicted with the views of his more relativist contemporaries. He cut through the fog of theory to emphasise the human essentials, namely the importance of the social bonds rooted in motherhood and fatherhood. Anthropology in its decades-long retreat from the serious study of kinship has lost a great deal. This volume points the way to a restoration.” — Peter Wood, National Association of Scholars

Human beings have two outstanding characteristics compared to all other species: the apparently enormous elaboration of our thought through language and symbolism and the elaboration of our forms of social organization. The view taken in Human Thought and Social Organization: Anthropology on a New Plane is that these are intimately interconnected. To understand this connection, the book compares the structure of the systems of thought that organizations are built upon with the organizational basis of human thinking as such. An experimental method is used, leading to a new science of the structure of human social organizations in two senses. First, it gives rise to a new kind of ethnology that has the combination of empirical solidity and formal analytical rigor associated with the “paradigmatic” sciences. Second, it makes evident that social organizations have distinctive properties and require distinctive explanations of a sort that cannot be reduced to the explanations drawn from, or grounded in, these other sciences. Human social organizations are created by people using systems of ideas with very specific logical properties. This book describes what these idea-systems are with an unbroken chain of analysis that begins with field elicitation, and continues by working out their most fundamental, logico-mathematical generative elements. This enables us to see precisely how these idea systems are used to generate organizations that give pattern to ongoing behavior. The book shows how organizations are objectified by community members through symbolic representations that provide them with shared conceptions of organizations, roles, or relations that they see each other as participating in. The case for this constructive process being pan-Homo sapiens is described, spanning all human communities from the Upper Paleolithic to today, and from the most seemingly primitive Australian tribes to modern-day America and India. While focusing primarily on kinship, Human Thought and Social Organization shows how the analysis applies with equal precision to other social areas ranging from farming to political factionalism.

Traditionally, etymology is concerned with the study of lexical items. However, in this book etymology is understood more generally as a research approach concerned with the question of how a particular word or structure came into existence. As a result, etymology can investigate the origin of words (lexical etymology) but also structural elements, such as morphemes and constructions (structural etymology). This pioneer volume assembles thirteen etymological studies over a broad range of languages, ranging from Europe to Australia and the Pacific, focusing in particular on Australian Indigenous languages. The phenomena investigated in the contributions comprise the origin of Australian Indigenous place names and kinship terms, constructions and word histories in Oceanic languages, typological investigations as well as papers on the methodology of etymological research. This volume is intended for a scholarly audience including intermediate and advanced university students with an interest in historical linguistic, especially in etymology, but also semantics, toponymy and language contact.