How Kinship Systems Change
Description
Using some of his landmark publications on kinship, along with a new introduction, chapter and conclusion, Robert Parkin discusses here the changes in kinship terminologies and marriage practices, as well as the dialectics between them. The chapters also focus on a suggested trajectory, linking South Asia and Europe and the specific question of the status of Crow-Omaha systems. The collection culminates in the argument that, whereas marriage systems and practices seem infinitely varied when examined from a very close perspective, the terminologies that accompany them are much more restricted.
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Person
Robert Parkin was Departmental Lecturer in Social Anthropology in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, from 2002 until his retirement in 2017. He has conducted field research in India, the UK, Brussels, northern Italy, and Poland.
Content
List of Figures
Introduction
Part I: Terminological change
Chapter 1. Kinship as classification: towards a paradigm of change
Chapter 2. Terminology and alliance in India: tribal systems and the north-south problem
Chapter 3. From tetradic society to dispersed alliance
Chapter 4. Why do societies abandon cross-cousin marriage?
Chapter 5. Dravidian and Iroquois in South Asia
Chapter 6. Indo-European kinship terminologies in Europe: trajectories of change
Part II: Crow-Omaha
Chapter 7. On the origin of Crow-Omaha terminologies
Chapter 8. Substitutability of kin and the Crow-Omaha problem
Chapter 9. The evolution of kinship terminologies: non-prescriptive forms of asymmetric alliance in Indonesia
Conclusion
Glossary
Appendix: Publications on kinship by Robert Parkin
Index
