Silverstein is obviously a brilliant scholar, I just wish he would write more clearly! The input/output ratio of work put into reading versus insight gained from his texts is much lower than it could be. And the Hanks book does look promising. I had a look at the Google Books preview and found his topics interesting. Anyone who knows who Floyd Lounsbury is has already gone a long way towards winning me over! I find it interesting that linguistics departments (or at least the Linguistics Department at my university) do not generally offer any sort of “History of” course. I know that individual courses often have a kind of historical trajectory through the semester, but this creates its own problems (such as “Advanced Phonology” being equivalent to “a semester of OT”).

This is steering the discussion away from where it began, but I think the mention of Silverstein’s work offers a good opportunity to mention what I think is a particular problem with the subfield of Linguistic Anthropology. Silverstein is both a fine linguist (by which I mean to say that he can do linguistic analysis at a high level) and cultural (or sociocultural or whatever one’s prefered adjective for the subfield is) anthropologist. I know that a handful of programs- like those at Chicago and Texas- exist which are designed to give a good foundation in both hard linguistics and cultural anthropology, and that individual students at other institutions find their own way. But doesn’t the criticism of many linguists that linguistic anthropology is really a kind of cultural anthropology making use of speech as data rather than its own subfield ring true? And yes, I know, this gets back to the point of Silverstein’s “Sacred Bundles” paper. But the fact remains that Silverstein can engage equally well with both linguists and anthropologists. How often is that true of younger linguistic anthropologists?

I don’t mean to place any blame here. I suspect the issue is one of funding as much as anything. One has to learn twice as much to have the skill set to do it right, but one rarely has twice the time and money. And I am not suggesting that Linguistic Anthropology is not the only place this phenomenon pops up. Ever since David Schneider offered his innovations it has apparently become OK to write about kinship despite lacking the ability to do traditional kinship analysis.

“Can one imagine a cultural system which is loosely connected to strategic social action?”

This is the justification for treating culture and society as distinct but related entities, isn’t it? I mean, you can argue against that distinction, but I think the reason for making it is to be able to posit both a cultural system that is truly a system as well as account for the fact that social behavior is strategic.

“… can ‘cultural systems’ be studied as formal systems the way language can be (that is, not ‘is it hard’ but ‘is it possible at all’). The second question is… can language be studied as a formal system the way the first question assumes.”

Answering the second question first: `language’ encompasses phenomena that are wholly or largely independent of the strategic interests of social interaction, ones that are heavily dependent on those interests, and ones that lie in between. The former extreme, which Hanks call the `formal’ aspect of language and linguists call `grammar’, is exemplified by phenomena like the rule for allomorphy of the English nominal plural (you know, the /-s/~/-z/~/Iz/ alternation). The latter extreme, where interactional strategy and language ideology plays a major role, which Hanks calls the `relational’ aspect of language, and which linguists call `pragmatics’, is exemplified by phenomena such as honorification. Then you have in-between phenomena, such as grammaticalized evidentiality, which show a mixture of substantial formal and relational (grammatical and pragmatic) aspects. Those language phenomena that lie towards the formal/grammatical end can be insightfully (though not necessarily exhaustively) analyzed as `formal systems’ (depending, in part, of what one *means* by this term — this is a point of vigorous debate). Hanks is very clear about this when he argues against relationist reductionism. A large body of work in descriptive, typological, and functional linguistics shows the fruitfulness of this approach. Of course, there are important aspects of `language’ (really, communicative practice), that simply cannot be treated formally, but this does not mean that there is not a lot that can be treated formally — pick up your average descriptive grammar to see what I mean.

Looking closely at what domains can be treated formally in language shows, I think, how completely unworkable this approach is for `cultural systems’. It is, after all, the very looseness of the connection between grammar and strategic social action that makes the formal approach feasible. Can one imagine a cultural system which is loosely connected to strategic social action?

And, hey, MTBradley, if you haven’t read Hanks, especially the work Rex cited, you should give it a go, its clear and well-reasoned. I can understand if Silverstein’s style sticks in your throat, but you shouldn’t tar all linguistic anthropologists with that brush.

Heh. Perhaps we can convince a contemporary rock star to restate Schneider’s arguments in opaque and jargon-laden prose that bemoans his lack of political engagement and gratuitously cites Julia Kristeva, all while offering no new insights. Then it would truly be anthropology for the 21st century. But the basic points of the original paper would still stand or fall on their own merit.

I’m curious as to what you find muddled about Schneider’s paper? I assume it’s the arguments rather than the prose, because Schneider is Hemingway vis-à-vis Silverstein in that department.

For those of you who are interested in something that is less than four decades old and less muddled than Schneider’s “Muddles” paper I’d recommend William Hanks’s “Language and Communicative Practice” for the second question, and Silverstein’s “Languages/Cultures are Dead! Long Live the Linguistic-Cultural!”

And GP is right on — I’d include Sarah Franklin’s work to GP’s list.

Strong: I basically feel like it is every anthropologist’s job to provide an up-to-date rewrite of “Use and Abuse of Sociobiology” every three years since it seems that’s about how often its needed!

As I hope I’ve made clear, and as Strong points out, the problem with Pinker’s not the what of it (I think studying the interaction of biology and culture is a good and important project) but the how of it (Pinker is a lousy scientist). Thumbs up on integrated science. Thumbs down on shoddy work. Four field anthro ftw!

The genealogy craze is receiving attention by anthropologists with a more subtle heuristic than the sledge hammer of evo psych. See for example JD Faubion’s article on sumptuary kinship in Anthropological Quarterly from a while back.

Who knows how indicative this is, but a few weeks ago I got some Brazilian spam offering to research my genealogical background, complete with an example of the kind of the kinds of results their service produces. The example documented someone’s principally Italian heritage.

Regarding HTML issues: Please use “preview” before you post!

These are the people who pay for our weddings, attend our funerals, give us a place to go when serious help is needed, in general behave as if the old wedding vow, “for better or worse, in sickness or health, til death do us part” applies becaise–“we’re family.”

Another angle is the one neglected by purely formal or cultural accounts of kinship, the tangled jural (legal) issues associated with property, inheritance and succession to office. You might ask yourself, for example, if you and your roommate own something in common, such that if one of you dies it passes, all other things being equal, to the other automatically. You might ask, if you are lovers, what happens if one of you is hospitalized. Does the other have the right to visit you in hospital or make medical decisions on your behalf?

Finally, of course, there is the great divide in definitions of citizenship in nation-states, between those who have a “natural” right to citizenship, through birth to citizen parents or birth on the nation’s soil, and those who do not . What about your passports?

Is the increasing separation of modern living affecting what anthropologists can consider a kinship group? Were I to die tomorrow I would probably prefer my friends and roommate handle my remains, rather than the family that I am biologically related to.

If one can consider the sharing of living space, experiences, familial feeling, and resources as ties as binding as shared genetic material (funny, isn’t that all that marriage is?) then it brings up a multitude of questions about the laws in the US regarding same-sex marriages, and who can legally be considered “family”?

Sorry, bit of a tangent. Just brought to mind a lot of interesting questions.

I think your comments point to why `formal’ studies of kinship were largely abandoned by cultural anthropologists: the more detailed and careful they became, the clearer it became that this area of research was basically a form of lexical semantics. Cultural anthropologists gave up this kind of study of kinship terminology as only marginally relevant to their concern: the role of kinship relations in social action.

This coincided with, and probably partly fueled (on the cultural anthropologists’ side), the intellectual estrangement between students of `culture’ and those of `language’ (the so-called `linguistic turn’ notwithstanding!). Ideally, what would have happened at this point would have been for linguists to take up the study of kinship terminology and bring it to some relatively mature point, as happened with other related areas, such as color term research and ethnozoological/botanical terminology research. But with a number of lonely exceptions, linguistics was at the time gripped by the formal, cognitivist (read: Chomskian) revolution of which Pinker is a direct heir, and `cultural’ matters like kinship terminology simply did not attract attention in that research climate.

But as much of the shine is wearing off formal linguistic theory, I think that kinship terminology will become an area of interest for typological linguists and those interested in areal linguistics. I was recently at a gathering of these types, and a workshop on kinship terminology was proposed and received very positively by everyone. So Jacob, cultural anthropologists may not end up being very receptive to your formally-inclined interests, but you may be able to find interested colleagues nevertheless!

Ridiculous. I never said that kinship is dead. I am aware that there has been a revival of interest in kinship. You might say that I’m part of that revival, though sidetracked at the moment doing a MS in Computer Science. So, with all due respect reciprocated back to you…

What I did say was that the result of Schneider’s critique was to shift the emphasis of kinship research away from the approaches advocated by folks like Anthony Wallace, John Atkins, Dwight Read, and Ward Goodenough. In fact, their work has been more or less abandoned except by a few. I think that it is unfortunate, not because there are no other worthwhile approaches to kinship (there are), but because these approaches have theoretical value, pure and simple.

I have no problem with kinship studies being subsumed into more general models of meaning (and interaction). They should be! But we’ve learned things that we ought not to ignore, eg:

Kinship terminologies (all of them have analyzed!) have algebraic structures (or close approximations). By this I mean two things:

1) An ordered pair of kin terms (*not* kintypes) can be consistently associated with a third kin term, forming a tuple, by asking a question like, “The X of your Y is your ___? This has everything to do with culturally specific *words* and their meaning (or structure) in relation to other *words* from a particular finite set. No need for some presumed universal grid of kin types.

2) The set of tuples (the ordered set of kin-terms elicited) have relationships between each other, forming a graph (a kin term map). This structure (a structure of sentences if you prefer) can be generated from a much smaller core structure (a set of a few atomic kin terms and some rules for how they are put together). A random graph on the other hand might take a distinct rule to describe every relation in the graph. But not so the structure of a kinship terminology.

This is an empirical fact, but a fact that has not been yet satisfactorily explained. Such structures are highly non-random; they don’t just happen.

And so while I agree with you that we need to explain how “macrolevel cultural structures are used in microlevel interaction to assign people identities in one form or another”, I must point out that this clearly is a distinct issue from the one I have outlined above. In fact, the formal approach I am advocating distinguishes between terminological structure(s), and the assigning of terms onto people. Dwight Read calls the latter ‘rules of instantiation’. Instantiation of terms is much more visible and much more contested than a terminology. People may argue about who is mother, who is grandmother, but they don’t argue about whether the mother of your mother is your grandmother, or whether the child of your aunt and uncle is your cousin. As a general rule (with exceptions).

jacob

Jacob: Kinship is dead?!? Its a very ‘hot’ topic in anthropology at the moment! With all due respect I’d urge you not to assume that it is not a topic of discussion simply because this work is not on your radar 🙂 I’d suggest you take a look at Carsten’s “Cultures of Relatedness” volume. For highlands PNG, I’d suggest “Ku Waru” by Merlan and Rumsey for a nice digest of the literature. But none of this work is ‘formal’ in the sense that you use the word. In fact if anything I’d say one of the signs of ‘progress’ in anthropological theorizing is the subsmption of theories of kinship into more general models of meaning making coming out of linguistic anthropology. So I’d say that if anything the issue has now become how macrolevel cultural structures are used in microlevel interaction to assign people identities in one form or another — including ‘kin’ types. This is quite complicated (as Ku Waru shows) and the focus has ben how these identities are created in interaction, rather than modelling some sui generis system. Or… well that’s the best way I can describe it briefly at this time of night 🙂