How Crow-Omaha Skewing Spreads

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2228581
AutoresP M Whiteley (0000-0001-7439-8507), Peter Whiteley, Patrick Mcconvell (Australian National University, autor correspondente)
Ano2021
Volume77
Fascículo4
Páginas483-519
Data de publicação2021-12-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of Anthropological Research (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0091-7710 • E-ISSN: 2153-3806
EditoraUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/716742
OpenAlexW3208544265
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas68

Crow-Omaha kinship systems skew kin terms intergenerationally. Although occurring worldwide, they are relatively infrequent and often exist in historically unrelated clusters: “similar inventions in areas widely apart” (per Boas). Most analyses have been formalist, evolutionist, or sociological. Here, adding some historical linguistics and focusing on the core kin-term equations via the ethnographic and ethnohistoric record of Indigenous Australia and North America, we examine how these systems arise and spread among near neighbors, and across language-family boundaries. We address comparative dynamics, sociological and linguistic, of distribution patterns over time and space. We suggest that skewing, as a social technology that enhances matrilineal-matrilocal (Crow) and patrilineal-patrilocal (Omaha) systems (with some similar and other converse patterns), confers advantages over systems with “crossness” of “Iroquois” or “Dravidian” type in circumstances of demographic stress. We affirm the key to skewing lies in its dispersal of affinal alliance beyond binary exchange and suggest some socio-evolutionary implications

Biological dispersal · Biology · Chiefdom · Converse · Epistemology · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Indigenous · Kinship · Politics · Sociocultural evolution · Sociology · Anthropology · Australian Indigenous Culture and History · Demography · Ecology · History · Language and cultural evolution · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology