At a glance marriage rules, religiosity, gender equality to explain why and how the terminology is used,” he outlines. “There are now sophisticated methods available to detect patterns of use and see how they hold up across the world, across all societies and cultures.”
Kinship language evolution Languages have shared ancestry – for example, French, Italian and Spanish are all Romance languages that are descended from Latin. This presents a challenge and an opportunity in terms of investigating the evolutionary processes behind the transformation of kinship systems. “The first rule in statistics is that your data has to be independent,” says Dr Catherine Sheard, an evolutionary biologist also working on the VariKin project. She is joined by Sam Passmore, a PhD candidate; both are drawing on techniques from biology, using phylogenetic models to investigate the transformation of kinship systems.
little literature cross-culturally,” she outlines. The VariKin project will make an important contribution in these terms, which could then act as a basis for further research. “One of the things we want to come out of VariKin is a kind of toolkit for other fieldworkers to go and take out to different communities in different parts of the world, and then add incrementally to the very small generalisations that we hope to make,” says Professor Jordan. “This is what researchers have done on how children acquire concepts of colours for example, so maybe we could do that for kinship. From this variety, we want to establish a set of hypotheses that perhaps other disciplines could test in the future.” This approach will allow researchers to test more ‘nuanced’ hypotheses about human behaviour than would otherwise have been possible. With phylogenetic models of cultural evolution, Professor Jordan and her colleagues can tease out information about the causes of language and social changes. “These methods give
In English we use ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ for our siblings, differentiating their gender and distinguishing them from, for example, cousins – but we don’t have a gendered term to differentiate between male and female cousins like in French. In other languages, you’d use the words for brother and sister for some but not all of your cousins. There are many languages in which the words for mother and aunt are the same. So there’s really intriguing variety “In evolutionary biology we use phylogenetic “tree” techniques to control for the non-independence of biological species from one another by historical relatedness,” explains Dr Sheard. “We’re borrowing these well developed techniques from evolutionary biology to say ‘ok, languages also evolve in a tree-like pattern.’ Can we take these techniques, working on trees, to model what might be going on and look at changes over time? We’re building up data sets of kinship terminologies, from which we’ll extract information about kinship systems in 500 different languages.” There are also more specific goals within each of the sub-projects in VariKin. One major area of interest to Professor Jordan is the question of how children learn about the family, which she says has previously been neglected. “There’s very
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us a time dimension, with an opportunity to correlate language change data with specific events or time periods. So with this information about societies, we can project back in time to what sorts of kinship systems existed in the past,” she outlines. By taking a cross-cultural approach, researchers hope to identify the main influences on the global distribution of kinship diversity. “Is it simply the case that if your language is part of a specific language family then you’re more likely to have a certain kind of kinship terminology system? Or does your way of life have something to do with it? Is it that you’re allowed to marry certain kinds of cousins, or inherit from your matrilineal ancestors?” asks Professor Jordan. “Is it society or something about shared cultural history that really underpins the diversity we see in kinship terminology?”
Full Project Title Cultural Evolution of Kinship Diversity: Variation in Language, Cognition, and Social Norms Regarding Family (VariKin) Project Objectives Why do human societies differ in whom they class as family? Why are cousins classed with siblings in some societies but not others? Accounting for the variable ways that cultures classify kin is an enduring puzzle. The VariKin project takes a cultural evolutionary approach to variety and unity and engages different fields– cultural phylogenetics, corpus linguistics, and cross-cultural child development. Project Funding ERC-StG-2014 - ERC Starting Grant EU contribution: EUR 1 233 672 Contact Details Project Coordinator, Professor Fiona Jordan Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol Bristol BS8 1UU United Kingdom T: +44 117 954 6078 E: fiona.jordan@bristol.ac.uk W: http://excd.org
Professor Fiona Jordan
Professor Fiona Jordan is a Professor in Anthropology at the University of Bristol in the UK. Her primary research interests are in cultural evolution and diversity, particularly in kinship and language, and with expertise on phylogenetic methods and the Austronesianspeaking populations of the Pacific.
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