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.

This essay presents Gould?s distinctive system for analyzing kin terminologies showing the system?s power, importance, and usefulness - and showing its relationship to other approaches and the payoffs each aims at. In revealing significant new empirical regularities and simplifications, Gould?s analytic system implies important constraints on future analytic and interpretative approaches to kin terminologies. Some of these new insights involve the demonstration of the effect of distributed collective cognitive systems over and above the effects of repeated iterations of individual cognitive constraints or pressures. It is the peculiar nature of the kinterm domain that allows these findings to be so directly shown, but the implication is that these findings apply more generally to the collective cognitive systems that make up language and culture.

The study of kinship is a fundamental part of the study and the practice of social anthropology. This volume examines the work of three distinguished anthropologists that bear on kinship and determines what theoretical models are implicit in their writings and assesses to what extent their claims have been validated. The anthropologists studied are from France, the UK and USA: Claude Levi-Strauss, Meyer Fortes and G.P. Murdock. First published in 1971.

The “Crow-Omaha problem” has perplexed anthropologists since it was first described by Lewis Henry Morgan in 1871. During his worldwide survey of kinship systems, Morgan learned with astonishment that some Native American societies call some relatives of different generations by the same terms. Why? Intergenerational “skewing” in what came to be named “Crow” and “Omaha” systems has provoked a wealth of anthropological arguments, from Rivers to Radcliffe-Brown, from Lowie to Lévi-Strauss, and many more. Crow-Omaha systems, it turns out, are both uncommon and yet found distributed around the world. For anthropologists, cracking the Crow-Omaha problem is critical to understanding how social systems transform from one type into another, both historically in particular settings and evolutionarily in the broader sweep of human relations. This volume examines the Crow-Omaha problem from a variety of perspectives—historical, linguistic, formalist, structuralist, culturalist, evolutionary, and phylogenetic. It focuses on the regions where Crow-Omaha systems occur: Native North America, Amazonia, West Africa, Northeast and East Africa, aboriginal Australia, northeast India, and the Tibeto-Burman area. The international roster of authors includes leading experts in their fields. The book offers a state-of-the-art assessment of Crow-Omaha kinship and carries forward the work of the landmark volume Transformations of Kinship, published in 1998. Intended for students and scholars alike, it is composed of brief, accessible chapters that respect the complexity of the ideas while presenting them clearly. The work serves as both a new benchmark in the explanation of kinship systems and an introduction to kinship studies for a new generation of students. Series Note: Formerly titled Amerind Studies in Archaeology, this series has recently been expanded and retitled Amerind Studies in Anthropology to incorporate a high quality and number of anthropology titles coming in to the series in addition to those in archaeology.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.

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.

Dziebel has doctorates in both history and anthropology and is currently both advisor to the Great Russian Encyclopedia and senior anthropologist at Crispin Porter + Bogusky advertising agency. His extremely dense work is actually three books in one. The first is a history of kinship studies from the early 19th century to the present. The second is a comparative study of kinship terminology among non-Indo-European languages, for which he has also prepared a data base published on the internet. The third section, highly controversial, as he admits, uses anthropology, mitochondrial studies and linguistics to suggest that the "out of Africa" model of human origins may be in error and that the first humans actually came from the Americas and spread from there to the rest of the world.