[Anthropgrad] Seminar on Kinship by Anna Wierzbicka

[Alan Rumsey]

Time and place:
Friday 08 August

3.30pm to 5pm followed by drinks, in Room W4.04 Baldessin Precinct Building.

*Kinship terms as a window onto social relations, attitudes, and values: 
English, French, German, Russian, Polish, Hindi, Pitjantjatjara*

*Anna Wierzbicka*

School of Language Studies, Australian National University

*Abstract*

A language’s kinship terms can give us an invaluable guide to a 
society’s view of interpersonal relations, attitudes and values. But 
despite the enormous literature on kinship terms in different languages, 
surprisingly little is known about culture-specific attitudes and values 
entrenched in such terms, as the research tended to rely on an abstract 
conceptual apparatus brought from outside (with notions like 
‘lineality’, ‘generational distance’ or ‘seniority’) without developing 
a methodology which could reveal “ordinary people’s” ways of thinking 
reflected in kin terms.

In addition, like many other areas of anthropology and social science in 
general, traditional analysis of kinship terms has suffered from 
ethnocentrism. This ethnocentrism has at times been acknowledged by 
anthropologists themselves. For example, in their classic study “The 
meaning of kinship terms” Wallace and Atkins (1969: 364) wrote about the 
“almost unavoidable ethnocentrism” of descriptions which use “simple 
kin-type denotata” such as “Brother”, “Sister”, “Son” and “Daughter”, 
given that such concepts are not universal and are basically derived 
from English.

Classificatory kinship systems like those in Australian languages pose 
particular challenges from this point of view. But the semantics of 
‘kinship terms’ is important not only for languages like Pitjantjatjara 
or Warlpiri, but also for European ones. For example, why was it so 
difficult for the translators of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu 
to translate the French word ‘maman’ into English? Why is it that the 
English title of Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya does not mean the same as 
the original Djadja Vanja? Why doesn’t the German word Geschwister mean 
the same as the English word siblings?

This talk will show that the meaning of kin terms can be portrayed, in 
an illuminating and non-Anglocentric way, through the NSM methodology, 
which relies on 60 or so universal “semantic primes” (such as ‘someone’, 
‘something’, ‘people’, ‘do’ and ‘say’) and on a small number of 
universal ‘semantic molecules’. The paper tentatively identifies seven 
universal molecules which are fundamental to kinship semantics, and 
thus, one might say, seven universals of kinship.

At the same time, the paper shows how with the help of this methodology 
we can throw light on interpersonal relations, attitudes and values 
embedded in ‘kin terms’ in French and in Russian, in Hindi and in 
Pitjantjatjara, and in any other language.