Social Practice and Shared History, Not Social Scale, Structure Cross-Cultural Complexity in Kinship Systems.

ABSTRACT: Human populations display remarkable diversity in language and culture, but the variation is not without limit. At the population level, variation between societies may be structured by a range of macro-evolutionary factors, including ecological and environmental resources, shared ancestry, spatial proximity, and covarying social practices. Kinship terminology systems are varying linguistic paradigms that denote familial social relationships of kin and non-kin. Systems vary by the kinds of salient distinctions that are made (e.g., age, gender, generation) and the extent to which different kinds of kin are called by the same term. Here, we explore two kinds of explanations for an observed typology of kin terms for cousins. The first one derives the typology from a learning bottleneck linked

SUBMITTER: Racz P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7318210 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature