Kinship terminology, in anthropology, the system of names applied to categories of kin standing in relationship to one another. The possibilities for such nomenclature would seem limitless, but anthropologists have identified a small number of basic systems that are found in all world societies. Six of these systems use the criterion of classification of kin in the same generation as “ego,” a given individual designated as the starting point in genealogical reckoning. Four terminological systems that focus on ego’s parental generation have also been identified.
While British social anthropologists examined the functions of various social rules and institutions and French structuralists used the regularities that underlay those features in a search for the origins of humanity, American cultural anthropologists explored the idea that behaviour is ordered by social…
Historically, the systematic study of kinship terminology began with the American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan, whose pioneering work, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, was published in 1871. An important element in Morgan’s formulation was the distinction between classificatory and descriptive systems of kinship. In a classificatory system some collateral kin—relatives not in ego’s direct line of descent or ancestry—are placed in the same terminological grouping as lineal kin—relatives in ego’s direct line of descent. Classificatory systems such as that of the Iroquois designate the father and his brother, and conversely the mother and her sister, by the same term. In many societies with unilineal descent—that is, systems that emphasize either the mother’s or the father’s line, but not both—ego uses one set of terms to refer to brothers, sisters, and parallel cousins (those whose genealogical ties are traced through a related parent of the same sex, as in a father’s brother or a mother’s sister), while another set of terms is employed for cross-cousins (the offspring of a father’s sister or a mother’s brother). This arrangement emphasizes the fact that cross-cousins do not belong to the lineage with ego, ego’s siblings, and ego’s parallel cousins, thus designating marriage between cross-cousins as exogamous.
Descriptive terminology, in contrast to classificatory terminology, maintains a separation between lineal and collateral kin; for example, mother and mother’s sister, although of the same generation and sex, are distinguished. Descriptive systems are typically found wherever the nuclear family operates as a relatively autonomous unit economically and socially; as a result, they are relatively rare in ethnographic literature.
The standard European-American system of kinship uses descriptive terminology, but it also demonstrates that the distinction between descriptive and classificatory kinship systems is not absolute. In contemporary U.S. social organization, for example, kinship terminology distinguishes lineal members of ego’s generation (siblings) from collateral members of ego’s generation (cousins) but, with the exception of father, groups the men of the previous generation together, so that mother’s brother, mother’s sister’s husband, father’s brother, and father’s sister’s husband are all referred to by the term uncle.
Kinship systems convey important social information, but the problem of the cultural meanings and correct translations of kinship terminology has proved to be intractable. To a great extent, this is because kinship terms represent the competing realms of social and genetic relatedness; thus, it cannot be assumed that two or more persons for whom ego uses a single term are socially indistinguishable. For example, although it is quite common for all men of ego’s parental generation to be called by a single term (e.g., to use the same kin term for father and uncles), nobody in such a community would confuse ego’s biological father with the other men in that generational cohort. One method used by anthropologists to avoid bias is the development of a precise descriptive language. For example, when a father and his brother are referred to by the same term within a kinship system, the anthropologist may express the position of father’s brother as “a male agnatic relative of the ascending generation.”