Dr. Peter Whiteley (Anthropology Division, American Museum of Natural History, New York) will convene an Advanced Seminar Workshop at The Amerind Foundation (Dragoon, Arizona) on significant new advances in the cross-cultural study of kinship and marriage systems. Co-chaired by Prof. Maurice Godelier (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris), the workshop will bring together researchers from Australia, Brazil, Europe, and the United States. Prior to the emergence of the state, all human social ties, including economic and political connections, were based on kinship and marriage. Therefore, explaining how societies organized these relationships is important for understanding patterns of human social formation, evolution, and adaptation.
Seminar participants include global leaders in kinship and social theory. Their respective regional concentrations include Native North America, Lowland Amazonia, sub-Saharan Africa, Papua New Guinea, Australia, South Asia, and Indonesia. Participants will present papers for critique and discussion over five days. A particular focus will be Crow-Omaha kinship systems, an apparently pivotal transitional type that has long puzzled anthropologists. By sustained, multi-faceted, collaborative analysis, the workshop seeks to explain the causes and consequences of these important systems. Under what social, political, and adaptive circumstances do they arise, persist, and/or transition into other systems? What is the role of demography, of linguistic relations, of geography? Do they provide comparative adaptive advantages over other systems? What are their effects, if any, on other aspects of societal form? The reciprocal aim is also to assess differing approaches (e.g., linguistic, formalist, historical, substantialist) to the study and analysis of kinship systems.
The results of this workshop, which will be published by the University of Arizona Press and thus widely available, will enable scientists to better explain the associations of kinship systems with other behavioral phenomena. This promises significant advances in the understanding of all human kinship systems through time and across cultures and languages. The seminar also seeks to demonstrate the renewed value of kinship-system analysis for the comparative explanation of human social formations.
