Jones' contribution to kinship is remarkably persuasive and coherent. He draws together relatedness-centric approaches to kinship (for example Carsten Reference Carsten1997) with what might be understood as more mathematical or formal approaches to kinship (see for example Goodenough Reference Goodenough1965; Read Reference Read2001). Within sociocultural anthropology there seems to be something terribly attractive in seeing and understanding the use of kinship as merely an adjunct of relatedness in some fuzzy and poorly defined situational sense. Jones astutely deals with the mathematical regularity that appears to be pervasive in kinship terminologies while attempting to account for empirically demonstrable inconsistency and ambiguity in kinship instantiation.
It is logical and predictable that simple (and self-consistent) systems produce complex, inconsistent clusters or relationships; however, the reverse is highly improbable and perhaps impossible. Jones is well aware of this and skillfully suggests that the innate conceptual structure of kinship (the part with the demonstrable mathematical regularity), is subject to principles of optimal grammatical communication present more generally in language. Optimality Theory (OT), Jones argues, renders inconsistency in observed usage comprehensible despite what would appear to be strong restriction on the range of algebraic models present in real societies. Kinship is of course not alone in demonstrating that persistent conceptual structures may be modified by grammars of communication.
Jones makes an intriguing argument about kinship borrowing its conceptual structure from that of space; however, rather than being useful for describing physical space, kinship-space is a specialized genealogy-representing tool. Jones seems to be making a similar argument to Bennardo (Reference Bennardo2009), except that whereas Bennardo begins with space and attempts to demonstrate how culturally specific conceptual models of space are fundamental to a broad range of knowledge domains, Jones instead appears to begin with kinship and notes the pervasive spatial referents that appear to form part of the logic of kinship itself. Bennardo's work has the advantage of more elaborated formal models of space, while one of the great strengths of Jones' contribution lies precisely in his attempt to reconcile radically different analytical conceptualizations of kinship.
While I must admit to being largely persuaded by Jones' masterful analysis, nevertheless, there is perhaps one important point of concern worth noting. The conflation of kinship with genealogy has a very long history within anthropology (going right back to Morgan and arguably earlier), and while Jones is very careful to avoid any clumsy conflation, he nevertheless argues somewhat forcefully that kinship systems are spatially informed conceptual systems that are highly specialized for representing genealogy. It is self-evident that kinship is used by people for ordering genealogical relations; however, there seem to be some dangers in such an argument. First, that genealogy somehow becomes reduced to reproduction and subsequently to possibly misleading sociobiological arguments about simplistic Darwinian forces operating on kinship via genealogy. Following from this, the risk that correlation coupled with longstanding folk beliefs about kinship result in erroneous attributions of causation. Unquestionably, there are constraints on kinship just as there are constraints on genealogy, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that genealogy takes the form it does because of the particular form, or structure, of kinship systems, which are themselves the result of fundamental constraints on ordering, or relation-creating knowledge systems produced by human cognition.
Attempting to understand genealogical ordering through an analytical set of terms a priori assumed to be organizationally homologous is precisely the problem that leads to the unease with kinship studies in the first place (see Leaf Reference Leaf1979 for a more fulsome discussion of the move away from rigorous formal approaches to kinship). Read (Reference Read2006), Fischer and Read (Reference Fischer and Read2005), and Leaf (Reference Leaf2005) have recently demonstrated that a number of kinship terminologies can be produced without reference to any notion or instance of genealogical relatedness. In other words, the kinship terminologies themselves are constrained by something that has no need for any reference to genealogical relatedness. This, then, renders the idea that kinship is somehow a highly specialized system for representing genealogy more than a little problematic. If the system can be produced without reference to genealogy then it seems at the very least one must consider that genealogies take the forms they do because of the independent kinship terminologies used by the societies in which they are produced.
Finally, one might, following Bennardo, make a similar case for notions of space arguably being independently constrained by more rudimentary principles of reciprocity and recursion and suggest that it is indeed genealogy that is the entirely dependent variable in the equation. Such a concern, to be sure, does not negate the significance and utility of Jones' application of OT to make sense of a more comprehensive view of social ordering in societies; rather, it suggests that while Jones is right to try to make sense of such phenomena in their entirety, he may inadvertently reinforce a demonstrably unsound assertion that genealogy is somehow driving kinship terminologies.
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Jones' contribution to kinship is remarkably persuasive and coherent. He draws together relatedness-centric approaches to kinship (for example Carsten Reference Carsten1997) with what might be understood as more mathematical or formal approaches to kinship (see for example Goodenough Reference Goodenough1965; Read Reference Read2001). Within sociocultural anthropology there seems to be something terribly attractive in seeing and understanding the use of kinship as merely an adjunct of relatedness in some fuzzy and poorly defined situational sense. Jones astutely deals with the mathematical regularity that appears to be pervasive in kinship terminologies while attempting to account for empirically demonstrable inconsistency and ambiguity in kinship instantiation.
It is logical and predictable that simple (and self-consistent) systems produce complex, inconsistent clusters or relationships; however, the reverse is highly improbable and perhaps impossible. Jones is well aware of this and skillfully suggests that the innate conceptual structure of kinship (the part with the demonstrable mathematical regularity), is subject to principles of optimal grammatical communication present more generally in language. Optimality Theory (OT), Jones argues, renders inconsistency in observed usage comprehensible despite what would appear to be strong restriction on the range of algebraic models present in real societies. Kinship is of course not alone in demonstrating that persistent conceptual structures may be modified by grammars of communication.
Jones makes an intriguing argument about kinship borrowing its conceptual structure from that of space; however, rather than being useful for describing physical space, kinship-space is a specialized genealogy-representing tool. Jones seems to be making a similar argument to Bennardo (Reference Bennardo2009), except that whereas Bennardo begins with space and attempts to demonstrate how culturally specific conceptual models of space are fundamental to a broad range of knowledge domains, Jones instead appears to begin with kinship and notes the pervasive spatial referents that appear to form part of the logic of kinship itself. Bennardo's work has the advantage of more elaborated formal models of space, while one of the great strengths of Jones' contribution lies precisely in his attempt to reconcile radically different analytical conceptualizations of kinship.
While I must admit to being largely persuaded by Jones' masterful analysis, nevertheless, there is perhaps one important point of concern worth noting. The conflation of kinship with genealogy has a very long history within anthropology (going right back to Morgan and arguably earlier), and while Jones is very careful to avoid any clumsy conflation, he nevertheless argues somewhat forcefully that kinship systems are spatially informed conceptual systems that are highly specialized for representing genealogy. It is self-evident that kinship is used by people for ordering genealogical relations; however, there seem to be some dangers in such an argument. First, that genealogy somehow becomes reduced to reproduction and subsequently to possibly misleading sociobiological arguments about simplistic Darwinian forces operating on kinship via genealogy. Following from this, the risk that correlation coupled with longstanding folk beliefs about kinship result in erroneous attributions of causation. Unquestionably, there are constraints on kinship just as there are constraints on genealogy, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that genealogy takes the form it does because of the particular form, or structure, of kinship systems, which are themselves the result of fundamental constraints on ordering, or relation-creating knowledge systems produced by human cognition.
Attempting to understand genealogical ordering through an analytical set of terms a priori assumed to be organizationally homologous is precisely the problem that leads to the unease with kinship studies in the first place (see Leaf Reference Leaf1979 for a more fulsome discussion of the move away from rigorous formal approaches to kinship). Read (Reference Read2006), Fischer and Read (Reference Fischer and Read2005), and Leaf (Reference Leaf2005) have recently demonstrated that a number of kinship terminologies can be produced without reference to any notion or instance of genealogical relatedness. In other words, the kinship terminologies themselves are constrained by something that has no need for any reference to genealogical relatedness. This, then, renders the idea that kinship is somehow a highly specialized system for representing genealogy more than a little problematic. If the system can be produced without reference to genealogy then it seems at the very least one must consider that genealogies take the forms they do because of the independent kinship terminologies used by the societies in which they are produced.
Finally, one might, following Bennardo, make a similar case for notions of space arguably being independently constrained by more rudimentary principles of reciprocity and recursion and suggest that it is indeed genealogy that is the entirely dependent variable in the equation. Such a concern, to be sure, does not negate the significance and utility of Jones' application of OT to make sense of a more comprehensive view of social ordering in societies; rather, it suggests that while Jones is right to try to make sense of such phenomena in their entirety, he may inadvertently reinforce a demonstrably unsound assertion that genealogy is somehow driving kinship terminologies.