This will be a virtual seminar, via Zoom. We welcome attendees in room 111 Levin Building for group viewing and Q&A with the speaker after the talk. 

A pizza lunch will be served. Please bring your own beverage.

To join remotely, please contact us for the Zoom link: jmarcus@sas.upenn.edu

Fiona Jordan
Department of Anthropology and Archaeology
University of Bristol

Relatively Speaking: Language, Culture and Cognition in Kinship

Cognitive anthropology once considered kinship a central object in understanding the relationship between language, culture, and cognition. Only recently have we returned to the family to study social cognition, this time informed by cultural evolutionary approaches that can account for cross-cultural relationships, field and corpus studies of language interaction, and new data resources. I’ll present work on kinship terminologies, which are the patterns of words that languages have for denoting and referring to family members. Our systems of reckoning relatives vary cross-culturally, and the structural features of these norms persist and recur across the globe. In some languages, siblings are distinguished by age; in others by gender; by both aspects; or not at all. The women I call my ‘aunty’ in one society might be called ‘mother’ in another. Observations from children and their families demonstrates the contexts of individual transmission and learning of kinship terms, while cross-cultural phylogenetic analyses explore functional explanations for the persistence of patterned structural systems across languages. Terminological systems are a product of cultural evolutionary processes shaped by cognitive and interactional constraints at multiple scales.

This is a joint seminar with Penn’s Social and Cultural Evolution Working Group (SCEW).