Lea focuses on Dziebel’s analysis of the section on South America, composed of two chapters that deal with the Northern Jê (Gê) societies, some displaying Omaha features, others Crow, or a mixture of the two. In his review article, Dziebel argues enthusiastically about the merits of large kinship data bases. However, there is not even consensus among social anthropologists concerning the characterization of the Northern Jê peoples. Dziebel is very critical of the book edited by Trautman and Whiteley, but he naively takes T. Turner’s model of societal reproduction at face value, despite it not even dealing directly with the kinship terminology. The other contributor, Marcela Coelho de Souza, sums up her position affirming that kinship is made, not given. Both of these authors dismiss Lea’s alternative analysis of the Mẽbêngôkre as a house-based matrilineal society, but Dziebel sidesteps this issue.

This article compounds the effort of a social anthropologist and a linguist to understand and to analyze what is known about the triadic terms of the Mẽbêngôkre, a Northern Jê people from Central Brazil. Triadic terms are kinship terms that refer to a single individual but encode at least two kin relations simultaneously: that between the addressee and the referent, and that between the speaker and the referent; their meaning can be represented schematically as “your X = [who is also] my Y.” The only other region where this phenomenon has been identified so far is among the First Peoples of Northern Australia. Our aim is to describe the logic of this system of terminology, and to examine the social variables governing its use.