About
The journal Kinship offers a scholarly site for research publications dedicated to the ethnography and theory of kinship and covers current systematic efforts using new data or new ideas, including the use of these data and ideas to revisit and rework earlier assumptions in the field. It covers a wide range of kinship-based cross-cultural practices ranging from incest to marriage, to avoidances, to kin terms, to succession, to contemporary forms of motherhood, fatherhood, and family, and more. The journal Kinship, as the design of the front cover seeks to convey, is dedicated to the study of kinship in all of its facets, is international in scope, and will publish original work in English, though publications in other languages will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2023
Articles
Triadic Kinship Terms in Mẽbêngôkre: A Linguistic and Anthropological Analysis
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.