Calculating Kin: Analyzing and Understanding Cultural Codes

Michael D. Fischer

Introduction

One of the goals of social anthropology is to gain an understanding of how and why people interact with each other and with their environment. One important idea that contributes to this understanding is culture. One of the many many ways that anthropologists use culture is to refer to systems of shared ideas among a group of people.

By systems we mean that there is some regularity to the way that ideas, information and concepts are shared. There are several possible ways this sharing could happen. One would be to imagine a very large corpus of ideas, which everyone carefully memorizes. No doubt there is a lot of simple memorization going on, but it is unlikely to account for all culture sharing.

While we could just about accept this for simple lists of vocabulary in language, one of the marked properties of human culture (and human language as a part of that culture) is that as large as the number of memorized ideas is, the number of things and situations these can apply to is much larger.

Take for example the idea of animal . This is one term, and can apply to a large number of varieties of animal. Even given that most languages have a large number of terms for specific kinds of animal, there are always more than one possible referent for a given term, e.g. more than one dog, cat or rat. Only if each individual organism in the experience of a group were given a unique term would the number ideas equal to the number of referents of those ideas. Given that different people have different specific experiences, this would make sharing the list very difficult indeed.

This idea we have encountered over the course of the year as classification, a powerful aspect of human thought which permits us to assign some common knowledge to a large number of things rather than have to learn it over and over for each new individual thing or organism we might encounter. Besides classifying different things to a common term or idea, an order can be imposed which supplies yet another term that generalises a larger set of more specific terms, e.g.

animals = dog, cat, rat, ...
or
animals = mammals, reptiles, amphibians, ... mammals = dog, cat, rat, ...

But culture is capable of even more powerful reduction of information required to deal with the world, at the expense of greater complexity. One of the responsibilities of the anthropologist is to identify these systems of reduction and organisation, these indigenous models of the world and their experience in the world, and to attempt to understand the basis by which these models are constructed.


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