essay
Another view of Trobriand kinship categories
Formal semantic analysis • 67 (5) (2) • Published In 1965 • Pages: 142-185, 309-316
By: Lounsbury, Floyd G..
AbstractBrief abstract written by HRAF anthropologists who have done the subject indexing for the document
In response to Leach's rebuttal of Malinowski's 'family-centered' and 'extensionist' theory of kinship, (see 50: Leach, in this file), Lounsbury defends Malinowski in this paper, defending the older and more conventional notion about kinship and kinship terminology and presenting a different theory of the meaning of Trobriand kinship terms based on his own formal semantic analysis. Lounsbury outlines the basic tenets of Leach's ideas about kinship in general and then shows, through his own analysis of the data that there is a perfectly understandable underlying logic to the terms and referents reported by Malinowski. Lounsbury expresses his skepticism about the view of 'primitive' kinship, and of kinship in unilineal societies that Leach and other social anthropologists have enunciated in recent studies.
- SubjectsDocument-level OCM identifiers given by the anthropology subject indexers at HRAF
- Information sources listed in other works
- Reviews and critiques
- Theoretical orientation in research and its results
- Kinship terminology
- cultureCulture name from the Outline of World Cultures (OWC)
- Trobriands
- HRAF PubDateThe date HRAF published the document
- 1995
- RegionThe area the document pertains to
- Oceania
- Sub RegionThe more specific area the document pertains to, which is located within the Region
- Melanesia
- Document TypeMay include journal articles, essays, collections of essays, monographs, or chapters/parts of monographs
- essay
- Evaluation
- Creator TypeThe type of person writing the document, e.g. Ethnographer, Missionary, Archaeologist, Folklorist, Linguist, Indigenous Person, and so on.
- Ethnologist
- Document Rating A ranking done by HRAF anthropologists based on the strength of the source material on a scale of 1 to 5, as follows: 1 - poor; 2 - fair; 3 - good, useful data, but not uniformly excellent; 4 - excellent secondary data; 5 - excellent primary data.
- 4: Excellent Secondary Data
- AnalystThe HRAF anthropologist who subject indexed the document and prepared other materials for the eHRAF culture/tradition collection
- John Beierle
- Field DateThe date the researcher conducted the fieldwork or archival research that produced the document
- no date
- Coverage DateThe date or dates that the information in the document pertains to
- not specified
- Coverage PlaceLocation of the research culture or tradition (often a smaller unit such as a band, community, or archaeological site)
- Papua New Guinea
- NotesAdditional notes
- [by] Floyd G. Lounsbury
- Bibliography: p. 309-316
- LCSHLibrary of Congress Subject Headings
- Trobriand Islanders