^^^^^
On 4/30/07, ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> Regarding this "kinship" issue, I would like to offer this thought:
> perhaps ChrisD and CB are using the word differently? Chris seems to
> be doing so in the way evolutionary biologists do: kin = a blood
> relative. Kinship being considered from the perspective of kin
> selection, where consideration is extended on the basis of shared
> blood (i.e., gene). CB seems to be referring to the broader notion of
> kinship: a sense of affinity, etc., as in "kindred".
>
> [Howdy Woj!]
>
> --ravi
I think that there are a few definitions/questions at work in the discussion of kinship.
(1) Are their kinship relations-simpliciter? These may exist without recognition.
(2) Are the kinship relations recognized by individuals It should be obvious that chimpanzees for example recognize kinship relations. In some groups brothers are more likely to make alliances for example. There has been some experiments about whether chimpanzees recognize "kinship relations" such as "mother's sister" and "mother's sister's daughter" and might act upon them. It seems that they do recognize "cousins" and prefer to make alliances with cousins. But the evidence is not conclusive. If the evidence becomes conclusive then I think that we can say that chimpanzees recognize kinship relations within groups.
(3) Is there an _extended_ kinship system (beyond face-to-face recognition), and is such an extended kinship system recognized by the individuals of the species. I doubt that chimpanzees have the capacity to recognize this kind of extended kinship, though I would not rule it out a priori. If we had the evidence (if we could even get the evidence) I would _guess_ that many of our ancestors - homo erectus, homo egaster, homo habilis, (but what about Australopithecus afranesis?) - were able to recognize extended kinship relations beyond face to face kinship.
(4) Kinship systems that are both extensive and symbolic or symbolized, both in the present, across generations, and across life-times. As far as I know only modern humans have the capacity to recognize and represent this kind of kinship system
For Charles only this last is a "real" kinship system.
By the way I am not making up this idea that we can analyze our nearest cousins in terms of kinship systems. Maurice Godelier points out in his critique of Levi-Strauss that chimpanzees and bonobos already live in societies that exhibit constraints and processes of human kinship systems. You might want to call it a simple kinship system. Godelier is one of the few Marxist anthropologists I know who actually pays attention to primate studies. The NLR reviewer of Godelier's book *_*Métamorphoses de la parenté._ puts Godelier's conclusion as follows: "The passage from nature to culture with *homo sapiens* thus cannot have been a sudden, discontinuous transformation, but must have been more evolutionary in nature." **
Chris Wrote: Jerry will probably correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC dolphins do use symbols in their communication system. They reproduce the sonar "images" of the things they are "talking" about, e.g., "shark" is represented by the sonar image of a shark. Caveat -- this is something I read years ago and barely remember, so I could be full of shit.
JM: The evidence is mixed on some of these things... but there is recent very good evidence that dolphins do something that we would might call symbolization....
Research among bottleneck dolphins has shown that each dolphin has an individual and unique name. Not only that but two dolphins in "communicating with each other will refer to a third dolphin who is not present. These "names" are recognized by the dolphins even if abstracted from each dolphin voice. In other words if the name is synthesized electronically, so that it does not sound like a dolphin voice, the dolphins still recognize the simple.
One report of the study is here but I think you can also find some more of the reports on line. "Dolphins Name Themselves With Whistles, Study Says" http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/060508_dolphins.html
It has also been shown that chimpanzees "symbolize" in their calls and gestures.
Gestures: Barbara J. King among others has done work on this. In some chimpanzee groups one gesture means "give" and one means "sympathy or sorrow" and another means something like "I give in...". These gestures are not like a dog bearing their necks because when humans do it they are recognized by chimps. Further these gestures are not "instinctual" because they vary from group to group, and yet even though the gestures are different from group to group their also seems to be a similar repertoire of gestures in each group. In other words the gestures are both "learned" by the young from troop to troop, with one group using different gestures for the same "reference". At the same time the repertoire of references seems to be similar from troop to troop. The gestures do not have anything like a "grammar", but they probably deserve to be called "symbols". It is hard to say anything more about this gestural communication because there has not been much work on them. Some claim that there is a larger repertoire of gestural communication among wild chimps than among chimps in captivity, which if true wold be an interesting observation.
Now we also know that chimpanzees "symbolize" through vocalization or specialized calls. Certain vocalizations mean "snake" and certain "vocalizations" mean eagle. This has been tested from chimpanzee troop to chimpanzee troop over and over again. Also the vocalizations vary from group to group so that one troops vocalization is played for another group they are not "recognized" as meaning "eagle" or "snake". This too is evidence of "symbolization".
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