Bridging Interdisciplinary Boundaries: The Case of Kin Terms

Abstract

A great debate over kin term analysis was waged for two decades beginning in the mid-1950s. By the end of this period, the principal dispute was between two different approaches to fractionating the meanings of the terms. In componential analysis, each term took a unique set of values on a set of abstract dimensions such as sex, generation and lineality; the results were displayed in a tabular format (componential paradigm). In relational analysis, each term was analyzed as a composition of one or more relational components; for example, a grandparent is the parent of a parent. This dispute petered out by the mid-1970s despite the fact that it remained unresolved. In this paper I take up where the debate left off, for two reasons: (1) an integrated account can now be offered, within which the two approaches that appeared to be at odds fit together as pieces of a solution; and (2) the history of the debate and its resolution in an integrated account provide a particularly illuminating case study of how disciplines such as linguistics and psychology relate to one another. In what follows, first, the debate over kin terms is placed in the context of an account of disciplinary structure and interrelationships which I recently proposed (Abrahamsen, 1987, from which some of the following exposition is drawn); second, the high points of the debate are introduced, and the integrated account is discussed in some detail.