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Why kinship is progeneratively constrained: Extending anthropology

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• Published: 15 April 2022
• Volume 200 , article number  175 , ( 2022 )

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• Robert A. Wilson   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8034-0317 1  

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The conceptualisation of kinship and its study remain contested within anthropology. This paper draws on recent cognitive science, developmental cognitive psychology, and the philosophy of science to offer a novel argument for a view of kinship as progeneratively or reproductively constrained. I shall argue that kinship involves a form of extended cognition that incorporates progenerative facts, going on to show how the resulting articulation of kinship’s progenerative nature can be readily expressed by an influential conception of kinds, the homeostatic property cluster view. Identifying the distinctive role that our extended cognitive access to progenerative facts plays in kinship delivers an integrative, progenerativist view that avoids standard performativist criticisms of progenerativism as being ethnocentric, epistemically naïve, and reductive.

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1 A novel argument for a progenerative view of kinship

A constructivist direction in the study of kinship within cultural anthropology over the past fifty years has been fuelled by criticism of the long-standing idea that kinship and kin relations are, at their core, reproductive, procreative, or progenerative. Footnote 1 For constructivists (or performativists), there are many ways of kinmaking and only some of these are procreative (Carsten 2004 ; Levine 2008; Peletz 1995; Strathern 1992a ). Footnote 2

This paper pushes back against this direction in kinship studies by offering a new argument for progenerativism that addresses some prominent criticisms. The putative ethnocentrism of progenerative views is the strongest and historically most influential of these criticisms. This charge of ethnocentric projection is expressed most famously by David Schneider: “Kinship is like totemism, matriarchy, and the ‘matrilineal complex’. It is a non-subject. It exists in the minds of anthropologists but not in the cultures they study.” (Schneider 1972 , 51; see also Schneider 1984 ; Wilson 2016 ). Marshall Sahlins ( 2013 ) has more recently argued that to think of kinship as progenerative in nature also reflects ethnographic naivety about cultural diversity in the performance of kinship. Footnote 3 Underlying these criticisms, as well as others that flag implicit sexism and racism in the progenerativist tradition, Footnote 4 is a general wariness of reductive tendencies in the history of kinship studies.

The red flags of ethnocentrism, epistemic naivety, and reductionism (let alone sexism and racialized primitivism) signal serious and real dangers to be avoided in the study of kinship. Footnote 5 I argue that those red flags can be heeded and dangers avoided while ascribing a central place for progeneration within kinship. I do so by utilizing conceptual resources drawn from cognitive science, developmental cognitive psychology, and the philosophy of science. Footnote 6

The capsule idea of this paper is that sophisticated, culturally-specific kinship systems rest on extended cognitive systems that are responsive to progenerative facts . More specifically, I defend the following argument:

Kinship is governed by extended cognitive processes that bind people together within and across generations.

These extended cognitive processes generate culturally diverse forms of kinship that, universally across cultures and over time, distinctively rely on progenerative facts and our sensitivity to those facts. Therefore,

Kinship is progeneratively constrained.

My defence of this argument appeals to a perceptually- and emotionally-focused view of what makes for cognitively extended, progeneratively-constrained kinship, a view of extended cognition that is more radical and controversial than at least non-philosophers may initially think. As such, my argument does not rest on claims about language and kinship. As important as kinship terminologies are for human kinship systems, these augment existing extended cognitive capacities that we bring to bear on kinship. They add complexity to an existing cognitively extended phenomenon, rather than create it. Footnote 7

I begin with a characterization of what distinguishes kinship from other important relationship structures and the place of extended cognition in kinship’s resulting staying power (Sect.  2 ). After defending each of the argument’s premises (Sects.  3 and 4 ), I show how the recent conception of kinship as a homeostatic property cluster (HPC) kind allows one to succinctly re-express why kinship is progeneratively constrained in a way that avoids ethnocentrism and epistemic naivety (Sect.  5 ). Footnote 8 I conclude by drawing attention to the resulting view’s non-reductive and integrative credentials (Sect.  6 ).

2 Distinguishing kinship and kinship’s staying power

Kinship is distinctive first and foremost in being the principle intra- and intergenerational binding structure in human cultures. Footnote 9 Consider this the basic content of kinship. This content has been neglected by constructivist views that summarily characterize kinship as relatedness (Carsten 2004 ) or mutuality of being (Sahlins 2013 ), characterizations in danger of lapsing into a thin, over-inclusive functionalism about kinship. Footnote 10 Kinship concerns the creation of future generations of people and their relationship to past and present generations. Other significant binding relationships, such as friendship and those specified by employment, religious affiliation, or nationality, do not bear this same relationship to generations, however important they may be in binding people together.

“Kinship relations”, as Gillian Feeley-Harnik has recently suggested, “are where people first, last and ultimately, deal with such matters as the creation of life, gestation, birth, growth, death, decay, and transformation” (Feeley-Harnik 2019 , 76). Kinship is part of the cultural world that each person’s life is naturally enmeshed in from before birth to beyond death and its generational structure is distinctive of it.

The primary place kinship occupies as an intra- and inter-generational binding structure gives kinship its staying power. Patrick McConvell has characterized kinship as “the bedrock of all human societies that we know”, noting that “all humans recognize fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, husbands and wives, grandparents, cousins, and often many more complex types of relationships in the terminologies that they use” (McConvell 2013 , 1). Here McConvell takes progeneratively-characterized kinship as a kind of biological constant or universal, as do others resistant to constructivist critiques of progenerativism (e.g., Shapiro 2018b ; Trautmann et al. 2011 ).

Kinship and kin terminologies are recurrent, pervasive, normatively loaded, and found universally across human cultures. Yet the central roles played in kinship by cognitive mechanisms and psychology more generally have sometimes been ignored or downplayed. For example, Robin Fox says that kinship groups “are the outcome of natural processes; they are as natural as limbs and digestion” and that they “do not depend for their existence on the equally natural ability to classify and name which characterizes our species” (Fox 1975 , 30). Fox’s final claim here is mistaken. Like other products of sophisticated human activities anchored by our natural needs—for example, meals (nutrition), clothes (bodily protection and display), and schools (child-rearing)—kinship groups depend on abilities to recognize and classify and, in our own species, to name. As cognitive anthropologists have long recognised (D’Andrade 1995 , ch.3), articulating an appropriate role for cognitive mechanisms in an account of kinship is a key part of the integrative bridge to be built between biological and sociocultural dimensions to kinship.

Unlike previous appeals to cognition that posit innate modules in building this bridge (Jones 2010; Gil-White 2001), however, my suggestion is to adopt a non-standard view of the relevant cognitive mechanisms. The fundamental cognitive mechanisms in play in kinship are not bits of intra-cranial machinery but literally extend beyond the head to incorporate the extra-cranial world. Here I apply the controversial idea of extended cognitive processing that originated in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science in challenges to individualistic views of computational psychology (Wilson 1994 ) and everyday psychological processing, such as remembering and planning (Clark and Chalmers 1998 ).

Extended cognition is not the platitudinous view that cognition is merely causally responsive to the physical or social environment but the more striking view that cognition itself extends beyond the boundary of the individual. Proponents of extended cognition hold that cognition incorporates both internal and external cognitive resources , whether they be physical, technological, or social in nature (Wilson and Clark 2009 ; Wilson 2010 ). The cognitive systems composed of those resources and that ultimately drive our behaviour are distributed between individual and world. For proponents of extended cognition, perception, thought, and motivation are not so much causally interactive with physical or social environments as partly constituted by them. The mind is not all in the head. Footnote 11

Extended cognition assumes a non-reductive view of the relationship between culture and the mind. This is because rather than viewing culture as a mere repository for input to or output from cognitive systems, the extended cognition paradigm takes culture to provide resources that physically constitute culturally extended cognitive systems. The tools and artifacts central to archaeology, as Malafouris ( 2013 ) has argued, are not simply “good to think with” but, as extended cognitive resources, are part of the machinery of thinking. The most powerful such resources lie in the realms of both what Bloch calls the transactional and transcendental social (Bloch 2008 ).

Extended cognitive processing is distributed between brain, body, and world and is itself interpersonal, social, and culture in nature (Wilson 2004 : ch.1–2). As such, extended cognition cannot be part of a reductive psychological or biological base for social or cultural structures, such as kinship, on pain of circularity. The claim that kinship is mediated by extended cognitive processes thus plays a crucial role in specifying a non-reductive role for psychology in an account of kinship.

Recall that the two premises in my argument for progenerativism are:

These extended cognitive processes generate culturally diverse forms of kinship that, universally across cultures and over time, distinctively rely on progenerative facts and our sensitivity to those facts.

In Sect.  3 , I defend (1) by elaborating on the claim that kinship involves culturally extended cognition, introducing the idea that it does so by utilizing what I call like us detectors . Here I explore the relationship between sociality, extended cognition, kinship, normativity, and our perception of sorts of people. In Sect.  4 , I defend (2) by distinguishing progenerative facts from two other kinds of facts about kinship— institutional and scientifically-mediated facts—and by spelling out how progenerative facts remain important to the performance of kinship despite the diversity to the forms of kinship generated by culturally extended cognition. I argue that reliance on progenerative facts in our culturally extended cognitive processing has an evolutionary character. Distinguishing progenerative from institutional and scientifically-mediated facts about kinship also provides a rich framework for accommodating the well-known, cross-cultural, developmental psychological work of Astuti, Bloch, Carey and Solomon on Malagasy kinship.

3 Culturally extended cognition, sorts of people, and we-knowledge

Sociality is a ubiquitous feature of the biological world, especially the mobile biological world. At least three things need to be true for creatures to manifest sociality: some kind of minimal, intraspecific group living, interactions with conspecifics, and a differential sensitivity to the presence of both conspecifics and non-conspecifics. Precisely which living (and even non-living) things are either social or cognitive beings is a topic of expanding recent interest (Calvo Garzón and Keijzer 2011 ; Kappeler 2019 ). As I have argued previously (Wilson 2018 , 122–126), we can see the particular forms that our sociality takes as building on three forms of cognitive sophistication that we partially share with some nonhuman animals: (a) enhanced internal cognitive processing (b) the distribution of cognitive processing between internal and external resources; and (c) the replacement of individual cognition with some kind of collective or group-level cognition.

Historically dominant individualistic views of cognition have emphasized (a). Especially relevant to (1), however, are (b) and (c). When cognition is distributed between the internal and external resources that an individual commands, it is a form of extended cognition . A prominent example of such distribution is the process of remembering, which often involves an individual drawing on and integrating external forms of storage (such as pictures, notes, and other evocative objects) as part of what sustains that individual’s activity of remembering. Here the individual remains the subject who remembers, a subject who integratively draws together both internal and external cognitive resources in doing so (Sutton et al. 2010 ).

The constitutive tasks for a given cognitive activity like remembering also can be distributed between individuals . Here what one individual does forms part of another individual’s activity of remembering. Joint remembering, where two individuals—a long-time married couple, say—remember an event or episode together, exemplifies this kind of distribution of cognitive resources (Barnier et al. 2008; Heersmink 2017 ). This raises the prospect that the larger group that those individuals constitute is a cognitive subject; in this example, it is the married couple that jointly remembers. In such cases, we have a more pointed departure from individualism: cognition is not simply extended but collective or shared (Theiner, Allen, and Goldstone 2010 ; Huebner 2013 ).

Extended and collective cognition allow us to create cultural capital serving as common cognitive resources, as when we collectively devise and deploy writing systems (Donald 1991 ) or when we coordinate our activity with sophisticated technologies, conventions, and heuristics to successfully navigate a large navy vessel (Hutchins 1995 ). We can then individually make use of such common cognitive resources in cognitively extended processing, as when we each use pen and paper to jot down notes for ourselves, or when a sonographer plots out points on a navigational chart. When our causal interaction with external cognitive resources is sufficiently sustained and robust, those resources become integrated to form an extended cognitive system, often one that enhances our cognitive abilities (see Wilson 2010 , 2014 ).

Whether or not nonhuman animals can make use of extended and collective cognitive systems that rely on shared intentionality (Wilson 2017 ), it is human animals that have made themselves masters of these cognitive trades. Traditions, rituals, ceremonies, rehearsals, and cultural symbols are amongst the cognitive resources familiar to social scientists, particularly anthropologists and archaeologists. Such external resources make for what Shore ( 1996 , ch.13) calls the ethnographic mind , resources that Malfouris (2013) has more explicitly conceptualized in terms of the extended cognition paradigm. Footnote 12

Human kinship systems provide a stock of external cognitive resources that partially constitute extended cognitive systems. These cognitive resources include kinship terms and the more elaborate systems of kinship terminologies that have been the focus of linguistic anthropologists. But on the view that I am defending, the external cognitive resource basis is broader than this and includes both linguistic and nonlinguistic resources accessed by perceptual and motivational systems, the latter of which are not essentially linguistically mediated.

Importantly, this culturally extended cognition generates normativity. As the principal binding structure in human cultures with both intra- and inter-generational dimensions, kinship displays a particular form of normativity that governs the “mutuality of being” central to it.

Normativity exists when there is a distinction between a correct, proper, or appropriate way for a process, event, or outcome to be completed, and thus an incorrect, improper or inappropriate such way (Andrews 2020 ). The most familiar and robust forms of normativity are the product of distinctly human practices and institutions. Footnote 13 These presuppose a kind of shared or collective intentionality, such as the norms generated within legal systems, within codes of etiquette, and by morality. Such norms may be explicit in the form of rules or commands or may be implicit in the ways in which we interact with one another. The threefold sophistication to our cognitive processing that I began this section with—internal complexity, extended cognition, and collective intentionality—structures human sociality partly through this normativity.

Any cognitively extended normativity endows us with certain capacities—extended capacities, if you like—in negotiating social life in general. But the extended capacity especially relevant to kinship is the ability to distinguish between sorts of people. People sort one another in many ways: by their height and weight, their eye, hair, and skin colour, their sex and sexual behaviour, their income level and type of employment, their personality and beliefs, their tastes in recreation and entertainment, their ancestry, religion, and ethnicity, their astrological sign and year of birth, and their marital and parental status. This mixture of cross-cutting and hierarchical sorting is a ubiquitous feature of how we think of one another and ourselves (Hacking 2007 ).

Amongst the most important ways in which we use this capacity to sort people is in determining whether other people are like us . The study of this capacity is manifest in social, personality, and developmental psychology. Our people-sorting capacity plays out in social psychology through in-group formation and bias (Brewer 2007 ) and in personality psychology via the need to belong as a fundamental human motivation (Baumeister and Leary 1995 ). A body of evidence from developmental psychology suggests that our sensitivities here emerge early in life (Kelly et al. 2005 ; Kinzler et al. 2007 ; Mahajan and Wynn 2012 ). These sensitivities perhaps build on what Meltzoff ( 2007 ) calls “like me” detectors used in infant imitation (Meltzoff and Moore 1977 ; see Oostenbroek et al. 2016 for a critique). But they are richer, requiring the ascription of bodily, perceptual, cognitive, and relational states to oneself and others.

This sorting of human beings often has significant normative uptake, generating a distinctive type of knowledge that departs from typical third-person knowledge. It is knowledge about how others relate to oneself, first-person plural knowledge. First-person because it is knowledge of one’s self ; plural because it is not just me-knowledge but we-knowledge , knowledge that I have of myself as a part of some larger us . This we-knowledge is group focused and so primes us to feel that we co-belong.

Kinship is one domain in which such we-knowledge is paramount and the feelings of likeness and co-belonging especially pronounced. Progenerativists and their performativist critics agree that kinship constitutes an important way in which people identify others as being like them. In English, the etymology of “kin”, “kind”, and “kindred” entwines the concepts of relatedness and likeness, as do common idioms and colloquialism (Like father, like son; A chip off the old block; The seed never falls far from the tree). One’s kin both feel like or similar to oneself in an important respect, as well as being of one’s own kind, as both Sahlins ( 2013 ) and Strathern ( 2020 , ch.1) note.

These types of idioms and usages, and more generally the connection between kinship and felt likeness, are cross-culturally robust. This connection between kinship and felt likeness permeates much of the ethnographic diversity that Sahlins reviews in documenting support for his view of kinship as culture, not biology. Sharing the same birthday for certain Inuit groups in Greenland (Sahlins 2013 , 9) or the same house for the Nyakyusa in the African Rift Valley (Sahlins 2013 , 22) can constitute the grounds for the mutuality of being characteristic of kinship. This connection also holds of examples more standardly cited by performativists, such as the Langkawi in Malaysia and the Zumbagua in highland Ecuador (Carsten 2004 , 137–140), where house and food sharing constitute the making of kinship. What is co-partaken is a similarity in trajectory, a life experience taken to be of the same kind. Cross-culturally, those who are conceptualized as kin share something important, a sense of common belonging. Footnote 14

Friends, co-workers, political associates, professional colleagues, and those with whom one shares strong interests and core values can also be felt to be like us, and so are amongst those with whom one co-participates in a sense of mutual being. Recall that kinship relations are distinguished from all of these, however, in that they create a sense of binding and belonging that non-incidentally links together individuals within and across generations. The fundamentality of kinship makes it no surprise that when other forms of “mutuality of being” gain a grip on our identities—as in ethnic, racialized, nationalistic, and even globalist identities—they often do so by invoking the language of kinship.

4 Progenerative constraints and the performance of kinship

So much for (1) and the claim that kinship employs a cultural form of extended cognition that draws on extended mechanisms of like us detection and binding. If such mechanisms do underwrite the culturally extended cognition that governs kinship, progenerativism about kinship follows if progenerative properties and relations have a distinctive role in kinship, so conceived. (2) claims that they do because there is an asymmetrical dependence between progeneration and other features that allow kinship to be made or performed through culturally extended cognition.

Bernard Chapais’s ( 2008 , 2014 , 2016 ) identification of precursor cognitive abilities for kin discrimination in nonhuman primates is relevant to defending this claim. Chapais has argued that nonhuman primates have homologues to many of the core components of what he calls the deep structure to human kinship systems that require the cognitive capacity to recognize and distinguish kin, particularly uterine kin. Chapais himself does not draw on the extended cognition paradigm in articulating the nature of these cognitive capacities in nonhuman primates. But given their perceptual and low-level conceptual nature, it is plausible that the like us detectors that, I have claimed, are part of the extended cognitive systems driving human kinship are shared by nonhuman primates. Whatever we say of nonhuman primate kinship itself, Footnote 15 it should be less controversial that the external resources that humans have integrated with their in-the-head capacities—language, conventions, rules, practices—that make human kinship distinctive from its primate precursors are readily conceptualized as constituents of extended cognitive systems.

But why think that such extended cognitive systems in our own species support a progenerative view of kinship? In discussing the significance of the claim that biological motherhood is sometimes denied, overridden, or ignored in the construction of kinship, Chapais notes that “motherhood creates genealogical kinship. Whatever the ideology of procreation, the biological facts of pregnancy, parturition, lactation, and maternal care translate into matrifilial links.” (Chapais 2008 , 55). The biological facts that Chapais intimates but doesn’t specify are what I have been calling progenerative facts, and the matrifilial links that our sensitivity to those facts generates are a function of extended cognitive machinery centred on like us detectors. Progenerative facts include the following:

Females are pregnant prior to giving birth.

The newly-born and young are not self-sufficient and are relatively vulnerable and so require nurturance and protection for an extended period of time.

Those reproduced develop to become adults and often themselves reproduce.

Adults, those who reproduced them, and those whom they have reproduced are sometimes alive at the same time.

A female can give birth to multiple individuals over time.

Our sensitivity to such progenerative facts establishes the intra- and intergenerational filiation that distinguishes kinship, ultimately endowing us with basic concepts of (respectively) pregnancy, care-provision, development, generations, and siblings. It does so in concert with the cognitive capacity to recognize both the relevant individual kin and the corresponding progenerative relations between them.

Important for the argument here is that these facts are suitably low-level to be universally known by members of every human culture. (This feature of progenerative facts also makes plausible the view that they are structuring precursors to human kinship in our primate ancestors.) Their constancy in an individual’s sociocultural environment allows them to function as external cognitive resources for that individual. For this reason, they can be integrated with internal cognitive resources to form the cognitively extended systems that govern human kinship.

Progenerative facts contrast in these respects with two other sorts of fact about kinship. The first of these are scientifically-mediated facts about reproduction, birth, and nurturance, such as the following:

Conception occurs when one or more ova are fertilized by one or more sperm, producing one or more zygotes.

The ovum and sperm are the biological substances contributed intergenerationally to form new individuals.

Genes, which are made up of many base pairs of DNA, make a significant causal contribution to many observable traits that are inherited.

Mutations in genes can lead to different phenotypic characters in offspring.

Deficiencies or excesses in certain proteins can significantly alter a child’s developmental trajectory.

The biological and medical sciences discover such facts. Unlike progenerative facts, these facts are not generally known and accepted, even if the continuities between folk and scientific knowledge in “Western” cultures makes them more generally known there than in many other cultures. For this reason, the extended forms of cognition structured by scientifically-mediated facts are culturally specific and gain significantly more limited purchase on the like us mechanisms that govern kinship.

Progenerative facts about kinship also contrast, in these respects, with institutional facts about kinship. These concern social regularities and norms about kinship, including the following:

Upon death, property is typically inherited by those classified as kin.

Those identified as kin, especially parents, have moral and legal obligations to nurture and care for their children.

Procreative sex and sex more generally are regulated by one or another institution of marriage.

Individuals whose adoption creates or augments a family acquire many (if not all) of the rights and responsibilities of biological relatives.

Families are recognized in various ways by larger-scale social institutions, including clans and states.

Such institutional facts about kinship are often important to particular kinship practices but lack the universality and cognitive shallowness that characterize progenerative facts. To gain the cognitive purchase that progenerative facts have they require further specification within particular cultural circumstances. Most importantly, that specification presupposes cognitively accessible progenerative facts. Ideologies of procreation within a specific culture construct how members of that culture think of kin. But this construction involves re-shaping or re-purposing extended cognitive machinery antecedently geared to respond to progenerative facts.

So (2) rests on the following conception of kinship. Progenerative facts generate basic kinship relations between mothers, fathers, and children that, in turn, are readily recognizable across all human cultures. As Chapais has argued (2008, 54–57), such facts (or perhaps a subset of them) underpin nonhuman precursors to human kinship via their uterine-based recognition throughout the Primate order consisting of approximately 250 species. Sophistications to this recognitionally-based, extended cognitive kinship system in our own species ultimately generate both scientifically-mediated facts and institutional facts about kinship. Scientifically-mediated facts have an uneven cultural distribution and have limited cognitive purchase on individuals, even within the cultures in which they are accepted and accorded significance. Institutional facts vary cross-culturally and require significantly more complicated cognitive capacities, such as those created by language and those required for many forms of collective intentionality. Both kinds of fact about kinship are anchored by a concept of kinship constrained by progenerative facts. For this reason, other facts about kinship, as important as they are for how individuals within specific cultural contexts perform kinship, are distinctively reliant on progenerative facts (see also Holy 1996 , 167).

To see how varied ideologies of procreation are accommodated on this threefold conception of progenerative, scientifically-mediated, and institutional facts about kinship, consider a phenomenon such as partible paternity , which allows for multiple biological fathers (Walker, Flinn, and Hill 2010 ), alongside partible maternity. Beliefs about and practices incorporating partible paternity correspond to institutional facts , turning as they do on complex cognitive capacities deployed in culturally-specific settings. Given that biological paternity has a restricted visible signature, there are few readily-detectable progenerative facts that partible paternity contradicts. Biological maternity, by contrast, has multiple visible signatures, such as pregnancy and parturition, that biological fatherhood lacks. The corresponding progenerative facts, such as the first listed above—females are pregnant prior to giving birth—constrain the development of beliefs and practices that incorporate partible maternity. That is why truly partible maternity has historically been much rarer across cultures. Having been facilitated primarily by relatively recent technologies of surrogacy, facts about partible maternity are perhaps best thought of as scientifically-mediated facts.

One might reasonably wonder whether a progenerative fact, such as that females are pregnant prior to giving birth, can be undermined by related technologies that create artificial wombs or make possible trans maternity. I think that the answer to this question is clearly “yes”. Supposing so, in any case, serves to underscore that the role that progenerative facts play in kinship does not imply that they cannot change due to technological or cultural shifts over time.

I have intimated that the reliance of both scientifically-mediated and institutional facts about kinship on progenerative facts is at least partially evolutionary in nature. Cognitive access to progenerative facts is a part of the deep history of kinship shared by human and nonhuman primates and is the bedrock on which other facts about human kinship rest. One might also ask whether this reliance is also developmental . That is, do children scaffold their knowledge of the larger set of facts about kinship on that of progenerative facts? Extensive collaborative research on Madagascar between developmental psychologists and anthropologists provides a rich context for answering this question, even if it does not (yet?) produce a definitive answer to it.

As Astuti, Solomon, and Carey (2004, 19) note, “Madagascar has been recognized by anthropologists as one of those places where traditional procreational models of kinship do not work because people emphasize the importance of post-natal processes in determining kinship and personhood over the facts of procreation”. Building on Bloch’s ( 1993 ) ethnographic research with the Zamifinary on birth and kinship and using Solomon’s (1996) paradigm for probing implicit beliefs about family resemblance, Bloch, Solomon, and Carey ( 2001 ) explored both Zamifinary children’s and adult’s beliefs about the inheritance of bodily and psychological characteristics. They reported two striking main findings.

First, Zamifinary adults appear to share the view that bodily (but not psychological) traits are inherited from a birth parent. Second, Zamifinary children acquire this view of biological inheritance only during their teenage years, significantly later than the ages at which children in North America do. The first finding suggests—against those who think that the distinction between “biological” and “social” facts about kinship is merely projected by anthropologists to all cultures—that a theory of biological inheritance is a mechanism driving inferential reasoning, even in a culture whose ethnographies suggest a limited role for such a theory. Footnote 16 The second finding suggests—against those who view such biological knowledge as a prior, innate constraint on kinship—that views about biological inheritance are acquired through a long process of cultural immersion.

In their monographic treatment of Malagasy views, Astuti, Solomon, and Carey (Astuti et al. 2004 ) replicated these results with the Vezo on Madagascar and extensively discussed both their location and significance (see also Astuti 2007 , 2009 ). In their concluding comments, after providing a careful statement of the significance of the first finding, they offered an explanation for why Vezo social discourse avoids “drawing attention to the exclusivity of the biological relations between birth parents and their children” (117). Here Astuti, Solomon, and Carey appeal to the instrumental value this avoidance has in creating community cohesion. But it is the second finding that might be thought more directly relevant for the developmental reading of the distinctive reliance view I am defending here. That finding suggests that the gradual and culturally variable acquisition of knowledge of progenerative facts by children makes it unlikely that those facts play a distinctive role in children’s developmental trajectory.

To see this, consider the putative progenerative fact that children share their birth parents’ bodily traits. The studies suggest that Malagasy children reject this claim in favour of the view that children share both the bodily and psychological traits of those adults who raise them (“adopted parents”). Since children come to acquire the contrary adult view, people in Malagasy cultures seem to begin without a theory of biological inheritance and later acquire it. If so, knowledge of the progenerative facts cannot be a developmental scaffold for later kinship knowledge.

This result may well undermine a developmental reading of the distinctive reliance thesis that I have been defending. But consider three other possibilities. First, Malagasy children’s task performance here may simply be an adaptation of the adult view that over-generalizes from psychological to all traits in the human case. Second, knowledge of other progenerative facts is compatible with lacking a theory of biological inheritance to explain within-family resemblance. That some such knowledge is present early on is suggested by the fact that Malagasy children as young as six recognize that animal offspring share the species kind of their birth parents (Astuti et al. 2004 , 90–102). Third, children sharing their birth parents’ bodily traits may not be a progenerative fact at all. What is and isn’t a progenerative fact is not an a priori matter, as already indicated by the cases of partible paternity and partible maternity. Theories of inheritance may instead turn on scientifically-mediated or institutional facts about kinship.

5 Progenerative kinship as a homeostatic property cluster

So perhaps both evolutionary and developmental readings of the distinctive reliance thesis that I have been articulating can be defended. In any case, the progenerative view of kinship and the argument I have given for it also can be summarily expressed in terms of the homeostatic property cluster (HPC) view of natural kinds due to Richard Boyd (Boyd 1999 ) and diversely developed and explored by a number of others (Griffiths 1999 ; Khalidi 2013 ). Here I concentrate on two related tasks: showing how kinship’s standing as an HPC kind further articulates the claim that kinship is progeneratively constrained, and subsequently consolidating the view that the HPC conception of kinship supports progenerativism. Footnote 17

The HPC conception of kinds has garnered attention amongst philosophers for its promise for application to a much messier and more complicated world than that typically portrayed in traditional accounts of natural kinds. Unlike what has been called traditional essentialist views of natural kinds (Wilson, Barker, and Brigandt 2007 ), on the HPC view there are no individual properties strictly necessary for membership in a given kind, with kinds instead being structured by clusters of properties that are stabilized by underlying mechanisms and robust relations. Biological and social features of kinship cluster in just this way, with cultural practices mediating some of the requisite robust relations.

Since the HPC view has been developed as an alternative to traditional essentialism about natural kinds, a HPC approach to kinship also departs from this kind of essentialism about kinship (Wilson 2016 , 576 − 78). Footnote 18 Viewing kinship as appropriately modelled as an HPC kind, however, is compatible with but doesn’t entail any form of progenerativism about kinship; the HPC view is neutral here. What more is needed to establish a progenerative view of kinship within the HPC framework is to show how the requisite homeostatic clustering reflects the kind of distinctive reliance that I have argued other features of kinship have on progenerative facts.

The arguments of Sects.  3 and 4 make establishing this additional claim relatively straightforward. The progenerative facts that serve as constraints on kinship are not a random assortment of facts relating to kinship but hold together because of underlying biological mechanisms governing progeneration. That is, they form a homeostatic (or perhaps better, homeo dynamic ) cluster unified by mechanisms governing pregnancy, parturition, organismic development, and human life spans. And they generate a basic conception of kinship because they are readily detected by the like-us mechanisms that constitute part of the extended cognitive machinery we use in generating the sense of intra- and intergenerational belonging that distinguishes kinship from other social relationships. The cognitive accessibility of the facts they detect make it likely that these like us mechanisms have homologous precursors in nonhuman primates. It follows that their operation is not mediated by putatively uniquely human traits, such as language or culture. Both scientifically-mediated facts about kinship and institutional facts about kinship, each of which enriches this basic concept of kinship, differ in these respects.

Scientifically-mediated facts about kinship cluster and do so in part by relying on more elaborate forms of these mechanisms. Yet they lack the universal cognitive pull of progenerative facts, even within the cultures in which they are more widely known. Their sophistication also requires language and other cultural forms of external mediation for them to gain cognitive purchase on us.

Institutional facts about kinship cluster together with progenerative facts to generate culturally diverse performances of kinship. That clustering is underwritten by cultural practices and conventions, which themselves can vary significantly across cultures. But without progenerative facts, there would be no such culturally-mediated clusters. Thus, kinship has an internal homeostatic property cluster structure that mirrors the kind of distinctive reliance that, I have argued, supports a progenerative view of kinship.

To illustrate how this adaptation of the HPC view applies in a concrete case, consider a practice of postnatal kinmaking often touted by performativists as showing the limitations of progenerativism about kinship, that of adoption, which has been reconsidered in recent discussions. Berman ( 2014 ) has highlighted how facts about the physicality and materiality of pregnancy and childbirth serve as what she calls interactional constraints on practices of adoption or child circulation in the Marshall Islands. Shapiro ( 2016 , 221–228) has identified ways in which those practices occur against a backdrop of progenerative kinship in three cultural locations often cited in constructivist accounts of kinship: the Malay peninsula, the Hawaiian Islands, and amongst the Belcher Islanders in northeastern Canada. People in all of these cultures know progenerative facts and their performances of kinship rely on how this knowledge infuses the institutional facts particular to each culture. The co-presence of progenerative facts in these adoptive practices undermines stronger claims of performativists that kinship is sometimes biologically innocent, floating free of any claims about biology at all (see also Shapiro 2015 ; Wilson 2022a ).

More pertinently here, the cultural universality and cognitive accessibility of progenerative facts affords them an asymmetrical constraining role in how adoption is performed. Scientifically-mediated and institutional facts governing practices or performances of kinship vary across cultures, but the cluster of progenerative facts remains a constant constraint. Thus, the HPC view of kinship integrates biological and cultural dimensions to kinship practices such as adoption within an overarching progenerative framework.

My hypothesis is that this framework can be utilized to explain the range of examples that performativists have produced, including those involving the sharing of birthdays, houses, and food introduced in Sect.  3 in discussing the views of Carsten and Sahlins. Those explanations, and so an ultimate defence of that hypothesis, rest on the kind of attentive re-examination of ethnographies that Berman ( 2014 ) and Shapiro ( 2016 ) present for the case of adoption. A defence of that hypothesis remains a task for another occasion.

6 Progeneratively-constrained kinship: Integration without reduction

This paper offers a new argument for an old view in anthropology: progenerativism about kinship. Sophisticated, culturally specific kinship systems rest on the extended cognitive systems governing intra- and intergenerational belonging, systems responsive to kinship structures anchored in progenerative facts.

To support this progenerative view of kinship I have reached beyond anthropology in a number of ways, leaning on the non-reductive credentials of recent philosophical views of kinds and cognition in each of Sects.  3 – 5 . In Sect.  5 I appealed to a relatively recent innovation in thinking about natural, social, and human kinds in the philosophy of science, the homeostatic property cluster view. The premises in the core argument in the paper in Sects.  3 and 4 draw from psychology and the cognitive sciences the idea of culturally extended cognition and like us mechanisms sensitive to progenerative facts. I have postulated that kinship derives its distinctiveness and staying power in part from non-linguistic, culturally extended cognition.

On the view I have articulated, progenerative facts about kinship possess a pair of properties that allow them to play a special role in the concept of kinship, a role played neither by the institutional facts central to performativist views nor by more scientifically-mediated facts. Progenerative facts are both part of pre-institutional human sociality (unlike institutional facts) and have a high level of epistemic accessibility. As a result, they are largely shared and capable of generating concepts with everyday cognitive pull (unlike scientifically-mediated facts).

Kinship anchored in such facts represents a form of progenerativism. Euro-American conceptions of kinship are progenerative in much the way that other conceptions of kinship are progenerative. It is just that they are shaped by an additional layer of biological knowledge generated by bioscience and biotechnology, knowledge that plays a central role in reflections on kinship and new reproductive technologies (Strathern 1992b ; Andreassen 2018 ).

I began by noting that the idea that kinship and kin relations are, at their core, progenerative, reproductive, or procreative has raised the red flags of ethnocentrism, epistemic naivety, and reductionism amongst anthropologists who have taken kinship in a constructivist or performativist direction. This paper has provided conceptual resources for moving beyond these negative evaluations of progenerative views of kinship. The kind of knowledge of progenerative facts generated by extended cognitive processing that I have identified is not culturally specific, and one of the key epistemic innovations of the homeostatic property cluster view of kinds is its rejection of traditional essentialism. Moreover, the conceptualisation of kinship as involving extended cognitive processing undermines the basis for viewing progenerative views as reductive in their appeal to psychology and biology. These core features of the resulting integrative conception of kinship thus provide little on which to hang standard criticisms of progenerativism. Kinship can be progenerative without tears.

I use the adjectives progenerative, progeneratively-constrained, reproductive , and procreative interchangeably here. Progenerative views of kinship have persisted within evolutionary (Chapais 2008 ) and linguistic (McConvell 2013 ) anthropology throughout the constructivist turn in kinship studies; see also Godelier ( 2011 ).

For a sense of the current state of kinship studies, see Bamford ( 2019a , 2019b ), Leaf and Read ( 2020 ), Read ( 2019 ), and Shapiro ( 2018b ), as well as the post-progenerative work beyond anthropology encapsulated in the short essays in Clarke and Haraway ( 2018 ). For more on the general contrast between progenerative and performativist views of kinship, see Wilson ( 2022a )

For example, in critically discussing the appeal by anthropologists to folk theories of conception that putatively vary across cultures, Sahlins says that it “is probably better not to speak of ‘biology’ at all, folk or otherwise, since few or no peoples other than Euro-Americans understand themselves to be constructed upon—or in fundamental ways, against—some biological-corporeal substratum” (2013, 77), going on to rehearse information from a range of ethnographic reports.

Implicit sexism and racism surface as criticisms of progenerativism in several contributions to the recent Cambridge Handbook of Kinship . For example, Sarah Franklin says that scepticism about biology’s place in kinship coalesced early on with “critical feminist analyses of how ‘the facts of life’ are often used to justify restrictive and hierarchical gender norms” (Franklin 2019 , 111). In her editorial introduction, Sandra Bamford reflects a common view of the history of the study of kinship in noting that for “many early kinship theorists, acquiring ‘accurate’ (i.e., bioscientific) knowledge of how offspring were produced signalled a critical state in the transition from ‘savagery’ to ‘civilization’” (Bamford 2019b , 10).

The presence of ethnocentricism and racialized primitivism as both flags and dangers are a reminder that the more general decolonial challenge to cultural anthropology remains only partially addressed in the discipline (Allen and Jobson 2016 ; Jobson 2020 ).

In reaching beyond anthropology in these ways, the argument here has affinities with recent work by Vukov and Lassiter, both in its general aim of clearing a new naturalistic pathway within the philosophy of anthropology (Vukov and Lassiter 2020 ) and more specifically in its focus on aspects of 4E contributions from the cognitive sciences to the epistemology of science (Lassiter and Vukov 2021 ). For an overview of 4E cognition, see Newen, Gallagher, and Bruin ( 2018 ).

Here I mean to pre-empt the thought that kinship involves extended cognition only because kinship terminologies, which structure human kinship systems, constitute external cognitive resources. For recent discussion of language and kinship, see the varying views of Leaf and Read ( 2020 : ch.11), Layton ( 2021 ), Passmore et al. ( 2021 ), and Wilson ( 2022a ).

My earlier articulation of a HPC view of kinship (Wilson 2016 ) left open its relationship to what I there called “bio-essentialism”; the discussion in Sect.  5 draws on the core argument of the present paper to advance this issue.

In keeping with the claim that kinship terminology provides additional layering to kinship, rather than serving as its originating source, I note that this distinctive feature of kinship is compatible with forms of kinship that sophisticate the nature of both intra- and inter-generational binding, such as those reflected in Crow-Omaha skewing, whereby maternal and paternal kin terms function differently across generations.

The insufficiency of Sahlins’s characterization of kinship as mutuality of being in failing to distinguish kinship from other significant social relationships, such as friendship, has been widely recognized; see, for example, Bloch ( 2013 , 254), Brightman ( 2013 , 260), and Feuchtwang ( 2013 , 281–282). Much the same problem faces those who simply equate kinship and relatedness.

In taking cognition itself , and not simply the cultural transmission or communication that cognition produces, as transcending the boundary of the individual, this view is more radical than Bloch and Sperber’s (2002) appeal to public representations in their account of the mother brother’s controversy. The same is true vis-à-vis views of cognition within standard cultural evolutionary frameworks (Boyd and Richerson 1985 , 2005 ) and within niche construction theory (Laland et al. 2000 , 2003 ).

Malfouris’s work in cognitive archaeology provides one of the few explicit anthropological engagements with the extended cognition paradigm, despite the gesture toward extended cognition made by others, such as by Donald, Hutchins, and Shore in the work cited in this and the previous paragraph.

That said, I also think that normativity arises in and through nonhuman and human cognition; it is not solely a feature of our own species’ activity (Vincent, Ring, and Andrews 2018 ).

This is not to say that similarity or likeness is either necessary or sufficient for kinship. The realist and anti-essentialist commitments of the HPC view of kinship recounted in Sect.  5 are incompatible with such claims about the relationship between similarity and kinship.

Views about the plausibility of kinship in nonhuman primates turn largely on corresponding views of the role of sophisticated cognitive capacities, language, and cultural norms in kinship; see El Guindi ( 2020 , ch.1–2) and Leaf and Read ( 2020 : ch.4) for recent sceptical views of nonhuman primate kinship.

As Astuti notes elsewhere, “Vezo adults take for granted the constraints imposed on human relations by the biological facts of reproduction. As ethnographers, we witness their efforts to transcend these constraints, and we should strive to represent them for what they are: efforts to work against the ties of biological kinship, to attenuate the difference between birth and nurture, to erase the ‘signs’ that only birth parents can leave on their children.” (2007, 186).

I leave for another occasion the task of locating this conception of kinship as an HPC kind among recent innovations in the literature on kinds and classification in the human sciences (Franklin-Hall 2015 ; Ludwig 2018 ).

The application of the HPC view of natural kinds to kinship in Wilson ( 2016 ) identifies the resulting view as a form of non-reductive realism about kinship, and so as distinct from both the earlier polythetic approach of Needham (1975) and more general views of natural kinds that generated pheneticism and numerical taxonomy about species in the philosophy of biology. For recent discussion of the HPC view and species, see Kendig ( 2022 ) and Wilson ( 2022b ).

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Kinbank: A global database of kinship terminology

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Affiliation Department of Linguistics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America

Roles Data curation

Affiliations Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom, Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

Affiliations Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom, Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Vienna, Austria

Affiliation Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Affiliation Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian, and Scandinavian Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

Affiliation Department of Linguistics, Universidade Federal do Pará, Belém, Pará, Brazil

Affiliation Research School of Biology, Ecology, and Evolution, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

Affiliation Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom

Roles Data curation, Project administration, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom, Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian, and Scandinavian Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

Affiliations Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom, Institute for African Studies, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

Affiliations Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom, Cognitive Science Department, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary

Affiliations Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom, School of English, Communications and Philosophy, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom

Affiliation School of Psychological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Funding acquisition, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Evolution of Cultural Diversity Initiative (ECDI), Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL), Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

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• Sam Passmore, 
• Wolfgang Barth, 
• Simon J. Greenhill, 
• Kyla Quinn, 
• Catherine Sheard, 
• Paraskevi Argyriou, 
• Joshua Birchall, 
• Claire Bowern, 
• Jasmine Calladine, 

• Published: May 24, 2023
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283218
• Peer Review
• Reader Comments

For a single species, human kinship organization is both remarkably diverse and strikingly organized. Kinship terminology is the structured vocabulary used to classify, refer to, and address relatives and family. Diversity in kinship terminology has been analyzed by anthropologists for over 150 years, although recurrent patterning across cultures remains incompletely explained. Despite the wealth of kinship data in the anthropological record, comparative studies of kinship terminology are hindered by data accessibility. Here we present Kinbank, a new database of 210,903 kinterms from a global sample of 1,229 spoken languages. Using open-access and transparent data provenance, Kinbank offers an extensible resource for kinship terminology, enabling researchers to explore the rich diversity of human family organization and to test longstanding hypotheses about the origins and drivers of recurrent patterns. We illustrate our contribution with two examples. We demonstrate strong gender bias in the phonological structure of parent terms across 1,022 languages, and we show that there is no evidence for a coevolutionary relationship between cross-cousin marriage and bifurcate-merging terminology in Bantu languages. Analysing kinship data is notoriously challenging; Kinbank aims to eliminate data accessibility issues from that challenge and provide a platform to build an interdisciplinary understanding of kinship.

Citation: Passmore S, Barth W, Greenhill SJ, Quinn K, Sheard C, Argyriou P, et al. (2023) Kinbank: A global database of kinship terminology. PLoS ONE 18(5): e0283218. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283218

Editor: Daniel Redhead, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, GERMANY

Received: July 25, 2022; Accepted: March 3, 2023; Published: May 24, 2023

Copyright: © 2023 Passmore et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: The Kinbank database is freely accessible at https://zenodo.org/record/6471794 , as are details of how each individual dataset can be cited ( S2 File ). The data is interactively available at www.kinbank.net .

Funding: FMJ received funding from the European Research Council (Starting Grant VARIKIN ERC-Stg-639291). NE received funding from the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (Grant CE140100041). JB and FMJ received funding from the British Academy (International Partnership Mobility Grant 160281). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Human kinship organization is remarkably diverse. Our patterns of caring for each other, finding partners, and cooperating with relatives show more variation than any other species on the planet, despite kinship being anchored in biological and social constraints [ 1 ]. Kinship relations in human communities are created through both basic reproductive processes and the social making of family ties which, importantly, are transmitted through language and culture [ 2 ]. Central to social organization, kinship has influenced many aspects of our evolutionary history including the distribution of linguistic and genetic diversity [ 3 ], technology [ 4 ], the likelihood of external warfare [ 5 , 6 ], and is thought to be the factor behind purported psychological “WEIRD-ness” observed in western societies [ 7 ]. Anthropological studies of kinship have traditionally encompassed marriage customs, the tracing of descent and community relations, the jurisdiction of rights and responsibilities in offspring, and the variety of residential groupings for family, with existing calls to use quantitative and evolutionary methods to understand kinship diversity, and its role in cultural evolution and linguistic change [ 8 , 9 ]. In the last half-century this remit has broadened, including e.g. new reproductive technologies, single-parent families, LGBT+ kinship, and different kinds of relatedness [ 10 , 11 ]. While research foci change, one consistent strand has been the linguistic denotation and organization of family members in kinship terminology : the patterned vocabulary of words for kin.

This paper introduces Kinbank, a free and open-source database that centralizes and systematizes global cross-cultural data on kinship terms of 1,229 spoken and signed languages, providing an accessible and comprehensive resource for documenting and analyzing kinship diversity. The organization of kinship terminology is remarkably variable across languages. Different languages distinguish relationships by using distinct terms, or they conflate the relationship by using the same term. For example, in Lau Fijian (Fiji) a woman refers to her male sibling using the same word that he refers to her ( weka i.e. ‘opposite-sex sibling’); Ngiyambaa (Australia) only has one term for children, unlike son and daughter in English; and Dutch (Netherlands) groups parent’s siblings children (cousins), and sibling’s children (nieces and nephews) together under neef (m) and nicht (f).

This structured variation in kinship terms has preoccupied anthropologists for 150 years [ 12 ]. Virtually all ethnographic and descriptive linguistic scholars in the 20 th century elicited kinterms from speakers in the communities they studied. As a result, kinship terminology is richly documented. However, these data are scattered. Terms have been collected in comparative surveys [ 9 ], documented within ethnographies [ 13 ], included as word lists within grammars [ 14 ], or scattered through dictionaries and specialized articles. Bringing these data together is important, because kinship terminology studies have made valuable contributions to our understanding of social structure. For example, studies have shown how linguistic denotation indicates group marriage norms [ 15 ] and how those rules are manipulated for economic [ 16 ], or reproductive benefit [ 17 , 18 ]. Research has used kinterms to identify cross-cultural differences in parental care roles [ 19 ] and revealed logical structures in terminology [ 20 , 21 ]. Furthermore, variations in kinship terminology have been used to infer the structures of early human society [ 22 ] and societies in prehistory [ 23 – 25 ].

In specialist study, kinship terminology has been a fruitful avenue for understanding contemporary and historical relationships between language and behavior. For example, the adoption of novel algebraic methods to transcribe and interpret kinship terminologies have provided valuable insights to the intersection of genealogical and cultural understandings of kinship [ 26 ]. Similarly, applying optimality theory has reframed kinship terminology diversity within a domain of rules and constraints that can generate cultural variability [ 1 ]. Despite the value of these approaches, there is an increasing disconnect between the field’s theoretical advancement and the data routinely used by other social sciences. The specialist knowledge needed to engage with cutting-edge kinship scholarship has meant work in fields such as psychology, linguistics, and wider anthropology largely rely on 70-year-old typologies [ 27 ], which lack cross-cultural validity [ 28 ]. This disconnect perpetuates ideas that existing knowledge does not support, such as the relationship between kinship typology and social norms [ 29 ]. Kinbank has the potential to re-engage diverse disciplines with the study of kinship terminology by offering streamlined access to data and sources, allowing specialists to quickly expand and generalize their findings, and by centralizing key new data in a single resource.

Since the turn of the 21st century, fields such as anthropology, psychology, and linguistics have taken a (re)turn to the empirical analysis of kinship systems [ 1 , 8 , 27 , 30 ]. Cognitive models of kinship terminology highlight strategies to uncover universal processing principles [ 1 , 31 , 32 ], and social categories of kinship are used to prescribe cultural patterns of behavior [ 33 , 34 ]. Such studies rely on kinship terminology, but have been restricted to existing aggregated data [ 31 ], or sourcing their own terminology [ 32 ], and would be improved or aided by larger datasets. Kinship is also becoming increasingly central to economic historians, who have used kinship terminology structure to infer broader patterns of social structure [ 7 , 35 ]. With access to broader data, members of the Kinbank project have: demonstrated links between linguistic and social organization [ 36 ], and the regional variation in these relationships [ 29 ]; shown the modularity of Pama-Nyungan kinship terminology and quantified the connections between modules [ 37 ]; presented a collection of terms for languages whose kinship systems had never been fully described alongside new methods for Tupian and Cariban languages [ 38 ]; used corpus-based studies to show the difference in cultural evolutionary changes between kinship words and basic vocabulary [ 39 ]; used field studies to revive research on the acquisition of kinship language and concepts by children [ 40 , 41 ]; and performed multiple studies showing how kinship finds its way into core grammar [ 42 , 43 ].

Kinbank centralises terminology from approximately 15% of known language diversity, at least 3.28 billion speakers (47% of the speakers in Ethnologue), including speakers for 96% of the territories covered in Ethnologue, and at least 20% of every continent [ 44 ]. Kinbank contains the largest and broadest collection of terminology available, offering a platform to investigate variation in kinship terminology. Researchers can leverage Kinbank to further explore the topics above or many other questions regarding kinship and kinship terminology. We offer two examples of analyses. First, we show a global analysis on forms of kinterms, testing whether we observe gender bias in the phonology of parental terms. Second, we use phylogenetic techniques to test for a co-evolutionary relationship between kinship terminology structure and patterns of cross-cousin marriage. These examples exemplify the types of methodological and theoretical approaches researchers can address using the Kinbank dataset. For example: is there any generalisable relationship between the behavioural structures and social norms of kinship and kinship terminology? What are the unattested categories of kin and what does that tell us about the constraints of language? How learnable are different terminological systems? The questions we can ask of kinship terminology are plentiful. With a comparative database, they are now also testable.

The Kinbank database

Data, sampling, and database structure.

Kinbank provides a digitized, open-access, and global database of kinship terminologies, resulting from the international, multi-funder collaboration of four aligned research projects. They are: Parabank based at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australian National University; Varikin at the University of Bristol; MPEGKin at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi; and Kinura at the University of Helsinki. The Kinbank database is freely accessible at https://zenodo.org/record/7232746 , as are details of how each individual entry or dataset can be cited (S1 Table in S1 File ). Kinbank is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International licence.

The etic approach

Capturing the global variation in kinship terminology requires a framework from which to compare languages. While much of the recent academic literature about kinship terminologies is written in English, the variety of categorizations found cross-linguistically means that using English kinship terms to describe cross-cultural variation would be scientifically inaccurate and ethnocentric. Historically, there have been two approaches to kinship terminology: emic (language-internal logic) and etic (objective language-independent grid for comparison) [ 45 ]. The emic approach seeks to unlock the inner logic of a language’s kinship terms by taking locally meaningful categories of terms as a fundamental unit of interest. The etic approach relies on a language independent yardstick, often in the form of a genealogical grid of kin types (a genealogical position in the etic grid), which kinterms (the word used to describe one or more genealogical positions) are laid on top of. For example: the Kayardild (Australia) kinship terms kularrint and duujint would be emically described as "opposite-sex sibling" and "younger same-sex sibling", but kularrint would be etically described as equating to man’s female sibling and woman’s male sibling, and duujint would be man’s younger male sibling, and woman’s younger female sibling. The emic approach provides a succinct description of the relationship and how the terms fit together within the language, but is difficult to apply cross-linguistically (e.g. opposite-sex sibling does not apply in an English terminology). The formulations used in an etic approach are less elegant, but we can more easily apply the category of man’s younger male sibling to other languages ( brother in English).

The goal of this database is to facilitate high-level cross-cultural comparison by providing the first open standardized base from which to compare kinship terms across languages, so Kinbank assumes an etic and genealogical approach. The etic approach provides a fine-grained and language-independent yardstick for the set of kin types over which each kin term can range, enabling us to quantify the similarity and differences across languages [ 46 ]. Here are three examples of how this could apply to kinship terminology: 1) By measuring how far particular terms extend over etically defined referents like father, father’s brother, and mother’s brother, we can readily measure the extent of referential categories and compare their semantics across societies: e.g. Does uncle for parent’s male siblings in English cover the same relatives as oba in Japanese (yes) or kakuju in Kayardilt (no)?. 2) We may ask questions about the similarity of referential ranges in different subsets of kinterms: e.g. Do parental terms tend to be extended to parents’ siblings more often than sibling terms to parents’ siblings’ children? And 3) we can also explore the structural similarity of kinship terminologies across languages [ 28 ]. Using an etic grid presents the opportunity to ask more of these types of questions and to draw macro- and cross-cultural conclusions. This has been done in previous approaches, such as when Nerlove and Romney [ 47 ] used an etic grid to determine 12 types of sibling terminologies, representing 98% of the observed languages. These authors established a design space of 4,140 possible sibling terminologies, derived from an etic set of eight sibling categories derived from three rules of distinction (gender of sibling, gender of speaker, and relative age). Using Kinbank’s etic structure and advances in statistical methods, we can extend this approach to larger subsets of kin and more complex methods of comparison (e.g., [ 28 ]).

The Kinbank sample

At time of publication, Kinbank holds 210,903 different data points across 1,229 languages ( Fig 1 ). The collaboration between Parabank, Varikin, MPEGKIN, and Kinura has resulted in a database with a broad global sample, coupled with focused sampling from specific language families. Each language is linked to a stable and unique linguistic identifier "Glottocode" that is commonly used to link language and cultural data to other databases [ 48 ]. By indexing on source, we can also separate terminologies within a language across sources, which allows analyses to measure concordance across sources, track change over time, or identify within-language variation. Each project had its own sampling objective, which we describe below.

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Each point indicates a unique language variety and is centered on the geographical center-point of the area where the speakers live when the data were recorded, but may also indicate a historical location, the demographic center-point or some other representative point. Colored points indicate languages from the 7 language families mentioned in text: Austronesian (light blue; n = 377); Pama-Nyungan (red; n = 105); Indo-European (yellow; n = 106), Bantu (orange; n = 113), Uralic (purple; n = 25), Tupian (maroon; n = 29); Cariban (pale blue; n = 7) and other languages (grey).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283218.g001

Parabank collected kinship terminologies opportunistically, including the digitisation of the terminologies from Morgan’s 1871 landmark global kinship survey, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity [ 12 ]. The global nature of the Parabank sample means the database holds terminologies from societies with a range of ecological pressures and kinship structures, allowing us to explore convergent patterns of terminology (e.g. [ 28 ] across the global sample.

Varikin focused on sampling languages that are paired both with a dated language phylogeny (e.g. [ 49 ] and with existing anthropological databases (e.g. D-PLACE [ 50 ]). The most sampled language families by Varikin wereAustronesian (n = 375), Atlantic-Congo (117), Indo-European (105), and Pama-Nyungan (104). This sampling strategy allows for a range of phylogenetic analyses that control for patterns of autocorrelation that might occur through descent [ 51 , 52 ]. The focus on societies within the Ethnographic Atlas additionally allows kinship terminology data to be connected to demographic and health surveys [ 53 ].

MPEGKin compiled data on two large language families of South America, Tupian and Cariban, sampling as densely as possible across the major branches of the families given the available ethnographic and linguistic documentation. Beyond making new data available for these lesser-known languages [ 38 ], MPEGKin was designed to support quantitative comparative studies and traditional linguistic reconstruction with these language families (e.g., [ 54 , 55 ]).

Kinura collected kinship terminologies of all the main groups of the Uralic family. The sampling focused on matching the kin term data with the speaker groups included in the genetic study by Tambets et al. in 2018 [ 56 ].

Focused sampling for languages attached to existing cultural and linguistic databases (e.g. D-PLACE [ 50 ]) and to computational language phylogenies (e.g. [ 57 ]), allows evolutionary analytic approaches to this important cultural domain. The combination of focused regional samples and broad global coverage will allow future research to compare the patterns and correlates of diversity across different scopes. Kinbank is citable as a whole and as separate regional projects (see S1 Table in S1 File ).

Concepts in Kinbank

The primary search criteria for Kinbank were a core set of 115 kin types (88 genealogical kin and 27 kin by marriage (affine); available in S2 Table in S1 File ). The core set of kin types encompass parents, siblings, and children; up to grandparents and down to grandchildren, and then from parents to their siblings and parents’ siblings’ children. We limited the set to two generations above and below the ego (grandparents to grandchildren). This is a commonly discussed range in the kinship literature, but it also represents the most common set of generations that exist during ego’s lifetime, which is four generations with a generation of between 20–30 years. Not all generations necessarily exist at the same time, e.g., ego might have grandparents when they are young, and grandchildren when they are old. It is uncommon for five generations to co-exist. Many languages have separate terms depending on the gender of the speaker, and we collected all such terms where available. We aimed to collect affinal terms for spouses, spouses of siblings, and the spouses’ nuclear family. Within ego’s generation (ego being the central figure from which relationships stem) and ego’s parents’ generation, kin types are also distinguished by relative age, and age of linking relative, where appropriate. This set is derived from a genealogical grid of relatives and aims to capture a globally recurrent set of cross-culturally valid kin-members.

The dataset contains terms of reference (the answer to: "who is this person to you"), as opposed to terms of address (the answer to: "what do you call this person") (48). Reference terms are more commonly the focus of anthropological data collection, since these designate formal categories of relationship (e.g. "father" vs "dad"), and are less prone to politeness effects which often extend the range of kinterms (e.g. by employing "uncle" / "aunt" to address non-related elder men and women as a term of respect). Terms of address were recorded when they were easily available but were not the focus of this collection.

The set of individuals designated by kinterms is culturally variable [ 58 ]. Some communities have a restricted set of kinterms, and others an expanded set extending beyond the established genealogical grid [ 59 ]; however, since the unit of the database is the kinterm, the database is flexible to account for different emic characterizations of kin relations. In the case of a restricted set, cells that are not required are left empty. This presents the difficult challenge of knowing whether a term is absent because this relative is not considered a kin member or because it was not recorded in the source. The difference between a language lacking a term for a particular kin type (true absence), and available records of a language lacking particular terms (data uncertainty), is important. Comparisons with closely related languages, the use of multiple sources, and iterative, community-elicited data collection can help to narrow this uncertainty in future.

Collection procedure

Data are entered into Kinbank as either primary or secondary data, and is affiliated with a source reference detailing where the data came from. The data are most commonly secondary, and transcribed by coders into the Kinbank collection template. Secondary sources ranged from ethnographies and grammars, to simpler descriptions like wordlists. In the majority of cases, secondary sources describe kinterms etically following the tradition laid out by Morgan (1871). The etic descriptions usually align with the list of 115 core kin types. In these instances, kin term collection is a matter of copying terms to the appropriate place. It is common for source categories to be less refined than Kinbank categories. In this case, coders would apply the term to all relevant categories. For example: the category father’s brother is commonly used in secondary sources, but this aggregates four Kinbank categories (father’s elder brother, father’s younger brother, and whether the speaker is male or female). A coder would apply the term to all four of these categories in the absence of further information. In the rare instance that kinterms were not etically described (often using English nomenclature), coders would search the text for context and confirmation that these categories align, and record any inferences in the notes column for each kin term. Coders were also encouraged to flag where original sources may have errors.

Kin terms are transcribed as closely as possible to their source form. Since terminologies are predominantly collected by anthropologists and not linguists, sources are primarily in Roman script (as opposed to other standardized orthographies) and can contain transcription inconsistencies across languages. Kinbank makes no judgments on which transcriptions are correct or incorrect, besides obvious typos. The database accommodates phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet where these are available. Some sources recorded terminology using Cyrillic; in this case kinterms are transliterated into Roman characters, with the original form in an adjacent column. This approach means that the copying is consistent within source but may not be consistent across sources or languages.

Some data was elicited from native speakers or academics actively working with a particular language. In this case the person(s) who offered the terms is listed as the source. When data was collected from native speakers, the fieldworker would use various methods to collect kinterms. For example: the fieldworker would have informants explain their genealogy, eliciting kinterms through this process, coupled with participant observation to observe the kinterms being used in context. Academics actively studying a language were provided with the template sheet and a description of the task and asked to fill in the categories with any necessary comments or adjustments, using the methods above. When there was specific context, meaning, or otherwise interesting information for a particular kinterm it was recorded in the notes. Some sources (speakers or secondary) may offer many more kinterms that apply beyond the 115 core types. In this instance, we expand the parameter list to accommodate the additional kinterms (see S2 Table in S1 File ). In total there are 940 kin types within Kinbank, but many of these are sparsely populated. Some languages also contain multiple terms for a particular kin type. In this instance each kin term is entered separately.

Kinbank database format

Data are stored and distributed in the Cross-Linguistic Data Format (CLDF; [ 60 ]), which is a flat structured database stored in comma-separated value (CSV) files ( Table 1 ), and built with the affiliated tools CLDFbench [ 61 ]. This format is easily importable into common analysis tools like Microsoft Excel, and data analysis languages like R or Python.

An extended description with additional structuring files is given in S3 Table in S1 File .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283218.t001

It is common for languages to have multiple terms recorded for some kin types. Due to the combination of form and kin type, the database can accommodate multiple terms per kin type. Multiple terms for a single kin type may occur for a number of reasons: borrowed and native terms coexisting, dialectal differences, different registers, or simply language flexibility [ 62 ]. The database offers no judgement as to the specific cause. Again, users can refer to the original source(s) for further information.

Kinbank was designed to be corrected and expanded over time. The ‘living’ datasets are stored at github.com/kinbank . By using Github to store the living datasets, users can raise issues with existing data, propose corrections, and upload new languages. All changes are reviewed by Kinbank authors. New languages can be added by filling in the template document of core kin types found on the homepage of each repository. Living database are not static. To ensure stability to researchers, the datasets are periodically versioned on Zenodo.

Inter-rater reliability

Forty-four languages were collected independently by both ANU and Bristol teams and used to determine the level of intercoder reliability. A major avenue for error is when kinship terms are collected for one language but two different sources disagree on kinterms. We focus on ensuring the structural paradigm of a particular kinship terminology is consistent (i.e. that all parent’s female sibling s are syncretized to "aunt" in English, not whether one source specifies "aunt" or "aunty"); inter-rater reliability is based on this benchmark. To compare collections, we used a structural similarity kappa value, which compares the pattern of syncretism within each collection, accounting for similarity by chance. Across all compared relationships, we obtained a structural similarity kappa value of 0.80. Calculation and discussion of interrater reliability is available in supplementary material and S4 Table in S1 File .

Analysis of Kinbank data

The Kinbank collection of 1,229 languages offers a large digitised sample of kinship terminology in an accessible format. The collection has 887 languages that contain all grandparent terms, 864 languages with all sibling terms, 728 languages with all terms for parents and parent’s siblings, 604 languages with all nibling terms, and 506 languages with all sibling and cousin terms. The most frequently collected kinterms are all nuclear family terms: Father (n = 1,197), Mother (1,192), younger brother (1,161), elder brother (1,149), elder sister (1,138), and younger sister (1,134). Closely followed by father’s father (1,110) and mother’s father (1,119). The least common terms, from within the core set, are a combination of affinal and cousin terms: wife’s sister (545), father’s brother’s daughter (552), husband’s sister (552), husband’s brother (554), and mother’s sister’s daughter (556). On average, languages have 23 terms: 2 grandparent terms, 3 sibling terms, 5 terms for parents and parent’s siblings, 4 nibling terms, and 6 sibling and cousin terms. Averages only tell us part of the picture however, as languages can have as low as one kin term for each set (with the exception of parents and parent’s siblings which has a minimum of two) or multiple terms for every category. Although languages range significantly in the number of kinterms they use, some syncretisms are “socially unthinkable” [ 63 , 64 ]. The law of collaterality states that we cannot observe syncretisms between kin that are linked by a member of the opposite sex, without other parallel sycrentisms occurring, a rule which is abided by in all Kinbank languages. For example: Kinbank contains no languages which have a term for father and for mother’s brother, but not father’s brother. Similarly, Kinbank contains no languages that have distinct terms for father’s mother, or mother’s father, with a single term for all other grandparents.

Below we provide two examples of how researchers can use Kinbank’s features and data to provide powerful insights to cultural change. First, we investigate the phonological structure of global terms for "mother" and "father" to show strong gender bias with regard to phonological form. Second, we integrate Kinbank with anthropological data and find no evidence to support a coevolutionary relationship between kinterms and marriage systems in Bantu languages.

Example 1: Are you my mama? Gender bias in the phonology of parental terms. The global recurrence of certain sounds in parental terms (e.g. [ma], [pa]) among geographically distant and historically unrelated languages is hypothesised to stem from the constraints on early baby babbling [ 65 ]. A babbling theory for parental term similarity was first identified by Murdock [ 66 ] as a statistical regularity, and then subsequently theorized by [ 65 ] to recur because of the maximal phonetic contrasts the sounds make. The combination of a stop or nasal, followed by a low vowel, creates the largest contrast amongst the sound’s babies are capable of making and are recognizable, distinguishable, and identifiable noises. The bias towards these perceivable signals of early communication then further evolves to become codified as words for parents in spoken language, as opposed to its babbled form.

An extension of this theory suggests that mother terms are more likely to start with [ma] because of the sound relationship to breastfeeding [ 65 , 66 ]. The bilabial nasal sound [m] is putatively an anticipatory murmur; the [a] sound is created by the baby’s mouth opening preparing to breastfeed. The onomatopoetic link to breast-feeding is hypothesized to produce a phonological gender bias. Although early descriptive statistics support this conclusion [ 66 ], recent research on Australian languages has shown that parental terms with initial [ma] sounds frequently refer to father, not mother; furthermore mama is a reconstructable proto-form for "father" in Pama-Nyungan languages [ 67 , 68 ]. [ 67 ] also show that other nasal consonants such as [ŋ] (velar nasal) are commonly used for mother, which are also compatible with the breastfeeding hypothesis. The regional and historical relationship between [ma] and "father" in Australia highlights the importance of accounting for the interdependence between languages when looking at cross-linguistic patterns. Had the sample been biassed towards Australian languages without a historical control, we would conclude that most languages use [ma] for father, but a phylogenetic control accounts for this bias through shared evolutionary history [ 52 ]. Here, we ask whether there is a gender bias in the phonology of parental terms, using phylogenetic approaches to explicitly model and control for the historical relationships between languages. We code the first syllable of 3,068 parental kinterms from 1,022 languages for a consonant and vowel, following categories established in [ 69 ], and model their relationship to the referent using a phylogenetically-controlled repeated measures multilevel Bayesian logistic regression (See methods for more detail).

Example 1: Results.

The model shows that consonant use is a strong predictor of parental referent. Vowels offer little predictive value. Since consonant-vowel combinations are the real-world depiction of these sounds, we calculate the probability of theoretically implicated, and contrastive, consonant-vowel pairs from the model posterior: [ma], [na], and [ŋa] (common mother sounds), and [pa], and [ta] (common father sounds; since vowels have little influence we only use [C-a] in the examples; Fig 2 ). The model only analyses "mother" or "father" words: mother words are coded as 1. Since the only other possibility is for a word to refer to father, probabilities close to zero indicate the likelihood a sound refers to father. There is positive evidence for [ŋa] and [na] more commonly referring to mother, and that [pa] and [ta] more commonly refer to father. Notably, there is no evidence that [ma] sounds refer preferentially to mother or to father. A summary of the model and all effects are available in S5 Table in S1 File .

Each row shows the probability density estimate from the model posterior. The colored sections and annotated numbers show 89% highest probability density intervals. Intervals that contain 0.5 have no statistical effect (since there is a 50:50 chance the sound refers to mother or father). Results show words with a root syllable of [ŋa] and [na] are more likely to refer to mother and [pa] and [ta] to refer to father. [ma] words are predicted to be used equally between mother and father words.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283218.g002

Example 1: Discussion.

Our analysis has shown that the bilabial-low vowel combination [ma], which is often thought to be linked to mothers, is actually equally linked to fathers. On the other hand, we present strong evidence in a global sample for [ŋa] and [na] sounds aligning exclusively with mother terms, as reported by [ 67 , 68 ] for Australian languages. Closer inspection of Murdock’s tabulations shows very few languages using velar nasal sounds in parental terms, in stark contrast to their relatively high frequency in our broader sample. This difference highlights the importance of wide language documentation, and an understanding of the full range of linguistic diversity before drawing premature "universal" conclusions [ 70 ]. Kinbank provides us with a broader sample of diversity, which reveals a new understanding of gender bias in parental term phonology. With a broader sample comes the possibility that languages are similar because of historical relatedness, rather than an external factor. Here, we have used global linguistic relationships to control for the possibility of auto-correlation within our sample. A puzzle yet to be solved is whether there is a causal reason for the relationship between [ta] and [pa] and father terms, or whether the bias is a result of phonological dispersion i.e., maximal differentiation as a phonological driver for parental terms.

Example 2: Does crossness indicate marriage preferences?

Within anthropology, the structure of kinship terminology is thought to reflect patterns of social structure [ 9 ]. A common example is the linguistic denotation of marriage taboos, indicating which kin are marriageable and which are not [ 71 ]. The presence of cross-cousin marriage is most often linked to the linguistic structure called crossness . Crossness is the presence of a linguistic distinction between opposite-gender siblings; for example: the child of a father’s sister is a cross-cousin because a father’s sister is a father’s opposite-gendered sibling (or crossed-gendered sibling). When crossness occurs within the parental generation it is commonly called a bifurcate-merging terminology, which merges same-sex siblings, and splits (or bifurcates) the opposite sex siblings [ 59 ]. This often leads to two classes of relatives per gender: for male referents, father and father’s brother are grouped under the same term, and mother’s brother is a separate term (as mother’s opposite-sex sibling), and mother and mother’s sister are grouped, and father’s sister is a separate term [ 72 ]. Historical interest in bifurcate-merging terminology surrounds two conditions. In the archetypal society with mandatory first-cousin cross-cousin marriage, a parent’s opposite-sex sibling is also a spouse’s parent (or a parent-in-law), making a kinterm applied to this relative polysemous, between a consanguineal and affinal relative (call this type A). Under these conditions, linguistic crossness could be seen to represent the limits of a culturally imposed incest taboo. However, bifurcate-merging terminology is often observed in societies lacking mandatory cross-cousin marriage, and thus a parent’s opposite-sex sibling and parent-in-law are different people (type B). Determining why type B exists–i.e. why there should be crossness in the absence of mandatory cross-cousin marriage–is an ongoing topic of discussion amongst kinship terminology scholars [ 71 , 73 ].

One suggestion is that all bifurcate-merging terminology occurs with some form of cross-cousin marriage, but does not require it to be mandatory for crossness to arise [ 71 ]. Here, we test the hypothesis that bifurcate-merging terminology co-evolves with allowable cross-cousin marriage in 56 Bantu societies (allowable being a weaker social norm than mandatory cross-cousin marriage). We define a language as bifurcate-merging if it distinguishes between a parent’s same and opposite gender siblings. Specifically, we categorize a terminology as bifurcate-merging under three scenarios: if the term for father is merged with father’s brother, and not mother’s brother, if the term for mother is merged with mother’s sister, but not father’s sister, and if there is complete merging in both parent’s male and female siblings (see S1 File for details). Cross-cousin marriage occurs in 38% of Bantu societies which have been studied, but the archetypal type A terminology is rare in contemporary languages, meaning a strict language-behavioral relationship is unlikely to be the main driver of crossness [ 50 , 73 ]. Historical linguists have previously shown that the likely Proto-East-Bantu parental kinship terminology contained a bifurcate-merging pattern, from which a historical presence of preferential cross-cousin marriage is inferred [ 25 ], but it remains to be seen why bifurcate-merging terminology persists throughout the language family.

Cross-cousin marriage data are sourced from the Ethnographic Atlas via D-PLACE, and binary coded for the presence or absence of any cross-cousin marriage, and matched to Kinbank using Glottocodes [ 50 , 74 ]. Language and marriage data are then paired to a sample of 100 Bantu phylogenies [ 75 ]. Using phylogenetic models of coevolution, implemented in BayesTraits v3.0.1, we fitted two different models, one where changes between the linguistic and behavioral traits depend on each other (co-evolve), and one where they are independent. We used Bayes factors to compare the likelihood of each model. A Bayes factor >2 indicates positive support for the dependent model and is evidence for a coevolutionary relationship. All models were run twice to test MCMC convergence (see details in the S1 File ).

Example 2: Results.

We find that there is no positive evidence for the coevolution of cross-cousin marriage and bifurcate merging terminology in any of the three terminology variables. In tests of "complete bifurcate-merging", and "bifurcate-merging in women", there is no evidence either for or against the co-evolution of crosscousin marriage and bifurcate-merging organizations (Complete log Bayes Factor = -0.83; Women: -0.18). Tests of "bifurcate-merging in men" show positive evidence for independent evolution (-2.28), suggesting in this set of data, bifurcate-merging terminologies have no general relationship to cross-cousin marriage. Fig 3 displays the data for the " complete bifurcate-merging" variable on the Bantu phylogeny. The internal nodes, shown as probabilistic pie-charts for the four possible states, show confidence in relatively recent changes, but contain high levels of uncertainty in deeper nodes.

Languages marked with grey show where kinterms data were present, but social data were imputed by BayesTraits. Pie-graphs indicate the probability of states at each node, which were calculated using the BayesTrait command "RecNode". Deeper into the phylogeny there is much uncertainty as to the relationship between these two traits, indicated by the almost equal probability of all four states.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283218.g003

Example 2: Discussion.

The relationship between bifurcate-merging terminology and cross-cousin marriage is statistically inconclusive from this analysis, adding to an increasing body of evidence disputing purported relationships between kinship terminology and social behaviors [ 29 , 37 ]. In particular, it may be the case that societies can arrive at the same structural organization of kinship terminology but with categories conveying different cultural meanings. For example: Bena (Tanzania) speakers use linguistic crossness, allow but do not prescribe cross-cousin marriage, as well as practicing polygyny [ 76 ], while Lumasaaba (Kenya) speakers use crossness but no cross-cousin marriage [ 77 ]. Amongst Bena, the distinction of cross-cousins reflects the predicted relationships between marriageable and non-marriageable cousins. Cross-cousin marriage is considered a high-status marriage, although other marriages frequently occur. The emic category of cross-cousin in the Bena is broad and includes relatives stemming from a cross-cousin relationship many generations before (e.g. great great fathers’ sister’s offspring). The closer the genealogical relationship between the marrying couple, or if the relationship is traced through a person of high status, the more status is granted to the children of that marriage. In contrast, Lumasaaba parents’ opposite-sex siblings play important roles in a child’s life, by holding important ceremonial roles in a child’s rite of passage and traditionally being the relative through whom the child will inherit wealth (although this tradition has since changed [ 77 ]). These important cultural roles highlight a special relationship between children and their mother’s brother or father’s sister, which could be the cause of the linguistic distinction. These are examples taken from our sample, but the relationship of kinship terminology structure to various semantic meanings is an avenue for future research.

Our coevolutionary results challenge a long-held belief within kinship terminology research. While some researchers have suggested that the relationship between kinship terminology and behavior is more complex than often assumed [ 78 ], the longstanding consensus of the field is that there is coupling between language and norms [ 1 , 9 , 31 ].

However, we test only one example of a behavioural-linguistic link from a sea of proposed hypotheses (e.g. [ 79 , 80 ]), and we hope this database encourages future research on the relationship between kinship norms and language. Using Kinbank will aid in transparent and iterated hypothesis testing: as methods such as phylogenetic analysis become mainstream, and sophisticated statistical methods that incorporate not just shared cultural ancestry but spatial autocorrelation are developed, the granularity of kin term data in Kinbank allows the analyst to move flexibly between typological levels depending on the research question at hand.

Kinbank offers an open and transparent database of kinship terminologies from a global sample of 1,229 languages. The examples presented in this paper illustrate the benefit of systematic and flexible storage of large cultural datasets, as they combine the rich ethnographic record with decades of theoretical debate in linguistics and anthropology. Moreover, the focus on language family sampling allows for the application of computational phylogenetic approaches from evolutionary biology. While the cultural basis of kinship has long been an anthropological focus, interest from such fields as economics [ 7 ], psychology [ 27 ], and linguistics [ 31 ] means that now, more than ever, there is a need for large, diverse cross-cultural datasets that allow us to test old and new hypotheses in one of the founding anthropological domains.

Materials and methods

Example 1: are you my mama.

Kinbank contains 3,068 words for mother or father, from 1,022 languages. Some languages have multiple words for mother and father terms. All words are reduced to the first syllable of their root and coded for a consonant and vowel ignoring sound order, following [ 66 ]. The root syllable is typically the first syllable of the word, with exceptions being the presence of a prefix, or some other feature of the language which might indicate a different syllable. Prefix decisions are at the coders discretion. Syllables are coded as one of 34 consonant types and one of seven vowel types (following Blasi et al. 2016; S6 Table in S1 File ). For example: the Serbian word for mother is majka : here the first and root syllable is [ma]. The first syllable [ma] has a consonant coded as [m] and vowel coded as [a]. Coding was performed manually and inter-rater reliability statistics are available in S7 Table in S1 File .

To control for the relatedness between languages, we use a global phylogenetic tree [ 81 ]. Though not a perfect measure of relatedness between languages, it is a vast improvement on correlational studies historically employed in kinship terminology studies (e.g. [ 9 ]). Pruning and cleaning of phylogenies was performed in R using the packages ape v5.3 [ 82 ], phangorn v2.5.5 [ 83 ] and phytools v0.7 [ 84 ].

We built a phylogenetically-controlled repeated measures multilevel Bayesian logistic regression using brms v2.16.3 [ 85 ]. By using a repeated measures approach, multiple terms can be modelled per language (e.g. mother and father), while controlling for the phylogenetic relationships between languages. The response is a binary variable which indicates whether a term is mother (1) or father (0) and is independently predicted by the consonant and vowel sound codes. To control for language relatedness we included an inverse variance-covariance matrix built from the phylogenetic tree, as well as a random effect for language. This controls for both historical relatedness, and other factors that may be explained at the language level. Models were run for four chains, with 5,000 iterations, and 2,000 burn-in iterations. All fixed effects had normal priors with a mean of zero and standard deviation of 10. Probability estimates of consonant-vowel combinations of interest were predicted from the model posterior.

We used terminological data from Kinbank to determine the presence of crossness across the whole parental generation (complete bifurcate-merging; F = FB ≠ MB & M = MZ ≠ FZ), or only within men (F = FB ≠ MB), or only within women (M = MZ ≠ FZ). Detailed data description is in S8 Table in S1 File . Cousin-marriage preference data are taken from the Ethnographic Atlas question EA023 from D-PLACE and coded to indicate the presence or absence of cross-cousin marriage (S9 Table in S1 File ; [ 50 , 74 ]), and linked to languages on the Bantu phylogeny (64). The intersection of Kinbank and D-PLACE results in a set of 56 societies for which 1) Kinbank contains kinterms for all parents and parents’ siblings, 2) D-PLACE contains information on the presence of cross-cousin marriage and 3) the language is represented on a dated Bantu phylogeny. More information on data coding decisions is given in the S1 File .

We implement a Bayesian correlated evolution phylogenetic approach, using BayesTraits v3.0.1 [ 86 ]. By using a Bayesian approach with a sample of phylogenetic trees, the model does not only control for shared ancestry between societies but also for uncertainty in the phylogenetic relationships of languages. For each statistical test there are two models: one model where correlated evolution is assumed, and one where traits evolve independently. These models are compared to calculate a log Bayes Factor (BF) to determine which model best fits the data. BF < 2 indicates weak evidence, > 2 positive evidence, 5–10 strong evidence, and >10 very strong evidence [ 87 ]. All models are run for 11,000,000 iterations, sampling every 1,000 iterations, with a burn-in of 1,000,000 iterations, on a posterior sample of 100 trees (approximately 200 samples per tree, but not enforced by using EqualTrees). All parameters have an exponential prior with a mean of 10. Each model was run twice to assess convergence; all MCMC runs show MCMC Gelman and Rubin statistics are <1.1 (S10 Table in S1 File ). MCMC trace plots are available in S1 Fig in S1 File .

Supporting information

S1 file. supporting information..

This file contains additional information on data collection and the methods used in the two examples.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283218.s001

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Isobel Clifford, Lieke Hoenselaar, and Maarten van den Heuvel for their assistance with data collection. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the manuscript.

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Health and Well-Being of Children in Kinship Care: Findings from the National Survey of Children in Nonparental Care

Matthew d. bramlett.

Survey Statistician, National Center for Health Statistics, Hyattsville, MD 20782, (301)458-4070

Laura F. Radel

Senior Social Science Analyst, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, Washington, DC 20201, (202)690-5938

Society for Research in Child Development Fellow, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, Washington, DC 20201, (202)260-5863

This study uses nationally representative survey data to describe differences in characteristics, adverse family experiences, and child well-being among children in kinship care with varying levels of involvement with the child welfare system. Well-being is examined in the domains of physical and mental health, education, and permanency. Comparisons provide insight on kinship care arrangements inside and outside the child welfare system, as well as the variability among nonfoster kinship care arrangements.

INTRODUCTION

Once largely separate from the child welfare system, in recent decades kinship care has become an integral part of child welfare practice and is often used as a preventive alternative to foster care (i.e., voluntary kinship care), as a foster care placement (public kinship care), or as an exit destination (permanent kinship care). This complexity exists, in part, due to layers of federal statute that have evolved over time and are not entirely consistent. Since the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, child welfare agencies have been directed to consider giving preference to an adult relative over an unrelated caregiver when placing a child in foster care, provided the relative caregiver meets all relevant child protection standards (42 U.S.C. 671(a)(19)). In addition, since the 2008 Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act, agencies have been required to notify adult relatives when a child is placed in foster care (42 U.S.C. 671(a)(29)). Federal law has also since 2008 provided agencies with the option to establish kinship Guardianship Assistance Programs with partial federal funding under title IV-E of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 673(d); Testa, Snyder, Wu, Rolock, & Liao, 2015 ). Federal policy creates an inherent tension, however, as the preference for initial, temporary foster care placement with relatives is replaced by a hierarchy of permanency preferences that, if reunification with parents is not feasible, prioritizes first adoption, then placement with relatives (42 U.S.C. 675(1)). By 2014, nearly one-third of children in foster care (29%) and adopted from foster care (32%) nationally were cared for by relatives ( U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2015 ). Cassanueva and colleagues found that of children living outside their parents’ home following a maltreatment investigation, an estimated 48% resided in private or voluntary kinship care (calculated from Exhibit 1 of Casanueva, Tueller, Dolan, Smith, & Ringeisen, 2012 ).

The tension between some kinship caregivers’ reluctance to consider adoption and the policy preference for adoption as a permanency outcome has prompted a number of policy and practice responses. As of March 2016, 33 states and 6 Indian Tribes have made guardianship subsidies a component of their title IV-E permanency programs ( Administration for Children and Families, 2016 ). Child welfare agencies have created initiatives to encourage relatives to adopt the children in their care and train caseworkers on speaking with relatives about adoption and guardianship options ( Pasztor, Mayers, Petras & Rainey, 2013 ). And child welfare agencies, relatives, and legal advisors have parsed the advantages and disadvantages of adoption versus guardianship ( Saisan, Smith and Segal, 2016 ).

Although placement preference is given to relatives, it remains unclear what nonparental living situations best support children’s development ( Winokur, Holtan, & Batchelder, 2014 ). Children in kinship foster care have shown more positive behavioral development, mental health, and placement stability than children in nonkin foster care ( Wu et al. , 2015 , Winokur et al., 2014 ). Yet, children in nonkin foster care may fare better in accessing needed services and achieving adoption ( Winokur et al ., 2014 ).

Less is known about the well-being of children in private kinship care than about children in public kinship care ( Littlewood, 2015 ). The living arrangements of children in public kinship care and nonkin foster care are similar in that both are monitored by caseworkers and in administrative databases from which children in informal kin care are absent ( Stein et al ., 2014 ). Researchers have lamented the lack of research on informal relative care following a Child Protective Services (CPS) investigation ( Stein et al ., 2014 ). Little is known about whether children’s situations improve if they are diverted to voluntary kinship care without oversight of the child welfare agency following a CPS investigation.

This study describes differences in characteristics, adverse family experiences, and well-being among children in kinship care in the following subgroups: (1) children in public kinship care; (2) children in voluntary kinship care for whom there is a current or past open CPS case; (3) children in voluntary kinship care without an open case but the relative reports other CPS involvement (e.g., the child welfare agency facilitated the placement); and (4) children in private kinship care with no current or past CPS involvement. We conceptualize kinship care as a continuum of arrangements, arrayed here according to decreasing level of child protective services involvement, and expect higher intensity of CPS involvement among children most at risk. However, state and local policies and practices may also influence the level of CPS involvement in less formal care arrangements.

As far as we are aware, the 2013 National Survey of Children in Nonparental Care (NSCNC) is the first population-based, nationally-representative survey of all children in nonparental care, the majority of whom are in relative care. Most surveys do not include enough cases to generate sufficient sample sizes in this rare subpopulation. While large surveys or Census data may include sufficient sample, they typically do not include relevant topical content (such as child well-being), nor the detail necessary to identify specific care types (foster, grandparent, other) or involvement with the child welfare system. Administrative foster care data cannot be used to compare foster children to children in other living arrangements and includes scant data on child well-being. Analysis of administrative data from CPS would similarly suffer from the inability to compare outcomes for children with varying levels of involvement with CPS (particularly those with none). NSCNC meets all these requirements.

Data were drawn from two national surveys conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS): the 2011–2012 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH), a nationally-representative survey of households with children, and the 2013 NSCNC, which re-interviewed almost 1,300 households identified as nonparental care households in the NSCH, including foster care, grandparent care, and other households with no parents present. Both surveys were modules of NCHS’ State and Local Area Integrated Telephone Survey. NSCH was sponsored by the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau; NSCNC was sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, with supplemental funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

NSCH was a random-digit-dial landline and cell telephone survey that interviewed 95,677 households with children throughout the U.S. The NSCH sample is nationally representative of noninstitutionalized children aged 0 to 17 years in the United States in 2011–2012.

NSCNC was a follow-back survey 1–2 years after the NSCH for children who lived in households with no parents present and were ages 0–16 when the NSCH was administered. Interviews were conducted with a current caregiver of the child, in some cases a parent who had reunited with the child since the NSCH interview. To distinguish among relative and nonrelative foster care and informal relative care situations, respondents who identified as foster parents were asked whether they were related to the child and respondents who identified as relatives were asked whether they were the child’s foster parent.

NSCH had a 23% overall response rate (partly due to the inclusion of a cell-phone sample to maximize coverage of the population), but this does not mean that three‐quarters of eligible households refused to participate in the survey. The response rate is low in part because it includes phone numbers that ring with no answer and for whom eligibility cannot be determined, especially among cell phone numbers. The NSCH cooperation rate among eligible households, or interview completion rate, was 51.4%. NSCNC had a 52% interview completion rate among eligible households 1–2 years later. Weighting adjustments were applied such that the population estimated by the sample of completed interviews matched that of the pool of eligible households demographically. This dramatically reduced estimated nonresponse bias; remaining bias in weighted estimates was smaller than sampling error. More information about NSCH and NSCNC may be found at: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/slaits.htm or by referring to the associated documentation ( CDC, 2013 ; CDC, 2014 ).

Statistical Analysis

Weighted estimates were calculated using SUDAAN ( RTI, 2008 ) to account for complex sample design. Four subgroups of children were compared on well-being outcomes: those in public kinship care (1), and three subgroups of children in nonpublic kinship care: 2) those in voluntary kinship care for whom there had ever been an open CPS case; 3) those in voluntary kinship care without an open case but with other CPS involvement in the placement (a background check or home visit or CPS had arranged for the child’s placement); and 4) children in private kinship care with no CPS involvement. Excluding from the analytic sample children not in relative care, the sample size of 1,298 is reduced to 1,122.

Demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, adverse family experiences, and child well-being (health, academics, and permanence) were compared between children in public and nonpublic kinship care. Linear and curvilinear (quadratic) trend tests were performed among the nonpublic children across the three ordinal categories of CPS involvement. The significance of public/nonpublic differences or trends across categories of CPS involvement was evaluated at the 0.05 level.

In addition to child demographics (age, sex and race/ethnicity), sociodemographic characteristics examined include household income relative to Federal Poverty Level and caregiver age.

We examined seven adverse family experiences (AFEs): whether the child had (1) experienced a parent’s death, (2) experienced parents’ divorce or separation, (3) experienced parental incarceration, (4) witnessed violence in the home, (5) experienced or witnessed violence in the neighborhood, (6) lived with a mentally ill person, or (7) lived with a substance abuser.

Child health is measured by indicators of: overall health (excellent/very good versus good/fair/poor); whether the child has any mental health conditions (ADHD, learning disability, depression, anxiety, behavior/conduct disorder, autism, developmental delay, intellectual disability, cerebral palsy, speech problems, or Tourette’s syndrome) or any physical conditions (asthma, diabetes, epilepsy, hearing problems, vision problems, bone/joint/muscle problems, or brain injury); whether the child received mental health care in the previous year; and whether the child has special health care needs (SHCN) (any of five health care consequences resulting from a chronic health condition: (1) need for prescription medications; (2) need for specialized therapies; (3) need for more health care services than most children the same age; (4) treatment for a behavioral, developmental or emotional problem; and/or (5) activity limitation).

Academic well-being indicators include whether the child has an Individualized Family Service Plan (children under age 6) or an Individualized Education Program (ages 6+) (IFSP/IEP); whether the child is engaged in school (i.e., the child cares about school and does all required homework); whether the child repeated any grades; and math and reading/writing performance (excellent/very good versus good/fair/poor).

Indicators of permanence include whether the child lived with the caregiver since birth, whether the child lives all/most of the time with the caregiver, whether the caregiver feels the child is likely to live with them until grown, whether the caregiver has legal custody, and whether the caregiver has or intends to adopt the child.

Child sex, race/ethnicity, overall health, chronic conditions, SHCN, AFEs, IFSP/IEP, school engagement and grade repetition are drawn from NSCH. Values may have changed between surveys – e.g., a child may have lost a diagnosis and no longer be considered to have a health condition – and events that occurred between surveys would not be included – e.g., a grade repeated after the NSCH interview would not be identified. Academic measures from NSCH are not available for children younger than 6 in 2011–2012. The remaining covariates are drawn from NSCNC.

Of children in nonparental relative care, an estimated 11.1% were in public kinship care; 21.1% were in voluntary kinship care and had ever had an open CPS case (“Open case”); 19% were in voluntary kinship care without an open case but with other CPS involvement in the child’s placement (“Other CPS”); and 49% were in private kinship care without CPS involvement (“No CPS”).

Table 1 shows demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Children in public kinship care were less likely than children in nonpublic kinship care to be ages 9–12, in the highest income category, or to have a caregiver aged 70+ years. Quadratic trend tests show parabolic associations in which children in the Other-CPS group are least likely to be Hispanic, most likely to be non-Hispanic black, and more likely to have caregivers aged 55–59 and less likely under age 55.

Demographic and Socioeconomic Characteristics by Kin Care Type and Child Protective Services (CPS) Involvement

Source: National Survey of Children’s Health 2011–2012 & National Survey of Children in Nonparental Care 2013;

Table 2 shows AFEs that may have precipitated the child’s entry into nonparental care. None showed a significant difference between foster and nonfoster children, but 5 of the 7 showed a significant linear trend among the private and voluntary kinship care groups in which higher prevalence is associated with more CPS involvement. Although the linear trend was not significant and differences were smaller, the remaining adverse experiences (parental divorce/separation and parental death) also showed the highest prevalence for children with the most CPS involvement.

Adverse Family Experiences by Kin Care Type and Child Protective Services (CPS) Involvement

Some Table 2 estimates and differences are large. Seventy percent of Open case children had lived with a substance abuser, and 63% experienced parental incarceration. The incidences of incarceration and witnessing violence in the home were roughly twice as likely among Open case children as among other nonpublic groups. Other adverse experiences with significant linear trends showed similar patterns of differences almost as large.

Table 3 shows health conditions, special health care needs, and receipt of mental health care. Physical and mental health conditions show a significant pattern of more conditions with more CPS involvement, or a greater likelihood of zero conditions with less CPS involvement. SHCN and mental health care also follow a pattern of higher estimates with more CPS involvement. SHCN and mental health care were particularly high among Open case children, who had SHCN at twice or more than twice the rate of foster children and voluntary kinship care children, respectively. More than half of Open case children had received mental health care and more than 60% had SHCN.

Health Characteristics by Kin Care Type and Child Protective Services (CPS) Involvement

Table 4 shows academics and permanence. There were few significant public/nonpublic differences but many indicators showed a linear trend across nonpublic categories. Significant academic measures (IFSP/IEP and grade repetition) showed a pattern of more favorable outcomes for children with less CPS involvement – and although the trends were not significant at the conventional level, most other measures of school engagement and academic performance were consistent with this pattern. These findings suggest that children in private kinship care tend to have better academic outcomes than children in other types of informal care. But while their academic outcomes may have been better, their permanency outcomes were worse: those with less CPS involvement were less likely to have been adopted or to have caregivers with adoption plans. Quadratic trend tests suggest that the likelihood that the child will live with the caregiver until grown or that the caregiver has custody are L-shaped associations in which children with no CPS involvement are much less likely than the other two groups to achieve these permanence indicators. Only 57% of children in voluntary kinship care had caregivers with legal custody, compared with about 90% of the other nonfoster groups.

Academic and Permanence Characteristics by Kin Care Type and Child Protective Services (CPS) Involvement

When children do not live with parents a connection critical to healthy development has been disrupted. Other family members frequently step in to fill the parental role, independently or in partnership with a child welfare agency. In recent decades perceptions and policies have been evolving about the appropriate role and level of child welfare involvement when relatives care for children due to parents’ absence or incapacity ( Hegar and Scannapieco, 2005 ; Allen, DeVooght and Geen, 2008 ). This study advances this discussion by comparing the well-being of children in kinship care with varying levels of child welfare involvement.

We found that children with current or former open CPS cases, but who were not in foster care at the time of the survey, had particularly high rates of SHCN and mental health care compared with children in nonfoster relative care with less CPS involvement. It is possible that some children with health problems have open cases in part because the caregiver needed additional support for the child’s needs ( Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2014 ).

Many adverse family experiences were increasingly likely with greater CPS involvement: violence in the home or neighborhood or having lived with the mentally ill, substance abusers, or parents who were incarcerated. Most were almost twice as prevalent among the open case children as among other nonfoster groups.

Because CPS cases could have occurred at any time, it is likely that some open case children were investigated by CPS, spent time in foster care and were later discharged to relatives. Nationally, 16% of children exiting foster care in 2014 lived with relatives or guardians following discharge ( U.S. DHHS, 2015 ). Discharge from foster care to private kinship care typically involves cessation of monitoring by CPS. Children who had an open CPS case may be particularly vulnerable given the frequency with which they have SHCN and receive mental health care. While post-reunification services for parents have received considerable attention ( Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2012 ) and post-adoption services have also been discussed ( Smith, 2014 ; Zosky, Howard, Smith, Howard & Shelvin, 2005 ), there has been less discussion in the child welfare field about post-permanency services for kinship caregivers.

Just under half of children in kinship care are not involved with the child welfare system at all, according to their caregivers. These children are absent from child welfare administrative databases and are invisible in most surveys. NSCNC affords an opportunity to examine well-being and permanency outcomes in a comparative analysis including this subgroup. We found that these children tended to have better health and academic outcomes than other nonfoster groups; but they also tended to have poorer prospects for permanence.

The concept of “permanence” is complex and is viewed differently by various parties within and outside the child welfare system. Thompson and Greeson (2015) differentiate between legal permanence, i.e., the attainment of a court-sanctioned legal status according to the hierarchy defined in federal law, and relational permanence, meaning the subjective experience of a long-term emotional and social connection to one or more caring adults. Many relative caregivers think of the child as “already family” and report that as a reason for not considering adoption ( Berrick, Barth, & Needell, 1994 ; Bramlett & Radel, 2016 ). Legal custody may not be seen as necessary given the family bond. However, children without CPS involvement did not just show lower rates of adoption or custody – they also had lower caregivers’ expectations that the living situation would last throughout childhood, perhaps indicating a hope for reunification with parents. Researchers have suggested that children in relative care need definitions of permanence that work for their particular situation and strategies to achieve permanence should be differentially targeted to specific subgroups ( Yampolskaya, Sharrock, Armstrong, Strozier, & Swanke, 2014 ).

For informal relative caregivers for whom adoption and custody are less likely, accessing support services for the child can be difficult. Grandparent caregivers are often ineligible for certain financial supports because they lack status as foster parents or formal caregivers ( Fruhauf, Pevney, & Bundy-Fazioli, 2015 ), but might be eligible for subsidies and Medicaid benefits if they adopted or established a subsidized guardianship. Health care for the child can be complicated when there is, “difficulty identifying who has the authority to consent for health care on behalf of the child” ( Szilagyi et al. , 2015 : p. e1133). There is often a poor fit between services and families’ needs because policies were designed without consideration for nonstandard family status ( Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2012 ). Not surprisingly, then, “kinship caregivers receive far fewer support services than nonkinship foster caregivers” ( Stein et al ., 2014 : p. 560).

Limitations

Findings from NSCH and NSCNC are based on caregivers’ experiences and perceptions. Information provided about health status and health care was not verified with health professionals. Information about CPS involvement was not verified with child welfare agencies. Sampling weights were adjusted to minimize nonresponse bias and evidence suggests that remaining estimated biases tend to be smaller than sampling error ( CDC, 2014 ), but because bias can only be estimated, the low overall response rate means that bias resulting from nonresponse cannot be completely ruled out.

That 75% of children in public kinship care were reported to be in the legal custody of their relative foster parents, when formal foster care usually means that the state retains formal custody, might indicate that custody was poorly understood by respondents – most of whom are grandparents – as distinct from having the child placed in their care. The question asked about a “formal or legal agreement about custody or guardianship for [the child]” and help text was provided (if necessary) to define custody as the legal right to make decisions for the child and to indicate that it may be conferred on a relative by a court. Custody status was not verified with child welfare agencies. It is possible that for some, custody was transferred between surveys. However, this limitation is less likely to affect comparisons among the nonpublic kinship care groups, and other measures of permanence, such as adoption and expectations for the future, showed similar patterns as for custody.

Despite these limitations, the authors know of no other data source that includes a population-based national sample of children in relative care, can identify the subgroups analyzed here, and includes survey content directly relevant to this population.

Relative care is an essential component of the safety net for children whose parents cannot care for them. Relatives are frequently sought by child welfare agencies as placement resources, particularly since the implementation of the 2008 Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act’s requirement that agencies notify relatives of children’s placement in foster care. We found that just under half of kinship care is arranged privately among parents and relatives, i.e., it occurs outside the context of formal foster care, without child protective services involvement. This does not mean, however, that children in voluntary kinship care have not faced serious adversity; a sizeable proportion have experienced disruption and adverse family experiences.

Children with current or former CPS cases tended to have poorer health and academic outcomes than other children in nonpublic kinship care and may be particularly vulnerable given the frequency with which they have special health care needs. Aftercare services for children and youth discharged to relatives have received less attention than post-permanency services to support reunification and adoption. Understanding the long term well-being of children who exit foster care across discharge destinations could benefit from further research.

That more than 40% of caregivers without CPS involvement lack custody may indicate a vulnerability regarding legal permanence. Such children do not have institutional advocates for permanency since they are not engaged with child welfare agencies or courts and relative caregivers may see little need for legal permanence. Yet the lack of legal guardianship may leave children vulnerable in the long term either from a troubled parent who retains legal custody or from instability if the current caregiver cannot provide a stable home or adequate access to supports and services.

Disclosure: the authors have no financial interests to disclose. This original research paper has not been published previously nor submitted elsewhere while under consideration at Child Welfare . As a secondary data analysis of a de-identified microdata set, this study is exempt from Human Subjects review; the original data collection protocols were approved by the NCHS Research Ethics Review Board as well as the Institutional Review Board at NORC at the University of Chicago.

Disclaimer: The opinions and conclusions in this study are the authors’ and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation.

Contributor Information

Matthew D. Bramlett, Survey Statistician, National Center for Health Statistics, Hyattsville, MD 20782, (301)458-4070.

Laura F. Radel, Senior Social Science Analyst, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, Washington, DC 20201, (202)690-5938.

Kirby Chow, Society for Research in Child Development Fellow, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, Washington, DC 20201, (202)260-5863.

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Examining Financial Hardship and Caregiver Subgroups in Kinship Foster Placements: A Machine Learning Approach

Add to collection, downloadable content.

• Affiliation: School of Social Work
• Children placed with kinship foster parents can experience less disruption and stronger family ties than children in non-kinship placements. However, financial hardship can restrict kinship caregivers from taking in relatives’ children. This study investigated (1) kinship caregivers’ financial standing compared to a national subsample of caregivers and (2) whether certain factors moderate the likelihood that a kinship caregiver will be able to provide care for additional non-relative children without additional financial assistance from the Department of Social Services (DSS). This study utilized primary data from 345 relatives across North Carolina and nationally representative secondary data on 6394 individuals’ financial circumstances. One-sample t-tests and chi-square goodness-of-fit tests revealed that caregivers who participated in our study generally fared better financially than caregivers at the national level. Model-based recursive partitioning results showed that if an additional child is placed in the home, the caregiver’s perceived capacity to provide care without extra DSS support decreased by approximately 19%, with a greater decrease (35%) among a subgroup of caregivers with low financial well-being status. The heterogeneity in caregivers’ experiences, capacities, and financial needs buttresses the need for nuanced interventions and programs targeting these caregivers, enabling them to provide more stable care for children placed in their homes.
• machine learning
• financial hardship
• kinship care
• financial well-being
• model-based recursive partitioning
• https://doi.org/10.17615/gp8a-7z76
• https://doi.org/10.3390/soc14030038
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What is kinship care? Why is it favored for Aboriginal children over foster care?

by Jocelyn Jones, Hannah McGlade and Sasha Moodie, The Conversation

The 1997 Bringing Them Home report into the removal of Aboriginal children from their families was a turning point in Australia's history. The inquiry rejected past government policies of assimilation and endorsed the importance of keeping Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children with their families.

Reducing the over-representation of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care is now a target of the federal government's Closing the Gap policy.

Yet the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care is increasing. Between 2021–2022 around 4,100 Indigenous children were placed in out-of-home care nationally. The highest rates were among children under one year old.

Across all age groups, Indigenous children are placed in out-of-home care at almost 12 times the rate of non-Indigenous children. In Western Australia, Indigenous children are placed in out-of-home care at 20 times the rate of non-Indigenous children.

Alongside the Closing the Gap target, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle recognizes the rights of Indigenous children in maintaining connections with their culture, family and community.

Yet until recently, fewer than half of Indigenous children removed from their families were placed with kin or in their community. National efforts to better meet best-practice standards has led to a small increase in Indigenous children placed in kinship arrangements from 50% in 2017 to 54% in 2022 . Clearly this situation must improve.

What is kinship care?

Studies show institutional racism, trauma, violence, homelessness, socioeconomic disadvantage and poverty present significant challenges for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families.

Out-of-home care means overnight care of a temporary or permanent nature for children under 18 who aren't able to live with their family for risk-related issues determined by the state. Common types of out-of-home care include foster care , residential care and kinship care .

A kinship caregiver is an Indigenous person who is a member of the child's community, a compatible community, or from the same language group. Kinship care aims to maintain a child's social and cultural connections .

Compared to foster care, children in kinship care tend to have more contact with their parents, family and community. Children may visit their country, learn their languages and learn about their cultural and family background.

A kinship caregiver involved in the Indigenous Child Removals Western Australia (I-CaRe) study spoke about how he connects the children in his care with their culture. The grandfather, aged 60, from Perth, Boorloo, said,

"Yeah, I'll take them to sites and explain to them what the site is all about. We will go up to Yagan memorial site there. We'll go to the statue. We'll talk about the river and the Derbarl Yerrigan, and I'll tell them why that name is there. I take them downtown to [Tuyim] Park, for example, and say, this is where all the Noongars used to hang around here. Look, see here?"

Research shows Indigenous children with strong cultural identity and knowledge are less likely to experience emotional and social problems. So, the risks of placing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in non-kinship care arrangements are serious.

Indigenous children aren't always placed with kin. Why?

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle recognizes kinship care as the preferred placement and is included in child protection laws. Child protection practices, research and policies are increasingly promoting contact with parents and family members, where possible.

All jurisdictions have committed to the principle, however, non-Indigenous departmental staff and judicial officers can readily make contrary decisions and place children in non-Indigenous care. While child protection workers across the nation must develop "cultural support plans" for Aboriginal children in out-of-home care, such plans often lack content and can be tokenistic. They are no replacement for kinship care.

Aboriginal researchers have highlighted that while connection to culture is critical to Aboriginal children's health and well-being, it is poorly understood by departmental staff.

Also, child protection's reliance on western psychological theory ("attachment theory") is being used to displace kinship care . Aboriginal children's placements with non-Aboriginal caregivers is given priority over the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle and reunification with their Aboriginal family and kin. This is identified as systemic racism on the part of child protection systems.

The Indigenous Child Removals WA research found further significant barriers facing Indigenous kinship caregivers. This included complex and demanding interactions with government departments, lack of support, health risks, and difficulty meeting the needs of children impacted by trauma. Kinship caregivers may receive a subsidy payment, but this depends on the nature of the care arrangement and whether it's formalized through a court order .

There are considerable screening requirements including working with children clearances, health checks and criminal checks, household inspections, and screening of all family members living in the household.

Some kinship caregivers described their experiences as very hard and even traumatic. As one Aboriginal kinship caregiver, a 51-year-old grandmother from Geraldton, explained:

"Apparently, I wasn't fit enough for my grandchildren, so I had to go through the court cases and everything to prove that we were fit enough […] I just went downhill and yeah, we just kept fighting and then it got to that stage where we're getting interrogated and I've had enough, because it went over a period of six months."

The high rate of Indigenous children in non-kinship arrangements has concerned Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people over many years. South Australia's Commissioner for Aboriginal Children and Young People, April Lawrie, recently said unless changes are made, Aboriginal children will enter care at rates similar to those of the Stolen Generations.

And SNAICC, the National Voice for our Children, has warned that when the Bringing Them Home report was issued more than 25 years ago, one in every five Aboriginal children were in out of home care. Today, one in every three Aboriginal children is in care.

Australia cannot continue to harm First Nations children in this way, and kinship care must be improved urgently if we are to address this dire situation.

Provided by The Conversation

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• Kinship Systems Research Paper

View sample anthropology research paper on kinship systems. Browse other research paper examples for more inspiration. If you need a thorough research paper written according to all the academic standards, you can always turn to our experienced writers for help. This is how your paper can get an A! Feel free to contact our writing service for professional assistance. We offer high-quality assignments for reasonable rates.

Humans in every culture structure a set of social relations that classify its members within the framework of a family. The notion of what constitutes a family can be fairly extensive in some groups, and more narrowly defined in other groups. For example, the concept of family is restricted to a smaller number of people in American culture than in Egyptian culture. When asked, students in the United States typically write down the names of 80 to120 relatives when asked to name all the members of their family, while Egyptian students can usually write down over twice that number. Likewise, categories of classification—kinship terms, such as father or mother —can be extensive and incorporate a number of different social relationships, as for example, when the term father in some kinship systems, refers simultaneously to one’s biological father, one’s father’s brothers, and one’s mother’s brothers. Or kinship terms can be more narrowly defined, as in our own system where father refers only to one particular social relationship.

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Kinship terms are also relative categories that classify according to one’s position in the overall system of relations. Consequently, while a certain female might be classified as daughter by her mother, she may also be differently classified as mother by her son. These variant classifications are simultaneous, so that every person can potentially be every possible category at the same time, the only limitation being that some categories are specific to one’s sex. Additionally, kinship classification is reciprocal. For example, a person who classifies another as sister will be referred to by that person as “sister” or as “brother” depending on their sex. A person who classifies another as son will be referred to as either “mother” or as “father.”

Kinship systems are structured by a variety of marriage practices but can also make allowances for the dissolution of structures through divorce. Kinship relations continue to persist even after the death of members of a society. Additionally, systems of bridewealth, brideservice, and dowry are an integral part of kinship systems, as are postmarital residence patterns. Most kinship systems are also malleable enough to allow the creations of “fictive” relations, that is, to allow for the incorporation of nonfamily members into the family.

Anthropologists are interested in studying kinship systems because such systems are found in every culture, and because a society’s kinship system articulates in some way all other aspects of the culture, such as politics, religion, worldview, marriage practices, economic behaviors, and so on. Due to the pervasiveness and surprisingly small range of variability in kinship systems across cultures, and because kinship systems are easily accessible for study in most cultures, such studies seem to offer, perhaps more so than some other areas of study in anthropology, an opportunity to say something universal about humanity. Consequently, many studies in anthropology have devoted a lot of effort to understanding kinship systems.

This research paper offers an overview of the history and different approaches to the study of kinship; a discussion of the application of kinship studies in ethnography; a discussion and overview of what is known in anthropology about kinship systems, family, marriage, and related topics; and some speculation on the future of kinship studies in anthropology.

Development of Theory in Kinship Studies

In the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, scientific inquiry in a number of disciplines became focused on the natural history of humanity. In order to understand how kinship studies emerged in an intellectual context in anthropology, it is necessary to briefly review a few works from that time. During this time, biology, history, and the then emerging disciplines of psychology, sociology, and anthropology all attempted to address various “origin” questions related to humans. Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, first published in 1871, provided breaking ground for answering questions about human biological origins. Around the same time, the historian Fustel De Coulanges, in The Ancient City (1873), explored the origin of Greek and Roman cities and civilization. Sigmund Freud then, in 1913, attempted to explain the psychological origin of incest taboos in Totem and Taboo. In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915), the sociologist Émile Durkheim sought to explain how humans came to classify the world, prefaced by his work with Marcel Mauss in Primitive Classification (1903/1963). In anthropology, Lewis Henry Morgan wrote two books, Ancient Society (1877/1912) and Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1870/1997), in an effort to explain the origin and development of culture. Throughout all of these works, concepts such as family, race, descent, incest, lineage, clan, tribe, marriage, agnation, and others frequently occur, all of which are in the domain of kinship studies.

Biology, history, psychology, sociology, and anthropology all recognized that human kin relations were connected in significant ways to other social phenomena. Darwin (1871/1952) found it necessary to discuss polygamy as one manifestation of human sexual selection (p. 369); Fustel de Coulanges (1873) had to elaborate on the family system of the ancient Romans and Greeks in order to explain the organization of ancient cities (pp. 40–116); Freud (1946) could only understand incest taboos within the framework of kin relations (pp. 3–25); Durkheim (1915) believed the elaborate kinship structures of “primitive” people gave rise to the earliest religions; and Morgan (1870/1997) saw the study of kinship as a way to illuminate the evolution of culture from the primitive to the civilized (p. xxii).

Morgan and Durkheim

A few particular works of Morgan and Durkheim have had a significant impact on the study of kinship systems in anthropology and will be briefly reviewed here.

In Ancient Society, Morgan (1877/1912) described the complexity of the kinship system of an Australian group called the Kamilaroi. The Kamilaroi have a totemic kinship system. The society is organized into two clans that are in turn subdivided into three lineages each. Each lineage has its own totem, an animal that symbolically represents the group. The purpose of describing the complex kinship system of the Kamilaroi was to establish a description and overview of the evolution of culture.

In Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, which, more than any other single work, established the foundation for kinship studies in anthropology, Morgan (1870/1997) systematically collected and organized a large volume of data from many different culture/ language groups. These data were arranged in tables that display the names given to one’s various kin relations in all the different groups. In Table I of Systems, Morgan compared 196 different kin relations among 39 different languages/cultures — an impressive display of scholarship for the time. For example, the following is a portion of the list in Table I for Arabic, slightly rearranged and shortened and using a different system of transliteration for Arabic than that used by Morgan (pp. 77–127):

My great grandfather: jidd abii

My great grandmother: sitt abii

My grandfather: jiddii

My grandmother: sittii

My father: abii

My father’s brother: ‘ammii

My father’s brother’s son: ibn ‘ammii

My father’s brother’s daughter: bint ‘ammii

My father’s sister: ‘ammtii

My father’s sister’s son: ibn ‘ammtii

My father’s sister’s daughter: bint ‘ammtii

My mother: ummii

My mother’s sister: khaltii

My mother’s sister’s daughter: bint khaltii

My mother’s sister’s son: ibn khaltii

My mother’s brother: khalii

My mother’s brother’s daughter: bint khalii

My mother’s brother’s son: ibn khalii

My son: ibnii

My daughter: bintii

My grandson: ibn ibnii/ibn bintii

In the above data, there are immediately discernible patterns. For example, ibnii means “my son,” and khalii means “my mother’s brother,” and ibn khalii means “son of my mother’s brother.” (The suffix, -ii, is the first person possessive pronoun and means “my.”) Likewise, bint khalii means “daughter of my mother’s brother.” Morgan called kinship-terminology systems that narrowly describe kin relations, like this one, “descriptive” (p. 50). He believed that descriptive systems contrasted with another group of systems that he labeled “classificatory” (p. 143).

Classificatory kinship terminology, for Morgan, comprises a system that does not repeat core terms, such as daughter or son, for the categorization of more distant kin, and because of this, classifies multiple relationships under one category. For example, the kinship terminology used by most North American English speakers has the categories aunt, uncle, and cousins to indicate the collateral relationships on both the father’s and mother’s side of the nuclear family.

As it turns out, Morgan’s distinction between descriptive and classificatory does not stand close scrutiny. All kinship systems are classificatory. The term aunt classifies under one category, four relationships, two of which are consanguineal (i.e., blood relationships), and two of which are affinal (i.e., created by marriage): father’s sister, mother’s sister, father’s brother’s wife, and mother’s brother’s wife, respectively. Likewise in Arabic, the term bint ‘ammii, my father’s brother’s daughter, can refer to all the daughters of all of my father’s brothers, and in so doing classifies more than just one relationship.

Systems generated a vigorous intellectual reaction, raising an important question for anthropologists. Was kinship terminology a psychological or a social phenomenon? This is an important question. A. L. Kroeber, in a 1909 article titled “Classificatory Systems of Relationship,” argued that kinship terminology is a linguistic phenomenon, hence psychological in nature, and not useful for the study of other social concerns. On the other hand, W. H. R. Rivers, in Kinship and Social Organization, published in 1914, argued that the study of kinship contributed significantly to understanding other social relations. Determining whether or not kinship terminology is merely linguistic classification, or whether it is causally linked to other social behaviors—such as marriage, descent, residence patterns, and so on—became, and remains, an important issue for anthropologists. It is clear that all these aspects of kinship are connected somehow, but to what degree one affects the other, and exactly how they influence each other, is not totally resolved.

Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, in an essay first published in 1903, called Primitive Classification, argued that social classification is the basis for all primitive classification. Because humans form groups, the social structure of the group becomes the template for other classification by the group. Durkheim and Mauss argued this from the ethnographic literature of the time about how primitive people classify the world. The primitive people they analyzed in Primitive Classification were native Australians, Zuni, Sioux, and Chinese. Durkheim and Mauss claimed that primitive classification was quite different than most modern and scientific forms of classification in that the categories of primitive classification are inclusive, not exclusive. By this, Durkheim and Mauss meant that primitive people classified according to categories that lumped things together, rather than according to categories that distinguished things. Specifically, they referred to totemic systems in which, for the primitive person, “There is a total lack of distinction between him and his exterior soul or totem” (1903/1963, p. 6). Myth and much of the religious thought that still existed in modern societies was seen by Durkheim and Mauss as survival of an earlier way of thinking, and modern scientific thought was an evolution away from it. In essence, according to Durkheim and Mauss, primitive people had a different way of knowing and thinking about the world that originated in the structure of kin relations in human groups. Of course, later scholars, such as Claude LéviStrauss (1963, 1949/1969), would challenge the notion that primitive thought was significantly different than modern thought, but the basic observation is significant: Kinship systems provide the model on which the world can be classified for some human groups.

In Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, published in

1940, Durkheim extended the ideas put forth in Primitive Classification by arguing that primitive religion is the ultimate product of primitive classification. He argues that totemic clans abstract symbols of their totems and place those symbols on objects, which become the focus of various rites; these rites in turn make those objects sacred. Beliefs, which are explanations of the rites directed at sacred objects, make the system understandable. Consequently, religion is society worshipping an abstraction of its own social order.

Lévi-Strauss

In the mid-20th century, the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss brought a new perspective to the understanding of kinship systems. Applying structural theory to kinship studies, he examined the nature of the relationships between different kinship categories in an effort to explain, for example, why many societies had different kinship classification systems, and why different descent systems had the same avunculocal postmarital residence pattern. In the avunculocal postmarital residence pattern, a man and his wife go to live with his mother’s brother. His analysis of the avunculate focused on the relationship between the individuals directly involved in the practice: a man, his mother, his father, and his mother’s brother. He referred to such a group as the “atom of kinship” and suggested it as the starting point for analyzing kinship structures (1963, p. 72). In structural analysis, focus is shifted away from the categories and is placed on the relationship among the categories. This approach is borrowed from modern structural linguistics.

Lévi-Strauss, in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949/1969), assumed that kinship classification, at least in some societies, is connected to marriage practices, and by doing some comparative analysis, he offered an answer to the question about the relationship between kinship systems and other social behaviors. He began by discussing incest and its origins. To him, incest prohibitions are manifestations of the transition from blood-relatedness (nature) to social alliances (culture) (p. 30). As a consequence, he suggested that the incest prohibition itself, by virtue of limiting what is possible in marriage relations, brings about the organization of social relations. He further argued that this organization takes the form of exogamous marriage practices that are, in reality, reciprocal systems of marriage exchange (p. 51). He concluded that “the rules of kinship and marriage are not made necessary by the social state. They are the social state itself ” (p. 490).

So, for Lévi-Strauss, kinship and marriage are the fabric of human society, consisting of social relations woven together by the warp and woof of marriage possibilities and marriage prohibitions.

The Elementary Structures of Kinship, as the title suggests, was only concerned with societies where there were preferred marriage patterns, such as preferences for matrilateral or patrilateral cross-cousin marriage. The work explicitly did not deal with complex structures of kinship, where the determination of eligible marriage partners is a result of other social processes, and not a result of the kinship classification itself.

Of course, Lévi-Strauss was careful to point out later, in Structural Anthropology (1963), that correspondences between behaviors, such as marriage patterns, and linguistic categories, such as kinship classification systems, will always be difficult to determine, especially in complex societies, unless another approach is adopted. That is because the relationship between language and culture is mediated by the human mind, which structures both language and culture (p. 71). He saw the study of language, on the one hand, and behavior, or culture, on the other hand, as two separate levels of analysis. Hence these were not directly comparable, but the fact that the human mind, and the way in which it works, underlies both language and culture suggests that by understanding the processes of the human mind, the relationships between language and culture can be better understood.

Recent Thought

There are currently many challenges to developing a more comprehensive approach to the understanding of human kinship systems. One recent book, Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies (2001), edited by Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, surveys many of those challenges. Relative Values “attempts to shift the terms of anthropological debate about kinship onto more contingent and productive terrain” (Franklin & McKinnon, 2001, p. 7). With this, the editors meant that it is necessary to remove kinship studies from the framework imposed by biology, that is, to focus more on gender, as opposed to sex. It is clear that the assumptions underlying much traditional work in kinship studies have implicitly unified sex and gender identity and have treated the two as one, when it is clear that the two are distinct. That being the case, traditional theories and approaches have failed to account for the emergence of new family forms, new conceptions of certain social relations, and the new dimensions that reproductive technologies have brought into being.

Feminist anthropologists and gay and lesbian anthropologists have brought a new perspective to kinship studies that appreciates the malleable nature of kinship systems and the contexts within which they are articulated. Same-sex unions/marriages, single-parent families, crosscultural/cross-ethnic adoptions, and surrogate parenting have all brought about reformulations of what it means to be “family.” Certainly, kinship systems have always been malleable, and have always been undergoing some degree of change in all times and places, but anthropologists have tended to use the ethnographic present when describing the kinship systems of the groups they study; until relatively recently, this has framed almost all kinship studies in the eternal present, making it appear as if they never change.

More contemporary studies in anthropology must also take into account the systems within which kinship systems and related behaviors are articulated. Conceptions of family, ethnicity, descent, marriage, and so on, exist within contexts of political power and technological ability. “Family values” are a familiar topic in American political discourse, and political power is brought to bear on determining the definition of exactly what constitutes a family. For example, consider current attempts to legally define marriage as being only between one man and one woman. Likewise, the technological ability to physically alter one’s body from male to female, or from female to male, has created social and legal conundrums in traditional thought and law. Power and technology have significantly impacted the nature of kinship systems and how they are now playing out in societies. In a truly holistic approach to the study of kinship systems, cultural context and power cannot be ignored.

Application of Kinship Theory

Kinship theory has found successful application in the ethnographic literature of anthropology. One characteristic of every well-written ethnography is a detailed description of a group’s kinship system and how that kinship system articulates into other aspects of that group’s culture. Kinship classification, descent system, and marriage practices have provided a focus for most of the classic ethnographic works in anthropology. In fact, most ethnographies reveal that kinship is intimately connected to all other aspects of a culture.

• W. M. Hart and Arnold Pilling did ethnographic fieldwork among the Tiwi in Australia, 1928 to 1929, and 1953 to 1954, respectively (1979, p. vii). In their book The Tiwi of North Australia, the entire first chapter is devoted to discussing household organization, marriage, naming rules, levirate, sororate, and cross-cousin marriage—all of which provide the framework for discussing everything else in Tiwi society in the remainder of the book. So important was kinship to the Tiwi that they had great difficulty interacting with people not related to them. To illustrate, Hart relates how he came to be accepted as a relative of the tribe. An old Tiwi woman kept harassing him for tobacco. He frequently told her to “Go to hell,” but she persisted in her efforts and, on one particular occasion, said, “‘Oh, my son . . . please give me tobacco,’” to which Hart replied, “‘Oh, my mother, go jump in the ocean’” (Hart & Pilling, 1979, p. 124). This exchange resulted in Hart being known as this woman’s son. The downside of being “adopted” into the Tiwi kinship system was that sometime later, Hart and all the woman’s other sons were asked to give their consent to “cover up” the woman who was getting too ill to take care of herself. This meant taking her out and burying her with only her head left above ground and thus causing her to die in the course of a few days. Hart gave his permission, and the woman was covered up, but he did not participate in the actual burying (pp. 125–126). The pervasiveness, social significance, responsibilities, and consequences of being a member of a kinship system are illustrated well in this ethnographic example.

Richard B. Lee had an experience similar in many respects to Hart’s on a different continent, Africa, and some three decades later, in the 1960s. Lee was “named” by the wife of a headman’s son. She referred to him as /Tontah (the / is a dental click), which was the name of her deceased uncle. The naming stuck and defined Lee’s relationship to the group (1993, p. 61). In The Dobe Ju/’hoansi, Lee devotes two chapters to kinship, social organization, marriage, and sexuality. Those chapters are essential to understanding Ju/’hoansi conflict, politics, exchange, religion, worldview, and relations with their neighbors.

It was also during the 1960s that Napoleon Chagnon first studied the Ya˛nomamö, a forest people living along the border between Venezuela and Brazil. In Ya˛nomamö: The Fierce People (1983), Chagnon found that simply asking genealogical questions can be problematic because of taboos against speaking the names of the dead, the mischievousness of some villagers, and the fact that some wives are obtained by raiding neighboring villages. Chagnon was routinely lied to during the first five months of his field research and said, “I had to throw away almost all the information I had collected on this the most basic set of data I had come there to get” (p. 20). Chagnon eventually figured out how to work around those obstacles to get the data he sought, but those obstacles also opened up many other productive avenues of ethnographic inquiry.

The examples chosen from these three ethnographies, which were selected from among many other possible examples, demonstrate clearly the importance of kinship as an organizing principle in culture. The description and analysis of kinship systems is the starting point for most ethnographic work. Describing and understanding kinship systems is still a primary activity in anthropological inquiry, and the development of a comprehensive theoretical framework is still an important epistemological goal.

What Anthropologists Know About Kinship Systems

What do anthropologists know about kinship systems? What are some of the generally accepted concepts in kinships studies? What follows is a brief summary of thought in the discipline. This knowledge is a product of the seminal contributions of the anthropological works just discussed and the intellectual stimulus that those works, and others, have provided to many other scholars who have refined and extended the understanding of kinship systems.

Kinship Systems

All humans are classified, at birth, within a system of kin relations. This system of relations organizes a society in a systematic way, such that it provides for the continuity of those relationships, and for the continuation of the society, through time. Ideally, the kinship system is perpetual and classifies all children at birth and maintains those classifications even after death; people continue to be sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers, and so on. The depth of the genealogical memory of groups varies tremendously, however. In some groups, the knowledge of the genealogy of one’s ancestors can go back many generations, as in the lists of ancestors found in biblical genealogies. On the other hand, such knowledge in other groups may only go as far back as grandparents or great-grandparents, as is common in North America. The depth of genealogical knowledge is, however, not as significant as the idea that kin relations persist through time.

There are all sorts of rituals found in human societies that occur to bring about the incorporation of a baby into the social structure of the society into which it is born. Baby showers, infant baptisms, and the naming of the infant herself are some of the ways that the social position and classification of the new member of society are recognized and reified.

Kinship systems are also flexible regarding the formal incorporation of nonkin into kinship systems. For example, adoption, in various forms, exists in most human societies. Though the establishments of such relations are “fictions,” they are very powerful fictions. Other fictive kin relations include such practices as choosing godparents, calling religious affiliates brothers or sisters, using the title of “Father” for priests, and the practice of female husbands among the Nandi of Kenya—where a “woman pays bridewealth for, and thus marries (but does not have sexual intercourse with) another woman. By so doing, she becomes the social and legal father of her wife’s children” (Oboler, 1980, p. 69).

Kin relations consist of two fundamental types: consanguineal and affinal. Consanguineal kin relations are blood relations. When a person is born, he is genetically closely related to his mother, to his mother’s siblings and their offspring, to his mother’s parents, to his father, and to his father’s siblings and their offspring, and to his father’s parents. Consanguineal relations are the primary structuring categories of the entire kinship system.

Affinal kin relations are those created by marriage. When a man marries one’s mother’s sister, he becomes one’s uncle by virtue of marriage, not because of bloodrelatedness. Keep in mind, however, that in some social groups, marriage may occur between consanguineal kin, such as when the preferred marriage pattern for a male is to marry his father’s brother’s daughter, as is the case in some areas of the Middle East. In cases like this, the bride and groom would hold simultaneous kin classifications, one consanguineal (parallel cousins) and the other affinal (wife and husband). By extension, all other members of the society would have a dual classification for the two. For example, the bride’s father would simultaneously classify his daughter’s husband as his son-in-law and as his brother’s son.

There are basically five different ways or patterns by which consanguineal kinship relations are classified. Three of those patterns distinguish between parallel cousins (the offspring of one’s father’s brother and mother’s sister) and cross-cousins (the offspring of one’s father’s sister and mother’s brother). The other two systems either classify parallel and cross-cousins as a distinct category (i.e., cousins), or classify parallel and cross-cousins as brother and sister. The five types are called Iroquois, Omaha, Crow, Eskimo, and Hawaiian.

In Iroquois, Omaha, and Crow one calls his father’s brother “father,” and his mother’s sister “mother.” Consequently, in these three terminologies, his parallel cousins are called “brother” and “sister.” Also, in Iroquois, Omaha, and Crow, one’s father’s sister is called “father’s sister” (i.e., roughly equivalent to aunt), and his mother’s brother is called “mother’s brother” (i.e., uncle). Beyond those kin relations just discussed, these three systems vary in important ways.

In the Iroquois kinship-terminology system, as just stated, a person’s parallel cousins are referred to with the same kin terms used for brother and sister. However, crosscousins are referred to collectively by some other unique term that could be translated as “cousins.”

With Omaha kinship terminology, one calls her parallel cousins brother and sister, but refers to her cross-cousins differently than in Iroquois. In Omaha, her cross-cousins on her mother’s side of the family are called “mother” and “mother’s brother.” One’s father’s sister’s children are “nephew” and “niece,” if one is a male, or “son” or “daughter,” if one is a female. The reason for the different kin terms between males and females is due to the fact that if one is a male, the cross-cousins called nephew and niece refer to him as “mother’s brother” (i.e., uncle), but if one is a female, those same cross-cousins, which she calls son or daughter, refer to her as “mother.”

The Crow kinship-terminology system is a mirror image of the Omaha system. In Crow, one calls his parallel cousins “brother” and “sister.” Cross-cousins on his father’s side of the family are his “father” and “father’s sister.” Cross-cousins on the mother’s side of the family are called “son” and “daughter,” if one is a male, or “nephew” and “niece,” if one is a female. The cross-cousins referred to as son and daughter, or as nephew and niece, will use either “father” or “father’s sister” (i.e., aunt) depending on gender.

The following two systems do not distinguish between parallel and cross-cousins. In the Eskimo system, one classifies all cross-cousins and parallel cousins into one category that can be called cousins. Similarly, one’s father’s brother and sister, and one’s mother’s brother and sister, are classified into two collective categories referred to as “aunts” and “uncles,” depending on their sex. This classification system should be familiar to most North Americans.

Hawaiian kinship terminology classifies all cross-cousins and parallel cousins as “brother” and “sister.” Consequently, one’s father’s brother, father’s sister, mother’s sister, and mother’s brother are all called “father” or “mother,” depending on their sex.

In the five general patterns covered here, only a very restricted set of kin relations—14 to be exact (father, mother, father’s brother, father’s sister, mother’s sister, mother’s brother, brother, sister, father’s brother’s children, father’s sister’s children, mother’s sister’s children, mother’s brother’s children, son, and daughter)—have been discussed. Remember that Morgan gathered data on 196 kin relationships. Kinship terminology beyond the 14 relations covered here includes a great amount of variability for more distant kin relations among different cultural groups. Nevertheless, these five basic patterns, allowing for some slight variations, underlie the categorization of all human kinship systems.

Note that depending on the kinship classification of a group, there are implications for what marriage patterns are possible. For example, the father’s brother’s daughter preferred marriage pattern is not found in cultures that classify kin in the Iroquois, Omaha, Crow, or Hawaiian systems. That is because marrying a brother or sister violates a universal incest taboo, and in Iroquois, Omaha, Crow, and Hawaiian, parallel cousins are classified as brother and sister. When anthropologists examine particular kin classification systems within the context of particular cultures, many other implications are frequently discovered.

In addition to classifying individual relationships, as we have just seen, kin groups also organize into descent groups, which create a collective identity by classifying a number of people into one group, according to a line of descent that is traced through either the father, the mother, or both.

When descent is traced through the father or through the mother, we refer to such groups as patrilineal or matrilineal, respectively. Collectively, the two are referred to as unilineal descent systems. A unilineal descent system—patrilineal or matrilineal—can have, theoretically, any of the five kinship-terminology systems. Whether someone thinks of herself as a member of her father’s or of her mother’s family is a completely separate matter from the system by which one classifies one’s kin relations.

A significant number of societies have both patrilines and matrilines, creating a more complex kind of descent system, in which identity with regard to both lines of descent is recognized and perpetuated. Such descent systems are called cognatic. Lévi-Strauss (1949/1969) suggests that a third of all descent systems are cognatic (p. 105).

Of course, lineal descent systems, whether unilineal or cognatic, always exist alongside systems of inheritance, status, marriage, and so on. Also, rather than thinking of patrilineal, matrilineal, and cognatic descent systems as three distinct systems that different societies map onto, it is better to think of patrilineal and matrilineal systems as two ends of a continuum along which varying degrees of emphasis on the mother’s or father’s line can be expressed, with full recognition of both lines being in the middle and called cognatic. As a special case of cognatic descent, a few societies allow a certain degree of freedom for individuals to emphasize or affiliate with one line or the other, and those systems are called ambilineal.

Many societies do not have lineal descent groups. Rather, they identify with both parents’ families. Bilateral groups such as this can recognize a fairly large set of relations as family, or, in a special case, called the bilateral kindred, will recognize a smaller set of relations that are only the same for siblings. The bilateral kindred is typical for most North Americans, where a group of siblings recognize their mother, father, sister, brother, son, daughter, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and nephews and nieces as their family. The cousins of the siblings in the example just given will have a different set of people in those same relationships, and, consequently, they will have a different bilateral kindred.

What is clear is that how a society structures its understanding of descent has significant implications for how the group defines its identity. Consequently, there are significant effects on many other aspects of social organization.

Marriage creates new social relationships between the family of the bride and the family of the groom. Marriage patterns vary significantly around the world but are reducible to a few general types, with some variation within each type. Those types are monogamy, polygyny, and polyandry.

Monogamous marriages are those between just two people. Traditionally, this has been defined as between one male and one female, and in many communities undoubtedly will continue to be defined this way, but a more contemporary definition incorporates the observation that many same-sex couples are marrying worldwide, and that those marriages are being accepted within some groups. Also, in parts of the Western world and elsewhere, due to the prevalence of divorce—a formal legal and/or religious process for ending a marriage—the practice of serial monogamy has emerged, in which an individual may have several spouses throughout her or his lifetime.

Marriage may also involve some form of economic exchange, such as brideservice, where a male renders economic service, such as gardening or herding, to the bride’s family, in exchange for the opportunity to marry the bride. Bridewealth is found in other groups, where the economic exchange will take the form of money or other material wealth paid by the groom’s family, either all at once or over a period of time, to the bride’s family. Dowry is another form of exchange linked to marriage, in which wealth is given to the bride by the bride’s family, and in many cases it functions as a sort of insurance policy against the loss of a husband because of death or divorce.

Polygynous marriages are between one male and more than one female. Polygyny has been common throughout human history. Various preferred marriage patterns have an effect on the social outcomes of polygyny. For example, there are social implications for a preference for exogamy (marrying outside one’s group), or endogamy (marrying within one’s group). There are further implications associated with a preference for either parallel cousin marriage, or cross-cousin marriage, and whether or not sororal polygyny (marrying a group of sisters) is allowed or prohibited.

Polyandry is very rare compared with monogamy and polygyny. In polyandry, a female is married to more than one male. As in polygyny, there are social implications for the particular preferred marriage patterns in a society.

Finally, many societies have mechanisms, such as polygyny, to ensure that most people, especially women, get married. To ensure that they remain married, many societies have additional practices. In some societies, if a woman’s husband dies, the husband’s brother or one of his other close male kinsmen must marry her. This practice is called the levirate. In some other societies, if a man’s wife dies, her family must find another woman to marry the man. This practice is called the sororate. In both cases, not only is the structure of the marriage preserved, but also all kin relations created by the marriage are preserved.

Households and Residence Patterns

Once a person is married, the couple must live somewhere. There are several patterns found in the ethnographic literature. If the couple lives with the husband’s family, the pattern is called patrilocal residence . If the couple lives with the wife’s family, it is called matrilocal residence . If the couple forms a new household, it is called neolocal residence. Some societies allow for residential affiliation with either the bride’s or the groom’s family, and that practice is called ambilocal residence. Finally, there is the pattern in which a man and his new wife go to live with the man’s mother’s brother. This pattern is called avunculocal residence (or uxorilocal residence in some older sources).

Households are a subset of a family that lives together and cooperates economically. Households can be nuclear, consisting of a husband, wife, and children; patrilocally extended , in which two or more patrilineally related nuclear families reside together; matrilocally extended, in which two or more matrilineally related nuclear families reside together; or ambilineally extended, in which both patrilineally and matrilineally related nuclear families reside together.

Future Directions

Much work remains to be done in kinship studies. Until recently, anthropologists have looked primarily at the larger, or macro, aspects of kinship studies with the goal of applying the comparative method to arrive at conclusions reaching across cultures and saying something universal. At the same time, anthropologists have left the smaller, or micro, aspects of kinship studies, such as family studies, largely to the sociologists. Anthropologists need to bring both the macro- and micro-aspects of kinship studies under scrutiny together. Currently, anthropology is headed in that direction.

Some of the original questions asked in kinship studies remain either unanswered or answered incompletely. Why do kinship classification systems vary? Why are there a small number of types? To what degree and how do kinship classification systems influence other social behaviors? And perhaps the most intriguing question: What is the relationship among the mind, language, and culture? This last question seems one of the most promising for furthering our understanding of kinship systems and the roles they play in human societies.

Just as important as the original questions are the emerging questions about power, cultural context, and group identity in relation to kinship studies. In what way do kinship systems articulate discourses of power? How does cultural context shape and reinterpret kinship systems? What aspects of kinship systems are most important to group identity?

All of those questions, and more that will emerge with additional research, need to be addressed in future kinship studies. New methodologies and new theories need to be developed and adopted in order to analyze kinship as process and to account for the variability that is observed from the micro- to the macrolevel of analysis. Kinship studies will stay a key focus of anthropological research, just as they always have Most likely, kinship studies will become even more important as the place of kinship systems in culture becomes better understood over time.

From the very beginning of the discipline of anthropology, kinship studies have been at the center of the study of culture. Kinship systems structure and influence many of our social behaviors and have a dynamic presence in the synergy among language culture, and the mind. The concepts and understanding gained from kinship studies are essential fundamentals of anthropological knowledge and continue to be applied in ethnographic research today. Future scholarship will undoubtedly generate new theoretical insights and lead to a more sophisticated and holistic knowledge of what it means to be human.

Bibliography:

• Chagnon, N. (1983). Ya˛nomamö: The fierce people (3rd ed.). New York: CBS College Publishing.
• Darwin, C. (1952). The origin of species by means of natural selection, and The descent of man, No. 49. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica. (Original work published 1871)
• Durkheim, É. (1915). The elementary forms of the religious life. New York: The Free Press.
• Durkheim, É., & Mauss, M. (1963). Primitive classification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1903)
• Franklin, S., & McKinnon, S. (Eds.). (2001). Relative values: Reconfiguring kinship studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Freud, S. (1946). Totem and taboo: Resemblances between the psychic lives of savages and neurotics. New York: Random House.
• Fustel de Coulanges, N. D. (1873). The ancient city. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
• Hart, C. W. M., & Pilling, A. R. (1979). The Tiwi of north Australia. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
• Kroeber, A. L. (1909). Classificatory systems of relationship. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 39, 259–287.
• Lee, R. B. (1993). The Dobe Ju/’hoansi (2nd ed.). New York: Harcourt College Publishers.
• Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
• Lévi-Strauss, C. (1969). The elementary structures of kinship. Toronto, Canada: Beacon Press. (Original work published 1949)
• Morgan, L. H. (1912). Ancient society. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company. (Original work published 1877)
• Morgan, L. H. (1997). Systems of consanguinity and affinity of the human family. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. (Original work published 1870)
• Oboler, R. S. (1980). Is the female husband a man? Woman/ woman marriage among the Nandi of Kenya. Ethnology, 19, 69–88.
• Parkin, R. (1997). Kinship: An introduction to basic concepts. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
• Rivers, W. H. R. (1968). Kinship and social organization. London: Althone Press. (Original work published 1914)
• Stone, L. (1997). Kinship and gender: An introduction. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Weston, K. (1991). Families we choose: Lesbians, gays, kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Large language models use a surprisingly simple mechanism to retrieve some stored knowledge

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Large language models, such as those that power popular artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT, are incredibly complex. Even though these models are being used as tools in many areas, such as customer support, code generation, and language translation, scientists still don’t fully grasp how they work.

In an effort to better understand what is going on under the hood, researchers at MIT and elsewhere studied the mechanisms at work when these enormous machine-learning models retrieve stored knowledge.

They found a surprising result: Large language models (LLMs) often use a very simple linear function to recover and decode stored facts. Moreover, the model uses the same decoding function for similar types of facts. Linear functions, equations with only two variables and no exponents, capture the straightforward, straight-line relationship between two variables.

The researchers showed that, by identifying linear functions for different facts, they can probe the model to see what it knows about new subjects, and where within the model that knowledge is stored.

Using a technique they developed to estimate these simple functions, the researchers found that even when a model answers a prompt incorrectly, it has often stored the correct information. In the future, scientists could use such an approach to find and correct falsehoods inside the model, which could reduce a model’s tendency to sometimes give incorrect or nonsensical answers.

“Even though these models are really complicated, nonlinear functions that are trained on lots of data and are very hard to understand, there are sometimes really simple mechanisms working inside them. This is one instance of that,” says Evan Hernandez, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and co-lead author of a paper detailing these findings .

Hernandez wrote the paper with co-lead author Arnab Sharma, a computer science graduate student at Northeastern University; his advisor, Jacob Andreas, an associate professor in EECS and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); senior author David Bau, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern; and others at MIT, Harvard University, and the Israeli Institute of Technology. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations.

Finding facts

Most large language models, also called transformer models, are neural networks . Loosely based on the human brain, neural networks contain billions of interconnected nodes, or neurons, that are grouped into many layers, and which encode and process data.

Much of the knowledge stored in a transformer can be represented as relations that connect subjects and objects. For instance, “Miles Davis plays the trumpet” is a relation that connects the subject, Miles Davis, to the object, trumpet.

As a transformer gains more knowledge, it stores additional facts about a certain subject across multiple layers. If a user asks about that subject, the model must decode the most relevant fact to respond to the query.

If someone prompts a transformer by saying “Miles Davis plays the. . .” the model should respond with “trumpet” and not “Illinois” (the state where Miles Davis was born).

“Somewhere in the network’s computation, there has to be a mechanism that goes and looks for the fact that Miles Davis plays the trumpet, and then pulls that information out and helps generate the next word. We wanted to understand what that mechanism was,” Hernandez says.

The researchers set up a series of experiments to probe LLMs, and found that, even though they are extremely complex, the models decode relational information using a simple linear function. Each function is specific to the type of fact being retrieved.

For example, the transformer would use one decoding function any time it wants to output the instrument a person plays and a different function each time it wants to output the state where a person was born.

The researchers developed a method to estimate these simple functions, and then computed functions for 47 different relations, such as “capital city of a country” and “lead singer of a band.”

While there could be an infinite number of possible relations, the researchers chose to study this specific subset because they are representative of the kinds of facts that can be written in this way.

They tested each function by changing the subject to see if it could recover the correct object information. For instance, the function for “capital city of a country” should retrieve Oslo if the subject is Norway and London if the subject is England.

Functions retrieved the correct information more than 60 percent of the time, showing that some information in a transformer is encoded and retrieved in this way.

“But not everything is linearly encoded. For some facts, even though the model knows them and will predict text that is consistent with these facts, we can’t find linear functions for them. This suggests that the model is doing something more intricate to store that information,” he says.

Visualizing a model’s knowledge

They also used the functions to determine what a model believes is true about different subjects.

In one experiment, they started with the prompt “Bill Bradley was a” and used the decoding functions for “plays sports” and “attended university” to see if the model knows that Sen. Bradley was a basketball player who attended Princeton.

“We can show that, even though the model may choose to focus on different information when it produces text, it does encode all that information,” Hernandez says.

They used this probing technique to produce what they call an “attribute lens,” a grid that visualizes where specific information about a particular relation is stored within the transformer’s many layers.

Attribute lenses can be generated automatically, providing a streamlined method to help researchers understand more about a model. This visualization tool could enable scientists and engineers to correct stored knowledge and help prevent an AI chatbot from giving false information.

In the future, Hernandez and his collaborators want to better understand what happens in cases where facts are not stored linearly. They would also like to run experiments with larger models, as well as study the precision of linear decoding functions.

“This is an exciting work that reveals a missing piece in our understanding of how large language models recall factual knowledge during inference. Previous work showed that LLMs build information-rich representations of given subjects, from which specific attributes are being extracted during inference. This work shows that the complex nonlinear computation of LLMs for attribute extraction can be well-approximated with a simple linear function,” says Mor Geva Pipek, an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, who was not involved with this work.

This research was supported, in part, by Open Philanthropy, the Israeli Science Foundation, and an Azrieli Foundation Early Career Faculty Fellowship.

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Researchers at MIT have found that large language models mimic intelligence using linear functions, reports Kyle Wiggers for  TechCrunch . “Even though these models are really complicated, nonlinear functions that are trained on lots of data and are very hard to understand, there are sometimes really simple mechanisms working inside them,” writes Wiggers. 

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Distribution of Market Power, Endogenous Growth, and Monetary Policy

Yumeng Gu, Sanjay R. Singh

Download PDF (1 MB)

2024-09 | March 28, 2024

We incorporate incumbent innovation in a Keynesian growth framework to generate an endogenous distribution of market power across firms. Existing firms increase markups over time through successful innovation. Entrant innovation disrupts the accumulation of market power by incumbents. Using this environment, we highlight a novel misallocation channel for monetary policy. A contractionary monetary policy shock causes an increase in markup dispersion across firms by discouraging entrant innovation relative to incumbent innovation. We characterize the circumstances when contractionary monetary policy may increase misallocation.

Article Citation

Gu, Yumeng, and Sanjay R. Singh. 2024. “Distribution of Market Power, Endogenous Growth, and Monetary Policy,” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper 2024-09. Available at https://doi.org/10.24148/wp2024-09

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• 27 March 2024

Tweeting your research paper boosts engagement but not citations

• Bianca Nogrady

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Even before complaints about X’s declining quality, posting a paper on the social-media platform did not lead to a boost in citations. Credit: Matt Cardy/Getty

Posting about a research paper on social-media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) doesn’t translate into a bump in citations, according to a study that looked at 550 papers.

The finding comes as scientists are moving away from the platform in the wake of changes after its 2022 purchase by entrepreneur Elon Musk.

An international group of 11 researchers, who by the end of the experiment had between them nearly 230,000 followers on X, examined whether there was evidence that posting about a paper would increase its citation rate.

“There certainly is a correlation, and that’s been found in a lot of papers. But very few people have ever looked to see whether there’s any experimental causation,” says Trevor Branch, a marine ecologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and lead author on the paper, published in PLoS ONE last week 1 .

Every month for ten months, each researcher was allocated a randomly selected primary research article or review from a journal of their choice to post about on their personal account. Four randomly chosen articles from the same edition of the journal served as controls, which the researchers did not post about. They conducted the experiment in the period before Elon Musk took ownership of what was then known as Twitter and complaints of its declining quality increased.

‘Nail in the coffin’

Three years after the initial posts, the team compared the citation rates for the 110 posted articles with those of the 440 control articles, and found no significant difference. The researchers did acknowledge that their followers might not have been numerous enough to detect a statistically significant effect on citations.

The rate of daily downloads for the posted papers was nearly fourfold higher on the day that they were shared, compared with controls. Shared papers also had significantly higher accumulated Altmetric scores both 30 days and three years after the initial post. Calculated by London-based technology company Digital Science, an Altmetric score, says Branch, is a measure of how many people have looked at a paper and are talking about it, but it’s not a reliable indicator of a paper’s scientific worth. “It’s thoroughly biased by how many people with large followings tweet about it,” he says.

The findings echo those of information scientist Stefanie Haustein at the University of Ottawa, whose 2013 study 2 found a low correlation between posts and citations.

Haustein says the problem with using posts as a metric is that, even a decade ago, there was a lot of noise in the signal.

“We actually showed that a lot of the counts on Twitter you would get were bots, it wasn’t even humans,” says Haustein, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

She says the more recent departure of scientists from the platform has been the final nail in the coffin of the idea that posting could increase citations.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00922-y

Branch, T. A. et al. PLoS ONE 19 , e0292201 (2024).

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Haustein, S., Peters, I., Sugimoto, C. R., Thelwall, M. & Larivière, V. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 65, 656–669 (2014).

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