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Salish Kinship: Why Decedence?
Academic Work
Language, remarkable enough for its internal consistency, nevertheless, serves primarily social ends. Actions do indeed speak louder than words; the second follows from the first. A case in point is kinship terminologies, which are linguistic reflections of the social consequence of biological factors. In his classic statement of these, Murdock (1949:101) listed nine criteria universally used for classifactory systems. These are generation, sex, affinity, collaterality, bifurcation, poliarity, relative age, speaker's sex, and decedence: "the last and least important of the nine...based on the biological fact of death" (same: 106).
Decedence, terminological changes following upon the death of a linking relative, is a feature of the kinship systems of Puget (Lushootseed) Salish and neighboring regions. While it is listed as one of the nine universals of kinship, its application is usually limited to situations involving the remarriage of a surviving spouse: levirate for a wife and sororate for the husband. In this form, it occurs in many kinship systems. To the best of my knowledge, however, only the Salish and other groups of the southern Norhtwest region have elaborated it into a hallmark of their overall system (Elmendorf 1961).
Decedence, terminological changes following upon the death of a linking relative, is a feature of the kinship systems of Puget (Lushootseed) Salish and neighboring regions. While it is listed as one of the nine universals of kinship, its application is usually limited to situations involving the remarriage of a surviving spouse: levirate for a wife and sororate for the husband. In this form, it occurs in many kinship systems. To the best of my knowledge, however, only the Salish and other groups of the southern Norhtwest region have elaborated it into a hallmark of their overall system (Elmendorf 1961).
AW.00117
1985
Language and Linguistics
UBC Working Papers in Linguistics Press
International Conference on Salish Languages, 20, 213-222
International Conference on Salish Languages, 20, 213-222
kinship
Working Papers
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