do set up networks of alliance that are narrower in focus than exogamous
marriage to non-kin among a range of groups. We do not know, how-
ever, whether cousin marriage was an original rule-governed form of
marriage in general rather than an outcome of the prevalence of small-
scale group life. And the implications of this form of marriage vary
greatly between cases where the immediate cousin is married, often for
reasons of the consolidation of property, and those where the marriage-
able pool is a category of persons all classified as a particular kind of
cousin in a context of ongoing alliance between groups. As these cases
are so different, a single explanation cannot hold for them. This brings
us, in turn, to a problem that has been with anthropology ever since
Lewis Henry Morgan’s work on kinship terminologies. Morgan ( 1871 )
distinguished between descriptive and classificatory terms, thereby set-
ting the tone for the basiccategorizations of kinship semantics for a long
time, in addition to setting up a typology of systems based on his samples
of terms from ethnographic accounts that happened to be available to
him at the time, for example, the category‘Crow-Omaha’derived from
Native American cases.
Rethinking this early distinction between descriptive and classifica-
tory/kin terms, we may notice some confusion in it. All kinship terms are
forms of classification, including those that Morgan dubbed‘descrip-
tive’.Equally,classificatory terms are also forms of description.
The question arises here, descriptive or classificatory of what? If the
basis, or cross-cultural putative foundation, of kinship ties is considered
to be the biological processes of procreation, then descriptive terms should
be primarily descriptions that refer to these processes.‘Descriptive’as a
term tends to appeal to such a notion. The idea is that all descriptive terms
can be broken down, or parsed, into an etic grid of genealogical links.
These suppositions are derived from a systematization of folk concepts
enshrined in the English language (or languages with the same or very
similar folk concepts), so at heart the problem is one of translation between
different languages. If, in the English language, the terms brother and sister
carry the implication that those so described share one, or two, biological
parents through procreation, then we can build up kin types based upon
genealogical readings and marriage ties. Thus, for example, the term aunt
can be defined by the following types: mother’s sister (MZ), father’s sister
(FZ), but also mother’s brother’s wife (MBW) and father’s brother’s wife
(FBW). While the translation into symbols renders these points unambigu-
ously and thus brings them under the purview of steps of procreation and
5 NATURE VERSUS CULTURE: A MISTAKEN CONUNDRUM 49