Unthinkable Categories and the Fundamental Laws of Kinship

In L'Exercice de la parenté, Héritier develops a general theory of kinship systems based on two “fundamental laws.” These laws depend for their proof on a sociological explanation of two logically possible but empirically unrealized terminologies in the classifications of Lowie and Murdock. Following Greenberg's cognitive‐linguistic theory of kinship classification, I interpret these unrealized terminologies in the first instance as special cases of a universal tendency to avoid disjunctive categories. In developing this interpretation I introduce an evolutionary perspective that has been absent from most discussions of kinship theory fora long time. The structural models for this analysis are, as always, graph theoretic, [kinship theory, cognition, linguistics, graph theory]