Geographical-Historical Versus Psycho-Functional Explanations of Kin Avoidances

Avoidances between the various combinations of parents-in-law and children-in-law in native North America are used to demonstrate a new method of measuring the potency of geographical-historical versus psycho-functional explanations of comparative data. A brief historical review assembles the principal ex-planation of kin avoidances employed by previous researchers. The psycho-functional explanations are: incest-phobia between persons of opposite sex, extension of avoidances to persons of the same sex, unilocal residence, and unilineal descent, Geographical historical explanations include diffusion by means of inter-tribal marriages, migration, and heritage from a proto-culture. Although a few significant correlations between avoidances and forms of unilocal residence and unilineal descent were obtained these averaged lower than those with forms for unicentered kinship terminology. It was further found that significant correlation of avoidances with culture areas and language families were more numerous and higher, on the whole, than those with residence, descent, and kinship terminology. When variables were combined to raise correlation values, combinations of culture areas produced the highest values, with combinations of language families next, followed by kinship terminology, descent, and residence, in that order. Thus one can predict whether an unspecified society will have kin avoidances from knowledge of its culture area and language family membership with greater accuracy than from knowledge of its residence, descent, or kinship terminology. Geographical-historical factors are more powerful than these functional ones. The fact that the correlations of the 4 combinations of avoiding relatives with each other are higher than any of the above correlations, and that these avoidances also form a cumulative scale, makes it possible to predict one avoidance from knowledge of the others with much greater accuracy than from knowledge of either culture area and language family or of residence- descent-kinship terminology. The greater frequency of cross-sex avoidance suggests that same-sex avoidances have often arisen from the former by means of extension.