[Xmca-l] Re: kinship

Sun Jan 7 15:45:26 PST 2018

David,

My question was a serious one: in Chinese (I’m not sure which language we’re discussing) can a childless couple be called a family?

Martin

"I may say that whenever I meet Mrs. Seligman or Dr. Lowie or discuss matters with Radcliffe-Brown or Kroeber, I become at once aware that my partner does not understand anything in the matter, and I end usually with the feeling that this also applies to myself” (Malinowski, 1930)

> On Jan 7, 2018, at 6:37 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> James not only calls the use of the "room" radical and the "pig" in the
> Chinese character etymology but also refers to the Chinese oracle (yes, the
> Book of Changes and oracle bones, the very earliest forms of writing on
> sheep shoulder blades and tortoise shells that are cast in the fire in
> order to observe their cracking). If James is warning us not to make too
> much of this historical detail, he's right: it's a little like reminding
> people that the word "family" in English derives from a Latin term for
> household servants.
> 
> I agree that we can't use this as evidence to explain, for example, the
> fact that when a Korean child comes home from school, the usual response of
> the mother is something like "You're here" (even when the child is actually
> returning from years of overseas study!). I can't use the fact that the
> Chinese word for "family" refers to rooms and livestock to explain why my
> mother-in-law and even my wife always avoided the kind of mushy talk that
> constitutes family celebrations in the West and much prefered to complain
> about housing problems, food and television programming on the rare
> occasions we reunited at Spring Festival. It's not etymological.
> 
> It is cultural, though. So for example both Chinese and Korean have family
> naming systems that make distinctions between maternal and paternal aunts
> and uncles in a way that is impossible in English, and in Korean the word
> for an older brother has nothing to do with the word for a younger brother,
> but the word for younger brother doesn't distinguish gender, as the English
> word does. In Korean, to say "cousin", you have to say exactly what degree
> of separation you have ("three degrees"); I don't think anybody but an
> anthropologist or a literature major can explain exactly what "second
> cousin twice removed" means in English. Which suggests inattention to
> kinship--making the relationship between housing and kinship explicit or
> leaving it implicit?
> 
> I think that what Rod is really asking about is words like 익숙한 ("familiar",
> i.e. "easily recognizable") and 熟悉 ("familiar", i.e. "practiced"). They
> have nothing to do with either housing or kinship, and in fact the idea
> that there might be some inner connection that has nothing to do with the
> context of situation seems rather puzzling to my learned (and hence rather
> feeble) Sino-Korean sensibilities. But maybe James can correct me here.
> 
> David
> 
> PS: There is this story on the BBC about a girl baby from Suzhou who was
> left in the street during the one-child policy with a Chinese poem in her
> swaddling clothes. She was adopted and brought up as an American, but when
> she was in her twenties, her parents had the poem translated, and
> discovered that the parents could not afford the fines and the lack of
> housing that having an extra child would mean but that they would go and
> wait in Hangzhou on the child's birthday for the rest of their lives, in
> the hope that some day she would have the poem translated and come and meet
> her "family" on the Duanqiao there. Duanqiao is the "broken bridge"; it's
> actually quite beautiful and completely undamaged, but it is the scene of
> a heartbreak scene in the opera "The White Snake", and inspired the couplet:
> 
> "断桥桥不断，残雪雪未残"
> 
> "The broken bridge is a bridge unbroken, and the lingering snow (i.e. White
> Snake, who is a snake spirit in love with an unworthy mortal) is snow that
> won't linger."
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHUGHRBmg2o
> 
> Of course, the BBC made a reality show out of this, insisting on following
> both the girl and her Chinese parents with a movie camera during their
> reunion. There was a lot of shrieking and screaming and crying on the
> Chinese side; on the American side not so much (but the daughter said she
> felt overwhelmed by the love). What the mother kept saying to her daughter,
> over and over again, was "You cannot understand what I am saying!"
> 
> dk
> 
> David Kellogg
> 
> Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
> Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
> Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'
> 
> Free e-print available (for a short time only) at
> 
> http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 7:45 AM, James Ma <jamesma320@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Just to add an etymological aspect that you might be interested to know
>> (this is because Chines is logographical).
>> 
>> According to the Chinese Oracle, family 家 has two parts: the upper
>> part 宀 refers
>> to "room"; the lower part 豕 refers to "pig". In the ancient times, people
>> raised pigs in their houses, so having pigs in a house was a hallmark of
>> living. In modern Chinese, family also indicates "relationship", e.g. 亲如一家
>> as close as a family.
>> 
>> James
>> 
>> 
>> *_____________________________________*
>> 
>> *James Ma*  *https://oxford.academia.edu/JamesMa
>> <https://oxford.academia.edu/JamesMa>   *
>> 
>> 
>> On 7 January 2018 at 21:30, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> In Chinese and in Korean, the word "family" is related to housing rather
>>> than to kinship. In European languages it is the other way around. This
>>> does suggest something semantic, no?
>>> 
>>> David Kellogg
>>> 
>>> Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
>>> Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
>>> Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'
>>> 
>>> Free e-print available (for a short time only) at
>>> 
>>> http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 6:22 AM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com
>>> 
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Martin,
>>>> Well that is a difficult question to answer without knowing what you
>> mean
>>>> by "family"?
>>>> What in the world do you mean by "family"?
>>>> -greg
>>>> 
>>>> On Sun, Jan 7, 2018 at 12:59 PM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net>
>>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> I am struggling with the way ‘family’ and ‘kinship’ have been
>> defined,
>>> or
>>>>> not defined, in psychology and anthropology. One question that has
>>>> occurred
>>>>> to me is whether a word equivalent to ‘family’ exists in every
>>> language.
>>>>> When I Google this, Google responds ‘Ask Siri’…  :(
>>>>> 
>>>>> Anyone have an idea?
>>>>> 
>>>>> Martin
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
>>>> Assistant Professor
>>>> Department of Anthropology
>>>> 880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
>>>> Brigham Young University
>>>> Provo, UT 84602
>>>> WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
>>>> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
>>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
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