Working Paper 158

Title
Thinking Scientifically about Kinship – towards an axiomatic formulation of ethnographic insights

Author
Patrick Heady

Department
Department ‘Integration and Confilct’

Year of publication
2014

Number of pages
26

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Working Paper 158

Abstract
Progress in kinship anthropology has been slowed both by real difficulties in analysing complex data and by poor communication between competing schools of thought. Formulating ethnographically-based insights as axioms should make it possible to explore their implications more thoroughly and to test them more systematically. It may also facilitate comparisons between theoretical and empirical results obtained by social and cultural anthropologists and those obtained by evolutionary anthropologists – with potential benefits for anthropology as a whole.