CROW-OMAHA KINSHIP: REVITALIZING A PROBLEM OR GENERATING A SOLUTION?

The article discusses the long-standing Crow-Omaha problem in kinship studies with a focus on the volume Crow-Omaha: New Light on a Classic Problem of Kinship Analysis (2012), edited by Thomas Trautmann and Peter Whiteley. While successful in restoring the importance of the Crow-Omaha problem to kinship studies and contributing to the revival of “traditional” kinship studies in anthropology, the book misses an opportunity to advance a solution to this problem. Drawing on a global database of kinship terminologies and the author’s own treatment of the Crow-Omaha problem in The Genius of Kinship: The Phenomenon of Human Kinship and the Global Diversity of Kinship Terminologies (2007), the article uses empirical material from multiple language families represented in the Trautmann & Whiteley volume to demonstrate the im-portance of alternate-generation equivalences, Bifurcate Collateral grouping and sibling termi-nologies in the evolution of “Crow-Omaha skewing.” Methodologically, it is recommended to shift kinship terminological analysis from using representative “case studies” to drawing on large-scale databases of global kinship-terminological variation, from discussing narrow “types” to discussing kinship terminologies as systems, from anthropology-only approaches to interdisciplinary studies marrying anthropology and linguistics, from semantics-only approaches to approaches combining semantics, etymology and speech pragmatics. &nbsp