UNTHINKABLE CATEGORIES AND THE FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF KINSHIP

In L'Exercice de la parente, Heritier develops a general theory of kin ship systems based on two ''fundamental laws.'' These laws depend for their proof on a sociological explanation of two logically possible bu t empirically unrealized terminologies in the classifications of Lowie and Murdock. Following Greenberg's cognitive-linguistic theory of kin ship classification, I interpret these unrealized terminologies in the first instance as special cases of a universal tendency to avoid disj unctive categories. In developing this interpretation I introduce an e volutionary perspective that has been absent from most discussions of kinship theory for a long time. The structural models for this analysi s are, as always, graph theoretic.