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This paper deals with the evidence for Proto-Indo-European (PIE) kinship and related institutions, discussing the problems of earlier work on PIE kinship, and the methodology of analyzing kinship terms (differences between address and reference, relevance of age, gender, and context, relation to systems of personal naming, etc.).
It particularly discusses the view that PIE had an 'Omaha' terminology; cousin/nephew terms; women's terms for affines; and the question whether wife-givers were terminologically distinguished from wife-takers.
PIE data allow us to say something about the long-term stability of kin terms: the paper considers both sociological and morphological factors that might affect stability. Finally, it suggests that absence of fixed marriage rules may have facilitated migration.
History of research
In the days of Maine's Ancient Law (1861) and Fustel de Coulanges' Cité antique (1864) it seemed clear that the comparative method used by linguists to reconstruct ancient forms from Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit could be applied also to the comparison and reconstruction of social institutions, and that the result of this exercise of reconstruction would be a picture of human society at a time close to its beginnings. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, despite the immense stretching of geological time that had by that date been accepted as part of the evolutionary perspective, both anthropologists and classicists assigned kinship (along with religion) to a category of 'traditional' institutions of the longue durée, within which continuity from early Indo-European society into historical periods did not seem problematic.
Since then, a major shift in perspectives and interpretive frameworks has taken place in anthropology; there has been less change in linguistics and ancient history. Indeed, one of my aims in discussing Indo-European questions here is to problematize assumptions that still too often seem self-evident to specialists in PIE studies or in the early history of Greece and Italy. As in any field of contact between ancient history and anthropology, it seems necessary to clear the ground of the debris of older anthropological theories, and give a brief account of how anthropology has moved from them to its present understandings and concerns, before proceeding to data analysis.
However, my purpose is not solely destructive. The literature on PIE and the social institutions that might have been associated with...