Overview

Why are kin, in societies all over the world, divided into 'joking' and 'avoidance' relations? Foundational figures in the human sciences, from E. B. Tylor and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown to Sigmund Freud and Claude Levi-Strauss, have sought to explain why some classes of kin are normatively expected to prank and tease one another while others must studiously avoid each other's presence. In this extensively researched comparative study, linguistic anthropologist Luke Owles Fleming offers a bold new answer to this problem. With a particular focus on avoidance relationships, On Speaking Terms argues that in order to understand cross-cultural convergences in the patterning of kinship-keyed comportments, we must attend to the sociolinguistic codes through which kinship relationships are enacted. Drawing on ethnographic data from more than one hundred different societies, the book documents and analyses parallels in the linguistic and non-verbal signs through which avoidance relationships are experientially realised. With dedicated discussions of Aboriginal Australian 'mother-in-law languages,' name and word tabooing practices, pronominal honorification, and non-verbal strategies of interactional and sensorial avoidance, it reveals recurrent sociolinguistic patterns attested in kinship avoidance. In demonstrating the vital role of sociolinguistic codes for transforming kinship categories into phenomenologically rich relationships, On Speaking Terms makes an important contribution to the anthropology of kinship.

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9781487549701

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Reviews

""On Speaking Terms is an instant classic in the anthropology of kinship and in the study of interaction. Rarely does an author synthesize such a breadth of comparative ethnography, with such insight both about specific examples and about the principles across them. This is now the definitive work on 'avoidance' as a social form, and via that topic offers a challengingly original synthesis of what it is to be kin and act as kin.""--Rupert Stasch, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge ""In this valuable book, linguistic anthropologist Luke Owles Fleming examines global linguistic and cultural evidence of the expression of meaning in social interaction through forms of 'avoidance' or modes of suppression of direct interaction. The book illustrates, with scholarly thoroughness and challenging novelty, gradient and multimodal properties of 'avoidance' and their grounds in human sensory capacities and socio-cultural frameworks. (Socio-)linguists, anthropologists, and other social scientists will want to read this book and consider the fundamental issues it addresses.""--Francesca Merlan, Professor of Anthropology, Australian National University ""This remarkable book extends the study of kinship beyond kinship terms to the vast range of speech and non-speech behaviours through which kinship relations are performed and construed in interpersonal conduct. It presents a unified framework for studying kinship and its infrastructures across human societies. Vivid examples and perspicuous discussion make analytic techniques highly accessible throughout, inviting readers to apply them to the study of other realms of human sociability.""--Asif Agha, Francis E. Johnston Term Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

Author Information

Luke Owles Fleming is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Montreal.

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