To cite this output:
Barnard, AJ, (2013) EuroBABEL - Kinship Systems in Southern African Non-Bantu Languages: Documentation,
Comparison, and Historical Analysis
ESRC End of Award Report, RES-062-23-1850. Swindon; ESRC.
ESRC End of Award Report
For awards ending on or after 1 November 2009
This End of Award Report should be completed and submitted using the grant reference
as the email subject, to [email protected] on or before the due date.
The final instalment of the grant will not be paid until an End of Award Report is completed
in full and accepted by ESRC.
Grant holders whose End of Award Report is overdue or incomplete will not be eligible for
further ESRC funding until the Report is accepted. We reserve the right to recover a sum of
the expenditure incurred on the grant if the End of Award Report is overdue. (Please see
the ESRC Research Funding Guide for details.)
Please refer to the Guidance notes when completing this End of Award Report.
Grant Reference
Grant Title
Grant Start Date
Grant End Date
Grant holding
Institution
Grant Holder
Grant Holder’s Contact
Details
RES-062-23-1850
EUROBABEL – KINSHIP SYSTEMS IN SOUTHERN
AFRICAN NON-BANTU LANGUAGES:
DOCUMENTATION, COMPARISON AND HISTORICAL
ANALYSIS
01.01.2010
Total Amount
£314,469,00
Expended:
31.03.2013
University of Edinburgh
Professor Alan Barnard
Address
Email
School of Social and Political
[email protected]
Science
Telephone
University of Edinburgh
+44 (0)131 650 3938
15a George Square
+44 (0)7775 680878
Edinburgh
EH8 9LD
Co-Investigators (as per project application): Institution
Dr Gertrud Boden (Research Assistant)
same as above (until 31.3.2013)
([email protected])
1
To cite this output:
Barnard, AJ, (2013) EuroBABEL - Kinship Systems in Southern African Non-Bantu Languages: Documentation,
Comparison, and Historical Analysis
ESRC End of Award Report, RES-062-23-1850. Swindon; ESRC.
1. Non-technical summary
Please provide below a project summary written in non-technical language. The summary
may be used by us to publicise your work and should explain the aims and findings of the
project. [Max 250 words]
The project aimed at advancing the knowledge of the prehistory of the indigenous nonBantu speaking populations in southern Africa by comparing their kinship systems. It was
part of the interdisciplinary collaborative research project ‘The Kalahari Basin Area – A
Sprachbund at the verge of extinction’ within the EUROCORES programme EuroBABEL of
the European Science Foundation (ESF). Indigenous non-Bantu speaking populations in
southern Africa are usually subsumed under the label ‘Khoisan’.
Among linguists there is today a growing consensus that their languages belong to three
different families: Kx'a, Khoe-Kwadi, and Tuu. The project compared Khoisan kin terms (as
lexical items), features of kinship classifications, and selected aspects of kinship norms and
practices of the contemporary and historically documented kinship systems. By the
comparative approach, it was possible to determine the origin of individual kinship features
in terms of linguistic lineages, to identify partly mixed or ‘hybrid’ kinship terminologies, and
to reconstruct likely prehistoric contact scenarios for individual areas in the Kalahari Basin.
Of significance for kinship studies more generally is the finding that kinship classifications are
much more in flux than they usually appear in the literature. Internal variation of kinship
classifications was found to correlate with particular contact settings. The effect of language
contact settings on kinship categories emerged as an unexplored, yet promising, research
topic for the future.
2. Project overview
a) Objectives
Please state the aims and objectives of your project as outlined in your proposal to us. [Max
200 words]
The objectives of the project were:
- to compile a comparative database from published sources and field research,
including information on kin terms, features of kinship classifications and norms for
behaviour,
- to complement the database by doing field research on selected Khoisan kinship
systems which had previously been under-represented in Khoisan studies,
- to gain insights into the conditions and processes of change in kinship classifications,
through field research in poly-ethnic and multilingual social settings,
- to analyze the comparative data by means of a synchro-diachronic approach and by
using data on observable current transformations for historical analogy,
- to disseminate the research results at various conferences and workshops and by
publishing papers,
2
To cite this output:
Barnard, AJ, (2013) EuroBABEL - Kinship Systems in Southern African Non-Bantu Languages: Documentation,
Comparison, and Historical Analysis
ESRC End of Award Report, RES-062-23-1850. Swindon; ESRC.
-
to publish the project’s major results in a book on kinship systems of southern
African Khoisan populations.
b) Project Changes
Please describe any changes made to the original aims and objectives, and confirm that these
were agreed with us. Please also detail any changes to the grant holder’s institutional
affiliation, project staffing or funding. [Max 200 words]
No significant changes were made to the main aims and objectives.
However, the following minor changes occurred during the project:
- No fieldwork could be carried out on !Ora and Vaal-Orange-!Ui-remnants in South
Africa, because no speakers could be identified by the linguist in the relevant subproject of the larger collaborative project;
- Fieldwork in the Shua community turned out to be unnecessary, because a
comprehensive record of the Shua kinship terminology was provided by the relevant
sub-project of the collaborative project.
- The excess capacities were used to include two additional speech communities:
Speakers of the southernmost and northernmost Ju dialects. Ethnographic and
linguistic research on Ju-speakers is heavily dominated by research in just one dialect
group, and the inclusion of other Ju dialects revealed a considerable amount of
dialectal and regional variation in kinship classifications.
- Due to car sharing within the collaborative project, money was saved during field
trips. In agreement with ESRC, the remaining funds were used for a three-month
contract extension for the main researcher.
- As agreed, a doctoral candidate (Jenny Lawy) joined the project after it began. She
has completed field research in a Naro community in Botswana and is writing up.
c) Methodology
Please describe the methodology that you employed in the project. Please also note any
ethical issues that arose during the course of the work, the effects of this and any action
taken. [Max 500 words]
The methodology applied was a synchro-diachronic approach, treating the variation in
kinship terminologies in the present as a hypothetical diachronic sequence. Different data
sets from different authors, for different time periods or different field sites were treated as
potentially valuable sources to identify change. Special attention was given to indicators for
change contained in the terminologies themselves, such as marking of particular kin terms,
the presence of descriptive or derivative terms, the presence of different terms used in
address and reference, the presence of loanwords, and cross-dialectal variation. Currently
observable changes were used for historical analogy.
Field methods included the elicitation of kin terms by using a genealogical chart, as well as by
3
To cite this output:
Barnard, AJ, (2013) EuroBABEL - Kinship Systems in Southern African Non-Bantu Languages: Documentation,
Comparison, and Historical Analysis
ESRC End of Award Report, RES-062-23-1850. Swindon; ESRC.
using previously recorded genealogical data. Social network questions were used to explore
the use of kin terms for non-genealogically related people, such as neighbours, members of
other ethnic groups, co-workers, employers, etc. Furthermore, life histories were recorded
with the purpose of correlating the variation in kin term use with biographical data (age
groups, exposure to formal education, exposure to farm labour, etc.). Qualitative interviews
discussed current and memorized normative rules and practices, in particular in the domains
of naming, residence and marriage, the acquisition of knowledge about genealogical
relationships and the translation of non-matching kin categories in multi-ethnic and multilingual families.
There were no a priori premises for assuming similarities in Khoisan kinship systems were
the result of linguistically-genetic or contact relations. Nor were there a priori premises with
respect to the direction of transformations. The first step of historical analysis was to look
at data for the languages of each linguistic lineage, in order to identify common features and
the degree of variation. In the second step, the data for all three lineages were compared,
and scenarios for individual kinship terminologies were developed. Data on a number of
Bantu languages and the Afrikaans language were also included in order to control for
possible effects of historically more-recent contacts. Research in contemporary contact
settings was undertaken in order to understand to what degree, and along which paths
kinship classifications are affected by language contact.
The fact that fieldwork sites were numerous, and periods of fieldwork in each community
short, turned out to be unfortunate. Even though the main researcher (Dr Boden) had done
earlier fieldwork in some of these areas over many years (within previous research
projects), she felt that she was not able to develop close enough relationships to her
respondents for feeling comfortable and confident in terms of researcher/researched
relationships. There were no complaints either by community members or by authorities,
but she did feel that such short term relationships might be regarded as ethically
questionable.
Ideally, in the future such a large amount of comparative work should not be done by one
researcher alone but by a team of researchers.
d) Project Findings
Please summarise the findings of the project, referring where appropriate to outputs
recorded on the ESRC website. Any future research plans should also be identified. [Max
500 words]
In his seminal comparative study of Khoisan population groups (Alan Barnard. 1992. Hunters
and Herders of Southern Africa: A Comparative Ethnography of the Khoisan People. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), and in other his publications, the PI demonstrated that two
features are common to the kinship systems of the three linguistic lineages of Khoisan: (1) a
joking/avoidance dichotomy in kinship classifications, and (2) the universal extension of kin
categories (i.e., throughout society: everyone classifying everyone else as ‘kin’). In this
project, the latter feature turned out to deserve a more nuanced approach: looking at
4
To cite this output:
Barnard, AJ, (2013) EuroBABEL - Kinship Systems in Southern African Non-Bantu Languages: Documentation,
Comparison, and Historical Analysis
ESRC End of Award Report, RES-062-23-1850. Swindon; ESRC.
different strategies and at different degrees of kin category extension, some occurring as a
result of language contact and social contact.
Apart from these, this project was able to identify further lineage-specific features: alternategeneration equivalence, together with cyclical concepts of generations, and ideas of shared
personalities between namesakes, for example, were found to be typical for the Kx'a (Ju and
ǂHoan) lineage. Most probably, these were characteristic of proto-Kx'a society. These
features seem to have been partly abandoned by some Kx'a populations in the course of
history, most probably in contact with speakers of Khoe languages. In Khoe kinship
terminologies, even weak forms of alternate generation equivalence are very uncommon,
and only found among the Naro, who, according to the most recent linguistic and molecular
anthropological research, seem to have switched from a Kx'a to a Khoe language at some
point in the distant past.
Khoe naming systems, apart from Naro do not show signs of recycling names. Indications of
alternate-generation equivalence and naming systems are found in Tuu populations.
However, given that most Tuu languages are extinct and their kinship systems not
sufficiently well- described in historical sources, it remains highly hypothetical whether these
features were actually part of the social-makeup in the proto-Tuu society.
Bifurcate-merging equations and cross/parallel distinctions are typical for Khoe languages.
However, they cannot be reconstructed for proto-Kx'a or for proto-Tuu society. Typical of
Khoe kinship terminologies is the fact that cross-relatives are usually equated with grandrelatives (grandparents and grandchildren). Some Kx'a and Tuu terminologies seem to have
adopted this latter feature first, i.e., before they have adopted bifurcate-merging equations
and cross/parallel distinctions. Different contemporary Kx'a and Tuu terminologies
apparently represent different stages of transformation to a Khoe-like terminology. Some
terminologies in the southern Kalahari area of Botswana were found to have subsequently
undergone additional changes by virtue of contact with Tswana and Kgalagadi.
e) Contributions to wider ESRC initiatives (eg Research Programmes or
Networks)
If your project was part of a wider ESRC initiative, please describe your contributions to the
initiative’s objectives and activities and note any effect on your project resulting from
participation. [Max. 200 words]
not applicable
5
To cite this output:
Barnard, AJ, (2013) EuroBABEL - Kinship Systems in Southern African Non-Bantu Languages: Documentation,
Comparison, and Historical Analysis
ESRC End of Award Report, RES-062-23-1850. Swindon; ESRC.
3. Early and anticipated impacts
a) Summary of Impacts to date
Please summarise any impacts of the project to date, referring where appropriate to
associated outputs recorded on the Research Outcomes System (ROS). This should include
both scientific impacts (relevant to the academic community) and economic and societal
impacts (relevant to broader society). The impact can be relevant to any organisation,
community or individual. [Max. 400 words]
Since the research outcomes are all still in the process of being published, it is still too early
to assess the scientific impacts relevant to the academic community.
That said, the main publication will be the edited volume, Alan Barnard and Gertrud Boden
(eds.), Kinship systems of southern African Khoisan populations. This will be published in
Cologne by the specialist Africanist publisher, Rüdiger Köppe. It will include two joint
chapters by editors, one chapter by PI, six chapters by main researcher, one joint chapter
by main researcher and an associate member of collaborative project, and four to six
chapters by associate members of collaborative project. Editorial plans and most of the
chapters are now complete, and publication is anticipated in 2014.
Fieldwork periods at each of the main researcher’s sites were too short for them to have
sustainable impacts on the economic or social situation of the relevant communities.
b) Anticipated/Potential Future Impacts
Please outline any anticipated or potential impacts (scientific or economic and societal) that
you believe your project might have in future. [Max. 200 words]
The following publications will result directly from the research project:
•
Boden, Gertrud (In press). Variation and change in Taa kinship terminologies. In F.
Berthold and A.-M. Fehn (eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on
Khoisan Languages and Linguistics, Riezlern/Kleinwalsertal, 10-14 July 2011. Cologne,
Rüdiger Köppe.
•
Boden, Gertrud, Tom Güldemann, et al. (In preparation). ‘Khoisan’ sibling
terminologies in historic perspective: a combined anthropological, linguistic and
phylogenetic comparative approach. In Tom Güldemann and A.-M. Fehn (eds.),
Beyond Khoisan: Historical Relations in the Kalahari Basin. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
•
Barnard, Alan and Gertrud Boden (eds.) (In preparation). Kinship systems of southern
African Khoisan populations. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe.
These publications will considerably advance the interpretation of commonalities and
differences of Khoisan kinship systems and, we hope, contribute greatly to the
understanding more generally of the prehistory of the Kalahari Basin Area.
6
To cite this output:
Barnard, AJ, (2013) EuroBABEL - Kinship Systems in Southern African Non-Bantu Languages: Documentation,
Comparison, and Historical Analysis
ESRC End of Award Report, RES-062-23-1850. Swindon; ESRC.
In addition, the on-going research by the doctoral student attached to the project (Jenny
Lawy) should have significant impact in Khoisan studies, as well as practical benefits within
her research community in western Botswana.
You will be asked to complete an ESRC Impact Report 12 months after the end date of
your award. The Impact Report will ask for details of any impacts that have arisen since the
completion of the End of Award Report.
7
To cite this output:
Barnard, AJ, (2013) EuroBABEL - Kinship Systems in Southern African Non-Bantu Languages: Documentation,
Comparison, and Historical Analysis
ESRC End of Award Report, RES-062-23-1850. Swindon; ESRC.
4. Declarations
Please ensure that sections A, B and C below are completed and signed by the appropriate
individuals. The End of Award Report will not be accepted unless all sections are signed.
Please note hard copies are not required; electronic signatures are accepted and should be
used.
A: To be completed by Grant Holder
Please read the following statements. Tick one statement under ii) and iii), then sign with an
electronic signature at the end of the section (this should be an image of your actual
signature).
i) The Project
This Report is an accurate overview of the project, its findings and impacts. All coinvestigators named in the proposal to ESRC or appointed subsequently have seen
and approved the Report.
X
ii) Submissions to the Research Outcomes System (ROS)
Output and impact information has been submitted to the Research Outcomes
System. Details of any future outputs and impacts will be submitted as soon as they
become available.
or
This grant has not yet produced any outputs or impacts. Details of any future
outputs and impacts will be submitted to the Research Outcomes System as soon
as they become available.
X
iii) Submission of Data
Data arising from this grant have been offered for deposit with the UK Data
Service.
or
Data that were anticipated in the grant proposal have not been produced and the
UK Data Service has been notified.
or
No datasets were proposed or produced from this grant.
8
X