Descent Systems and Ideal Language
Rodney Needham
Philosophy of Science, Vol. 27, No. 1. (Jan., 1960), pp. 96-101.
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DISCUSSION
DESCENT SYSTEMS AND IDEAL LANGUAGE*
RODNEY NEEDHAM
University of Oxford
This note is written in response to Gellner's "Ideal Language and Kinship
Structure" (l).l In that article he tries to shed some light on the notion of
an ideal language by constructing in outline an ideal language for what he
calls "kinship structure theory". It is gratifying to see a philosopher pay
attention to social anthropology, and pleasing to imagine that such an important
topic as the analysis of descent systems may have philosophical application;
but in this case the references to social anthropology are so erroneous
that a rejoinder is called for.
Gellner acknowledges that he is not sufficiently conversant with the subject,
but this is not good enough. If his argument were analytic and a priori, or
if it were made clear that it was intended to be so, there would not be much
ground for complaint; but he appears to maintain that his procedure represents
the methods or results of anthropological analysis. Indeed, in the preamble
to his argument he claims authority for his approach on the ground that the
study of descent systems is an important and well developed part of the
discipline. So it is, but the picture he gives of it is fallacious, and it cannot
in any case support the ideas that he advances.
For my part, I am fairly familiar with the topic of an ideal or logical language,
and I think that the terminologies of descent systems may in fact offer
promising material for philosophical investigation, but I am not competent
to consider such issues here. My only proper concern in this note is to say
where Gellner is misleading in his representation to philosophers of what
social anthropologists actually do in the study of descent systems and of
what the characteristics of such systems are.
It may be most convenient if I proceed simply by dealing individually,
and briefly, with points as they arise seriatim in Gellner's paper. Though
my observations may thus have a rather disconnected character, they should
produce cumulatively an impression of the value of the assumptions on which
he works.
T o begin with, it is not the case, even figuratively, that the descent system
is more "tangible" and stateable with accuracy than most aspects of a simple
society (p.235). Gellner appears to think this because individual human
beings themselves are discrete and tangible, because these individuals have
* Received June, 1959.
The article contains the following misprints and omissions: p. 235, line 22, "well developed"
-add "topic in'' (or words to this effect); p. 236, line 21, "assert to social"-read "the social";
p. 236, lines 39-40, "such a system should be devised"-read "such a system should not be
devised"; p. 237, line 43, "1GHKL"-read "1GHKL"; p. 240, line 44, "Statesw-readMstated":
96
DISCUSSION: DESCENT SYSTEMS AND IDEAL LANGUAGE 97
proper names by which they are readily identifiable, and because genealogical
connexions can often be precisely traced between them. But these properties,
as I shall consider more closely below, are not the analytically significant
features of a descent system. The ideas and categories by which the members
of a social aggregate may order their relations according to the criterion of
descent are not tangible in any sense, and their comprehension is not identical
with ascertaining the appellations and genealogical relationships of individuals.
Descent systems do not simply regulate marriage (p. 235) but are as importantly
concerned with aggregation into distinct social groups, and with the
ascription of right and duties in many other spheres of social life to individuals
and groups who are not primarily, if at all, connected by marriage. The regulation
of marriage is certainly an important part of the constituent rules of a
descent system, but it is misleading to assert that "kinship structure" means
the specification of possible spouses (p. 236). Further, it is false to say that
kinship roles are functions of the "biological kinship position" of an individual
(p. 236). Biology is one matter and descent is quite another, of a different
order. They will usually be concordant to some degree, but the defining
character of descent systems is social. This is seen in such institutions as,
for example, unilineal descent reckoning, which omits from account one of
the parents from whom the individual is biologically descended; adoption,
in which a child may have no biological connexion with either of his social
parents from whom he is regarded as descended; leviratic marriage, in which
a man marries a deceased brother's widow and raises descendants to the dead
man's name; and ghost marriage, in which the social father, from whom the
descent of the children is reckoned, is dead.
The appreciation of the distinction between biology and notions of descent
is the pons asinorurn of the study of descent systems. It has nothing to do
with the alleged anxiety of social anthropologists about the social nature of
their subject matter, or about the autonomy of their discipline in relation
to physical or biological sciences, but derives from the very nature of descent
systems. Briefly, a descent system is an ordered set of categories, and it
is a misleading error of the most fundamental and elementary kind to suppose
that these categories can profitably be analysed as though the relations they
govern were biological. Also, it is simply not the case that social anthropologists
are committed by functionalist theory to the explanation of descent
systems by reference to "the basic needs connected with procreation" (p. 236).
It is true that Malinowski derived the bonds of kinship from the fundamental
biological processes of reproduction (2, pp. 101-2), but it is a travesty of
the scholarly investigations into descent systems over the last seventy years
to represent this approach as characteristic of social anthropology.
This misapprehension is the basic reason why Gellner's approach cannot
be accepted or even taken seriously. There is another mistake, of comparable
importance, which also contributes to its invalidity. This is seen in the
major part of the article, where he describes what he thinks would count as
an ideal language for "kinship structure theory"; and this, oddly, is all about
98 RODNEY NEEDHAM
naming. In his proposed scheme a name is the individual designation of a
single human being; but the terms of a descent system are not names of this
sort, and it is almost incomprehensible that he should argue as though they
were. A descent system may work with only twenty or so terms, each denoting a
category of relatives, but a very large number of named individuals may be
subsumed under each. For example, the Batak of Sumatra number a million
but they order their social relations within the descent system by only about
twenty-three terms-not a million names. It cannot be said, in some sort
of defence, that Gellner simply confuses names with certain properties of
descent terms, for in this context he makes no mention at all of descent
categories or of the terms by which they are represented, and it is clear that
when he writes of names he thinks he is in fact dealing with descent categories.
The system he devises is intended to name individuals by their relations
"biologically speal~ing"to other individuals, and the use of the system would
be to place individuals within their "biological logical space" (p. 236). But
even in this notion of logical space Gellner is mistaken or misleading, for
he thinks that for the purposes of social science it is a logical truth that a
man has a man for a father, and that in certain contexts "mother's son" is
synonymous with "man" (p. 237). I shall consider for the moment only the
second proposition. It is hardly possible to examine such an imprecise formulation
in any conclusive manner, but certain general considerations may be
adduced which are relevant to its theme. In many descent systems a term
conventionally translated as "mother" may refer to a large class of women who
in English would never be referred to, or thought of, as mothers; and in
some systems such a term (sometimes, but not invariably, with a qualifier)
applies to males as well as to females. These facts clearly affect the meaning
of the description. Further, in many systems the term which would stand
for "son" here may denote indifferently a male or a female. That is, each
descent system has to some extent its own logic, and is not analysable in
terms of Gellner's "universal relations", which are simply biological.
Biological relations are indeed universal, but descent systems are interesting
in that they are structurally and conceptually different from biological
necessities or possibilities. The logical space is a category within a system,
the properties of which are not determined by biology; and the genealogical
specifications co-ordinate with the category may be practically innumerable.
Gellner's system may be capable of naming individuals who are biologically
related, but it cannot give any idea of the structure of any descent system to
which it is applied. Gellner himself admits this, when he writes later that once
people have been named by the system they all have names of the same
structure "irrespective of what their kinship organization is" (p. 240); but
to rob systems of their distinctive structural characteristics is an odd way of
trying to understand them, and in fact so misrepresents them as to make
useful analogy with an ideal language impossible.
Gellner sees some difficulty in the fact that there are two sexes, and suspects
that it would be necessary to treat only members of one sex as individuals
99DISCUSSION: DESCENT SYSTEMS AND IDEAL LANGUAGE
proper, members of the other being only admitted by courtesy but ultimately
eliminable and definable in terms of the first (p. 238). The analogy he makes
in this respect is with real and rational numbers, but he would have done
better to deal with the situation in known descent systems, the majority of
which do in fact define descent in either the male or the female line. But by
no means all systems do so, and here is another flaw in the scheme; for if
only one sex counts there is no way of dealing with a cognatic society (in
which descent may be traced through either a male or a female) or with a
bilineal society (in which any individual is a member both of a patrilineal
descent group and of a matrilineal descent group). That Gellner believes a
matrilineal rule would be more convenient, on the ground that it is harder
for an individual to be ignorant of the identity of his mother than of that of
his father, merely reflects his identification of biology with descent. (One
has to go back to the Victorians to find this argument seriously advanced in
anthropological literature.)
The same confusion is repeated in another stipulation for the proposed
notation, viz. that "it must be made nonsense . . .for a man to mate with a
man. . . . Biological impossibility must be made into a logical impossibility
of our notation" (p. 238). Here, as well as assuming a priori the connotations
of European kinship terms, Gellner confuses mating with marriage. In some
societies a woman may so far acquire masculine status as to marry a woman,
of whose children (begotten by a proxy male lover) she is the social father and
thus figures in genealogies. Individuals of the same sex may thus in fact marry
and be the parents of children. There are also societies in which a man may
assume feminine status and become the wife of a man, and even claim to
bear children with supernatural aid. In other words, what Gellner calls the
"underlying biological presuppositions of kinship" are not, as he thinks,
logical truths and should not be written into any proposed descent system
as though they were.
It is next claimed as an advantage that in this kinship language individuals
in a logical system would for once mean individuals (p. 238), to which the
respoilse is again that in descent systems the terms characteristically denote
categories of relatives and not individuals. The terms of descent systems do
admittedly conform to one of Gellner's conditions for an ideal language<
c
one thing, one namey'-but it has to be understood that the "thing" is a
category which may well have no equivaleilt in our language or society,
and that the "name" is not an individual designation but a term applied to a
class of individuals defined by criteria which may be strange to us. For
instance, among the patrilineal Kuki the term tu covers members of three
generations, two distinct descent lines, and both sexes. This category makes
perfect structural sense in the system of which it is a part, but it could not
be dealt with by Gellner's.
I now come to a third misapprehension. Gellner wishes to add to the naming
system "things that can be said of the things named" (p. 239). What is said,
however, turns out to be no more than how individuals are biologically
100 RODNEY NEEDAM
related to each other. But in known descent systems specification, even when
made by the rules of such systems and not by those of Gellner's, is only the
beginning: what is important then is what such a named member of a category
does. Gellner might respond that this introduces contingent facts of a synthetic
nature, and that these are not his concern; but if his concern is with
any imaginable sort of descent system it must include some reference to
"function". He appears to think, however, that specification by name and
biological relation is enough, and that jural and other properties are merely
incidental variations on a universal system. This is seen in his statement
that when logically necessary relationships have been shown by the notation
itself, "only synthetic factual truths" (my italics) need actually be asserted
(p. 240), which is of a piece with the utter lack of any jural structure in his
scheme. What he calls "sociological predicates", though, cannot be simply
contingent: the categories of the classification and the jural status of persons
defined and ordered by it are inseparable parts of one and the same system.
In considering the implications of his approach for social anthropology,
Gellner concedes that his scheme would almost certainly not be of any use in
naming actual people (p. 241), but he still does not see that naming is not
the concern of a descent system at all, and that objections to the scheme
would not be aimed at its failure to perform this function. He thinks, nevertheless,
that the language might be of analytical use by providing a "guaranteed
exhaustive classification of possible kinship structure and even bringing out
empirically unperceived similarities". It would be wearisome, and I hope
now unnecessary, to examine this claim, since it is so clear that the scheme he
has proposed can bear no relation to actual or possible descent systems.
(Indeed, it is one conceivable merit of Gellner's paper that his unmanipulable
ideal language for a descent system shows why no society adopts or could
adopt such a socially impossible terminology and categorization.) Rules of
inheritance, another proposed field of use for the scheme, are easily stated
and compared without it, and the features of "classificatory" terminologies
also. Demographic issues of the sort he indicates, finally, can certainly be
tackled without a complicated and cumbersome naming system.
It is not simply that the scheme is inept for such types of problem, but
that it can be of no use in any, since it is based on radically inappropriate
premises. In sum, Gellner fails to distinguish (a) biology and descent,
(b) individual and category, (c) specification and function. No proposal
based on such an aggregation of fundamental errors could possibly have
implications for social anthropology.
There are a number of other erroneous or questionable points, but I have
been concerned to examine only those which seemed basic misapprehensions
relevant to the general validity or otherwise of the paper. It would be a
waste of time, for example, since I consider the scheme so misdirected, to
deal with its practical difficulties even as a naming system; and I can leave
questions of logic and expression to philosophers.
My professional colleagues will realize that I have dealt summarily with
DISCUSSION: DESCENT SYSTEMS AND IDEAL LANGUAGE 101
very large issues, and that if I had been writing for them a number of qualifications
would have been necessary. But I have not been writing for them, for
the very good reason that my points about the general characteristics of
descent systems are common knowledge and form an early part of elementary
instruction in social anthropology. On the other hand, I realize that since
these points are not common knowledge to philosophers my dismissal of
Gellner's undertaking may seem rather sweeping. I t would not be possible
in a short article to describe systems which make my points, and there unfortunately
exists no satisfactory general introduction to the study of descent
systems to which reference might be made, but it may be helpful if I cite
three outstanding articles in this field and one of my own: viz. Hocart's
"Kinship systems" (3), Dumont's "The Dravidian kinship terminology as an
expression of marriage" (4), Leach's "Concerning Trobriand clans and the
kinship category 'tabu' " (5)' and myMStructuralanalysis of Purum society3'(6).
Lastly, I should like it to be appreciated that it has not been my purpose
merely to expose another man's mistakes. I have been perturbed by a philosopher
trying to tell other philosophers what an important topic in social
anthropology is about, and I fear it is probable they will be misled and that
they will also conceive a wrong estimation of social anthr~pology.~The
notion of an ideal language is of considerable interest, and so is the study
of descent systems. There may be profitable analogies to be established
between these two fields of thought, but it is essential that the radical features
of both be mastered before comparative analysis is attempted.
1. GELLNER,ERNEST:"Ideal language and kinship structure," Philosophy of Science, 24, 1957,
pp. 235-242.
2. MALINOWSKI, A Scientijic Theory of Culture, Chapel Hill, N.C.,B~IONISLAW: 	 1944.
3. 	 HOCART,A. M.: "Kinship systems," Anthuopos, 32, 1937, pp. 545-551. (Reprinted in The
Life-Giving Myth, London 1952.)
4. DUNIONT, "The Dravidian kinship terminology as an expression of marriage," Man,LOUIS: 

53, 1953, pp. 34-39. 

5. LEACH,E. R.: "Concerning Trobriand clans and the kinship category 'tabu'," Cambridge
Papers in Social Anthropology, 1, 1958, pp. 120-145.
6. 	NEEDHAM,RODNEY:"A structural analysis of Purum society," American Anthvopologist,
60, 1958, pp. 75-101.
7. GELLNER, "Time and theory in social anthropology," Mind, 67, 1958, pp. 182-202.ERNEST:
Something of the same kind of danger is present in another article addressed to philosophers,
in which Gellner deals with time and theory in social anthropology (7), and fundamentally
for the same reason.
You have printed the following article:
Descent Systems and Ideal Language
Rodney Needham
Philosophy of Science, Vol. 27, No. 1. (Jan., 1960), pp. 96-101.
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References
1
Ideal Language and Kinship Structure
Ernest Gellner
Philosophy of Science, Vol. 24, No. 3. (Jul., 1957), pp. 235-242.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8248%28195707%2924%3A3%3C235%3AILAKS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9
4
54. The Dravidian Kinship Terminology as an Expression of Marriage
L. Dumont
Man, Vol. 53. (Mar., 1953), pp. 34-39.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0025-1496%28195303%291%3A53%3C34%3A5TDKTA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q
6
A Structural Analysis of Purum Society
Rodney Needham
American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 60, No. 1, Part 1. (Feb., 1958), pp. 75-101.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7294%28195802%292%3A60%3A1%3C75%3AASAOPS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5
7
Time and Theory in Social Anthropology
Ernest Gellner
Mind, New Series, Vol. 67, No. 266. (Apr., 1958), pp. 182-202.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-4423%28195804%292%3A67%3A266%3C182%3ATATISA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2
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[Footnotes]
2
Time and Theory in Social Anthropology
Ernest Gellner
Mind, New Series, Vol. 67, No. 266. (Apr., 1958), pp. 182-202.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-4423%28195804%292%3A67%3A266%3C182%3ATATISA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2
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LINKED CITATIONS
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