Talking about kinship.

Using our vocabulary's kinship terms to translate the apparently homologous terms of the societies studied by ethnologists amounts to abusively applying to these societies the unspoken thesis underlyning our own conceptualization, namely consanguinity. Besides not adequately explaining the meaning of the translated terms, which may be much more fertile, this widespread practice in ethnology, whether functionalist or structuralist, also alters and impoverishes the social contents of the observed facts. Even componential analyses fall under this criticism.