India and the study of kinship terminologies

The study of kinship terminologies grew out of the eighteenth-century project of linguistic ethnology, which sought to uncover the historical relations among nations by determining the relations among languages, using lists of core vocabulary items including kinship terms. Lewis H. Morgan was the first to conceptualize the kinship terminology as an integrated set. India and the Dravidian kinship terminology have played a large role in the history of kinship study. Most modern advances in the study of kinship terminology are owed to structuralism, though the contributions of evolutionism are not entirely in the past, and those of historicism lie largely in the future.