부산대학교 도서관

This paper attempts to designate a system of relationships among people in a town of West Bengal, India as the cultural domain of kinship in a locality at a given moment of time. In doing this, the authors do not assume a genealogical grid for kinship systems so universal as to allow them only the presentation of a Bengali variation on a general human theme. They start with Bengali notions of person, kinsmen and so on, the English terms being no more than pointers to Bengali concepts. Throughout, the authors try to follow the meaning of indigenous terms for relationships and to arrive at the system in which these terms participate. They use data from their own observations, statements of informants, descriptions and exegeses of rituals, personal histories and so on. But in each case they find meaning in cultural constructs which are applied to events and behavior. They note behavior, attitude and sentiment as codes for conduct, cultural constructs which define and interpret social reality for the people engaged in daily life. In an attempt to sketch the Bengali domain of kinship, they proceed comparatively, exploring the meaning of Bengali terms and categories of persons, and persons in relationships to each other by opposing restricted to general, and inclusive to exclusive meaning.