Map | : The location of the Temiar of Peninsular Malaysia can hold meaning for its users-and perhaps something of its inventors’ intentions. It is true, of course, that the terms alone cannot tell us much about real-life kinship patterns. But it is also true that the terms are an intrinsic part of those kinship patterns. This means that we must take at least two approaches. First, we need to analyse the ordered kinship terminologies to which the kin terms belong. In the final part of this paper I do just this by treating the Temiar referential kinship terminology as a formal calculus or algorithm, in the hope that such an analysis might reveal how the terminology can hold meaning for its users-and perhaps something of its inventors’ intentions. Table 5: Temiar affinal kin-terminology: the components ‘collaterality’ marks the distinction between one’s own spouse on the one hand and Rules 2-6 are unordered with respect to each other, but they are ordered with respect to rules | and 7, which should be applied respectively before and after all possible applications of rules 2-6 have been performed. Finally, we apply all the relevant rules, from among rules 2 to 6, to the kin-type formula. It is simplest to work from left to right, and progressively down the page, until no more reductions are possible: Thus, by reducing PaSb... to Pa... (applying Rule 3b), ...SpSb to ...Sp (applying Rule With one exception, the superclasses listed in Table 9 are perfectly comprehensible as kin-types: the notions ‘parent’s parent’s parent’ or ‘spouse’s opposite-sex sibling’ make sense. But what are we to make of the puzzling string SpSp? This superclass, ‘spouse’s spouse’, is the automatic result of applying the In-law or Co-spouse rule to the kin- type SpSbSp-a relative that most people have, whether or not their cultural tradition regards him or her as a kinsperson. In English such relatives (wife’s brother’s wife, for example), if recognised at all, are usually assimilated to the ‘sibling-in-law’ category. In other languages, distinctive terms are used (as with the Malay term biras ‘wife’s sister’s husband’). The Temiar terminology, however, has no distinctive term for ‘spouse’s sibling’s spouse’: the ‘sibling’ terms are used instead. This is quite consistent with the preference for marrying into the same group of people that one’s own siblings and cousins have already married into. Two individuals marrying into the same sibling- set easily come to be thought of as classificatory siblings. kin-types: the notions ‘parent’s parent’s parent’ or ‘spouse’s opposite-sex sibling’ make
