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The Philippines-Borneo zone contains an unbroken continuum of Western Malayo-Polynesian cognatic kinship systems which recognize kin bilaterally, do not single out a unilineal line of descent, do not distinguish between cross cousins and parallel cousins, and do not merge cousins with potential spouses. They display a so-called Eskimo or Hawaiian type terminology, stress difference in generation and degrees in collateral distance. Some of them do emphasize a distinction between affinal and consanguineal kin, some do not or to a lesser degree. Why do some kinship systems, within this larger and apparently homogeneous group of systems, make a difference between affinal and consanguineal, whereas others do not is an unsolved puzzle so far.
But among those systems that possess a specific vocabulary for affinal kin, differences can be clearly spotted from one system to another. One of the main causes of variation pertains to the siblings-in-law kinterms because they usually stress a male/female speaker difference : men do not use the same terms as the women or they both use the same terms but apply them to different kintypes. Why should such a male speaker/female speaker difference avail at all ? And why is it found here and not there ? Methodology
Anthropologists will try to explain this by invoking various behavioral or sociological reasons. Some have correlated the number and distribution of kinterms for siblings-in-law in Borneo with residence patterns. Linguistics, semantics, cognitive psychology and logic can be resorted to (Nerlove & Romney 1967).
The procedure I will follow will consist in examining first the distribution patterns, or categorizations, emerging from the various ways kinterms classify kintypes in real empirically documented instances. It will lead to a typology which I shall interpret in the next steps. The first of these steps will consist in projecting these arrangements against the wider set of logically possible, likely and unlikely occurrences according to the concepts outlined by Greenberg (Greenberg 1980 :15-29). In the second step, I will bring in considerations pertaining to the priority of contrasts made by empirically present systems as well as the number of terms, the number of contrasts and the level of logical discrimination induced by the various contrasts, including reciprocal terms. Finally I shall invoke communicatory constraints and cognitive principles to explain the nature of choices made by individual systems or groups of systems.
The whole problem then consists in putting together all the documented systems, and finding a way to order these systems according to principles that are intrinsic to them. In doing so I will produce a model that can be used to locate individual kinship systems, or terminologies, in an encompassing structure (the typology itself), and lead to hypotheses concerning their geographical and historical distribution. On the other hand I will be able to show how sociological, logical and other explanations complement and constrain each other, and in which order of priority.
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