In the distant past, when you met someone new, they asked who you are in relation to your tribe and family.
Now, they ask what you do for the economy as an economic unit.
It’s fun to rebel against the current culture by asking someone who they are instead of what they do.
I know this isn’t a firm rule, but there are many people in my life who I’m certain wouldn’t have a good grasp of how they fit into their family and community beyond fairly superficial platitudes.
Maybe this has been true in the past as well. I wouldn’t know.
As non-contrarian as it sounds, I'd argue that as someone who came from a small town, having to define yourself by your "tribe" last name is worse, because if it the "wrong" last name, there's nothing you can do about it. You can, within reason, change what you do for a living.
They have often gone hand in hand though, just as for example lawyers will discriminate against you if you aren’t elite educated.
No, I think it's more fun to rebel against the older culture of inbred villages and oppressive tradition
Yes thanks, judge me by what I do, not because some and some other people I barely care about
Sometimes it is illuminating to see if you aren’t running into a wall though.
When you compare it like that, it gets the author's point across even better to show how the language and culture play into each other. That being that anglophone cultures are very cold/distant to the importance of family on your life, outside of social convention (and how important that structure/convention is); while others (Hawaiian or Nigerian, for instance) treat family as a fluid and inviting unit of kinship.
You see this in the more "warm cultured" English regions (a good chunk of the US, Australia, etc) where it's common to refer to family friends as "aunt"/"uncle", or "cousin"; almost in defiance of the linguistic history.
In other words, I think the topic is fascinating and deserves even more depth compared to how it was broken down there.
I don’t know what you mean by ‘Nigerian’, but that sounds to me like a Hawaiian kinship system, which is different to the Eskimo kinship system found in English.
> The language is specific to level (grand), node depth (x removed) and colinears (brother, sister, cousin, 2nd cousin, etc) that you can accurately describe pretty much any lineage.
My understanding of the kinship system classifications is that they’re focussed on the most basic terms. You can refer to ‘my mother’s father’s sister’s son’ in pretty much any language, but it’s most interesting to see which terms are considered basic (because that in turn reveals ‘how language and culture play into each other’, as you say).
But cool. You do you.