Found on 2026-10-10 by a search the owner asked for: a documented case for the three relations CLAIM-210 separates. Two instances share a kind with no transport between them. A pair shares it by descent. A rendering shares it by transport. The case is partial on independence and on recognition.
The case
The kind. Radcliffe-Brown, “On Joking Relationships” (1940), as reprinted in Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1952), p. 90: “What is meant by the term ‘joking relationship’ is a relation between two persons in which one is by custom permitted, and in some instances required, to tease or make fun of the other, who in turn is required to take no offence.” He separates “symmetrical” and “asymmetrical” varieties on the same page, and calls such relationships “widespread, not only in Africa but also in Asia, Oceania and North America”.
Instances with no route between them.
- Crow. Lowie, Social Life of the Crow Indians (1912), p. 204: the i’watkucé, the child of a man of one’s father’s clan, “might twit him with it and publicly disgrace him, yet such action must not be resented.” The twits are recorded verbatim: to a man long with one wife, “You are next to a dead thing”; to a woman, “you are exceedingly lazy, you never do beadwork or make moccasins for your husband” (pp. 204–205). Radcliffe-Brown (1949, reprinted 1952, p. 109) puts the Crow in his class: with such men “he has a joking relationship; he may make offensive remarks to them or receive such from them without offence.”
- Dogon. Radcliffe-Brown (1952, p. 91), citing Paulme: “among the Dogon a man stands in a joking relationship to his wife’s sisters and their daughters.”
- Thonga. Radcliffe-Brown (1952, pp. 97–98), citing Junod: the sister’s son’s “privileged disrespect” to the mother’s brother; “The uterine nephew is a chief! He takes any liberty he likes with his maternal uncle”.
The positions differ: father’s clansmen’s children among the Crow, wife’s sisters among the Dogon, mother’s brother among the Thonga. The relation is the one Radcliffe-Brown defines: licensed disrespect, with offence not to be taken. That is TERM-040’s split of one kind with different positions. The Crow recorded twits have the shape of CASE-018’s sentence: a public remark on the hearer’s conduct that the hearer must not resent.
A descended pair. Lowie, Notes on the Social Organization and Customs of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Crow Indians (1917), p. 42: “As among the Crow, individuals whose fathers belonged to the same clan were ‘joking-relatives’ (maku’tsatsi)”, and “it was not the function of his fellow-clansmen but of his maku’tsati to reprove him or make fun of him.” On the clan system on which the relation is defined, he concludes (pp. 90–91): “There can be no doubt that we are dealing with a unique clan concept developed by the parent tribe”, and he calls independent origin of the shared kin terms “absurd in the light of known tribal relations”. On another shared custom, teknonymy, he leaves the question open on the page (p. 92): “Does the Crow-Hidatsa custom represent a feature independently evolved by the parent tribe or … borrowed by Hidatsa and Crow from different directions since their separation?” So descent against independent evolution is a question the source itself asks of Crow–Hidatsa customs, and answers for the clan concept. He does not say that the joking relation in particular was inherited. He also records it among the Mandan, neighbours of long contact (p. 15: “As among the Hidatsa and Crow, there was a joking-relationship”), so spread between neighbours is possible too.
A transport. Tehrani, “The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood” (2013): “an Ibo tale, which grouped with European variants of Little Red Riding Hood, thus endorsing the collector’s belief that the story is not of local origin, but an Ibo oral translation of the western fairy tale.” The same paper tests convergence elsewhere and rejects it for the East Asian tales: “it seems unlikely that they could have evolved independently.”
What it can show
The three relations of CLAIM-210 on documented material.
- Kind-sharing without transport. The Crow joking-relative and Dogon or Thonga joking are one kind on a structural definition, with no route by which one could be a rendering of the other. Neither has fidelity to the other: not high, not low, none.
- Kind-sharing by descent of an institution. Crow and Hidatsa share it through a parent tribe. This is CLAIM-002’s continuity of transmission, the identity of an institution across its branches. There is no transport between them: neither is a rendering of the other. So descent by common ancestry and transport are different facts, the distinction CLAIM-210’s third relation draws. The case does not show whether each line is itself a chain of transmissions from the parent tribe’s practice, as the record treats serial reproduction (CASE-068, CLAIM-056); if it is, fidelity could be asked of each branch relative to the ancestor, though never of one sibling relative to the other.
- A transport. The Ibo tale is a rendering of a source, with a phylogeny that places it.
It supports the claim’s point that descent is not similarity. Lowie treats “independently evolved” against “borrowed” as an empirical question that a shared custom alone cannot settle, and he settles it for the clan concept on other evidence, from tribal history.
What it cannot show
The condition met only partly: documented independence. The Crow and the Dogon or Thonga had no contact before 1492, and there is no historical route by which the institution could pass between them. But no source states their independence. Radcliffe-Brown’s explanation is structural, that the same “kind of structural situation” (p. 91) yields the custom. That is a theory of convergence, but he does not argue against diffusion, and he declines historical conjecture: “conjecture gives us neither scientific nor historical knowledge” (p. 104).
The second condition met only partly: recognition of the kind. The kind is an analyst’s. The insiders’ categories (i’watkucé, maku’tsati, the Dogon mangou) are local. Griaule, on the Dogon–Bozo exchange of insults, rejects the comparative class: “Nous adoptons, vis-à-vis travaux parus sur cette question, une attitude négative” (quoted by Radcliffe-Brown, 1952, p. 105). There is no evidence that a Crow would recognise a Dogon joking exchange as the same thing. That bears on CLAIM-217, which takes competent participants’ uptake as the standard.
The strongest reply. A defender of reading fidelity off kind-sharing says that analysts’ kinds are cheap: put the Crow and the Dogon in one class and of course nothing transports between them, because the class was drawn after the fact. The reply has force against condition (c). It does not reach the claim, which needs only that kind-sharing and transport can come apart, and the Crow–Hidatsa and Ibo halves show transport and descent where the kind is also shared.
Judged fidelity. No one asks whether Thonga joking is a “rendering” of Crow joking. So the case leaves CLAIM-210’s empirical residue untouched: do judges track descent? That is CLAIM-137’s second defeat disjunct.
What would close the gap. A judgement test on these texts. Present raters with a Crow twit from Lowie, a Hidatsa reproof, and a constructed English “rendering” of the Crow twit. Ask which pairs are “the same kind of remark” and which is “a version of” which, telling one group the provenance and not the other. If kind judgements do not move with provenance and version judgements do, judges keep the two relations apart, as the claim says the thesis does. The items could serve CASE-055.
Sources
- A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, “On Joking Relationships”, Africa 13(3) (1940), 195–210, DOI 10.2307/1156093; and “A Further Note on Joking Relationships”, Africa 19(2) (1949), 133–140, DOI 10.2307/1156517. Both read directly in the reprint, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (Cohen & West, 1952), chs. IV–V, pp. 90–116, https://archive.org/details/1952-radcliffe-brown-1952-structure-and-function-in-primitive-society. The quotations were checked against the OCR text on 2026-10-10.
- R. H. Lowie, Social Life of the Crow Indians, AMNH Anthropological Papers 9(2) (1912), https://archive.org/details/b33444833. Read directly, pp. 204–205.
- R. H. Lowie, Notes on the Social Organization and Customs of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Crow Indians, AMNH Anthropological Papers 21(1) (1917), https://archive.org/details/customsofmandan00lowirich. Read directly, pp. 15, 42, 90–92.
- M. Griaule, “L’Alliance cathartique”, Africa 18(4) (1948), 242–258, DOI 10.2307/3180447. Not read; quoted through Radcliffe-Brown 1949.
- D. Paulme on the Dogon and H. A. Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe (1913), on the Thonga. Not read; through Radcliffe-Brown only.
- J. J. Tehrani, “The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood”, PLoS ONE 8(11) (2013), e78871, DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0078871, PMC3827309. Full text read directly (Europe PMC). Its source for the Ibo tale, N. W. Thomas, Anthropological Report on the Ibo-Speaking Peoples of Nigeria (1913), was not read.