Diagram 1[8]
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
STUDIES IN ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
Edited by the HON. W. PEMBER REEVES
Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science
No. 36 in the Series of Monographs by Writers connected with the London School of Economics and Political Science.
KINSHIP AND SOCIAL ORGANISATION
By
W. H. R. RIVERS, M.D., F.R.S.,
Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge
LONDON
CONSTABLE & CO LTD
1914
These lectures were delivered at the London School of Economics in May of the present year. They are largely based on experience gained in the work of the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition to Melanesia of 1908, and give a simplified record of social conditions which will be described in detail in the full account of the work of that expedition.
A few small additions and modifications have been made since the lectures were given, some of these being due to suggestions made by Professor Westermarck and Dr. Malinowski in the discussions which followed the lectures. I am also indebted to Miss B. Freire-Marreco for allowing me to refer to unpublished material collected during her recent work among the Pueblo Indians of North America.
W. H. R. Rivers.
St. John’s College,
Cambridge.
November 19th, 1913.
KINSHIP AND SOCIAL
ORGANISATION
The aim of these lectures is to demonstrate the close connection which exists between methods of denoting relationship or kinship and forms of social organisation, including those based on different varieties of the institution of marriage. In other words, my aim will be to show that the terminology of relationship has been rigorously determined by social conditions and that, if this position has been established and accepted, systems of relationship furnish us with a most valuable instrument in studying the history of social institutions.
In the controversy of the present and of recent times, it is the special mode of denoting relationship known as the classificatory system which has formed the chief subject of discussion. It is in connection with this system that there have arisen the various vexed questions which have so excited the interest—I might almost say the passions—of[2] sociologists during the last quarter of a century.
I am afraid it would be dangerous to assume your familiarity with this system, and I must therefore begin with a brief description of its main characters. The essential feature of the classificatory system, that to which it owes its name, is the application of its terms, not to single individual persons, but to classes of relatives which may often be very large. Objections have been made to the use of the term “classificatory” on the ground that our own terms of relationship also apply to classes of persons; the term “brother,” for instance, to all the male children of the same father and mother, the term “uncle” to all the brothers of the father and mother as well as to the husband of an aunt, while the term “cousin” may denote a still larger class. It is, of course, true that many of our own terms of relationship apply to classes of persons, but in the systems to which the word “classificatory” is usually applied, the classificatory principle applies far more widely, and in some cases even, more logically and consistently. In the most complete form of the classificatory system there is not one single term of relationship the use of which tells us that reference is being made to one person and to one person only, whereas in our own system there are six such terms, viz., husband, wife, father, mother, father-in-law and mother-in-law. In those systems in which the classificatory principle is carried to its extreme degree every term is applied to a class of persons. The term[3] “father,” for instance, is applied to all those whom the father would call brother, and to all the husbands of those whom the mother calls sister, both brother and sister being used in a far wider sense than among ourselves. In some forms of the classificatory system the term “father” is also used for all those whom the mother would call brother, and for all the husbands of those whom the father would call sister, and in other systems the application of the term may be still more extensive. Similarly, the term used for the wife may be applied to all those whom the wife would call sister and to the wives of all those whom the speaker calls brother, brother and sister again being used in a far wider sense than in our own language.
The classificatory system has many other features which mark it off more or less sharply from our own mode of denoting relationship, but I do not think it would be profitable to attempt a full description at this stage of our enquiry. As I have said, the object of these lectures is to show how the various features of the classificatory system have arisen out of, and can therefore be explained historically by, social facts. If you are not already acquainted with these features, you will learn to know them the more easily if at the same time you learn how they have come into existence.
I will begin with a brief history of the subject. So long as it was supposed that all the peoples of the world denoted relationship in the same way, namely, that which is customary among ourselves,[4] there was no problem. There was no reason why the subject should have awakened any interest, and so far as I have been able to find, it is only since the discovery of the classificatory system of relationship that the problem now before us was ever raised. I imagine that, if students ever thought about the matter at all, it must have seemed obvious that the way in which they and the other known peoples of the world used terms of relationship was conditioned and determined by the social relations which the terms denoted.
The state of affairs became very different as soon as it was known that many peoples of the world use terms of relationship in a manner, and according to rules, so widely different from our own that they seem to belong to an altogether different order, a difference well illustrated by the confusion which is apt to arise when we use English words in the translation of classificatory terms or classificatory terms as the equivalents of our own. The difficulty or impossibility of conforming to complete truth and reality, when we attempt this task, is the best witness to the fundamental difference between the two modes of denoting relationship.
I do not know of any discovery in the whole range of science which can be more certainly put to the credit of one man than that of the classificatory system of relationship by Lewis Morgan. By this I mean, not merely that he was the first to point out clearly the existence of this mode of denoting relationship, but that it was he who[5] collected the vast mass of material by which the essential characters of the system were demonstrated, and it was he who was the first to recognise the great theoretical importance of his new discovery. It is the denial of this importance by his contemporaries and successors which furnishes the best proof of the credit which is due to him for the discovery. The very extent of the material he collected[1] has probably done much to obstruct the recognition of the importance of his work. It is a somewhat discouraging thought that, if Morgan had been less industrious and had amassed a smaller collection of material which could have been embodied in a more available form, the value of his work would probably have been far more widely recognised than it is to-day. The volume of his material is, however, only a subsidiary factor in the process which has led to the neglect or rejection of the importance of Morgan’s discovery. The chief cause of the neglect is one for which Morgan must himself largely bear the blame. He was not content to demonstrate, as he might to some extent have done from his own material, the close connection between the terminology of the classificatory system of relationship and forms of social organisation. There can be little doubt that he recognised this connection, but he was not content to demonstrate the dependence of the terminology of relationship upon social forms the[6] existence of which was already known, or which were capable of demonstration with the material at his disposal. He passed over all these early stages of the argument, and proceeded directly to refer the origin of the terminology to forms of social organisation which were not known to exist anywhere on the earth and of which there was no direct evidence in the past. When, further, the social condition which Morgan was led to formulate was one of general promiscuity developing into group-marriage, conditions bitterly repugnant to the sentiments of most civilised persons, it is not surprising that he aroused a mass of heated opposition which led, not merely to widespread rejection of his views, but also to the neglect of lessons to be learnt from his new discovery which must have received general recognition long before this, if they had not been obscured by other issues.
The first to take up the cudgels in opposition to Morgan was our own pioneer in the study of the early forms of human society, John Ferguson McLennan.[2] He criticised the views of Morgan severely and often justly, and then pointing out, as was then believed to be the case, that no duties or rights were connected with the relationships of the classificatory system, he concluded that the terms formed merely a code of courtesies and ceremonial addresses for social intercourse. Those who have followed him have usually been content to repeat the conclusion that the classificatory[7] system is nothing more than a body of mutual salutations and terms of address. They have failed to see that it still remains necessary to explain how the terms of the classificatory system came to be used in mutual salutation. They have failed to recognise that they were either rejecting the principle of determinism in sociology, or were only putting back to a conveniently remote distance the consideration of the problem how and why the classificatory terms came to be used in the way now customary among so many peoples of the earth.
This aspect of the problem, which has been neglected or put on one side by the followers of McLennan, was not so treated by McLennan himself. As we should expect from the general character of his work, McLennan clearly recognised that the classificatory system must have been determined by social conditions, and he tried to show how it might have arisen as the result of the change from the Nair to the Tibetan form of polyandry.[3] He even went so far as to formulate varieties of this process by means of which there might have been produced the chief varieties of the classificatory system, the existence of which had been demonstrated by Morgan. It is quite clear that McLennan had no doubts about the necessity of tracing back the social institution of the classificatory system of relationship to social causes, a necessity which has been ignored or even explicitly[8] denied by those who have followed him in rejecting the views of Morgan. It is one of the many unfortunate consequences of McLennan’s belief in the importance of polyandry in the history of human society that it has helped to prevent his followers from seeing the social importance of the classificatory system. They have failed to see that the classificatory system may be the result neither of promiscuity nor of polyandry, and yet have been determined, both in its general character and in its details, by forms of social organisation.
Since the time of Morgan and McLennan few have attempted to deal with the question in any comprehensive manner. The problem has inevitably been involved in the controversy which has raged between the advocates of the original promiscuity or the primitive monogamy of mankind, but most of the former have been ready to accept Morgan’s views blindly, while the latter have been content to try to explain away the importance of conclusions derived from the classificatory system without attempting any real study of the evidence. On the side of Morgan there has been one exception in the person of Professor J. Kohler,[4] who has recognised the lines on which the problem must be studied, while on the other side there has been, so far as I am aware, only one writer who has recognised that the evidence from the nature of the classificatory system of relationship cannot be[9] ignored or belittled, but must be faced and some explanation alternative to that of Morgan provided.
This attempt was made four years ago by Professor Kroeber,[5] of the University of California. The line he takes is absolutely to reject the view common to both Morgan and McLennan that the nature of the classificatory system has been determined by social conditions. He explicitly rejects the view that the mode of using terms of relationship depends on social causes, and puts forward as the alternative that they are conditioned by causes purely linguistic and psychological.
It is not quite easy to understand what is meant by the linguistic causation of terms of relationship. In the summary at the end of his paper Kroeber concludes that “they (terms of relationship) are determined primarily by language.” Terms of relationship, however, are elements of language, so that Kroeber’s proposition is that elements of language are determined primarily by language. In so far as this proposition has any meaning, it must be that, in the process of seeking the origin of linguistic phenomena, it is our business to ignore any but linguistic facts. It would follow that the student of the subject should seek the antecedents of linguistic phenomena in other linguistic phenomena, and put on one side as not germane to his task all reference to the objects and relations which the words denote and connote.
Professor Kroeber’s alternative proposition is[10] that terms of relationship reflect psychology, not sociology, or, in other words, that the way in which terms of relationship are used depends on a chain of causation in which psychological processes are the direct antecedents of this use. I will try to make his meaning clear by means of an instance which he himself gives. He says that at the present time there is a tendency among ourselves to speak of the brother-in-law as a brother; in other words, we tend to class the brother-in-law and the brother together in the nomenclature of our own system of relationship. He supposes that we do this because there is a psychological similarity between the two relationships which leads us to class them together in our customary nomenclature. I shall return both to this and other of his examples later.
We have now seen that the opponents of Morgan have taken up two main positions which it is possible to attack: one, that the classificatory system is nothing more than a body of terms of address; the other, that it and other modes of denoting relationship are determined by psychological and not by sociological causes. I propose to consider these two positions in turn.
Morgan himself was evidently deeply impressed by the function of the classificatory system of relationship as a body of salutations. His own experience was derived from the North American Indians, and he notes the exclusive use of terms of relationship in address, a usage so habitual that[11] an omission to recognise a relative in this manner would amount almost to an affront. Morgan also points out, as one motive for the custom, the presence of a reluctance to utter personal names. McLennan had to rely entirely on the evidence collected by Morgan, and there can be no doubt that he was greatly influenced by the stress Morgan himself laid on the function of the classificatory terms as mutual salutations. That in rude societies certain relatives have social functions definitely assigned to them by custom was known in Morgan’s time, and I think it might even then have been discovered that the relationships which carried these functions were of the classificatory kind. It is, however, only by more recent work, beginning with that of Howitt, of Spencer and Gillen, and of Roth in Australia, and of the Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits, that the great importance of the functions of relatives through the classificatory system has been forced upon the attention of sociologists. The social and ceremonial proceedings of the Australian aborigines abound in features in which special functions are performed by such relatives as the elder brother or the brother of the mother, while in Torres Straits I was able to record large groups of duties, privileges and restrictions associated with different classificatory relationships.
Further work has shown that widely, though not universally, the nomenclature of the classificatory system carries with it a number of clearly defined[12] social practices. One who applies a given term of relationship to another person has to behave towards that person in certain definite ways. He has to perform certain duties towards him, and enjoys certain privileges, and is subject to certain restrictions in his conduct in relation to him. These duties, privileges and restrictions vary greatly in number among different peoples, but wherever they exist, I know of no exception to their importance and to the regard in which they are held by all members of the community. You doubtless know of many examples of such functions associated with relationship, and I need give only one example.
In the Banks Islands the term used between two brothers-in-law is wulus, walus, or walui, and a man who applies one of these terms to another may not utter his name, nor may the two behave familiarly towards one another in any way. In one island, Merlav, these relatives have all their possessions in common, and it is the duty of one to help the other in any difficulty, to warn him in danger, and, if need be, to die with him. If one dies, the other has to help to support his widow and has to abstain from certain foods. Further, there are a number of curious regulations in which the sanctity of the head plays a great part. A man must take nothing from above the head of his brother-in-law, nor may he even eat a bird which has flown over his head. A person has only to say of an object “That is the head of your brother-in-law,” and[13] the person addressed will have to desist from the use of the object. If the object is edible, it may not be eaten; if it is one which is being manufactured, such as a mat, the person addressed will have to cease from his work if the object be thus called the head of his brother-in-law. He will only be allowed to finish it on making compensation, not to the person who has prevented the work by reference to the head, but to the brother-in-law whose head had been mentioned. Ludicrous as some of these customs may seem to us, they are very far from being so to those who practise them. They show clearly the very important part taken in the lives of those who use the classificatory system by the social functions associated with relationship. As I have said, these functions are not universally associated with the classificatory system, but they are very general in many parts of the world and only need more careful investigation to be found even more general and more important than appears at present.
Let us now look at our own system of relationship from this point of view. Two striking features present themselves. First, the great paucity of definite social functions associated with relationship, and secondly, the almost complete limitation of such functions to those relationships which apply only to individual persons and not to classes of persons. Of such relationships as cousin, uncle, aunt, father-in-law, or mother-in-law there may be said to be no definite social functions. A school-boy[14] believes it is the duty of his uncle to tip him, but this is about as near as one can get to any social obligation on the part of this relative.
The same will be found to hold good to a large extent if we turn to those social regulations which have been embodied in our laws. It is only in the case of the transmission of hereditary rank and of the property of a person dying intestate that more distant relatives are brought into any legal relationship with one another, and then only if there is an absence of nearer relatives. It is only when forced to do so by exceptional circumstances that the law recognises any of the persons to whom the more classificatory of our terms of relationship apply. If we pay regard to the social functions associated with relationship, it is our own system, rather than the classificatory, which is open to the reproach that its relationships carry into them no rights and duties.
In the course of the recent work of the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition in Melanesia and Polynesia I have been able to collect a body of facts which bring out, even more clearly than has hitherto been recognised, the dependence of classificatory terms on social rights.[6] The classificatory systems of Oceania vary greatly in character. In some places relationships are definitely distinguished in nomenclature which are classed with other relationships elsewhere. Thus, while most Melanesian and[15] some Polynesian systems have a definite term for the mother’s brother and for the class of relatives whom the mother calls brother, in other systems this relative is classed with, and is denoted by, the same term as the father. The point to which I now call your attention is that there is a very close correlation between the presence of a special term for this relative and the presence of special functions attached to the relationship.
In Polynesia, both the Hawaiians and the inhabitants of Niue class the mother’s brother with the father, and in neither place was I able to discover that there were any special duties, privileges or restrictions ascribed to the mother’s brother. In the Polynesian islands of Tonga and Tikopia, on the other hand, where there are special terms for the mother’s brother, this relative has also special functions. The only place in Melanesia where I failed to find a special term for the mother’s brother was in the western Solomon Islands, and that was also the only part of Melanesia where I failed to find any trace of special social functions ascribed to this relative. I do not know of such functions in Santa Cruz, but my information about the system of that island is derived from others, and further research will almost certainly show that they are present.
In my own experience, then, among two different peoples, I have been able to establish a definite correlation between the presence of a term of relationship and special functions associated with[16] the relationship. Information kindly given to me by Father Egidi, however, seems to show that the correlation among the Melanesians is not complete. In Mekeo, the mother’s brother has the duty of putting on the first perineal garment of his nephew, but he has no special term and is classed with the father. Among the Kuni, on the other hand, there is a definite term for the mother’s brother distinguishing him from the father, but yet he has not, so far as Father Egidi knows, any special functions.
Both in Melanesia and Polynesia a similar correlation comes out in connection with other relationships, the most prominent exception being the absence of a special term for the father’s sister in the Banks Islands, although this relative has very definite and important functions. In these islands the father’s sister is classed with the mother as vev or veve, but even here, where the generalisation seems to break down, it does not do so completely, for the father’s sister is distinguished from the mother as veve vus rawe, the mother who kills a pig, as opposed to the simple veve used for the mother and her sisters.
There is thus definite evidence, not only for the association of classificatory terms of relationship with special social functions, but from one part of the world we now have evidence which shows that the presence or absence of special terms is largely dependent on whether there are or are not such functions. We may take it as established that the[17] terms of the classificatory system are not, as McLennan supposed, merely terms of address and modes of mutual salutation. McLennan came to this conclusion because he believed that the classificatory terms were associated with no such functions as those of which we now have abundant evidence. He asks, “What duties or rights are affected by the relationships comprised in the classificatory system?” and answers himself according to the knowledge at his disposal, “Absolutely none.”[7] This passage makes it clear that, if McLennan had known what we know to-day, he would never have taken up the line of attack upon Morgan’s position in which he has had, and still has, so many followers.
I can now turn to the second line of attack, that which boldly discards the origin of the terminology of relationship in social conditions, and seeks for its explanation in psychology. The line of argument I propose to follow is first to show that many details of classificatory systems have been directly determined by social factors. If that task can be accomplished, we shall have firm ground from which to take off in the attempt to refer the general characters of the classificatory and other systems of relationship to forms of social organisation. Any complete theory of a social institution has not only to account for its general characters, but also for its details, and I propose to begin with the details.
I must first return to the history of the subject, and stay for a moment to ask why the line of argument I propose to follow was not adopted by Morgan and has been so largely disregarded by others.
Whenever a new phenomenon is discovered in any part of the world, there is a natural tendency to seek for its parallels elsewhere. Morgan lived at a time when the unity of human culture was a topic which greatly excited ethnologists, and it is evident that one of his chief interests in the new discovery arose from the possibility it seemed to open of showing the uniformity of human culture. He hoped to demonstrate the uniformity of the classificatory system throughout the world, and he was content to observe certain broad varieties of the system and refer them to supposed stages in the history of human society. He paid but little attention to such varieties of the classificatory system as are illustrated in his own record of North American systems, and seems to have overlooked entirely certain features of the Indian and Oceanic systems he recorded, which might have enabled him to demonstrate the close relation between the terminology of relationship and social institutions. Morgan’s neglect to attend to these differences must be ascribed in some measure to the ignorance of rude forms of social organisation which existed when he wrote, but the failure of others to recognise the dependence of the details of classificatory systems upon social institutions is rather to be[19] ascribed to the absence of interest in the subject induced by their adherence to McLennan’s primary error. Those who believe that the classificatory system is merely an unimportant code of mutual salutations are not likely to attend to relatively minute differences in the customs they despise. The credit of having been the first fully to recognise the social importance of these differences belongs to J. Kohler. In his book “Zur Urgeschichte der Ehe,” which I have already mentioned, he studied minutely the details of many different systems, and showed that they could be explained by certain forms of marriage practised by those who use the terms. I propose now to deal with classificatory terminology from this point of view. My procedure will be first to show that the details which distinguish different forms of the classificatory system from one another have been directly determined by the social institutions of those who use the systems, and only when this has been established, shall I attempt to bring the more general characters of the classificatory and other systems into relation with social institutions.
I am able to carry out this task more fully than has hitherto been possible because I have collected in Melanesia a number of systems of relationship which differ far more widely from one another than those recorded in Morgan’s book or others which have been collected since. Some of the features which characterise these Melanesian systems will be wholly new to ethnologists, not having yet been[20] recorded elsewhere, but I propose to begin with a long familiar mode of terminology which accompanies that widely distributed custom known as the cross-cousin marriage. In the more frequent form of this marriage a man marries the daughter either of his mother’s brother or of his father’s sister; more rarely his choice is limited to one of these relatives.
Such a marriage will have certain definite consequences. Let us take a case in which a man marries the daughter of his mother’s brother, as is represented in the following diagram:
Diagram 1[8]
One consequence of the marriage between C and d will be that A, who before the marriage of C was only his mother’s brother, now becomes also his wife’s father, while b, who before the marriage was the mother’s brother’s wife of C, now becomes his wife’s mother. Reciprocally, C, who before his marriage had been the sister’s son of A and the husband’s sister’s son of b, now becomes their son-in-law. Further, E and f, the other children of A and b, who before the marriage had been only the cousins of C, now become his wife’s brother and sister.
Similarly, a, who before the marriage of d was her father’s sister, now becomes also her husband’s mother, and B, her father’s sister’s husband, comes to stand in the relation of husband’s father; if C should have any brothers and sisters, these cousins now become her brothers- and sisters-in-law.
The combinations of relationship which follow from the marriage of a man with the daughter of his mother’s brother thus differ for a man and a woman, but if, as is usual, a man may marry the daughter either of his mother’s brother or of his father’s sister, these combinations of relationship will hold good for both men and women.
Another and more remote consequence of the cross-cousin marriage, if this become an established institution, is that the relationships of mother’s brother and father’s sister’s husband will come to be combined in one and the same person, and that there will be a similar combination of the relationships of father’s sister and mother’s brother’s wife. If the cross-cousin marriage be the habitual custom, B and b in Diagram 1 will be brother and sister; in consequence A will be at once the mother’s brother and the father’s sister’s husband of C, while b will be both his father’s sister and his mother’s brother’s wife. Since, however, the mother’s brother is also the father-in-law, and the father’s sister the mother-in-law, three different relationships will be combined in each case. Through the cross-cousin marriage the relationships[22] of mother’s brother, father’s sister’s husband and father-in-law will be combined in one and the same person, and the relationships of father’s sister, mother’s brother’s wife and mother-in-law will be similarly combined.
In many places where we know the cross-cousin marriage to be an established institution, we find just those common designations which I have just described. Thus, in the Mbau dialect of Fiji the word vungo is applied to the mother’s brother, the husband of the father’s sister and the father-in-law. The word nganei is used for the father’s sister, the mother’s brother’s wife and the mother-in-law. The term tavale is used by a man for the son of the mother’s brother or of the father’s sister as well as for the wife’s brother and the sister’s husband. Ndavola is used not only for the child of the mother’s brother or father’s sister when differing in sex from the speaker, but this word is also used by a man for his wife’s sister and his brother’s wife, and by a woman for her husband’s brother and her sister’s husband. Every one of these details of the Mbau system is the direct and inevitable consequence of the cross-cousin marriage, if it become an established and habitual practice.
This Fijian system does not stand alone in Melanesia. In the southern islands of the New Hebrides, in Tanna, Eromanga, Anaiteum and Aniwa, the cross-cousin marriage is practised and their systems of relationship have features similar to[23] those of Fiji. Thus, in Anaiteum the word matak applies to the mother’s brother, the father’s sister’s husband and the father-in-law, while the word engak used for the cross-cousin is not only used for the wife’s sister and the brother’s wife, but also for the wife herself.
Again, in the island of Guadalcanar in the Solomons the system of relationship is just such as would result from the cross-cousin marriage. One term, nia, is used for the mother’s brother and the wife’s father, and probably also for the father’s sister’s husband and the husband’s father, though my stay in the island was not long enough to enable me to collect sufficient genealogical material to demonstrate these points completely. Similarly, tarunga includes in its connotation the father’s sister, the mother’s brother’s wife and the wife’s mother, and probably also the husband’s mother, while the word iva is used for both cross-cousins and brothers- and sisters-in-law. Corresponding to this terminology there seemed to be no doubt that it was the custom for a man to marry the daughter of his mother’s brother or his father’s sister, though I was not able to demonstrate this form of marriage genealogically.
These three regions, Fiji, the southern New Hebrides and Guadalcanar, are the only parts of Melanesia included in my survey where I found the practice of the cross-cousin marriage, and in all three regions the systems of relationship are just such as would follow from this form of marriage.
Let us now turn to inquire how far it is possible to explain these features of Melanesian systems of relationship by psychological similarity. If it were not for the cross-cousin marriage, what can there be to give the mother’s brother a greater psychological similarity to the father-in-law than the father’s brother, or the father’s sister a greater similarity to the mother-in-law than the mother’s sister? Why should it be two special kinds of cousin who are classed with two special kinds of brother- and sister-in-law or with the husband or wife? Once granted the presence of the cross-cousin marriage, and there are psychological similarities certainly, though even here the matter is not quite straightforward from the point of view of the believer in their importance, for we have to do not merely with the similarity of two relatives, but with their identity, with the combination of two or more relationships in one and the same person. Even if we put this on one side, however, it remains to ask how it is possible to say that terms of relationship do not reflect sociology, if such psychological similarities are themselves the result of the cross-cousin marriage? What point is there in bringing in hypothetical psychological similarities which are only at the best intermediate links in the chain of causation connecting the terminology of relationship with antecedent social conditions?
If you concede the causal relation between the characteristic features of a Fijian or Anaiteum or[25] Guadalcanar system and the cross-cousin marriage, there can be no question that it is the cross-cousin marriage which is the antecedent and the features of the system of relationship the consequences. I do not suppose that, even in this subject, there will be found anyone to claim that the Fijians took to marrying their cross-cousins because such a marriage was suggested to them by the nature of their system of relationship. We have to do in this case, not merely with one or two features which might be the consequence of the cross-cousin marriage, but with a large and complicated meshwork of resemblances and differences in the nomenclature of relationship, each and every element of which follows directly from such a marriage, while no one of the systems I have considered possesses a single feature which is not compatible with social conditions arising out of this marriage. Apart from quantitative verification, I doubt whether it would be possible in the whole range of science to find a case where we can be more confident that one phenomenon has been conditioned by another. I feel almost guilty of wasting your time by going into it so fully, and should hardly have ventured to do so if this case of social causation had not been explicitly denied by one with so high a reputation as Professor Kroeber. I hope, however, that the argument will be useful as an example of the method I shall apply to other cases in which the evidence is less conclusive.
The features of terminology which follow from[26] the cross-cousin marriage were known to Morgan, being present in three of the systems he recorded from Southern India and in the Fijian system collected for him by Mr. Fison. The earliest reference[9] to the cross-cousin marriage which I have been able to discover is among the Gonds of Central India. This marriage was recorded in 1870, which, though earlier than the appearance of Morgan’s book, was after it had been accepted for publication, so that I think we can be confident that Morgan was unacquainted with the form of marriage which would have explained the peculiar features of the Indian and Fijian systems. It is evident, however, that Morgan was so absorbed in his demonstration of the similarity of these systems to those of America that he paid but little, if any, attention to their peculiarities. He thus lost a great opportunity; if he had attended to these peculiarities and had seen their meaning, he might have predicted a form of marriage which would soon afterwards have been independently discovered. Such an example of successful prediction would have forced the social significance of the terminology of relationship upon the attention of students in such a way that we should have been spared much of the controversy which has so long obstructed progress in this branch of sociology. It must at the very least have acted as a stimulus to the collection of systems of relationship. It would hardly have been possible that now, more than[27] forty years after the appearance of Morgan’s book, we are still in complete ignorance of the terminology of relationship of many peoples about whom volumes have been written. It would seem impossible, for instance, that our knowledge of Indian systems of relationship could have been what it is to-day. India would have been the country in which the success of Morgan’s prediction would first have shown itself, and such an event must have prevented the almost total neglect which the subject of relationship has suffered at the hands of students of Indian sociology.
In my last lecture I began the demonstration of the dependence of the classificatory terminology of relationship upon social institutions by showing how a number of terms used in several parts of Melanesia have been determined by the cross-cousin marriage. I showed that in places where the cross-cousin marriage is practised there are not merely one or two, but large groups of, terms of relationship which are exactly such as would follow from this form of marriage. To-day I begin by considering other forms of Melanesian marriage which bring out almost as clearly and conclusively the dependence of the classificatory terminology upon social conditions.
The systems of relationship of the Banks Islands possess certain very remarkable features which were first recorded by Dr. Codrington.[10] Put very shortly, it may be stated that cross-cousins stand to one another in the relation of parent and child, or, more exactly, cross-cousins apply to one another terms of relationship which are otherwise used between parents and children. A man applies to his mother’s brother’s children the term which he[29] otherwise uses for his own children, and, conversely, a person applies to his father’s sister’s son a term he otherwise uses for his father. Thus, in the following diagram, C will apply to D and e the terms which are in general use for a son and daughter, while D and e will apply to C the term they otherwise use for their father.
Diagram 2.
In most forms of the classificatory system members of different generations are denoted in wholly different ways and belong to different classes,[11] but here we have a case in which persons of the same generation as the speaker are classed with those of an older or a younger generation.
I will first ask you to consider to what kind of psychological similarity such a practice can be due. What kind of psychological similarity can there be between one special kind of cousin and the father, and between another special kind of cousin and a son or daughter? If the puzzle as put in this form does not seem capable of a satisfactory answer, let us turn to see if the Banks Islanders practise any social custom to which this peculiar terminology can have been due. In the story of[30] Ganviviris told to Dr. Codrington in these islands[12] an incident occurs in which a man hands over one of his wives to his sister’s son, or, in other words, in which a man marries one of the wives of his mother’s brother. Inquiries showed, not only that this form of marriage was once widely current in the islands, but that it still persists though in a modified form. The Christianity of the natives does not now permit a man to have superfluous wives whom he can pass on to his sister’s sons, but it is still the orthodox, and indeed I was told the popular, custom to marry the widow of the mother’s brother. It seemed that in the old days a man would take the widow of his mother’s brother in addition to any wife or wives he might already have. Though this is no longer allowed, the leaning towards this form of marriage is so strong that after fifty years of external influence a young man still marries the widow of his mother’s brother, sometimes in preference to a girl of his own age. Indeed, there was reason to believe that there was an obligation to do so, if the deceased husband had a nephew who was not yet married. The peculiar features of the terminology of relationship in these islands are exactly such as would follow from this form of marriage. If, in Diagram 2, C marries b, the wife or widow of his mother’s brother, and thereby comes to occupy the social position of his uncle A, the children of the uncle, D and e, will come to stand to him in the relation[31] of children, while he, who had previously been the father’s sister’s son of D and e, will now become their father. An exceptional form of the classificatory system, in which there is a departure from the usual rule limiting a term of relationship to members of the same generation, is found to be the natural consequence of a social regulation which enjoins the marriage of persons belonging to different generations.
The next step in the process of demonstrating the social significance of the classificatory system of relationship will take us to the island of Pentecost in the northern New Hebrides. When I recorded the system of this island, I found it to have so bizarre and complex a character that I could hardly believe at first it could be other than the result of a ludicrous misunderstanding between myself and my seemingly intelligent and trustworthy informants. Nevertheless, the records obtained from two independent witnesses, and based on separate pedigrees, agreed so closely even in the details which seemed most improbable that I felt confident that the whole construction could not be so mad as it seemed. This confidence was strengthened by finding that some of its features were of the same order of peculiarity as others which I had already found in a set of Fijian systems I have yet to consider. There were certain features which brought relatives separated by two generations into one category; the mother’s mother, for instance, received the same designation as the elder sister;[32] the wife’s mother the same as the daughter; the wife’s brother the same as the daughter’s son. The only conclusion I was then able to formulate was that these features were the result of some social institution resembling the matrimonial classes of Australia, which would have the effect of putting persons of alternate generations into one social category.
This idea was supported by the system of relationship of the Dieri of Australia which possesses at least one feature similar to those of Pentecost, a fact I happened to remember at the time because Mr. N. W. Thomas[13] had used it as the basis of a reductio ad absurdum argument to show that terms of relationship do not express kinship. The interest of the Pentecost system seemed at first to lie in the possibility thus opened of bringing Melanesian into relation with Australian sociology, a hope which was the more promising in that the people of Pentecost and the Dieri resemble one another in the general character of their social organisation, each being organised on the dual basis with matrilineal descent. When in Pentecost, however, I was unable to get further than this, and the details of the system remained wholly inexplicable.
The meaning of some of the peculiarities of the Pentecost system became clear when I reached the Banks Islands; they were of the same kind as[33] those I have already considered as characteristic of these islands. When I had discovered the dependence of these features upon the marriage of a man with the wife of his mother’s brother, it became evident that not only these, but certain other features of the Pentecost system, were capable of being accounted for by this kind of marriage. The peculiar features of the Pentecost system could be divided into two groups, and all the members of one group could be accounted for by the marriage with the mother’s brother’s wife. All these features had the character in common that persons of the generation immediately above or below that of the speaker were classed in nomenclature with relatives of the same generation.
The other group consisted of terms in which persons two generations apart were classed with relatives of the same generation. Since the first group of correspondences had been explained by a marriage between persons one generation apart, it should have been obvious that the classing together of persons two generations apart might have been the result of marriage between persons two generations apart. The idea of a society in which marriages between those having the status of grandparents and grandchildren were habitual must have seemed so unlikely that, if it entered my mind at all, it must have been at once dismissed. The clue only came later from a man named John Pantutun, a native of the Banks Islands, who had been a teacher in[34] Pentecost. In talking to me he often mentioned in a most instructive manner resemblances and differences between the customs of his own island and those he had observed in Pentecost. One day he let fall the observation with just such a manner as that in which we so often accuse neighbouring nations of ridiculous or disgusting practices, “O! Raga![14] That is the place where they marry their granddaughters.” I saw at once that he had given me a possible explanation of the peculiar features of the system of the island. By that time I had forgotten the details of the Pentecost system, and it occurred to me that it would be interesting, not immediately to consult my note-books, but to endeavour to construct a system of relationship which would be the result of marriage with a granddaughter, and then to see how far my theoretical construction agreed with the terminology I had recorded. The first question which arose was with which kind of granddaughter the marriage had been practised, with the son’s daughter or with the daughter’s daughter, and this was a question readily answered by means of a consideration arising out of the nature of the social organisation of Pentecost.
The society of this island is organised on the dual basis with matrilineal descent in which a man must marry a woman of the opposite moiety. Diagram 3, in which A and a stand for men and[35] women of one moiety, and B and b for those of the other moiety, shows that a marriage between a man and his son’s daughter would be out of the question, for it would be a case of A marrying a. It was evident that the marriage, the consequences of which I had to formulate, must have been one in which a man married his daughter’s daughter.
Diagram 3.
It would take too long to go through the whole set of relationships, and I choose only a few examples which I illustrate by the following diagram:
Diagram 4.
This diagram shows that if A marries e, c, who previous to the marriage had been only the daughter of A, now becomes also his wife’s mother; and D, who had previously been his daughter’s husband, now becomes his wife’s father. Similarly, F, who before the new marriage was the[36] daughter’s son of A, now becomes the brother of his wife, while f, his daughter’s daughter, becomes his wife’s sister. Lastly, if we assume that it would be the elder daughters of the daughter who would be married by their grandfathers, e, who before the marriage had been the elder sister of F and f, now comes through her marriage to occupy the position of their mother’s mother.
When, after making these deductions, I examined my record of the Pentecost terms, I found that its terminology corresponded exactly with those which had been deduced. The wife’s mother and the daughter were both called nitu. The daughter’s husband and the wife’s father were both bwaliga. The daughter’s children were called mabi, and this term was also used for the brother and sister of the wife. Lastly, the mother’s mother was found to be classed with the elder sister, both being called tuaga.
For the sake of simplicity of demonstration I have assumed that a man marries his own daughter’s daughter, but through the classificatory principle all the features I have described would follow equally well if a man married the granddaughter of his brother, either in the narrow or the classificatory sense. There was one correspondence, according to which both the husband’s brother and the mother’s father were called sibi, which does not follow from the marriage with the own granddaughter, but would be the natural result of marriage with the daughter’s daughter of the[37] brother—i.e., with a marriage in which e was married by A’s brother.
I hope these examples will be sufficient to show how a number of features which might otherwise seem so absurd as to suggest a system of relationship gone mad become natural and intelligible, even obvious, if it were once the established practice of the people to marry the daughter’s daughter of the brother.
Such inquiries as I was able to make confirmed the conclusion that the Pentecost marriage was with the granddaughter of the brother rather than with the daughter of the daughter herself. After I had been put on the track of the explanation by John Pantutun I had the chance of talking to only one native of Pentecost, unfortunately not a very good informant. From his evidence it appeared that the marriage I had inferred from the system of relationship even now occurs in the island, but only with the granddaughter of the brother, and that marriage with the own granddaughter is forbidden. The evidence is not as complete as I should like, but it points to the actual existence in the island of a peculiar form of marriage from which the extraordinary features of its system of relationship directly follow.
When I returned to England I found that this marriage was not unique, but had been recorded among the Dieri of Australia,[15] where, as I have already mentioned, it is associated with peculiar[38] features of nomenclature resembling those of Pentecost.
I must again ask, how are you going to explain the features of the Pentecost system psychologically? What psychological resemblance is there between a grandmother and a sister, between a mother-in-law and a daughter, between a brother-in-law and a grandfather? Apart from some special form of social relationship, there can be no such resemblances. Further, if there were such psychological resemblances, why should we know of their influence on nomenclature only in Pentecost and among the Dieri? The features to be explained are definitely known to exist in only two systems of the world, and it is only among the peoples who use these two systems that we have any evidence of that extraordinary form of marriage of which they would be the natural consequence.
I have now tried to show the dependence of special features of the classificatory system of relationship upon special social conditions. If I have succeeded in this I shall have gone far towards the accomplishment of one of the main purposes of these lectures. They have, however, another purpose, viz., to inquire how far we are justified in inferring the existence of a social institution of which we have no direct evidence when we find features of the nomenclature of relationship which would result from such an institution. I have now[39] to enter upon this part of my subject, and I think it will be instructive to take you at once to a case in which I believe that an extraordinary form of marriage can be established as a feature of the past history of a people, although at the present moment any direct evidence for the existence of such a marriage is wholly lacking.
When I was in the interior of Viti Levu, one of the Fijian islands, I discovered the existence of certain systems of relationship which differed fundamentally from the only Fijian systems previously known. Any features referable to the cross-cousin marriage were completely absent, but in their place were others, one of which I have already mentioned, which brought into one class relatives two generations apart. The father’s father received the same designation as the elder brother, and the son’s wife was called by the same term as the mother. As I have already said, my first conclusion was that these terms were the survivals of forms of social organisation resembling the matrimonial classes of Australia, but as soon as I had worked out the explanation of the Pentecost system, it became evident that the Fijian peculiarities would have to be explained on similar lines. At first I thought it probable that the difference between the Pentecost and Fijian systems was due to the difference in the mode of descent in the two places. For long I tried to work out schemes whereby a change from the matrilineal descent of Pentecost to the patrilineal condition of Fiji could[40] have had as one of its consequences a change from a correspondence in nomenclature between the mother’s mother and the elder sister to one in which the common nomenclature applied to the father’s father and the elder brother. It is an interesting example of the strength of a preconceived opinion, and of some measure of the belief in the impossibility of customs not practised by ourselves, that for more than two years I failed to see an obvious alternative explanation, although I returned to the subject again and again. The clue came at last from the system of Buin, in the island of Bougainville, recorded by Dr. Thurnwald.[16] The nomenclature of this system agreed with that of inland Fiji in having one term for the father’s father and the elder brother, but since the people of Buin still practice matrilineal descent, it was evident that I had been on a false track in supposing the correspondence to have been the result of a change in the mode of descent. Once turned into a fresh path by the necessity of showing how the correspondence could have arisen out of a matrilineal condition, it was not long before I saw how it might be accounted for in a very different way. I saw that the correspondence would be the natural result of a form of social organisation in which it was the practice to marry a grandmother, viz., the wife of the father’s father. Not only did this form of marriage explain the second peculiar feature of the Fijian system,[41] viz., the classing of the son’s wife with the mother, but it would also account for several features of the Buin system which would otherwise be difficult to understand.
Diagram 5.
If, as shown in Diagram 5, E marries b, the wife or widow of his father’s father, he, who had previously been the elder brother of F and f, now comes to occupy the position of their father’s father, while d, the mother of E, will now come to stand to him in the relationship of son’s wife.
I need only mention here one of the features of the Buin system which can be accounted for by means of this marriage. The term mamai is used, not only for the elder sister and for the elder brother’s wife, but it is also applied to the father’s mother; that is, the wife of the elder brother is designated by the same term as the wife of the father’s father, exactly as must happen if E marries b, the wife of his father’s father. A number of extraordinary features from two Melanesian islands collected by two independent workers fit into a coherent scheme if they have been the result of a marriage in which a man gives one of his wives to his son’s son during his life, or in which this woman is taken to wife by her husband’s grandson when she becomes a widow. If the[42] practice were ever sufficiently habitual to become the basis of the system of relationship, we can be confident that it is the former of these two alternatives with which we have to do.
If you are still so under the domination of ideas derived from your own social surroundings that you cannot believe in such a marriage, I would remind you that there is definite evidence from the Banks Islands that men used to hand over wives to their sisters’ sons. It is not taking us so much into the unknown as it might appear to suppose that they once also gave their wives to their sons’ sons.
I have taken this case somewhat out of its proper place in my argument because the evidence is so closely connected with that by means of which I have shown the relation between features of systems of relationship and peculiar forms of marriage in Melanesia. I have now to return to the more sober task of considering how far we are justified in inferring the former existence of marriage institutions when we find features of systems of relationship of which they would have been the natural consequence. It is evident that, whenever we find such a feature as common nomenclature for a grandmother and a sister or for a cross-cousin and a parent, it should suggest to us the possibility of such marriage regulations as those of Pentecost and the Banks Islands. But such common designations might have arisen in some other way, and in order to establish the existence of such forms of marriage in the past[43] history of the people, we must have criteria to guide us when we are considering whether a given feature of the terminology of relationship is or is not a survival of a marriage institution.
I will return to the cross-cousin marriage for my examples. The task before us is to inquire how far such features of relationship as exist in Fiji, Anaiteum or Guadalcanar, in conjunction with the cross-cousin marriage, will justify us in inferring the former existence of this form of marriage in places where it is not now practised.
If there be found among any people all the characteristic features of a coastal Fijian or of an Anaiteum system, I think few will be found to doubt the former existence of the cross-cousin marriage. It would seem almost inconceivable that there should ever have existed any other conditions, whether social or psychological, which could have produced this special combination of peculiar uses of terms of relationship. It is when some only of these features are present that there will arise any serious doubt whether they are to be regarded as survivals of the former existence of the cross-cousin marriage.
One consideration I must point out at once. Certain of the features which follow from the cross-cousin marriage may be the result of another marriage regulation. In some parts of the world there exists a custom of exchanging brothers and sisters, so that, when a man marries a woman, his sister marries his wife’s brother. As the result of[44] this custom the mother’s brother and the father’s sister’s husband will come to be one and the same person, and the father’s sister will become also the mother’s brother’s wife.
This form of marriage exists among the western people of Torres Straits,[17] and is accompanied by features of the system of relationship which would follow from the practice. The mother’s brother is classed with the father’s sister’s husband as wad-wam, but there is an alternative term for the father’s sister’s husband and there was no evidence that the mother’s brother’s wife was classed with the father’s sister. It seemed possible that the classing together of the mother’s brother and the father’s sister’s husband was not a constant feature of the system of relationship, but only occurred in cases where the custom of exchange had made it necessary. The case, however, is sufficient to show that two of the correspondences which follow from the cross-cousin marriage may be the result of another kind of marriage. If we accept the social causation of such features and find these correspondences alone, it would still remain an open question whether they were the results of the custom of exchange or of the marriage of cross-cousins. The custom of exchange, however, is wholly incapable of accounting for the use of a common term for the mother’s brother and the father-in-law, for the father’s sister and the mother-in-law, or for cross-cousins and brothers- or sisters-[45]in-law. It is only when these correspondences are present that there will be any decisive reason for inferring the former existence of the cross-cousin marriage.
The first conclusion, then, is that some of the features found in association with the cross-cousin marriage are of greater value than others in enabling us to infer the former existence of the cross-cousin marriage where it no longer exists. Next, the probability that such features as I am considering are due to the former presence of the cross-cousin marriage will be greatly heightened if this form of marriage should exist among people with allied cultures. An instance from Melanesia will bring out this point clearly.
In the island of Florida in the Solomons it is clear that the cross-cousin marriage is not now the custom, and I could discover no tradition of its existence in the past. One feature, however, of the system of relationship is just such as would follow from the cross-cousin marriage. Both the wife’s mother and the wife of the mother’s brother are called vungo.
Florida is not only near Guadalcanar where the cross-cousin marriage is practised, (the two islands are within sight of one another), but their cultures are very closely related. In such a case the probability that the single feature of the Florida system which follows from the cross-cousin marriage has actually had that form of marriage as its antecedent becomes very great, and this conclusion[46] becomes still more probable when we find that in a third island, Ysabel, closely allied in culture both to Florida and Guadalcanar, there is a clear tradition of the former practice of the cross-cousin marriage although it is now only an occasional event.
Again, in one district of San Cristoval in the Solomons the term fongo is used both for the father-in-law and the father’s sister’s husband, and kafongo similarly denotes both the mother-in-law and the mother’s brother’s wife. This island differs more widely from Guadalcanar in culture than Florida or Ysabel, but the evidence for the former existence of the marriage in these islands gives us more confidence in ascribing the common designations of San Cristoval to the cross-cousin marriage than would have been the case if these common designations had been the only examples of such possible survivals in the Solomons. Speaking in more general terms, one may say that the probability that the common nomenclature for two relatives is the survival of a form of marriage becomes the greater, the more similar is the general culture in which the supposed survival is found to that of a people who practise this form of marriage. The case will be greatly strengthened if there should be intermediate links between the supposed survival and the still living institution.
When we find a feature such as that of the Florida system among a people none of whose allies in culture practise the cross-cousin marriage, the[47] matter must be far more doubtful. In the present state of our knowledge we are only justified in making such a feature the basis of a working hypothesis to stimulate research and encourage us to look for other evidence in the neighbourhood of the place where the feature has been found. Our knowledge of the social institutions of the world is not yet so complete that we can afford to neglect any clue which may guide our steps.
I propose briefly to consider two regions, South India and North America, to show how they differ from this point of view.
The terms of relationship used in three[18] of the chief languages spoken by the people of South India are exactly such as would follow from the cross-cousin marriage. In Tamil[19] the mother’s brother, the father’s sister’s husband, and the father of both husband and wife are all called mama, and this term is also used for these relatives in Telegu. In Canarese the mother’s brother and the father-in-law are both called mava, but the father’s sister’s husband fails to fall into line and is classed with the father’s brother.
Similarly, the father’s sister, the mother’s brother’s wife and the mother of both wife and[48] husband are called atta in Telegu and atte in Canarese, Tamil here spoiling the harmony by having one term, attai, for the father’s sister and another, mami, for the mother’s brother’s wife and the mother-in-law. Since, however, the Tamil term for the father’s sister is only another form of the Telegu and Canarese words for the combined relationships, the exception only serves to strengthen the agreement with the condition which would follow from the cross-cousin marriage.
The South Indian terms for cross-cousin and brother- and sister-in-law are complicated by the presence of distinctions dependent on the sex and relative age of those who use them, but these complications do not disguise how definitely the terminology would follow from the cross-cousin marriage. Thus, to take only two examples: a Tamil man applies the term maittuni to the daughters of his mother’s brother and of his father’s sister as well as to his brother’s wife and his wife’s sister, and a Canarese woman uses one term for the sons of her mother’s brother and of her father’s sister, for her husband’s brother and her sister’s husband.
So far as we know, the cross-cousin marriage is not now practised by the vast majority of those who use these terms of relationship. If the terminology has been the result of the cross-cousin marriage, it is only a survival of an ancient social condition in which this form of marriage was habitual. That it is such a survival, however,[49] becomes certain when we find the cross-cousin marriage still persisting in many parts of South India, and that among one such people at least, the Todas,[20] this form of marriage is associated with a system of relationship agreeing both in its structure and linguistic character with that of the Tamils. I have elsewhere[21] brought together the evidence for the former prevalence of this form of marriage in India, but even if there were no evidence, the terminology of relationship is so exactly such as would follow from the cross-cousin marriage that we can be certain that this form of marriage was once the habitual custom of the people of South India.
While South India thus provides a good example of a case in which we can confidently infer the former existence of the cross-cousin marriage from the terminology of relationship, the evidence from North America is of a kind which gives to such an inference only a certain degree of probability. In this case it is necessary to suspend judgment and await further evidence before coming to a positive conclusion.
I will begin with a very doubtful feature which comes from an Athapascan tribe, the Red Knives[22] (probably that now called Yellow Knife). These people use a common term, set-so, for the father’s sister, the mother’s brother’s wife, the wife’s[50] mother and the husband’s mother, a usage which would be the necessary result of the cross-cousin marriage. Against this, however, is to be put the fact that there are three different terms for the corresponding male relatives, the two kinds of father-in-law being called seth-a, the mother’s brother ser-a, and the father’s sister’s husband sel-the-ne. Further, the term set-so, the common use of which for the aunt and mother-in-law seems to indicate the cross-cousin marriage, is also applied by a man to his brother’s wife and his wife’s sister, features which cannot possibly be the result of this form of marriage. These features show, either that the terminology has arisen in some other way, or that there has been some additional social factor in operation which has greatly modified a nomenclature derived from the cross-cousin marriage.
A stronger case is presented by the terminology of three branches of the Cree tribe, also recorded by Morgan. In all three systems, one term, ne-sis or nee-sis, is used for the mother’s brother, the father’s sister’s husband, the wife’s father and the husband’s father; while the term nis-si-goos applies to the father’s sister, the mother’s brother’s wife and the two kinds of mother-in-law. These usages are exactly such as would follow from the cross-cousin marriage. The terms for the sister’s son of a man and the brother’s son of a woman, however, differ from those used for the son-in-law, and there is also no correspondence between the terms for cross-[51]cousin and any kind of brother- or sister-in-law. The case points more definitely to the cross-cousin marriage than in the case of the Red Knives, but yet lacks the completeness which would allow us to make the inference with confidence.
The Assiniboin have a common term, me-toh-we, used for the father’s sister, the mother’s brother’s wife and the two kinds of mother-in-law, and also a common term, me-nake-she, for the mother’s brother and the father’s sister’s husband, but the latter differs from the word, me-to-ga-she, used for the father of husband or wife. The case here is decidedly stronger than among the Red Knives, but is less complete than among the Crees.
Among a number of branches of the Dakotas the evidence is of a different kind, being derived from similar nomenclature for the cross-cousin and certain kinds of brother- and sister-in-law. Morgan[23] has recorded eight systems, all of which show the features in question, but I will consider here only that of the Isauntie or Santee Dakotas, which was collected for him by the Rev. S. R. Riggs. Riggs[24] and Dorsey[25] have given independent accounts of this system which are far less complete than that given by Morgan, but agree with it in all essentials.
In this system a man calls the son of his mother’s[52] brother or of his father’s sister ta-hang-she or tang-hang-she, while his wife’s brother and his sister’s husband are ta-hang or tang-hang. Similarly, a woman calls her cross-cousin she-chay-she, while her husband’s brother and her sister’s husband are called she-chay. The terms for brothers-in-law are thus the same as those for cross-cousins with the omission of the suffix she. One of these resemblances, that when a woman is speaking, has been cited by Professor Kroeber[26] as an example of the psychological causation of such features of relationship as I am considering in these lectures. He rejects its dependence on the cross-cousin marriage and refers the resemblance to the psychological similarity between a woman’s cousin and her brother-in-law in that both are collateral relatives alike in sex, of the same generation as the speaker, but different from her in sex.
As we have seen, however, the Dakota correspondence is not an isolated occurrence, but fits in with a number of other features of the systems of cognate peoples to form a body of evidence pointing to the former prevalence of the cross-cousin marriage.
There is also indirect evidence leading in the same direction. In Melanesia there is reason to believe that the cross-cousin marriage stands in a definite relation to another form of marriage, that with the wife of the mother’s brother. If there should be evidence for the former existence of[53] this marriage in North America, it would increase the probability in favour of the cross-cousin marriage.
Among a number of peoples, some of whom form part of the Sioux, including the Minnitarees, Crows, Choctas, Creeks, Cherokees and Pawnees, cross-cousins are classed with parents and children exactly as in the Banks Islands, and exactly as in those islands, it is the son of the father’s sister who is classed with the father, and the children of the mother’s brother who are classed with sons or daughters. Further, among the Pawnees the wife of the mother’s brother is classed with the wife, a feature also associated with the peculiar nomenclature for cross-cousins in the Banks Islands. The agreement is so close as to make it highly probable that the American features of relationship have been derived from a social institution of the same kind as that to which the Melanesian features are due, and that it was once the custom of these American peoples to marry the wife of the mother’s brother. Here, as in the case of the cross-cousin marriage itself, the case rests entirely upon the terminology of relationship, but we cannot ignore the association in neighbouring parts of North America of features of relationship which would be the natural consequence of two forms of marriage which are known to be associated together elsewhere.
I am indebted to Miss Freire-Marreco for the information that the Tewa of Hano, a Pueblo[54] tribe, call the father’s sister’s son tada, a term otherwise used for the father, thus suggesting that they also may once have practised marriage with the wife of the mother’s brother. The use of this term, however, is only one example of a practice whereby all the males of the father’s clan are called tada, irrespective of age and generation. The common nomenclature for the father and the father’s sister’s son among the Tewa thus differs in character from the apparently similar nomenclature of the Banks Islands and cannot have been determined directly, perhaps not even remotely, by marriage with the wife of the mother’s brother. This raises the question whether the nomenclature of the Sioux has not arisen out of a practice similar to that of the Tewa. The terms for other relatives recorded by Morgan show some evidence of the widely generalised use of the Tewa, but such a use cannot account for the classing of the wife of the mother’s brother with the wife which occurs among the Pawnees. Nevertheless, the Tewa practice should keep us alive to the possibility that the Sioux nomenclature may depend on some social condition different from that which has been effective in the Banks Islands in spite of the close resemblance between the two.
The case for the former existence of the cross-cousin marriage will be much strengthened if this form of marriage should occur elsewhere in North America. So far as I am aware, the only people among whom it has been recorded are the Haidahs[55] of Queen Charlotte Island.[27] It is a far cry from this outpost of North American culture to Dakota, but it may be noted that it is among the Crees who formerly lived in the intermediate region of Manitoba and Assiniboia that the traces of the cross-cousin marriage are most definite. This mode of distribution of the peoples whose terminology of relationship bears evidence of the cross-cousin marriage suggests that other intermediate links may yet be found. Though the existing evidence is inconclusive, it should be sufficient to stimulate a search for other evidence which may make it possible to decide whether or no the cross-cousin marriage was once a widespread practice in North America.
I can only consider one other kind of marriage here. The discovery of so remarkable a union as that with the daughter’s daughter in Pentecost and the evidence pointing to a still more remarkable marriage between those having the status of grandparent and grandchild in Fiji and Buin have naturally led me to look for similar evidence elsewhere in Melanesia. Though there is nothing conclusive, conditions are to be found here and there which suggest the former existence of such marriages.
When I was in the Solomons I met a native of the Trobriand Islands, who told me that among[56] his people the term tabu was applied both to grandparents and to the father’s sister’s child. I went into the whole subject as fully as was possible with only one witness, but in spite of his obvious intelligence and good faith, I remained doubtful whether the information was correct. The feature in question, however, occurs in the list of Trobriand terms drawn up for Dr. Seligmann[28] by Mr. Bellamy, and with this double warrant it must be accepted. It is a feature which would follow from marriage with the daughter’s daughter, for by this marriage one who was previously a father’s sister’s daughter becomes the wife of a grandfather and thereby attains the status of a grandparent. The feature exists alone, and, further, it is combined with other applications of the term which deprive it of some of its significance; nevertheless, the fact that a peculiar and exceptional feature of a Melanesian system of relationship is such as would follow naturally from a form of marriage which is practised in another part of Melanesia cannot be passed over. Standing alone, it would be wholly insufficient to justify the conclusion that the marriage with the daughter’s daughter was ever prevalent among the Massim, but in place of expressing a dogmatic denial, let us look for other features of Massim sociology which may have been the results of such a marriage.
In Wagawaga[29] there is a peculiar term, warihi,[57] which is used by men for other men of their own generation and social group, but the term is also applied by an old man or woman to one of a younger generation. Again, in Tubetube[30] the term for a husband, taubara, is also a term for an old man, and the term for the wife is also applied to an old woman. These usages may be nothing more than indications of respect for a husband or wife, or of some mechanism which brought those differing widely in age into one social category, but with the clue provided by the Trobriand term of relationship it becomes possible, though even now only possible, that the Wagawaga and Tubetube customs may have arisen out of a social condition in which it was customary to have great disparity of age between husbands and wives, and social relations between old and young following from such disparity in the age of consorts.
In Tubetube there is yet another piece of evidence. Mr. Field[31] has recorded the existence in this island of three named categories of persons, two of which comprise relatives with whom marriage is prohibited, while the third groups together those with whom marriage is allowed. The grandparents and grandchildren are included in one of the two prohibited classes, so that we can be confident that marriage between these relatives does not now occur. The point to which I call your attention is that the class of relative with[58] whom marriage is allowed is called kasoriegogoli. Li is the third person pronominal suffix, and we do not know the meaning of kasorie, but goga is the term used in Wagawaga and Wedau for the grandparents, its place being taken by the usual Melanesian term tubu in Tubetube. The term kasoriegogoli applied to marriageable relatives thus contains as one of its constituent elements a word which is probably the ancient term for grandparent in the island, since it is still used in this sense in the closely allied societies of the mainland.
We have thus a number of independent facts among the Massim, all of which would be the natural outcome of marriage between persons of alternate generations. To no one of them standing alone could much importance be attached, but taken in conjunction, they ought at least to suggest the possibility of such a marriage, a possibility which becomes the more probable when we consider that the Massim show clear evidence of the dual organisation of society with matrilineal descent which is associated with the granddaughter marriage of Pentecost and the Dieri of Australia. It adds to the weight of the evidence that indications of this peculiar form of marriage should be found among a people whose social organisation so closely resembles that in which the marriages between persons of alternate generations elsewhere occur.
I have no time for other examples. I hope to have shown that there are cases in which it is[59] possible to infer with certainty the ancient existence of forms of marriage from the survival of their results in the terminology of relationship. In other cases, differences of culture or the absence of intermediate links make it unjustifiable to infer the ancient existence of the forms of marriage from which features of terminology might be derived. Other cases lie between the two, the confidence with which a form of marriage can be inferred varying with the degree of likeness of culture, the distance in space, and the presence or absence of other features of culture which may be related to the form of marriage in question. Even in the cases, however, where the inference is most doubtful, we have no right dogmatically to deny the origin of the terminology of relationship in social conditions, but should keep each example before an open mind, to guide and stimulate inquiry in a region where ethnologists have till now only scratched the surface covering a rich mine of knowledge.
Thus far in these lectures I have been content to demonstrate the dependence of the terminology of relationship upon forms of marriage. In spending so much time upon this aspect of my subject I fear that I may have been helping to strengthen a very general misconception, for it is frequently supposed that the sole aim of those who think as I do is to explain systems of relationship by their origin in forms of marriage. Marriage is only one of the social institutions which have moulded the terminology of relationship. It is, however, so fundamental a social institution that it is difficult to get far away from it in any argument which deals with social organisation. In now passing to other examples of the dependence of the terminology of relationship upon social conditions, I begin with one in which features of this terminology have come about, not as the result of forms of marriage, but of an attitude towards social regulations connected with marriage. The instance I have now to consider is closely allied to one which Professor Kroeber has used as his pattern of the psychological causation of the terminology of relationship.
Both in Polynesia and Melanesia it is not infrequent for the father-in-law to be classed with the father, the mother-in-law with the mother, the brother-in-law with the brother, and the sister-in-law with the sister. The Oceanic terminology of relationship has two features which enable us to study the exact nature of this process in more detail than is possible with our own system. Oceanic languages often distinguish carefully between different kinds of brother- and sister-in-law, and, if it be found that it is only certain kinds of brother- or sister-in-law who are classed with the brother or sister, we may thereby obtain a clue to the nature of the process whereby the classing has come about. Secondly, Oceanic terminology usually distinguishes relationships between men or between women from those between persons of different sex, and there is a feature of the terminology employed when brothers- or sisters-in-law are classed with brothers or sisters in Oceania which throws much light on the process whereby this common nomenclature has come into use.
The first point to be noticed in the Oceanic nomenclature of relationship is that not all brothers- and sisters-in-law are classed with brothers and sisters, but only those of different sex. Thus, in Merlav, in the Banks Islands, it is only the wife’s sister and a man’s brother’s wife who are classed with the sister, and the husband’s brother and a woman’s sister’s husband who are classed with the brother, while there are special[62] terms for other categories of relative whom we include under the designations brother- and sister-in-law. Similar conditions are general throughout Melanesia. If, as Professor Kroeber has supposed, the classing of the brother-in-law with the brother be due to the psychological similarity of the relationships, we ought to be able to discover why this similarity should be greater between persons of different sex than between persons of the same sex.
If now we study our case from the Banks Islands more closely and compare the social conditions in Merlav with those of other islands of the group, we find definite evidence, which it will not now be possible to consider in detail, showing that sexual relations were formerly allowed between a man and his wife’s sisters and his brothers’ wives, and that there is a definite association between the classing of these relatives with the sister and the cessation of such sexual relations. If such people as the Melanesians wish to emphasise in the strongest manner possible the impropriety of sexual relations between a man and the sisters of his wife, there is no way in which they can do it more effectually than by classing these relatives with a sister. To a Melanesian, as to other people of rude culture, the use of a term otherwise applied to a sister carries with it such deeply-seated associations as to put sexual relations absolutely out of the question. There is a large body of evidence from southern Melanesia which suggests strongly,[63] if not conclusively, that the common nomenclature I am now considering has arisen out of the social need for emphasising the impropriety of relations which were once habitual among the people.
The second feature of Melanesian terminology which I have mentioned helps us to understand how the common nomenclature has come about. In most of the Melanesian cases in which a wife’s sister is denoted by a term otherwise used for a sister, or a husband’s brother by a term otherwise used for a brother, the term employed is one which is normally used between those of the same sex. Thus, a man does not apply to his wife’s sister the term which he himself uses for his sister, but one which would be used by a woman of her sister. In other words, a man uses for his wife’s sister the term which is used for this relative by his wife. This shows us how the common nomenclature may have come into use. It suggests that as sexual relations with the wife’s sister became no longer orthodox, a man came to apply to this woman the word with which he was already familiar as a term for this relative from the mouth of his wife. The special feature of Melanesian nomenclature according to which terms of relationship vary with the sex of the speaker here helps us to understand how the common nomenclature arose. The process is one in which psychological factors evidently play an important part, but these psychological factors are themselves the outcome of a social process, viz., the change from a con[64]dition of sexual communism to one in which sexual relations are restricted to the partners of a marriage. Such psychological factors as come into action are only intermediate links in a chain of causation in which the two ends are definitely social processes or events, or, perhaps more correctly, psychological concomitants of intermediate links which are themselves social events. We should be shutting our eyes to obvious features of these Melanesian customs if we refused to recognise that the terminology of relationship here “reflects” sociology.
This leads me to question for a moment whether it may not be the same with that custom of our own society which Professor Kroeber has taken as his example of the psychological causation of the terminology of relationship. Is it as certain as Professor Kroeber supposes that the classing of the brother-in-law with the brother, or of the sister-in-law with the sister, among ourselves does not reflect sociology? We know that there are social factors at work among us which give to these relationships, and especially to that of wife’s sister, a very great importance. If instead of stating dogmatically that this feature of our own terminology is due to the psychological similarity of the relationships, Professor Kroeber’s mind had been open even to the possibility of the working of social causes, I think he might have been led to inquire more closely into the distribution and exact character of the practice in question. He might have[65] been led to see that we have here a problem for exact inquiry. Such a custom among ourselves must certainly own a cause different from that to which I have ascribed the Melanesian practice, but is it certain that there is no social practice among ourselves which would lead to the classing of the wife’s sister with the sister and the sister’s husband of a woman with the brother? I will only point to the practice of marrying the deceased wife’s sister, and content myself with the remark that I should be surprised if there were any general tendency to class these relatives together by a people among whom this form of marriage is the orthodox and habitual custom.
Till now I have been dealing with relatively small variations of the classificatory system. The varieties I have so far considered are such as would arise out of a common system if in one place there came into vogue the cross-cousin marriage, in another place marriage with the wife of the mother’s brother, in another that with the granddaughter of the brother or with the wife of the grandfather, and in yet other places combinations of these forms of marriage. I have now to consider whether it is possible to refer the main varieties of the classificatory system to social conditions; as an example with which to begin, I choose one which is so definite that it attracted the attention of Morgan, viz., the variety of the classificatory system which Morgan called “Malayan”. It is now generally recognised that this term was badly chosen. The[66] variety so called was known to Morgan through the terminology of the Hawaiian Islands, and as the system of these islands was not only the first to be recorded, but is also that of which even now we have the most complete record, I propose to use it as the pattern and to speak of the Hawaiian system where Morgan spoke of the Malayan. If now we compare the Hawaiian system with the forms of the classificatory system found in other parts of Oceania, in Australia, India, Africa or America, we find that it is characterised by its extreme simplicity and by the fewness of its terms. Distinctions such as those between the father’s brother and the mother’s brother, between the father’s sister and the mother’s sister, and between the children of brothers or of sisters and the children of brother and sister, distinctions which are so generally present in the more usual forms of the classificatory system, are here completely absent. The problem before us is to discover whether the absence of these distinctions can be referred to any social factors. If not, we may be driven to suppose that there is something in the structure of the Polynesian mind which leads the Hawaiian and the Maori to see similarities where most other peoples of rude culture see differences.
The first point to be noted is that in Oceania the distinction between the Hawaiian and the more usual forms of the classificatory system does not correspond with the distinction between the Polynesian and Melanesian peoples. Systems are[67] to be found in Melanesia, as in the western Solomons, which closely resemble that of Hawaii, while there are Polynesian systems, such as those of Tonga and Tikopia, which are so like those of Melanesia that, if they had occurred there, they would have attracted no special attention. The difference between the two kinds of system is not to be correlated with any difference of race.
Next, if we take Melanesian and Polynesian systems as a whole, we find that they do not fall into two sharply marked-off groups, but that there are any number of intermediate gradations between the two. It would be possible to arrange the classificatory systems of Oceania in a series in which it would not be possible to draw the line at any point between the different varieties of system which the two ends of the series seem to represent. The question arises whether it is possible to find any other series of transitions in Oceania which runs parallel with the series connecting the two varieties of system of relationship. There is no doubt but that this question can be answered in the affirmative.
Speaking broadly, there are two main varieties of social organisation in Oceania, with an infinite number of intermediate conditions. In one variety marriage is regulated by some kind of clan-exogamy, including under the term “clan” the moieties of a dual organisation; in the other variety marriage is regulated by kinship or genealogical relationship. We know of no part of Melanesia[68] where marriage is regulated solely by clan-exogamy, but it is possible to arrange Melanesian and Polynesian societies in a series according to the different degrees in which the principles of genealogical relationship is the determining factor in the regulation of marriage. At one end of the series we should have places like the Banks Islands, the northern New Hebrides and the Santa Cruz Islands, where the clan-organisation is so obviously important that it was the only mechanism for the regulation of marriage which was recognised even by so skilful an observer as Dr. Codrington. At the other end of the series we have places such as the Hawaiian Islands and Eddystone Island in the western Solomons, where only the barest traces of a clan-organisation are to be found and where marriage is regulated solely by genealogical relationship. Between the two are numerous intermediate cases, and the series so formed runs so closely parallel to that representing the transitions between different forms of the classificatory system that it seems out of the question but that there should be a relation between the two. Of all the places where I have myself worked, the two in which I failed to find any trace of the regulation of marriage by means of a clan-organisation were the Hawaiian Islands and Eddystone Island, and the systems of both places were lacking in just those distinctions the absence of which characterised the Malayan system of Morgan. Only in one point did the Eddystone system differ from[69] the Hawaiian. Though the mother’s brother was classed in nomenclature with the father, there was a term for the sister’s son, but it was so little used that in a superficial survey it would have escaped notice. Its use was so exceptional that many of the islanders were doubtful about its proper meaning. In other parts of the Solomons where the clan-organisation persists, but where the regulation of marriage by genealogical relationship is equally, if not more, important, the systems of relationship show intermediate characters. Thus, in the island of Florida the mother’s brother was distinguished from the father and there was a term by means of which to distinguish cross-cousins from other kinds of cousin, but the father’s sister was classed with the mother, and it was habitual to ignore the proper term for cross-cousins and to class them in nomenclature with brothers and sisters and with cousins of other kinds, as in the Hawaiian system. One influential man even applied the term for father to the mother’s brother; it was evident that a change is even now in progress which would have to go very little farther to make the Florida system indistinguishable in structure from that of Hawaii.
Among the western Papuo-Melanesians of New Guinea, again, the systems of relationship come very near to the Hawaiian type, and with this character there is associated a very high degree of importance of the regulation of marriage by genealogical relationship and a vagueness of clan-[70]organisation. We have here so close a parallelism between two series of social phenomena as to supply as good an example as could be wished of the application of the method of concomitant variations in the domain of sociology.
The nature of these changes and their relation to the general cultures of the peoples who use the different forms of terminology show that the transitions are to be associated with a progressive change which has taken place in Oceania. In this part of the world the classificatory system has been the seat of a process of simplification starting from the almost incredible complexity of Pentecost and reaching the simplicity of such systems as those of Eddystone or Mekeo. This process has gone hand in hand with one in which the regulation of marriage by some kind of clan-exogamy has gradually been replaced by a mechanism based on relationship as traced by means of pedigrees.
If this conclusion be accepted, it will follow that the more widely distributed varieties of the classificatory system of relationship are associated with a social structure which has the exogamous social group as its essential unit. This position has only to be stated for it to become apparent how all the main features of the classificatory system are such as would follow directly from such a social structure. Wherever the classificatory system is found in association with a system of exogamous social groups, the terms of relationship do not apply merely to relatives with whom it is possible[71] to trace genealogical relationship, but to all the members of a clan of a given generation, even if no such relationship with them can be traced. Thus, a man will not only apply the term “father” to all the brothers of his father, to all the sons’ sons of his father’s father, and to all the sons’ sons’ sons of his father’s father’s father, to all the husbands of his mother’s sisters and of his mother’s mother’s granddaughters, etc., but he will also apply the term to all the members of his father’s clan of the same generation as his father and to all the husbands of the women of the mother’s clan of the same generation as the mother, even when it is quite impossible to show any genealogical relationship with them. All these and the other main features of the classificatory system become at once natural and intelligible if this system had its origin in a social structure in which exogamous social groups, such as the clan or moiety, were even more completely and essentially the social units than we know them to be to-day among the peoples whose social systems have been carefully studied. If you are dissatisfied with the word “classificatory” as a term for the system of relationship which is found in America, Africa, India, Australia and Oceania, you would be perfectly safe in calling it the “clan” system, and in inferring the ancient presence of a social structure based on the exogamous clan even if this structure were no longer present.
Not only is the general character of the classi[72]ficatory system exactly such as would be the consequence of its origin in a social structure founded on the exogamous social group, but many details of these systems point in the same direction. Thus, the rigorous distinctions between father’s brother and mother’s brother, and between father’s sister and mother’s sister, which are characteristic of the usual forms of the classificatory system, are the obvious consequence of the principle of exogamy. If this principle be in action, these relatives must always belong to different social groups, so that it would be natural to distinguish them in nomenclature.
Further, there are certain features of the classificatory system which suggest its origin in a special form of exogamous social grouping, viz., that usually known as the dual system in which there are only two social groups or moieties. It is an almost universal feature of the classificatory system that the children of brothers are classed with the children of sisters. A man applies the same term to his mother’s sister’s children which he uses for his father’s brother’s children, and the use of this term, being the same as that used for a brother or sister, carries with it the most rigorous prohibition of marriage. Such a condition would not follow necessarily from a social state in which there were more than two social groups. If the society were patrilineal, the children of two brothers would necessarily belong to the same social group, so that the principle of exogamy would prevent marriage[73] between them, but if the women of the group had married into different clans, there is no reason arising out of the principle of exogamy which should prevent marriage between their children or lead to the use of a term common to them and the children of brothers. Similarly, if the society were matrilineal, the children of two sisters would necessarily belong to the same social group, but this would not be the case with the children of brothers who might marry into different social groups.
If, however, there be only two social groups, the case is very different. It would make no difference whether descent were patrilineal or matrilineal. In each case the children of two brothers or of two sisters must belong to the same moiety, while the children of brother and sister must belong to different moieties. The children of two brothers would be just as ineligible as consorts as the children of two sisters. Similarly, it would be a natural consequence of the dual organisation that the mother’s brother’s children should be classed with the father’s sister’s children, but this would not be necessary if there were more than two social groups.
I should have liked, if there were time, to deal with other features of the classificatory system, but must be content with these examples. I hope to have succeeded in showing that the social causation of the terminology of relationship goes far beyond the mere dependence of features of the system on special forms of marriage, and that the character of[74] the classificatory system as a whole has been determined by its origin in a specific form of social organisation. I propose now to leave the classificatory system for a moment and inquire whether another system of denoting and classifying relationships may not similarly be shown to be determined by social conditions. The system I shall consider is our own. Let us examine this system in its relation to the form of social organisation prevalent among ourselves.
Just as among most peoples of rude culture the clan or other exogamous group is the essential unit of social organisation, so among ourselves this social unit is the family, using this term for the group consisting of a man, his wife, and their children. If we examine our terms of relationship, we find that those applied to individual persons and those used in a narrow and well-defined sense are just those in which the family is intimately concerned. The terms father, mother, husband and wife, brother and sister, are limited to members of the family of the speaker, and the terms father-, mother-, brother-, and sister-in-law to the members of the family of the wife or husband in the same narrowly restricted sense. Similarly, the terms grandfather and grandmother are limited to the parents of the father and mother, while the terms grandson and granddaughter are only used of the families of the children in the narrow sense. The terms uncle and aunt, nephew and niece, are used in a less restricted sense, but even these[75] terms are only used of persons who stand in a close relation to the family of the speaker. We have only one term used with anything approaching the wide connotation of classificatory terms of relationship, and this term is used for a group of relatives who have as their chief feature in common that they are altogether outside the proper circle of the family and have no social obligations or privileges. They are as eligible for marriage as any other members of the community, and only in the very special cases I considered in the first lecture are they brought into any kind of legal relation. The dependence of our own use of terms of relationship on the social institution of the family seems to me so obvious that I find it difficult to understand how anyone who has considered these terms can put forward the view that the terminology of relationship is not socially conditioned. It seems to me that we have only to have the proposition stated that the classificatory system and our own are the outcome of the social institutions of the clan and family respectively for the social causation of such terminology to become conspicuous. I find it difficult to understand why it has not long before this been universally recognised. I do not think we can have a better example of the confusion and prejudice which have been allowed to envelop the subject through the unfortunate introduction of the problem of the primitive promiscuity or monogamy of mankind. It is not necessary to have an expert knowledge of[76] the classificatory system. It is only necessary to consider the terms we have used almost from our cradles in relation to their social setting to see how the terminology of relationship has been determined by that setting.
This brief study of our own terms of relationship leads me to speak about the name by which our system is generally known. Morgan called it the “descriptive system,” and this term has been generally adopted. I believe, however, that it is wholly inappropriate. Those terms which apply to one person and to one person only may be called descriptive if you please, though even here the use does not seem very happy. When we pass beyond these, however, our terms are no whit more descriptive than those of the classificatory system. We speak of a grandfather, not of a father’s father or a mother’s father, only distinguishing grandfathers in this manner when it is necessary to supplement our customary terminology by more exact description. Similarly, we speak of a brother-in-law, and only in exceptional circumstances do we use forms of language which indicate whether reference is being made to the brother of the husband or wife or to the husband of a sister. Such occasional usages do not make our system descriptive, and if they be held to do so, the classificatory system is just as descriptive as our own. All those peoples who use the classificatory system are capable of such exact description of relationship as I have mentioned. Indeed, classificatory systems[77] are often more descriptive than our own. In some forms of this system true descriptive terms are found in habitual use. Thus, in the coastal systems of Fiji the mother’s brother is often called ngandina (ngane, sister of a man, and tina, mother), this term being used in place of the vungo already mentioned. Similar uses of descriptive terms occur in other parts of Melanesia. Thus, in Santa Cruz the father’s sister is called inwerderde (inwe, sister, and derde, father). This relative is one for whom Melanesian systems of relationship not infrequently possess no special designation, and the use of a descriptive term suggests a recent process which has come into action in order to denote a relative who had previously lacked any special designation.
If “descriptive” is thus an inappropriate name for our own system, it will be necessary to find another, and I should like boldly to recognise the direct dependence of its characters on the institution of the family and to speak of it as the “family system.”
While I thus reject the term “descriptive” as a proper name for the terminology of relationship with which we are especially familiar, it does not follow that there may not be systems of denoting relationship which properly deserve this title. In Samoa a mode of denoting relatives is often used in which the great majority of the terms are descriptive. Thus, the only term which I could obtain for the father’s brother’s son was atalii o le uso o le tama, which is literally “son of the brother[78] of the father,” and there is some reason to suppose that this descriptive usage has come into vogue owing to the total inadequacy of the ancient Samoan system to express relationships in which the peoples are now interested.
The wide use of such descriptive terms is also found in many systems of Europe, as in the Celtic languages, in those of Scandinavia, in Lithuanian and Esthonian.[32] A similar mode of denoting relationships is found in Semitic languages and among the Shilluks and Dinkas of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and since it is from these peoples that I have gained my own experience of descriptive terminology, I propose to take them as my examples.
In the Arabic system of relationship used in Egypt many of the terms are descriptive; thus, the father’s brother being called ’amm, the father’s brother’s wife is mirat ’ammi, the father’s brother’s son ibn ’ammi, and the father’s brother’s daughter bint ’ammi, and there is a similar usage for the consorts and children of the father’s sister and of the brother and sister of the mother.
Similarly, many Shilluk terms suggest a descriptive character, the father’s brother being wa, the wife of the father’s brother is chiwa, the father’s brother’s son is uwa, and his daughter is nyuwa. The father’s sister being waja, her son and daughter are uwaja and nyuwaja respectively. Similar descriptive terms are used by the Dinkas.[79] The father’s brother being walen, the father’s brother’s son is manwalen and his daughter yanwalen; the mother’s brother being ninar, the mother’s brother’s son is manninar and his daughter yanninar.
According to the main thesis of these lectures, these descriptive usages should own some definite social cause. The descriptive terminology seems to be particularly definite in the case of cousins, and it might be suggested that they are dependent, at any rate in part and in so far as Egypt is concerned, on the prevalence of marriage with a cousin. Marriages with the daughter of a father’s brother or of a mother’s brother are especially orthodox and popular in Egypt, and different degrees of preference for marriage with different classes of cousin would produce just such a social need as would have led to the definite distinction of the different kinds of cousin from one another by means of descriptive terms.
It is more probable, however, that the use of descriptive terms in the languages of the Semites and of the Shilluks and Dinkas has been the outcome of a definite form of social organisation, viz., that in which the social unit is neither the family in the narrow sense, nor the clan, but that body of persons of common descent living in one house or in some other kind of close association which we call the patriarchal or extended family, the Grossfamilie of the Germans. It is a feature of the Semitic and Nilotic systems, not only to distinguish[80] the four chief categories of cousin, but also the four chief kinds of uncle or aunt, viz., the father’s brother, the father’s sister, the mother’s brother and the mother’s sister, all of whom are habitually classed together in our system, while some of them are classed with the father or mother in the classificatory system. The Semitic and Nilotic terminology is such as would follow from a form of social organisation in which the more intimate relationships of the family in the narrow sense are definitely recognised, but yet certain uncles, aunts, and cousins are of so much importance as to make it necessary for social purposes that they shall be denoted exactly. The brothers of the father and the unmarried sisters of the father would be of the same social group as the father, while the brothers and unmarried sisters of the mother would be of a different social group, which would account for their distinctive nomenclature, while within the social group it would be necessary to distinguish the father from his brothers. It would be too cumbrous to call this variety of system after the extended family, and I suggest that it should be called the “kindred” system.
Analogy with other parts of the world suggests that all those of the same generation in the social group formed by the extended family may once have been classed together under one term, and that, as later there arose social motives requiring the distinction of different relatives so classed together, descriptive terms came into use to make[81] the necessary distinctions. You must please regard this only as a suggestion. We need far more detailed evidence concerning the social status of different relatives among the peoples who use these descriptive terms. Such knowledge as we possess seems to point to the dependence of the Semitic and Sudanese terminology upon the social institution of the extended family, just as our own system depends on the social institution of the family in the narrow sense and the classificatory system upon the clan.
If this descriptive mode of nomenclature be thus the outcome of a social organisation of which the essential element is the extended family, I need hardly point out how natural it is that we should find this kind of nomenclature so widely in Europe. The presence of this descriptive terminology in Celtic and Scandinavian languages, in Lithuanian and Esthonian, would be examples of the persistence of a form of nomenclature which had its origin in the kindred of the extended family. On this view we must believe that, in other languages of Europe, this mode of nomenclature has gradually been replaced by one dependent on the social institution of the family in the narrow sense.
At this point I should like to sum up briefly the position to which our argument has taken us. I have first shown the dependence of a number of special features of the classificatory system of relationship upon special forms of marriage. Then I have shown that certain broad varieties of the[82] classificatory system are to be referred to different forms of social organisation and to the different degrees in which the regulation of marriage by means of clan-exogamy has been replaced by a mechanism dependent upon kinship or genealogical relationship. From that I was led to refer the general features of the classificatory system to the dependence of this system upon the social unit of the clan as opposed to the family which I believe to be the basis of our own terminology of relationship. I then pointed to several features of the classificatory system which suggest that it arose in that special variety of the clan-organisation in which a community consists of two exogamous moieties, forming the social structure usually known as the dual organisation. I considered more fully the dependence of our own mode of denoting relatives upon the social institution of the family, and then a study of the descriptive terminology of relationship has led me to suggest that certain modes of denoting relationship in Egypt, the Sudan and many European countries may be examples of a third main variety of system of relationship which has arisen out of the patriarchal or extended family. We should thus have three main varieties of system of relationship in place of the two which have hitherto been recognised, having their origins respectively in the clan, in the family in the narrow sense, and in the extended or patriarchal family. These three varieties may be regarded as genera within each of which are species and varieties depending upon[83] special social conditions which have arisen within each kind of social grouping, either as the result of changes within each form of social organisation or of transitions from one form to another. We know of a far larger number of such varieties within the classificatory system than within those due to the two forms of the family, and this is probably due in some measure to the fact that the classificatory system is still by far the most widely distributed form over the earth’s surface. Still more important, however, is the fact that among the peoples who use the classificatory system there is an infinitely greater variety of social institution, and especially of forms of marriage, than exist among civilised peoples whose main social unit, the family, is not one which is capable of any extended range of variation. The result of the complete survey has been to justify my use of the classificatory system as the means whereby to demonstrate the dependence of the terminology of relationship upon social conditions. It is the great variability of this mode of denoting relatives which makes it so valuable an instrument for the study of the laws which have governed the history of that department of language by which mankind has denoted those who stand in social relations to himself.
You may have been wondering whether I am going to say anything about the merits of the controversy which has till now given to systems of relationship their chief interest among students of[84] sociology. I have so far left on one side the subjects which have been the main ground of controversy ever since the time of Morgan. You will have gathered that I regard it as a grave misfortune for the science of sociology that the topics of promiscuity and group-marriage should have been thrust by Morgan into the prominent place which they have ever since occupied in the theoretical study of relationship. Even now I should have liked to leave them on one side on the ground that the evidence is as yet insufficient to make them profitable subjects for such exact inquiry as I believe to be the proper business of sociology. Their very prominence, however, makes it impossible to leave them wholly unconsidered, but I propose to deal with them very briefly.
I begin with the question whether the classificatory system of relationship provides us with any evidence that mankind once possessed a form of social organisation, or rather such an absence of social organisation, as would accompany a condition of general promiscuity in which, if one can speak of marriage at all, marriage was practised between all and any members of the community, including brothers and sisters. I can deal with this subject very briefly because I hope to have succeeded elsewhere in knocking away the support on which the whole of Morgan’s own construction rested.
Morgan deduced his stage of promiscuity from the Hawaiian system, which he supposed to be the most primitive form of classificatory nomenclature.[85] In an article published in 1907 I showed[33] that it rather represents a late stage in the history of the more ordinary forms of the classificatory system. My conclusion at that time was based on the scanty evidence derived from the relatively few Oceanic systems which had then been recorded, but my work since that article was written has shown the absolute correctness of my earlier opinion, which I can now support by a far larger body of evidence than was available in 1907. It remains possible, however, that the Hawaiian system may have had its source in promiscuity, even though this condition be late rather than primitive, but it would be going beyond the scope of these lectures to deal fully with this subject here. I cannot forbear, however, from mentioning that Hawaiian promiscuity, in so far as it existed, was not the condition of the whole people, but only of the chiefs who alone were allowed to contract brother and sister marriages, while I have evidence that the avoidance of brother and sister in Melanesia, which has so often been regarded as a survival of man’s early promiscuity, is capable of a very different explanation.[34] Our available knowledge, whether derived from features of the classificatory system or from other social facts, does not provide one shred of evidence in favour of such a condition as was put forward by Morgan as the earliest stage of human society, nor is there any evidence that such promis[86]cuity has ever been the ruling principle of a people at any later stage of the history of mankind.
The subject of group-marriage is one about which I do not find it possible to speak so dogmatically. It would take me more than another lecture to deal adequately with the Melanesian evidence alone, and I must content myself with two remarks. Firstly, I think it desirable to throw aside the term group-marriage as only confusing the issue, and to speak rather of a state of organised sexual communism, in which sexual relations are recognised as orthodox between the men of one social group and the women of another. Secondly, the classificatory system has several features which would follow naturally from such a condition of sexual communism. I have evidence from Melanesia which places beyond question the former presence of such a condition, with features of culture which become readily explicable if they be the survivals of such a state of sexual communism as is suggested by the terminology of the classificatory system. This evidence comes from only one part of the world, but it is enough to convince me that we have no right to dismiss from our minds a state of organised sexual communism as a feature of the social development of mankind. The wide distribution of the classificatory system would suggest that this communism has been very general, but it need not have been universal, and even if the widespread existence of organised sexual communism be established, it would not[87] follow that it represents the earliest stage in the evolution of human society. There are certain features even of the classificatory system itself which suggest that, if this system be founded in sexual communism, this communism was not primitive, but grew out of a condition in which only such ties of kinship were recognised as would result from the social institution of the family.
I must be content with this brief reference to the subject. The object of these lectures is to demonstrate the dependence of the terminology of relationship upon social conditions, and the dependence of the classificatory system upon a condition of sexual communism is not now capable of demonstration. The classificatory mode of denoting relationship should, however, act as a suggestion and stimulus, and as a preventative of dogmatic statement in a part of our subject which, in spite of its entrancing interest, still lies only at the edge of our slowly spreading circle of exact knowledge.
In conclusion, I should like to point out briefly some of the lessons of more general interest which may be learnt from the facts I have brought before you in these lectures. I hope that one result has been to convince you of the danger lying in the use of the reductio ad absurdum argument when dealing with cultures widely different from our own. In the literature of the subject one often meets the adjectives “absurd” and “impossible” applied in some cases to social conditions in which the actual existence of the absurdities or impossi[88]bilities can be demonstrated. I may take as an example the argument of Mr. N. W. Thomas, which I have already mentioned, in which the classing of the maternal grandfather with the elder brother by the Dieri is regarded as reducing to an absurdity the contention that classificatory terms express ties of kinship. If Mr. Thomas had had a more lively faith in the social meaning of terms of relationship, he might have been led to notice that the Dieri marry the granddaughter of a brother, a fact he appears, in common with many other readers of Howitt, to have missed; one result of this marriage is to bring about just such a relationship as Howitt records without a man being his own great-uncle, as is supposed to be necessary by Mr. Thomas.
Still another example may be taken from Professor Kroeber. He states that the classing together of the grandfather and the father-in-law which is found in the Dakota system, when worked out to its implications, would lead to the absurd conclusion that marriage with the mother was once customary among the Sioux. Here again, if Professor Kroeber had been less imbued with his belief in a purely linguistic and psychological chain of causation, and had been ready to entertain the idea that there might be a social meaning, he must have been led to see that the features of nomenclature in question would follow from other forms of marriage, and two of these, whatever their apparent improbability in America, cannot well be[89] called absurd, since they are known to occur in other parts of the world. Following Riggs, Professor Kroeber does not specify which kinds of grandfather and father-in-law are classed together in Dakotan nomenclature, but in the full list given by Morgan, it is evident that one term is used for the fathers of both father and mother and for the fathers of both husband and wife. The classing of the father’s father with the wife’s father would be a natural result of marriage with the father’s sister, while the common nomenclature for father’s father and husband’s father would result from marriage with the brother’s daughter. It is not without significance that the features of nomenclature which would be the result of one or other, or of both these marriages, occur in a system which also bears evidence of the cross-cousin marriage, for these three forms of marriage occur in conjunction in one part of Melanesia, viz., the Torres Islands.
The foregoing instance, together with many others scattered through these lectures, will have pointed clearly to another lesson. In the present state of our knowledge a working scheme or hypothesis has largely to be judged by its utility. A way of regarding social phenomena which obstructs inquiry and leads people to overlook facts has its disadvantages, to say the least, while a scheme or hypothesis which leads people to worry out and discover things which do not lie on the surface will establish a strong claim on our consideration, even if it should ultimately turn out[90] to be only the partial truth. I will give only one instance to illustrate how a belief in the dependence of the terminology of relationship on forms of marriage might act as a stimulus to research.
In a system from the United Provinces recorded by Mr. E. A. H. Blunt in the Report of the last Indian Census, one term, bahu, is used for the son’s wife, for the wife, and for the mother.[35] Mr. Blunt puts on one side without hesitation the possibility that such common nomenclature can have been the result of any form of marriage, and ascribes it to the custom whereby a man and his wife live with the husband’s parents, in consequence of which the son’s wife, who is called bahu by her husband, is also called bahu by everyone else in the house. The causation of the common nomenclature which is thus put forward is a possible, perhaps even a probable, explanation. In such a case we should have a social chain of causation in which the son’s wife is called bahu because she is one of a social group bound together by the ties of a common habitation. It can do no harm, however, to bear in mind as an alternative the possibility that the terminology may have arisen out of a form of marriage. It is evident that the use of a common term for the wife and the son’s wife would follow from a form of polyandry in which a man and his son have a wife in common. A further result of this form of marriage would be that the wife of the son, being also the wife of[91] his father, would have the status of a mother.[36] We have no evidence for the presence of such a marriage in India, but our knowledge of the sociology of the more backward peoples of India is not so complete that we can afford to neglect any clue. The possibility suggested by the mode of using the term bahu should lead us to look for other evidence of such a form of polyandry among the ruder elements of the population of India, of whose social structure our present knowledge is so fragmentary.
Another important result of our study of the terminology of relationship is that it helps us to understand the proper place of psychological explanation in sociology. These lectures have largely been devoted to the demonstration of the failure to explain features of the terminology of relationship on psychological grounds. If this demonstration has been successful, it is not because the terminology of relationship is anything peculiar, differing from other bodies of sociological facts; it is because in relationship we have to do with definite and clean-cut facts. The terminology of relationship is only a specially favourable example by means of which to show the value of an attitude towards, and mode of treatment of, social facts which hold good, though less conspicuously, throughout the whole field of sociology.
In social, as in all other kinds of human activity, psychological factors must have an essential part. I have myself in these lectures pointed to psychological considerations as elements in the problems with which the sociologist has to deal. These psychological elements are, however, only concomitants of social processes with which it is possible to deal apart from their psychological aspect. It has been the task of these lectures to refer the social facts of relationship to antecedent social conditions, and I believe that this is the proper method of sociology. Even at the present time, however, it is possible to support sociological arguments by means of considerations provided by psychological motives, and the assistance thus rendered to sociology will become far greater as the science of social psychology advances.
This is, however, a process very different from the interpolation of psychological facts as links in the chain of causation connecting social antecedents with social consequences. It is in no spirit of hostility to social psychology, but in the hope that it may help us to understand its proper place in the study of social institutions that I venture to put forward the method followed in these lectures as one proper to the science of sociology.[37]
It may be that there will be those who will accept my main position, but will urge that these lectures have been devoted to the criticism of an extreme[93] position, the position taken up by Professor Kroeber. They may say that they have never believed in the purely psychological causation of the terminology of relationship. In reply to such an attitude I can only express my conviction that the paper of Professor Kroeber is only the explicit and clear statement of an attitude which is implicit in the work of nearly all, if not all, the opponents of Morgan since McLennan. Whether they have themselves recognised it or not, I believe that it has been this underlying attitude towards sociological problems which has prevented them from seeing what is good in Morgan’s work, from sifting out the chaff from the wheat of his argument, and from recognising how great is the importance to the science of sociology of the body of facts which Morgan was the first to collect and study. I feel that we owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Kroeber for having brought the matter into the open and for having presented, as a clear issue, a fundamental problem of the methods of sociology.
Lastly, I should like to point out how rigorous and exact has been the process of the determination of the nomenclature of relationship by social conditions which has been demonstrated in these lectures. We have here a case in which the principle of determinism applies with a rigour and definiteness equal to that of any of the exact sciences. According to my scheme, not only has the general character of systems of relationship been strictly determined by social conditions, but[94] every detail of these systems has also been so determined. Even so small and apparently insignificant a feature as the classing of the sister-in-law with the sister has been found to lead back to a definite social condition arising out of the regulation of marriage and of sexual relations. If sociology is to become a science fit to rank with other sciences, it must, like them, be rigorously deterministic. Social phenomena do not come into being of themselves. The proposition that we class two relatives together in nomenclature because the relationships are similar is, if it stand alone, nothing more than a form of words. It is incumbent on those who believe in the importance of the psychological similarity of social phenomena to show in what the supposed similarity consists and how it has come about—in other words, how it has been determined. It has been my chief object in these lectures to show that, in so far as such similarities exist in the case of relationship, they have been determined by social conditions. Only by attention to this aim throughout the whole field of social phenomena can we hope to rid sociology of the reproach, so often heard, that it is not a science; only thus can we refute those who go still further and claim that it can never be a science.
“Absurd” in sociology, 32, 87.
America, North, 10, 18, 49, 55.
Anaiteum, 22.
Aniwa, 22.
Assiniboin, 51.
Australia, 11, 32.
Avoidance, 85.
Banks Is., 12, 16, 28, 42, 53, 61, 68.
Bellamy, R. L., 56.
Blunt, E. A. H., 90.
Bougainville I., 40.
Brother-in-law, functions of, 12.
Buin, 40.
Canarese, 47.
Celtic terms, 78, 81.
Cherokees, 53.
Chiefs, 85.
Choctas, 53.
Christianity, 30.
Clan, 67, 71, 74.
Classes, matrimonial, 32, 39.
Classificatory relationship, 2, 4, 19, 83.
Codrington, Dr., 28, 30, 68.
Communism in property, 12;
sexual, 62, 86.
Concomitant variations, method of, 70.
“Creek” Indians, 53.
Crees, 50, 55.
Cross-cousins, 20, 28;
see marriage.
“Crow” Indians, 53.
Dakotas, 51, 88.
Descent, 34, 39, 73.
Descriptive system, 76;
terms, 77, 81.
Determinism, 7, 93.
Dieri, 32, 37, 88.
Dinkas, 78.
Dorsey, J. O., 51.
Dual organisation, 32, 34, 58, 67, 72, 82.
Eddystone I., 68, 70.
Egidi, Father, 16.
Egypt, 78, 79.
English terms of relationship, 13, 74.
Eromanga, 22.
Esthonia, 78, 81.
Exchange of brothers and sisters, 43.
Exogamy, 68, 72.
Family, 74, 77, 87;
extended, 79, 81.
Father’s sister, functions of, 16.
Field, Rev. J. T., 57.
Fiji, 22, 31, 39, 77.
Fison, Rev. L., 26.
Florida, 45, 69.
Freire-Marreco, Miss B., 53, 55.
Functions of relatives, 6, 11, 12, 15.
Gait, E. A., 47.
Genealogical method, 23, 31.
Genealogical relationship, 68, 70.
Gillen, F. J., 11.
Gonds, 26.
Group-marriage, 6, 86.
Guadalcanar, 23, 45.
Haidahs, 54.
Hawaiian Is., 15, 66, 68;
system, 66, 84.
Head, sanctity of, 12.
Hopi Indians, 55.
Howitt, A. W., 11, 88.
India, 18, 26, 47, 90.
Kindred, 80.
Kinship, 1, 67, 82.
Kohler, J., 8, 19.
Kroeber, A. L., 9, 25, 52, 60, 62, 64, 88, 93.
Kuni, 16.
[96]Lithuania, 78, 81.
McLennan, J. F., 6, 17.
Malayalam, 47.
“Malayan” system, 65, 68.
Maori, 66.
Marriage, 1, 60;
between brother and sister, 85;
by exchange, 43;
group-, 6, 86;
regulation of, 67;
with brother’s daughter, 89;
with brother’s granddaughter, 34, 37, 56;
with cousin, 79;
with cross-cousin, 20, 39, 43, 47, 49, 54;
with deceased wife’s sister, 65;
with father’s sister, 89;
with wife of father’s father, 40, 57;
with wife of mother’s brother, 30, 33, 52.
Massim, 56.
Mbau, 22.
Mekeo, 16, 70.
Melanesia, 14, 19, 28, 45, 52, 61, 66, 77, 85, 89.
Morgan, Lewis, 4, 10, 18, 26, 47, 50, 65, 84, 93.
Mother’s brother, functions of, 15.
New Hebrides, 22, 31, 68.
New Guinea, 16, 56, 69.
Niue, 15.
Pantutun, John, 33, 37.
Pawnees, 53, 54.
Pedigrees, 31, 70.
Pentecost I., 31.
Polyandry, 7, 90.
Polynesia, 15, 61, 66.
Prediction, 26.
Promiscuity, 6, 75, 84.
Psychology, 10, 17, 24, 29, 38, 52, 62, 63, 66, 91, 94.
Pueblo Indians, 53.
“Red Knives” Indians, 49.
Riggs, Rev. S. R., 51, 89.
Roth, W., 11.
Salutations, 7, 10.
Samoa, 77.
San Cristoval, 46.
Santa Cruz, 15, 68, 77.
Scandinavia, 78, 81.
Seligmann, C. G., 56.
Semitic terms, 78, 81.
Shilluks, 78.
Sioux, 53, 54, 88.
Sladen Trust, 14.
Sociology, 10, 26, 70, 84, 92, 94.
Solomon Is., 15, 23, 45, 67, 68.
Spencer, B., 11.
Sudan, 78, 81.
Survival, 39, 43, 46, 48, 59, 86, 92.
Swanton, J. R., 55.
Tamil, 47.
Tanna, 22.
Telegu, 47.
Tewa Indians, 53.
Thomas, N. W., 32, 88.
Thurnwald, R., 40.
Tikopia, 15, 67.
Todas, 49.
Tonga, 15, 67.
Torres Is., 89.
Torres Straits, 11, 44.
Trobriand Is., 55.
Tubetube, 57.
Wagawaga, 56, 58.
Wedau, 58.
Widow, 12, 30, 41.
“Yellow Knife” Indians, 49.
Ysabel, 46.
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[1] Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family: Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, vol. xvii.; Washington, 1871.
[2] Studies in Ancient History, 1st series, 1876, p. 331.
[3] Op. cit., p. 373.
[4] Zur Urgeschichte der Ehe, Stuttgart, 1897 (reprinted from Zeitsch. f. vergleich. Rechtswiss., 1897, xii., 187).
[5] Journ. Roy. Anth. Inst., 1909, xxxix, 77.
[6] The full account of these and other facts cited in these lectures will appear shortly in a work on The History of Melanesian Society, to be published by the Cambridge University Press.
[7] Op. cit., p. 366.
[8] In this and other diagrams capital letters are used to represent men and the smaller letters women.
[9] Grant, Gazetteer of Central Provinces, Nagpur, 2nd ed., 1870, p. 276.
[10] The Melanesians, p. 38.
[11] I leave out of account here those cases in which members of different generations are denoted by a reciprocal term.
[12] Op. cit., p. 384.
[13] Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia, Cambridge, 1906, p. 123.
[14] This is the Mota name for Pentecost Island.
[15] Howitt, Native Tribes of South-East Australia, pp. 164, 177.
[16] Zeitsch. f. vergleich. Rechtswiss., 1910, xxiii., 330.
[17] Rep. Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. v., pp. 135 and 241.
[18] I know of no complete record of the terminology of the fourth chief language of South India, Malayalam.
[19] I take my data from the lists compiled for Morgan by the Rev. E. C. Scudder and the Rev. B. Rice, Morgan’s Systems ..., pp. 537-566. These lists are not complete, giving in some cases only the terms used in address. They agree in general with some lists compiled during the recent Indian Census which Mr. E. A. Gait has kindly sent to me.
[20] Rivers, The Todas, 1906, pp. 487, 512.
[21] Journal Royal Asiatic Society, 1907, p. 611.
[22] See Morgan, Systems ..., Table II.
[23] Loc. cit.
[24] Dakota Grammar, Texts, and Ethnography: Contributions to North American Ethnology, Washington, vol. ix.
[25] Preface to above.
[26] Op. cit., p. 82.
[27] Swanton, Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haidahs, Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1905, vol. v., pt. i., p. 62. Miss Freire-Marreco tells me that the cross-cousin marriage occurs among some of the Hopi Indians.
[28] See The Melanesians of British New Guinea, Cambridge, 1910, p. 707.
[29] Ibid., pp. 482 and 436.
[30] The Melanesians of British New Guinea, Cambridge, 1910, p. 482.
[31] Rep. Austral. Ass., 1900, viii., 301.
[32] See Tables in Morgan’s Systems ..., pp. 79-127.
[33] Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor, Oxford, 1907, p. 309.
[34] For the full evidence on these topics see my forthcoming book The History of Melanesian Society.
[35] Census of India, 1911, vol. xv., p. 234.
[36] In such a case the use of the term by other members of the household, including women, would be the result of a later extension of meaning.
[37] See also “Survival in Sociology,” Sociological Review, 1913, vol. vi., p. 293. I hope shortly to deal more fully with the relations between sociology and social psychology.
The following apparent errors have been corrected: