Classificatory kinship

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As much as almost anything else it has led to false conclusions as to the evolution of the family, conclusions which seem to entangle even the best authorities in a mass of contradictions. I cannot think of a family group in savagery with father, mother, sons, and daughters, all delightfully known to each other, in terms which also belong to the civilised family, and still less can I think of these terms being used to take in the extended grouping of local kinships. One of our greatest difficulties, indeed, is the indiscriminate use of kinship terms by our descriptive authorities. ”

“ Just as, with us, kinship and consanguinity largely coincide, so with primitive peoples are the kinship organisations immense, if one-sided, extensions of blood relationship, at all events in theory. In many parts of the world a totem kin traces its descent to a single male or female ancestor ”

“ Let me turn from the phenomenon of over-specialisation to that of neglect, and for this purpose I will take the simple fact of blood kinship. Existing obviously everywhere through the mother, and not obviously but admittedly through the father among most primitive peoples, there are examples where both maternal kinship and paternal kinship are neglected factors in the construction of the social group. ”

“ What was my clan was determined by customary law, which was not the same in all stages of society; in the earliest Semitic communities a man was of his mother’s clan, in later times he belonged to the clan of his father. But the essential idea of kinship was independent of the particular form of the law. A kin was a group of persons whose lives were so bound up together, in what must be called a physical unity, that they could be treated as parts of one common life. ”

“ As with us, it is a sociological fact; custom, which has among them far more power than law among us, determines whether a man is of kin to his mother and her relatives alone, or to his father and father's relatives, or whether both sets of relatives are alike of kin to him. In the latter case, where parental kinship prevails, the limits of the kin are often determined by the facts of consanguinity. In the two former cases, where kinship is reckoned through males alone or through females alone, consanguinity has little or nothing to do with kinship, as will be shown more in detail below. ”

“ Although it frequently happens that the children belong to the kin which through one of the parents or otherwise exercises the supreme authority in the family, it is far from being the case that there is invariable agreement between the principles on which kinship and authority are determined. ”

“ In tribal society, both clan and gentile, the entire social structure is based on real or assumed kinship, and a large part of the demotic devices are designed to establish, perpetuate, and advertise kinship relations. As already indicated, the conspicuous devices in order of development are the taboo with the prohibitions growing out of it, kinship nomenclature and regulations, and a system of ordination by which incongruous things are brought into association. ”

“ When legal kinship comes to coincide with natural kinship the circle of the kin widens, and the organisation of society changes, so as to render less needful the strengthening of the family by adding artificially to its numbers; testamentary rights come into existence; the {419} feeling of natural kinship dominates the legal idea; and kinship by adoption ultimately vanishes. ”

“ Taking the Kamilaroi again, the Muri-iguana man brings into his group a Butha-emu woman; their children are Ipatha-emu. If, therefore, a local group is made up of the descendants of a single family, the phratry, class, and totem names vary from generation to generation; for the girls go to other groups, and the men bring in wives of a phratry, class, and totem different, as a rule, from their own; the children of the next generation take their kinship names directly or indirectly from the mother. ”

“ Frazer's monumental treatise, Totemism and Exogamy, which epitomizes the known facts for the whole wide world, as surveyed region by region.
The first thing to grasp is that, for peoples of this type, social organization is, primarily and on the face of it, identical with kinship-organization. Before proceeding further, let us see what kinship means. Distinguish kinship from consanguinity. Consanguinity is a physical fact. It depends on birth, and covers all one's real blood-relationships, whether recognized by society or not. Kinship, on the other hand, is a sociological fact. ”

“ A man's kin comprises either his mother's people or his father's people, but not both. Remember that by the law of exogamy, the father and mother are strangers to each other. Hence, primitive society, as it were, issues a judgment of Solomon to the effect that, since they are not prepared to halve their child, it must belong body and soul either to one party or to the other.
We may now go on to analyse this one-sided type of kinship-organization a little more fully. There are three elementary principles that combine to produce it. They are exogamy, lineage and totemism. ”

“ As a general rule, marriage is prohibited between members of the stock—between all, that is, who claim descent from the same object and wear the same badge. The exogamous limit, therefore, is denoted by the stock-name and crest, and kinship is kinship in the wolf, bear, potato, or whatever other object is recognised as the original ancestor. ”

“ In the one case, the kinship groups such as totem kins, phratries, etc., an individual remains permanently in the association into which he is born, special cases apart, in which by adoption he passes out of it and joins another by means of a legal fiction2. The other kind of association, to which the name age-grades is applied, is composed of a series of grades, through which, concomitantly with the [3] performance of the rites of initiation obligatory on every male member of the community, each man passes in succession, until he attains the highest. ”

“ The question why marriage within the generation—the rule of four-class and two-phratry tribes alike—should have come into existence is a complicated one and involves that of the origin of kinship terms. If we take a crucial case of kinship terminology, we find that a child applies the same term to its actual mother as to all the women whom its father might have married, to its potential mothers in fact. ”

“ Incidentally, it is by no means certain that in reported cases the levirate is limited to the real brother or the multiple sister marriages to own sisters; indeed, in some cases the reverse is stated, cousins or members of the same clan or gens being expressly included. With the dual organization the case is especially clear. The kinship terms then appear simply as status names. I am brother to those who are potential husbands of the same group of women and since all of us males occupy this common status there is correlatively a single term by which all of us are called by our children. ”

“ Assuming the account we have of the beliefs of the Arunta to be correct as far as it goes, the tracing of descent in the male line for the purpose of determining the exogamous group to which a child shall belong involves, and can involve, no real recognition of blood. Yet the tables of kinship show that some relation is held to subsist between father and child. ”

“ 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; 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. ”

“ It may be said, therefore, that consanguinity is not always considered as the essence of kinship. If now we wish to determine what are the common features of the different ideas which in different societies define kinship, the only answer is that the said ideas affirm in one way or another a very close, intimate tie between offspring and parents. ”

“ What appeared to be nearly universal in this connection is the fact that infants and small children are always specially attached, and stand in a specific close relation to a man and a woman. [565] The woman is invariably their own mother, who gave them birth; the man is the woman's husband. The existence of this group, which may be called the individual family, is the basis upon which kinship may be determined; it is [199] the condition under which it is possible to speak of individual parental kinship in any given society. ”

“ This is of course equivalent to the establishment of age grades and is in itself not unthinkable; age grades are of course perfectly well known among primitive peoples; but the establishment of age grades implies a degree of social organisation; and, what is more important, this hypothesis makes the term brother quite meaningless as a kinship term ”

“ The importance of the difference in the constitution of the local group under descent in the male line is seen when we reflect that in the normal tribe the totem kin is practically the unit for many purposes. If, for example, an emu man has killed, let us say, an iguana man, it is the duty of the iguana men to avenge the death of their kinsman. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Rights or obligations of marriage within the clan everywhere attest the same communal exclusiveness; and some forms of clan life would even lead us to believe that the brotherhood once lived under a common roof, and shared not only their sacred festivals but even their ordinary meals. Conspicuous, however, among these signs of communal kinship is an economic feature of the settled clan which living scholars have investigated with equal patience and learning—the common ownership of land. ”

“ The male member of the family inherits, but he does so only as the son of a female member of the family through whom he may justly claim kinship, or, to put it in another form, a man's natural heir is not his son, or his brother's son, or the descendant of a common male ancestor, but his sister's, or his sister's daughter's son, or the descendant of a common female ancestress. ”

“ These two forces acting together may produce two types of local group: (1) the mixed group, in which persons of various kinship organisations are scattered at random; (2) the kin group, in which either all the males or all the females together with the children are members of one kinship organisation.
Save in the rare instances of non-exogamous kinship groups, the family necessarily contains one member, at least, whose kin is not the same as that of the remainder; this is either the husband or the wife, according as descent is reckoned in the female or the male line ”

“ To sum up, it may be said that parental kinship is the personal tie obtaining between members of the parental group or individual family, and like all other personalties it must be further determined in each society by the characteristic collective feelings and collective ideas which in the given society give it its specific meaning. ”

“ The notion of kin was so elastic that various conceptions of procreation have been 497grafted upon it, and various ways of organizing the family, or of reckoning kinship, have been connected with it. Mores grow upon the notions of kinship. They dictate modes of behavior and ideas of right and duty, and train all members of the society in the same. The relation of father and child is known to few persons, perhaps only to two. Kinship through the father, therefore, seems to uncivilized people far less important than kinship through the mother. ”

“ In truth, in the primitive view, relationship is exactly limited by patria potestas. Where the potestas begins, kinship begins; and therefore adoptive relatives are among the kindred. Where the potestas ends, kinship ends; so that a son emancipated by his father loses all rights of agnation. And here we have the reason why the descendants of females are outside the limits of archaic kinship." Indeed "it is obvious that the organization of primitive societies would have been confounded, if men had called themselves relatives of their mother's relatives." ”

“ Descent is the normal, the typical, cause of kinship and a common blood. It is the legal presupposition, a presumption not to be rebutted. But kinship may also be acquired; and when it is once acquired by a stranger he ranks thenceforth for all purposes as one descended from the common ancestor. In a state of society organised on the lines of kinship this is an important matter. A man who is not of the kin is a stranger; and a stranger is a foe. The kinless man has no rights, no protection: he is an outlaw. His hand is against every man’s, and every man’s hand against him. ”