Kin

“ And although in the most archaic period whose remains are accessible to us it does not appear that these rites meant actual admission into the kin, their analogy easily lent itself to that construction as the organisation of society into clans drew closer and closer together, and especially as the patriarchal clan developed; and marriage at length came in many cases to operate as an actual severance from one kin and an entrance into another. ”

“ The most instructive application of the doctrine that the kin is, in much more than a metaphorical sense, one body, is to be found in the collective responsibility of the clan. Illustrations might be cited from every corner of the known world. ”

“ In conformity with the organization of society based upon kin, when in the first stage of its development, the kindred group inherited, and the common ancestor of this kin being considered a female, it follows that if a man died, not his children, still less his wife, but his mother's descendants, that is, his brothers, sisters, in fact the entire consanguine relationship from which he derived on his mother's side, were his heirs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ In the classificatory system most of the kin in the same generation are grouped under one general term; e.g., all the males of the grandfather’s generation are called by one term—another term includes father, father’s brothers, father’s male cousins, mother’s sisters’ husbands, mother’s female cousins’ husbands, and so on. ”

“ This will appear from the general principle that a man may not marry any who are near of kin to him. This is the general law as laid down in Lev. xviii. 6. "None of you shall approach to any "that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness. I am the "Lord." The words translated "near of kin to him," mean, as in the marginal rendering, "remainder of flesh." They include all near relatives by blood. They include also near relatives by marriage or by affinity, as it is called. ”

“ The eighth is of a man with his kin, and the same sin is increased and lessened according as the kinship is near or far. The ninth is of the man with the 40 kin of his wife, or, on the contrary, of the wife with the kin of her husband. ”

“ One kin may be wolves, another bears, another cranes, and so on. Each kin derives its kin-name from its beast, plant, or what not; pays to it more or less respect, usually abstains from killing, eating, or using it (except in occasional sacrifices) ; is apt to claim descent from or relationship with it, and sometimes uses its effigy on memorial pillars, carved pillars outside huts, tattooed on the skin, and perhaps in other ways not known to me. In Australia and North America, where rules are strict, a man may not marry a woman of his own totem ”

“ There were the hysterical relatives, the wives and mothers and brothers who demanded that their kin be Awakened because they were special cases, not really guilty, or needed at home, or possessed of such awesome talents and qualities as to be exempt from the laws of lesser men. ”

“ It was the gens or clan, as we find it exemplified in all stages from the middle period of savagery to the middle period of barbarism. The gens or clan was simply—to define it by a third synonym—the kin; it was originally a group of males and females who were traditionally aware of their common descent reckoned in the female line. "Exogamy." At this stage of development there was quite generally though not universally prevalent the custom of "exogamy," by which a man was forbidden to marry a woman of his own clan. ”

“ There seemed to be no doubt, however, that in connexion with marriage, a man always thought of these relatives as püliol, a term which denotes certain kin, to whatever clan they may belong. So far as I could ascertain, if a man thought of a given woman, he thought of her as one, or not one, of his püliol, and it seemed to me in several cases as if it came almost as a new idea to some of the Todas that his püliol included all the people of his own clan. ”

“ Duties of Near Relatives.—There are similar duties of charity and piety between other near relatives, for example, between brothers and sisters, grandparents and grandchildren uncles and aunts and their nephews and nieces, and between first cousins. The obligation seems, to some authors, to be a grave one as far as the second degree of kinship, but is light in the other degrees. The relationship and duty to kin by marriage is not so strong. ”

“ That they apply to relatives by marriage, and not to relatives by blood merely, is evident from the fact, that of the fifteen particular cases specified as "near of kin," eight are relatives by marriage, and seven relatives by blood, the first on the list being a relative by blood, the second a relative by marriage, the next six being relatives by blood, and the last seven being relatives by marriage. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the nearest of kin are the mother and the brothers and sisters, the personal estate is divisible in equal portions, one of which will belong to the mother, and one to each of the brothers and sisters ”

“ All of us have monarchs and sages for kinsmen; nay, angels and archangels for cousins; since in antediluvian days, the sons of God did verily wed with our mothers, the irresistible daughters of Eve. Thus all generations are blended: and heaven and earth of one kin: the hierarchies of seraphs in the uttermost skies; the thrones and principalities in the zodiac; the shades that roam throughout space; the nations and families, flocks and folds of the earth; one and all, brothers in essence—oh, be we then brothers indeed! All things form but one whole; ”

“ The kinsman, without the least expression of discontent on his face, like a man perfectly indifferent to sitting at home or to taking a walk, looked round, scratched his shoulder with the handle of his cudgel, and away went the two kinsmen. ”

“ The beginning of society, it has been said a thousand times, is the family, a natural association of kindred by blood, composed of father, mother and their descendants. In this family, the father is absolute master of his wife, his children and the goods of the little community; at his death his eldest son succeeds him; and in course of time this association of kindred, by natural increase and by adoption, develops into the clan, gens, or γένος. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All related individuals of one’s generation are classed as brothers and sisters, certain distinctions being drawn according to the age of their parents relatively to that of one’s own parents and also according to the speaker’s sex, but none resulting from the differences in nearness of kinship. The children of all these brothers and sisters are classed with one’s own children, and their children with one’s grandchildren, while a single term embraces grandparents and all related members of their generation. ”

“ I have told thee, beloved, that thou art not of the kin; The blood in thy body is blended of the wandering Elking race, And one that I may not tell of, who in God-home hath his place, And who changed his shape to beget thee in the wild-wood's leafy roof. ”

“ The tie of kinship at once marks a group off externally and gives it distinction, and internally holds all its members together. Kinship, kind, class, genus are synonymous terms, starting from social and concrete facts and going to the technical and abstract. For kinship is a sign of a common nature, of something universal and permanent running through all particular individuals, and giving them a real and objective unity. ”

“ The notion of kinship was carried to degrees of relationship very distant, according to our ideas, and it is quite common to hear one person referring to another as his elder or younger brother or sister, who is, according to our ideas only an eighth or a tenth cousin. In former times the genealogies were considered to be sacred and were used for what may be called religious purposes. ”

“ This implied wealth of pre-historic terms for degrees of kinship can be only understood by us as existing at a time when our ancestors lived together in clans as shepherds and nomads. When with the changing years the more fully developed relations of kinship lost the old inherited terms, how seldom have alien designations attempted to oust the native words, and how seldom with success! ”

“ Every possible kinsman—his maternal uncle, his cross cousin, his father-in-law, his wife’s brother-in-law, his daughter’s son—has his moiety affiliation foreordained. Where descent is paternal, for instance, everybody knows that his future mother-in-law must be of his own moiety. Evidently the effect of this dual system on the relations between kinsfolk, on social usages, on the individual’s attitude of mind toward other individuals, should normally tend to be profoundly different from the influence of a multiple clan system. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In B3 are recorded the kin and its coefficient. The period glyph here is represented by an anthropomorphic figure with a grotesque head. Its identity, as representing the kins of this number, is better established from its position in the number than from its appearance, which is somewhat irregular. The kin coefficient is just like the uinal coefficient—an anthropomorphic figure the head of which has the clasped hand as its determining characteristic. ”

“ The construction and limits of kinship in any society are products of the folkways, or—inasmuch as the system is built up with notions of welfare and rights and duties—of the mores. In fact, since the folkways in regard to this matter begin at a very primitive stage of human life, run up to the highest civilization, and are interwoven with the most tender sympathies and ethical convictions at all stages, kinship is one of the most important products of the folkways and mores. ”

“ In time, however, through the marriage of the daughters—for in savage life the young men usually roam off and take wives elsewhere, while the young women stay at home—instead of the original single family, we have the grown daughters, with their husbands, living still with their parents and rearing children, thus forming a group of families, closely united by kinship. ”

“ How strange was the relation between parents and children! When they were small the parents doted on them, passed through agonies of apprehension at each childish ailment, and the children clung to their parents with love and adoration; a few years passed, the children grew up, and persons not of their kin were more important to their happiness than father or mother. Indifference displaced the blind and instinctive love of the past. Their meetings were a source of boredom and irritation. ”

“ 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. ”