Kinship

“ Not realised as an idea of the intellect, not reflected upon as an emotion of the heart, but profoundly felt to be the centre of social life, this common kinship is as real as though it could be touched in the person of that communal ancestor from whose loins the group is sprung or thought to be sprung, whose imaginary presence sanctifies every festival of common joys, whose favour is to be propitiated in every common affliction, and to whom, in company with others long since gathered to their fathers, it is the destiny of the clansman, sooner or later, to return. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We must look on the family as constantly enlarged by the absorption of strangers within its circle, and we must try to regard the fiction of adoption as so closely simulating the reality of kinship that neither law nor opinion makes the slightest difference between a real and an adoptive connexion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ We may suppose that the idea of kinship or the recognition of consanguinity, whichever be the more correct term to apply to these far-off developments of the factors of human society, extended only by degrees beyond the limits of the group. ”

“ And here again arises the necessity of a general definition of kinship, one which would afford indications in what direction to search for social facts giving a right idea of kinship in any given society. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus into the general formula of kinship there must enter also the psychological elements: collective ideas, expressing in a given society what is kinship, what are its legal, moral and customary aspects; and the collective feelings prevailing in a given society. From the interaction of these psychological elements with different variable social elements arise the more special, peculiar factors which define kinship in any given society. ”

“ The system of kinship through females, common among rude peoples, results in descent of property and power to brothers or to the children of sisters; while the system of kinship through males, general among advanced peoples, results in descent of property and power to sons or daughters. We have first to note that succession through females results in less stable political headships than does succession through males. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Kinship is a fact which, in the forms of heredity and race, is second to none in importance to the interests of men. It is a fact which was concealed by ignorance from primitive men. It is yet veiled in much mystery from us. Nevertheless the notion of kinship was one of the very first notions formed by primitive men as a bond of association, and they based folkways upon their ideas about it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In our society the meal unites the members of the family; but the sacrificial repast has nothing to do with the family. Kinship is older than family life; the oldest families known to us regularly comprised persons who belonged to various bonds of kinship. The men married women of strange clans and the children inherited the clan of the mother ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But kinship is a vague, evasive expression. There are degrees of kinship, near and distant. What sort of kinship is intended? For the relation of man to God, there is but one form of kinship which is appropriate,—the nearest, profoundest, most sacred that can be conceived,—the relation of the child to the father. According to this God is the Father of man, man the son, the child of God. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We must now emphasize the fact that just as we may say that the different ideas determining kinship converge towards one central concept, or rather flow out of one common central idea of kinship, so there is also an intimate connection between the ideas determining kinship and the feelings bound up with it. This becomes obvious if our own social conditions be considered. As mentioned above, a father in our society loves his child in a great measure because he knows that it is his own offspring. ”

“ We see thus that the clan organization grows naturally out of the drawing together of men to strengthen themselves in the fierce struggle of savage life. The clan is simply an extension of the family. The family idea still runs through it, and kinship is the bond that holds together all the members. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A king and clan being able, subject to certain limitations, to adopt new members or families, or amalgamate with another clan, the theory of common origin was not rigidly adhered to. Kinship with the clan was an essential qualification for holding any office or property. The rules of kinship largely determined status with its correlative rights and obligations, supplied the place of contract and of laws affecting the ownership, disposition and devolution of property, constituting the clan an organic, self-contained entity, a political, social and mutual insurance co-partnership. ”

“ Its very foundations have recently been powerfully assaulted by the adherents of a totally different view of the origin and development of the human family. How the phenomena of marriage and kinship will appear when seen in a new light, we shall next try to discover. ”

“ The Turanian, Ganowánian and Malayan systems of consanguinity show plainly and conclusively that kinship through males was recognized as constantly as kinship through females. A man had brothers and sisters, grandfathers and grandmothers, grandsons and granddaughters, traced through males as well as through females. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 far the idea of kinship changes from society to society, what are its essential invariable features, and what are the variable elements—these are the problems that must be set forth.
The inadequacy of our ideas of kinship as applied to lower societies has been often felt by those ethnographers who wished to enter deeper into the problems of kinship among a given people. ”

“ The relatives under the first head will be members of the same clan as the man, and the prohibition of marriage between püliol under this head may be regarded as a restriction dependent on either clanship or kinship. ”

“ In primitive society, however, consanguinity tends to be wider than kinship by as much again. In other words, in the recognition of kinship one entire side of the family is usually left clean out of account. ”

“ 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. ”