Kinship and Social OrganisationRivers, W. H. R. (William Halse Rivers)
General
Kinship and Social Organisation
Rivers, W. H. R. (William Halse Rivers)
Anthropology; Consanguinity; Ethnology -- Melanesia; Marriage
If you concede the causal relation between the characteristic features
of a Fijian or Anaiteum or 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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