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
The features of terminology which follow from 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
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.
[9] Grant, _Gazetteer of Central Provinces_, Nagpur, 2nd ed., 1870, p.
276.
LECTURE II
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.
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