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
I have taken this case somewhat out of its proper place in my argument
because the evidence is so closely connected with that by means
of which I have shown the relation between features of systems of
relationship and peculiar forms of marriage in Melanesia. I have now to
return to the more sober task of considering how far we are justified
in inferring the former existence of marriage institutions when we
find features of systems of relationship of which they would have been
the natural consequence. It is evident that, whenever we find such a
feature as common nomenclature for a grandmother and a sister or for a
cross-cousin and a parent, it should suggest to us the possibility of
such marriage regulations as those of Pentecost and the Banks Islands.
But such common designations might have arisen in some other way,
and in order to establish the existence of such forms of marriage in
the past history of the people, we must have criteria to guide us
when we are considering whether a given feature of the terminology of
relationship is or is not a survival of a marriage institution.
I will return to the cross-cousin marriage for my examples. The task
before us is to inquire how far such features of relationship as exist
in Fiji, Anaiteum or Guadalcanar, in conjunction with the cross-cousin
marriage, will justify us in inferring the former existence of this
form of marriage in places where it is not now practised.
If there be found among any people all the characteristic features of
a coastal Fijian or of an Anaiteum system, I think few will be found
to doubt the former existence of the cross-cousin marriage. It would
seem almost inconceivable that there should ever have existed any other
conditions, whether social or psychological, which could have produced
this special combination of peculiar uses of terms of relationship. It
is when some only of these features are present that there will arise
any serious doubt whether they are to be regarded as survivals of the
former existence of the cross-cousin marriage.
One consideration I must point out at once. Certain of the features
which follow from the cross-cousin marriage may be the result of
another marriage regulation. In some parts of the world there exists a
custom of exchanging brothers and sisters, so that, when a man marries
a woman, his sister marries his wife’s brother. As the result of this
custom the mother’s brother and the father’s sister’s husband will come
to be one and the same person, and the father’s sister will become also
the mother’s brother’s wife.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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