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
Just as among most peoples of rude culture the clan or other
exogamous group is the essential unit of social organisation, so
among ourselves this social unit is the family, using this term for
the group consisting of a man, his wife, and their children. If we
examine our terms of relationship, we find that those applied to
individual persons and those used in a narrow and well-defined sense
are just those in which the family is intimately concerned. The terms
father, mother, husband and wife, brother and sister, are limited to
members of the family of the speaker, and the terms father-, mother-,
brother-, and sister-in-law to the members of the family of the wife
or husband in the same narrowly restricted sense. Similarly, the
terms grandfather and grandmother are limited to the parents of the
father and mother, while the terms grandson and granddaughter are
only used of the families of the children in the narrow sense. The
terms uncle and aunt, nephew and niece, are used in a less restricted
sense, but even these terms are only used of persons who stand in a
close relation to the family of the speaker. We have only one term
used with anything approaching the wide connotation of classificatory
terms of relationship, and this term is used for a group of relatives
who have as their chief feature in common that they are altogether
outside the proper circle of the family and have no social obligations
or privileges. They are as eligible for marriage as any other members
of the community, and only in the very special cases I considered in
the first lecture are they brought into any kind of legal relation.
The dependence of our own use of terms of relationship on the social
institution of the family seems to me so obvious that I find it
difficult to understand how anyone who has considered these terms
can put forward the view that the terminology of relationship is not
socially conditioned. It seems to me that we have only to have the
proposition stated that the classificatory system and our own are the
outcome of the social institutions of the clan and family respectively
for the social causation of such terminology to become conspicuous. I
find it difficult to understand why it has not long before this been
universally recognised. I do not think we can have a better example
of the confusion and prejudice which have been allowed to envelop the
subject through the unfortunate introduction of the problem of the
primitive promiscuity or monogamy of mankind. It is not necessary to
have an expert knowledge of the classificatory system. It is only
necessary to consider the terms we have used almost from our cradles
in relation to their social setting to see how the terminology of
relationship has been determined by that setting.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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