The Evolution of Marriage and of the FamilyLetourneau, Ch. (Charles)
Science
The Evolution of Marriage and of the Family
Letourneau, Ch. (Charles)
Families; Marriage
It seems probable that analogous systems of kinship may have been
adopted by the greater number of the Asiatic Mongols. This may at
least be inferred from the fragmentary but significant accounts with
which explorers have supplied us. Among the Yourak Samoyedes, it is
forbidden to marry a woman of the same tribe (or rather clan).[972]
The people among the Kalmucks are subject to restrictions of the same
kind in regard to marriage, which must not take place within three or
four degrees of kinship. The great men, however, for whom the laws
are more lenient in all countries, sometimes obtain immunity from
these inconvenient obligations, but the populace is very much shocked
at their laxity. “Great men and dogs,” they say, “have no kin.”
Nevertheless, the sons of the great men, who often also marry their
sisters-in-law, always take a wife in another clan.[973] Kinship by
classes surely existed among the Mongols only a few centuries ago,
for Baber, the founder of the Mongol Empire of Delhi, speaks in his
_Memoirs_ of one of his lieutenants, named Lenguer Khan, who possessed
a whole tribe of maternal uncles, the Djendjouhah, forming a people who
lived in the mountains of the Punjaub.[974]
V. _The Evolution of the System of Kinship by Classes._
These facts, and the inferences they suggest, enable us to solve a
difficulty which has embarrassed an eminent sociologist, L. Morgan, to
whom we owe our acquaintance with the details of the curious systems of
kinship by classes prevailing among the Polynesians and the Redskins.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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