The Family among the Australian Aborigines, a Sociological StudyMalinowski, Bronislaw
History
The Family among the Australian Aborigines, a Sociological Study
Malinowski, Bronislaw
Aboriginal Australians -- Social life and customs; Ethnology -- Australia; Families -- History
Bearing now in mind that what will be said hereafter applies in the
first place to Australia, it may be said that in the physiological
and social basis of kinship adopted above, the minimum of conditions
necessary for the application of the idea of individual kinship was
enumerated. But this minimum is not sufficient to determine this idea
completely in any given society. By studying only the social facts
which determine the individuality of family life within the society, we
should not exhaust all the features and essential aspects of parental
kinship in any society. The existence of the individual family merely
indicates unambiguously that individual parental kinship exists
in the given society. For this social unit having a deep analogy
with our own individual family, the relation between the members of
both these social units must also have some deep resemblance. But
to exaggerate this resemblance would be as erroneous as to deny it.
Besides the features common both to our parental kinship and to that
of the Australian, there are also those which differentiate these
two relationships. They must be sought for in the differences in the
_social conditions_, which may even modify the physiological basis of
kinship, as for instance when physical fatherhood is in one society
established beyond doubt by exclusive sexual appropriation, while in
the other there can be no question of it, owing to sexual communism.
The variations in the general social conditions obviously also affect
the purely sociological side of kinship. To point this out clearly, it
is enough to mention that each relation is subject to the normative
influences of the society in the midst of which it exists, and these
norms and their sanction vary with the general social structure.
The variable elements in parental kinship must be also looked for in
the different elements of the _collective mind_, connected with the
parental relationship; in other words, in the different _collective
ideas_ and _feelings_ which have parental kinship for their centre.
Moreover, as mentioned above, there are reasons why the knowledge of
the collective idea of kinship is sociologically important. It may be
emphasized here that we should cripple and curtail our knowledge if
we arbitrarily abstained from inquiring what influence the collective
knowledge as to procreation, consanguinity, affinity, etc., may have
upon the social aspect of the relation in question.
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