our argument has taken us. I have first shown the dependence of a
number of special features of the classificatory system of relationship
upon special forms of marriage. Then I have shown that certain
broad varieties of the classificatory system are to be referred to
different forms of social organisation and to the different degrees
in which the regulation of marriage by means of clan-exogamy has
been replaced by a mechanism dependent upon kinship or genealogical
relationship. From that I was led to refer the general features of
the classificatory system to the dependence of this system upon the
social unit of the clan as opposed to the family which I believe to
be the basis of our own terminology of relationship. I then pointed
to several features of the classificatory system which suggest that
it arose in that special variety of the clan-organisation in which
a community consists of two exogamous moieties, forming the social
structure usually known as the dual organisation. I considered more
fully the dependence of our own mode of denoting relatives upon the
social institution of the family, and then a study of the descriptive
terminology of relationship has led me to suggest that certain modes of
denoting relationship in Egypt, the Sudan and many European countries
may be examples of a third main variety of system of relationship
which has arisen out of the patriarchal or extended family. We should
thus have three main varieties of system of relationship in place of
the two which have hitherto been recognised, having their origins
respectively in the clan, in the family in the narrow sense, and in
the extended or patriarchal family. These three varieties may be
regarded as genera within each of which are species and varieties
depending upon special social conditions which have arisen within
each kind of social grouping, either as the result of changes within
each form of social organisation or of transitions from one form to
another. We know of a far larger number of such varieties within the
classificatory system than within those due to the two forms of the
family, and this is probably due in some measure to the fact that the
classificatory system is still by far the most widely distributed form
over the earth’s surface. Still more important, however, is the fact
that among the peoples who use the classificatory system there is an
infinitely greater variety of social institution, and especially of
forms of marriage, than exist among civilised peoples whose main social
unit, the family, is not one which is capable of any extended range of
variation. The result of the complete survey has been to justify my use
of the classificatory system as the means whereby to demonstrate the
dependence of the terminology of relationship upon social conditions.
It is the great variability of this mode of denoting relatives which
makes it so valuable an instrument for the study of the laws which have
governed the history of that department of language by which mankind
has denoted those who stand in social relations to himself.
* * * * *
You may have been wondering whether I am going to say anything about
the merits of the controversy which has till now given to systems of
relationship their chief interest among students of sociology. I have
so far left on one side the subjects which have been the main ground
of controversy ever since the time of Morgan. You will have gathered
that I regard it as a grave misfortune for the science of sociology
that the topics of promiscuity and group-marriage should have been
thrust by Morgan into the prominent place which they have ever since
occupied in the theoretical study of relationship. Even now I should
have liked to leave them on one side on the ground that the evidence
is as yet insufficient to make them profitable subjects for such exact
inquiry as I believe to be the proper business of sociology. Their
very prominence, however, makes it impossible to leave them wholly
unconsidered, but I propose to deal with them very briefly.
I begin with the question whether the classificatory system of
relationship provides us with any evidence that mankind once possessed
a form of social organisation, or rather such an absence of social
organisation, as would accompany a condition of general promiscuity
in which, if one can speak of marriage at all, marriage was practised
between all and any members of the community, including brothers and
sisters. I can deal with this subject very briefly because I hope to
have succeeded elsewhere in knocking away the support on which the
whole of Morgan’s own construction rested.
Morgan deduced his stage of promiscuity from the Hawaiian system,
which he supposed to be the most primitive form of classificatory
nomenclature. In an article published in 1907 I showed[33] that it
rather represents a late stage in the history of the more ordinary
forms of the classificatory system. My conclusion at that time was
based on the scanty evidence derived from the relatively few Oceanic
systems which had then been recorded, but my work since that article
was written has shown the absolute correctness of my earlier opinion,
which I can now support by a far larger body of evidence than was
available in 1907. It remains possible, however, that the Hawaiian
system may have had its source in promiscuity, even though this
condition be late rather than primitive, but it would be going beyond
the scope of these lectures to deal fully with this subject here. I
cannot forbear, however, from mentioning that Hawaiian promiscuity,
in so far as it existed, was not the condition of the whole people,
but only of the chiefs who alone were allowed to contract brother
and sister marriages, while I have evidence that the avoidance of
brother and sister in Melanesia, which has so often been regarded as
a survival of man’s early promiscuity, is capable of a very different
explanation.[34] Our available knowledge, whether derived from features
of the classificatory system or from other social facts, does not
provide one shred of evidence in favour of such a condition as was put
forward by Morgan as the earliest stage of human society, nor is there
any evidence that such promiscuity has ever been the ruling principle
of a people at any later stage of the history of mankind.
[33] _Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor_, Oxford, 1907,
p. 309.
[34] For the full evidence on these topics see my forthcoming book _The
History of Melanesian Society_.
The subject of group-marriage is one about which I do not find it
possible to speak so dogmatically. It would take me more than another
lecture to deal adequately with the Melanesian evidence alone, and I
must content myself with two remarks. Firstly, I think it desirable
to throw aside the term group-marriage as only confusing the issue,
and to speak rather of a state of organised sexual communism, in which
sexual relations are recognised as orthodox between the men of one
social group and the women of another. Secondly, the classificatory
system has several features which would follow naturally from such a
condition of sexual communism. I have evidence from Melanesia which
places beyond question the former presence of such a condition, with
features of culture which become readily explicable if they be the
survivals of such a state of sexual communism as is suggested by the
terminology of the classificatory system. This evidence comes from
only one part of the world, but it is enough to convince me that we
have no right to dismiss from our minds a state of organised sexual
communism as a feature of the social development of mankind. The wide
distribution of the classificatory system would suggest that this
communism has been very general, but it need not have been universal,
and even if the widespread existence of organised sexual communism be
established, it would not follow that it represents the earliest stage
in the evolution of human society. There are certain features even of
the classificatory system itself which suggest that, if this system be
founded in sexual communism, this communism was not primitive, but grew
out of a condition in which only such ties of kinship were recognised
as would result from the social institution of the family.
I must be content with this brief reference to the subject. The object
of these lectures is to demonstrate the dependence of the terminology
of relationship upon social conditions, and the dependence of the
classificatory system upon a condition of sexual communism is not
now capable of demonstration. The classificatory mode of denoting
relationship should, however, act as a suggestion and stimulus, and as
a preventative of dogmatic statement in a part of our subject which, in
spite of its entrancing interest, still lies only at the edge of our
slowly spreading circle of exact knowledge.
In conclusion, I should like to point out briefly some of the lessons
of more general interest which may be learnt from the facts I have
brought before you in these lectures. I hope that one result has been
to convince you of the danger lying in the use of the _reductio ad
absurdum_ argument when dealing with cultures widely different from our
own. In the literature of the subject one often meets the adjectives
“absurd” and “impossible” applied in some cases to social conditions
in which the actual existence of the absurdities or impossibilities
can be demonstrated. I may take as an example the argument of Mr. N. W.
Thomas, which I have already mentioned, in which the classing of the
maternal grandfather with the elder brother by the Dieri is regarded
as reducing to an absurdity the contention that classificatory terms
express ties of kinship. If Mr. Thomas had had a more lively faith in
the social meaning of terms of relationship, he might have been led to
notice that the Dieri marry the granddaughter of a brother, a fact he
appears, in common with many other readers of Howitt, to have missed;
one result of this marriage is to bring about just such a relationship
as Howitt records without a man being his own great-uncle, as is
supposed to be necessary by Mr. Thomas.
Still another example may be taken from Professor Kroeber. He states
that the classing together of the grandfather and the father-in-law
which is found in the Dakota system, when worked out to its
implications, would lead to the absurd conclusion that marriage with
the mother was once customary among the Sioux. Here again, if Professor
Kroeber had been less imbued with his belief in a purely linguistic
and psychological chain of causation, and had been ready to entertain
the idea that there might be a social meaning, he must have been led
to see that the features of nomenclature in question would follow from
other forms of marriage, and two of these, whatever their apparent
improbability in America, cannot well be called absurd, since they are
known to occur in other parts of the world. Following Riggs, Professor
Kroeber does not specify which kinds of grandfather and father-in-law
are classed together in Dakotan nomenclature, but in the full list
given by Morgan, it is evident that one term is used for the fathers of
both father and mother and for the fathers of both husband and wife.
The classing of the father’s father with the wife’s father would be a
natural result of marriage with the father’s sister, while the common
nomenclature for father’s father and husband’s father would result from
marriage with the brother’s daughter. It is not without significance
that the features of nomenclature which would be the result of one
or other, or of both these marriages, occur in a system which also
bears evidence of the cross-cousin marriage, for these three forms
of marriage occur in conjunction in one part of Melanesia, viz., the
Torres Islands.
The foregoing instance, together with many others scattered through
these lectures, will have pointed clearly to another lesson. In
the present state of our knowledge a working scheme or hypothesis
has largely to be judged by its utility. A way of regarding social
phenomena which obstructs inquiry and leads people to overlook facts
has its disadvantages, to say the least, while a scheme or hypothesis
which leads people to worry out and discover things which do not lie on
the surface will establish a strong claim on our consideration, even
if it should ultimately turn out to be only the partial truth. I will
give only one instance to illustrate how a belief in the dependence of
the terminology of relationship on forms of marriage might act as a
stimulus to research.
In a system from the United Provinces recorded by Mr. E. A. H. Blunt
in the Report of the last Indian Census, one term, _bahu_, is used
for the son’s wife, for the wife, and for the mother.[35] Mr. Blunt
puts on one side without hesitation the possibility that such common
nomenclature can have been the result of any form of marriage, and
ascribes it to the custom whereby a man and his wife live with the
husband’s parents, in consequence of which the son’s wife, who is
called _bahu_ by her husband, is also called _bahu_ by everyone else in
the house. The causation of the common nomenclature which is thus put
forward is a possible, perhaps even a probable, explanation. In such a
case we should have a social chain of causation in which the son’s wife
is called _bahu_ because she is one of a social group bound together
by the ties of a common habitation. It can do no harm, however, to
bear in mind as an alternative the possibility that the terminology
may have arisen out of a form of marriage. It is evident that the use
of a common term for the wife and the son’s wife would follow from a
form of polyandry in which a man and his son have a wife in common. A
further result of this form of marriage would be that the wife of the
son, being also the wife of his father, would have the status of a
mother.[36] We have no evidence for the presence of such a marriage in
India, but our knowledge of the sociology of the more backward peoples
of India is not so complete that we can afford to neglect any clue. The
possibility suggested by the mode of using the term _bahu_ should lead
us to look for other evidence of such a form of polyandry among the
ruder elements of the population of India, of whose social structure
our present knowledge is so fragmentary.
[35] _Census of India_, 1911, vol. xv., p. 234.
[36] In such a case the use of the term by other members of the
household, including women, would be the result of a later extension of
meaning.
Another important result of our study of the terminology of
relationship is that it helps us to understand the proper place of
psychological explanation in sociology. These lectures have largely
been devoted to the demonstration of the failure to explain features
of the terminology of relationship on psychological grounds. If this
demonstration has been successful, it is not because the terminology
of relationship is anything peculiar, differing from other bodies of
sociological facts; it is because in relationship we have to do with
definite and clean-cut facts. The terminology of relationship is only
a specially favourable example by means of which to show the value
of an attitude towards, and mode of treatment of, social facts which
hold good, though less conspicuously, throughout the whole field of
sociology.
In social, as in all other kinds of human activity, psychological
factors must have an essential part. I have myself in these lectures
pointed to psychological considerations as elements in the problems
with which the sociologist has to deal. These psychological elements
are, however, only concomitants of social processes with which it is
possible to deal apart from their psychological aspect. It has been
the task of these lectures to refer the social facts of relationship
to antecedent social conditions, and I believe that this is the proper
method of sociology. Even at the present time, however, it is possible
to support sociological arguments by means of considerations provided
by psychological motives, and the assistance thus rendered to sociology
will become far greater as the science of social psychology advances.
This is, however, a process very different from the interpolation of
psychological facts as links in the chain of causation connecting
social antecedents with social consequences. It is in no spirit of
hostility to social psychology, but in the hope that it may help us to
understand its proper place in the study of social institutions that
I venture to put forward the method followed in these lectures as one
proper to the science of sociology.[37]
[37] See also “Survival in Sociology,” _Sociological Review_, 1913,
vol. vi., p. 293. I hope shortly to deal more fully with the relations
between sociology and social psychology.
It may be that there will be those who will accept my main position,
but will urge that these lectures have been devoted to the criticism
of an extreme position, the position taken up by Professor Kroeber.
They may say that they have never believed in the purely psychological
causation of the terminology of relationship. In reply to such an
attitude I can only express my conviction that the paper of Professor
Kroeber is only the explicit and clear statement of an attitude which
is implicit in the work of nearly all, if not all, the opponents of
Morgan since McLennan. Whether they have themselves recognised it
or not, I believe that it has been this underlying attitude towards
sociological problems which has prevented them from seeing what is
good in Morgan’s work, from sifting out the chaff from the wheat of
his argument, and from recognising how great is the importance to the
science of sociology of the body of facts which Morgan was the first to
collect and study. I feel that we owe a debt of gratitude to Professor
Kroeber for having brought the matter into the open and for having
presented, as a clear issue, a fundamental problem of the methods of
sociology.
Lastly, I should like to point out how rigorous and exact has been the
process of the determination of the nomenclature of relationship by
social conditions which has been demonstrated in these lectures. We
have here a case in which the principle of determinism applies with a
rigour and definiteness equal to that of any of the exact sciences.
According to my scheme, not only has the general character of systems
of relationship been strictly determined by social conditions, but
every detail of these systems has also been so determined. Even so
small and apparently insignificant a feature as the classing of the
sister-in-law with the sister has been found to lead back to a definite
social condition arising out of the regulation of marriage and of
sexual relations. If sociology is to become a science fit to rank
with other sciences, it must, like them, be rigorously deterministic.
Social phenomena do not come into being of themselves. The proposition
that we class two relatives together in nomenclature because the
relationships are similar is, if it stand alone, nothing more than a
form of words. It is incumbent on those who believe in the importance
of the psychological similarity of social phenomena to show in what
the supposed similarity consists and how it has come about--in other
words, how it has been determined. It has been my chief object in these
lectures to show that, in so far as such similarities exist in the case
of relationship, they have been determined by social conditions. Only
by attention to this aim throughout the whole field of social phenomena
can we hope to rid sociology of the reproach, so often heard, that it
is not a science; only thus can we refute those who go still further
and claim that it can never be a science.
INDEX
“Absurd” in sociology, 32, 87.
America, North, 10, 18, 49, 55.
Anaiteum, 22.
Aniwa, 22.
Assiniboin, 51.
Australia, 11, 32.
Avoidance, 85.
Banks Is., 12, 16, 28, 42, 53, 61, 68.
Bellamy, R. L., 56.
Blunt, E. A. H., 90.
Bougainville I., 40.
Brother-in-law, functions of, 12.
Buin, 40.
Canarese, 47.
Celtic terms, 78, 81.
Cherokees, 53.
Chiefs, 85.
Choctas, 53.
Christianity, 30.
Clan, 67, 71, 74.
Classes, matrimonial, 32, 39.
Classificatory relationship, 2, 4, 19, 83.
Codrington, Dr., 28, 30, 68.
Communism in property, 12;
sexual, 62, 86.
Concomitant variations, method of, 70.
“Creek” Indians, 53.
Crees, 50, 55.
Cross-cousins, 20, 28;
_see_ marriage.
“Crow” Indians, 53.
Dakotas, 51, 88.
Descent, 34, 39, 73.
Descriptive system, 76;
terms, 77, 81.
Determinism, 7, 93.
Dieri, 32, 37, 88.
Dinkas, 78.
Dorsey, J. O., 51.
Dual organisation, 32, 34, 58, 67, 72, 82.
Eddystone I., 68, 70.
Egidi, Father, 16.
Egypt, 78, 79.
English terms of relationship, 13, 74.
Eromanga, 22.
Esthonia, 78, 81.
Exchange of brothers and sisters, 43.
Exogamy, 68, 72.
Family, 74, 77, 87;
extended, 79, 81.
Father’s sister, functions of, 16.
Field, Rev. J. T., 57.
Fiji, 22, 31, 39, 77.
Fison, Rev. L., 26.
Florida, 45, 69.
Freire-Marreco, Miss B., 53, 55.
Functions of relatives, 6, 11, 12, 15.
Gait, E. A., 47.
Genealogical method, 23, 31.
Genealogical relationship, 68, 70.
Gillen, F. J., 11.
Gonds, 26.
Group-marriage, 6, 86.
Guadalcanar, 23, 45.
Haidahs, 54.
Hawaiian Is., 15, 66, 68;
system, 66, 84.
Head, sanctity of, 12.
Hopi Indians, 55.
Howitt, A. W., 11, 88.
India, 18, 26, 47, 90.
Kindred, 80.
Kinship, 1, 67, 82.
Kohler, J., 8, 19.
Kroeber, A. L., 9, 25, 52, 60, 62, 64, 88, 93.
Kuni, 16.
Lithuania, 78, 81.
McLennan, J. F., 6, 17.
Malayalam, 47.
“Malayan” system, 65, 68.
Maori, 66.
Marriage, 1, 60;
between brother and sister, 85;
by exchange, 43;
group-, 6, 86;
regulation of, 67;
with brother’s daughter, 89;
with brother’s granddaughter, 34, 37, 56;
with cousin, 79;
with cross-cousin, 20, 39, 43, 47, 49, 54;
with deceased wife’s sister, 65;
with father’s sister, 89;
with wife of father’s father, 40, 57;
with wife of mother’s brother, 30, 33, 52.
Massim, 56.
Mbau, 22.
Mekeo, 16, 70.
Melanesia, 14, 19, 28, 45, 52, 61, 66, 77, 85, 89.
Morgan, Lewis, 4, 10, 18, 26, 47, 50, 65, 84, 93.
Mother’s brother, functions of, 15.
New Hebrides, 22, 31, 68.
New Guinea, 16, 56, 69.
Niue, 15.
Pantutun, John, 33, 37.
Pawnees, 53, 54.
Pedigrees, 31, 70.
Pentecost I., 31.
Polyandry, 7, 90.
Polynesia, 15, 61, 66.
Prediction, 26.
Promiscuity, 6, 75, 84.
Psychology, 10, 17, 24, 29, 38, 52, 62, 63, 66, 91, 94.
Pueblo Indians, 53.
“Red Knives” Indians, 49.
Riggs, Rev. S. R., 51, 89.
Roth, W., 11.
Salutations, 7, 10.
Samoa, 77.
San Cristoval, 46.
Santa Cruz, 15, 68, 77.
Scandinavia, 78, 81.
Seligmann, C. G., 56.
Semitic terms, 78, 81.
Shilluks, 78.
Sioux, 53, 54, 88.
Sladen Trust, 14.
Sociology, 10, 26, 70, 84, 92, 94.
Solomon Is., 15, 23, 45, 67, 68.
Spencer, B., 11.
Sudan, 78, 81.
Survival, 39, 43, 46, 48, 59, 86, 92.
Swanton, J. R., 55.
Tamil, 47.
Tanna, 22.
Telegu, 47.
Tewa Indians, 53.
Thomas, N. W., 32, 88.
Thurnwald, R., 40.
Tikopia, 15, 67.
Todas, 49.
Tonga, 15, 67.
Torres Is., 89.
Torres Straits, 11, 44.
Trobriand Is., 55.
Tubetube, 57.
Wagawaga, 56, 58.
Wedau, 58.
Widow, 12, 30, 41.
“Yellow Knife” Indians, 49.
Ysabel, 46.
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