Abstract
A person brought up in Western society might be forgiven for regarding the subject of kinship as being of meagre interest. To be sure we Westerners do possess kith and kin, and there are social tendencies and moral obligations associated with having relatives. However, except during specific social occasions like weddings, such tendencies and obligations do not generally dominate our lives. Most of our conscious decisions and social acts are determined (or, at any rate, we believe them to be determined) by utilitarian considerations based upon an assessment of economic or other pragmatic factors.
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Notes and References
See for example Colin Rosser and Christopher Harris, The Family and Social Change. A Study of Family and Kinship in a South Wales Town (London, 1965).
See for example Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches. The Riddles of Culture (Glasgow, 1977). The entire book is relevant to the issue of aboriginal pragmatism, although an excellent sample of Harris’s approach may be obtained from the section entitled “Mother Cow”.
Leslie A. White, “How Morgan Came to Write Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity”, Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters 42 (1957). Carl Resek, Lewis Henry Morgan: American Scholar (Chicago, 1960).
Quoted in Resek, ibid., p. 26.
Quoted in Resek, ibid., p. 36.
Quoted in White, op. cit. (note 3), p. 262.
Ibid., pp. 262, 263.
Resek, op. cit. (note 3), p. 78.
Ibid., p. 97 ff.
c.f. M. Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York, 1968), p. 185.
Resek, op. cit. (note 3), p. 98.
Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (London, 1877), p. 62.
American [Whig] Review 5 186 (1847). The same sentence occurs in Morgan’s League of the Iroquois, (1962 Corinth Books reprint of original 1851 edn.), p. 82.
See, for example, the first few pages of Chapter IV.
A more detailed and technical discussion of classificatory kinship systems, in which ten “indicative features” are listed may be found in Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity… (Washington, 1870), pp. 155–161.
W. H. R. Rivers, Kinship and Social Organization (London, 1914), pp. 4, 5.
J. G. Frazer, Introduction to R. R. Marett and T. K. Penniman (eds.), Spencer’s Last Journey (Oxford, 1931), p. 9.
Robin Fox, Kinship and Marriage (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 260.
Ibid. Fox’s account is written against the background of extensive debates, which occurred during the first half of the present century, about whether or not certain aboriginal peoples recognize a connection between copulation and pregnancy. For a polemical modern discussion of some of the issues involved in these debates, see Edmund Leach, “Virgin Birth”, Proc. Roy. Anthrop. Instit. 1966, pp. 39–49. For a comprehensive general review of the debates up until 1936, see M. F. Ashley Montagu, Coming into Being Among the Australian Aborigines (London, 1937), Chaps. 1–10.
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, “On Social Structure”, original 1940, reprinted in A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (New York, Free Press edn.,1965), p. 203.
F. Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (reprint of 4th edn., Moscow, 1952), p. 13. See also pp. 30–32.
Specifically J. F. McLennan, John Lubbock, Andrew Lang and, to a lesser extent, E. B. Tylor, were perceived as hostile. Bernard J. Stern (ed.), “Selections from the Letters of Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt to Lewis Henry Morgan”, Am. Anthrop. NS 32 (1930), passim.
J. H. Morgan, `Introduction’ to Everyman’s Library edn. of Sir Henry Maine, Ancient Law (London and New York, 1917), p. V.
Sir Henry Maine, Ancient Law (London and New York, 1917. Originally published 1861), p. 74.
Ibid., p. 88.
Ibid., p. 91.
Ibid., p. 99.
Ibid., p. 100.
John F. McLennan, Primitive Marriage. An Inquiry into the Origin of The Form of Capture in Marriage Ceremonies (Chicago and London, 1970. Originally published 1865), p.5.
Ibid., p. 6.
Ibid., p. 17. The passage cited is actually a quotation from Lord Kame’s Sketches of the History of Man (Edinburgh, 1807).
Quoted in H. R. Hays, From Ape to Angel. An Informal History of Social Anthropology (New York, Capricorn edn., 1964), p. 45.
Peter Rivière’s ‘Introduction’ to John F. McLennan, Primitive Marriage (Chicago and London, 1970), p. xiii.
W. Robertson Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia (London, 1907. Originally published 1885), p. 27.
Ibid., p. 30. See also E. L. Peters, article on `William Robertson Smith’ in the Inter- national Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (Macmillan and Free Press, 1968), p. 333.
Robertson Smith, op. cit. (note 34), p. xi.
Peters, op. cit. (note 35), p. 333.
Ibid., p. 329.
E. B. Tylor, Researches Into The Early History of Mankind (London, 1865). 1878 edn., p. 279. Quoted in M. Fortes, Kinship and the Social Order (Chicago, 1969), p. 12.
J. Anthrop. Inst. 18,245–269 (1888).
James Frazer, “William Robertson Smith”, in Frazer, The Gorgon’s Head and Other Literary Pieces (London, 1927), pp. 281, 282.
Quoted in E. O. James, “Sir James George Frazer O. M., F. R. S., F. B. A.”, Man 42, 2 (1942).
Quoted in Abram Kardiner and Edward Preble, They Studied Man (New York,1963), p. 74.
c.f. G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of An Age (Oxford, 1960), pp. 149, 109, 74 ff, 69 n. 2.
These two lines occur in the “Double Ballade of Primitive Man”. In Andrew Lang, XXXII Ballades in Blue China (London, 1888), pp. 44–46. A footnote at the end of the ballad reveals that the stanza in which the lines occur was written by “an eminent Anthropologist” [i.e., Tylor]. See also the article on Tylor by George W. Stocking Jnr in the International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968).
Quoted in Kardiner and Preble, op. cit. (note 43), p. 91.
Bibliography of Tylor in Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor in Honour of His 75th Birthday (Oxford, 1907).
R. R. Marett and T. K. Penniman (eds.), Spencer’s Scientific Correspondence With Sir J. G. Frazer and Others (Oxford, 1932), p. 43.
Edmund Leach, “Frazer and Malinowski”, Encounter 25: 5, 30 (November, 1965). See also Edmund Leach, “Golden Bough or Gilded Twig?” Daedalus (Spring 1961), p. 376. The fast-mentioned of these two articles sparked off a substantial and interesting debate. Ian Jarvie replied in defence of Frazer in Encounter of April 1966, and Leach replied to Jarvie in the May 1966 issue of the same periodical. All three items were then reprinted in Current Anthrop. 7: 5 (December 1966), together with further comments by a number of other contributors, and a final reply by Leach. While Leach ends up by conceding one or two points to his critics, his attack on Frazer’s anthropological scholarship emerges, in my judgement, substantially intact.
Fox, op. cit. (note 18), p. 195.
Harrison C. White, An Anatomy of Kinship. Mathematical Models For Structure of Cumulated Roles (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1963). White’s book also contains, in the form of appendices, two pioneering attempts, by André Weil and Robert R. Bush respectively, to apply mathematical methods to kinship systems of the Australian kind. Here, therefore, between the one set of covers is an interesting collection of mathematically sophisticated contributions towards a general theory of systems of relationship.
For example, in his discussion of the Murngin system, White apparently obtains all his data from Lloyd Warner’s 1937 book A Black Civilization, thereby ignoring a whole host of other investigators.
White, op. cit. (note 51), pp. 51, 97. Ones mother’s brother’s child and ones father’s sister’s child are called “cross-cousins” because, in any unilineal system, these kinsmen will not be in one’s descent group. In traversing the relationships which connect ego with the kinsmen in question, the lines of descent must be “crossed”. The mother’s brother’s child may be labelled more precisely as the “matrilateral” variety of cross-cousin, and the father’s sister’s child as the “patrilateral” variety.
Ibid., pp. 68, 145.
Ibid., pp. 76, 109, 110.
J. A. Barnes, Inquest on the Mumgin (London, 1967), p. 11. For the proof that there are six distinct kinds of four-class system, see John G. Kemeny et al.,Introduction to Finite Mathematics (2nd edn., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1966), p. 432.
J. A. Barnes, personal communication.
Barnes, op. cit. (note 56).
A precursor of this kind of schema was first developed by Howitt in 1888, adopted by Stirling in 1896, and by Spencer and Gillen in 1904. The slightly modified form represented by my Figure 1 was first used by Radcliffe-Brown, in 1910.
In adding symbols for men and women to the schema, I am following a practice developed by John Layard in his book Stone Men of Malekula (Chatto and Windus, 1942). Layard, however, did not normally set out his diagrams like my Figure 2. As we shall find out later in the book, he devised circular methods of representation which reflect very nicely the repetitive structure of marriage-class systems.
See Barnes, op. cit. (note. 56), pp. 10, 11. Also Kenneth Maddock, The Australian Aborigines. A Portrait of their Society (Pelican, Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 74.
Anthropology is sufficiently male-chauvinistic to always talk about men exchanging women, and never about women exchanging men. Which locution is the more appropriate in any particular instance would depend upon which sex plays the more active role in arranging marriages.
See Barnes, op. cit. (note 56) pp. 10, 11. Also Maddock, op. cit. (note 61), p. 74.
During the early twentieth-century there was some debate about whether the allocation of children to marriage-classes in eight-class systems proceeds matrilineally or patrilineally. This will be mentioned in Chapter VII in my account of the development of Radcliffe-Brown’s career. However, a more issue-oriented discussion of the same debate would seem to be appropriate at this point.
At the turn of the century, R. H. Mathews had described the marriage-class systems of a number of tribes from the Northern Territory. According to Mathews, the women in these tribes can be classified into two “cycles”, descent from class to class within the cycles being determined matrilineally. In their 1904 book The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, Spencer and Gillen had discussed a Northern Territory tribe which they called the “Bingongina”. They presented a table giving the class-governed regulations for marriage and descent among the Bingongina, and asserted that the tribe is divided into two moieties which the natives call “Wiliuku” and “Liaraku”. In an article entitled “Matrilineal Descent, Northern Territory”, published in the 1908 volume of Man, Mathews claimed that, while Spencer and Gillen’s speculations for the Bingongina marriage-class system were very similar to data which he himself had reported, Spencer and Gillen had arranged their tabulation of the Bingongina classes in such a way as to imply that, within the so-called “moieties”, descent took place patrilineally. Citing descent practices stemming from non-standard marriages, Matthews claimed that it is possible for Liaraku children to have Wiliuku fathers. Hence, it seemed clear to Mathews that, whatever Wiliuku and Liaraku represent, they can hardly be two independent, patrilineal moieties. “Consequently”, Mathews concluded, “Spencer and Gillen have utterly failed… to prove descent through the men”. A further article by Mathews, also published in 1908 (Am. Anthrop. NS 10, 88–102), discussed marriage and descent among the Arunta (or, as Mathews spelled the name, “Arranda”). In this article Mathews alleged that inquiries made by “a friend” in 1899 had revealed that the classes of the Arunta had “consolidated” since the Reverend Louis Schulze made his pioneering investigations one or two decades previously. Following this consolidation, all the women of the tribe could be placed in two cycles. (These cycles were presumably not given names by the Arunta, since Mathew labels them simply “A” and `B“.) Within each of these alleged cycles, descent from class to class is traced via the women. Thus once again, Mathews was pushing a matrilineal interpretation of an eight-class system.
In April 1910, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown published a reply to Mathews called “Marriage and Descent in North Australia” (Man 10, 32). On this occasion Radcliffe-Brown argued that it makes no sense just to talk about “descent”. Rather one has to talk about descent with respect to class, phratry or totem. And where four or more classes are involved, one must take irregular marriages into account in order to decide which line of descent is being followed. Using Arunta genealogies from articles by Mathews, Radcliffe-Brown arrived at what he called a “law”, which states that the evidence of irregular marriages indicates that the Arunta count descent, as regards class, in the paternal line. In the June 1912 issue of Man, Mathews came back with a further article in which however he managed to ignore Radcliffe-Brown’s main point about it not making sense to talk about descent in isolation from social units, and did little more than restate his former conclusion about descent in various Australian tribes. The last word in the dispute would seem to have been uttered by Radcliffe-Brown. In the August 1912 issue of Man, Radcliffe-Brown took Mathews to task for missing the point. Where a tribe is divided into four or eight classes, wrote Radcliffe-Brown, then as long as we consider only the classes, “and take note only of regular marriages, there can be no question as to whether descent is through the father or the mother. In every case it is through both”. Where classes are grouped into moieties, it does make sense to talk about descent with respect to the moieties. Mathews apparently wishes to deny, said Radcliffe-Brown, that the named moieties reported by Spencer and Gillen really exist. But Radcliffe-Brown could see no reason for doubting the accuracy of Spencer and Gillen’s fieldwork.
In view of the fact that, in this early debate, Radcliffe-Brown’s patrilineal interpretation of the Arunta class system appeared to have won the day, it is interesting to note that currently accepted opinion endorses the matrilineal interpretation.
This mode of presentation is borrowed from Barnes’s article on “Genealogies” in A. L. Epstein (ed.), The Craft of Social Anthropology (London, 1967), pp. 126, 127. In this source Barnes states that his method of depicting class-systems is based upon the indigenous system of representation which Deacon recorded in Ambrym in 1927. However, in a recent communication with the author, Barnes described this method as “a simplified adaptation of Layard’s circular diagrams”. At any rate, the distinction is a fine one, since, as we shall learn in Chapter VI, Layard’s circular diagrams would seem to have been created in the first instance as a means of systematizing the expositions of the Ambrym kinship system given by Deacon’s informants.
One aspect of Barnes’s mode of presentation which I have not borrowed is his numerical notation for the classes. Now, as Barnes demonstrates in Inquest On the Mum gin, p. 15 ff, and as Maddock reiterates in his book on The Australian Aborigines (Pelican, Harmondsworth, 1974, p. 79 ff), this notation can be quite illuminating in many ways. However, for historical reasons it seemed sensible that I should stick to modes of presentation which were actually used by people who took part in the developments being recounted. Also I did not want to overwhelm my reader with too many alternative modes of presentation.
A. W. Howitt, “Further Notes on the Australian Class Systems”, J. Anthrop. Inst. 18, 44 (1888).
As set out by Barnes op. cit. (note 56), p. 15.
Barnes’s article on “Genealogies” in A. L. Epstein (ed.), The Craft of Social Anthropology (London, 1967), p. 126.
Fox, op. cit. (note 18), Chap. 7.
E. B. Tylor, review of Kamilaroi and Kumai, The Academy, 9 Apr. 1881, No. 466, p. 264.
Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kumai (Melbourne, 1880), p. 37 fn.
W. Ridley, “On the Kamilaroi Tribe of Australians and Their Dialect”, J. Ethnological Soc. Lond. 4, 285–293 (1856).
At one point (ibid., p. 289) Ridley refers to the “privileged class of ippai”. One suspects that his informant carne from this class, and that this fact (assuming it was a fact) constituted the only sense in which Ridley would have been justified in labelling the class “privileged”.
According to Ridley (ibid., p. 288) an Ippai can sometimes marry an Ippata.
Fison and Howitt, op. cit. (note 70), p. 48 n.
W. Ridley, “Report on Australian Languages and Traditions”, J. Anthrop. Inst. 2, 257–291 (1872).
Ibid.
Ibid.
Fison, memoranda appended to paper on Australian kinship by Lewis Henry Morgan, Proc. Amer. Acad. Arts Sci. 8, 429–438 (1868–1873).
Morgan, ibid., pp. 412–428.
W. E. H. Stanner, article on Fison in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 4, 1851–1890 (Melbourne, 1972).
Fison and Howitt, op. cit. (note 70), section entitled “Theory of the Kumai System… ”. In 1892, Fison wrote that the theory of the Kumai system which he advanced in Kamilaroi and Kumai is “not worth a rush”, since further enquiry showed conclusively that the Kumai arrived at their system “by a different road”. (Quoted in J. G. Frazer, “Fison and Howitt”, in Frazer, The Gorgon’s Head and Other Literary Pieces (London, 1927), pp. 300, 301.
Ibid., section on “Kamilaroi Marriage, Descent and Relationship... ”.
Ibid., p. 27.
Ibid., p. 67.
Ibid., p. 132.
Lewis Henry Morgan, conclusion to Ancient Society (London, 1877).
Fison and Howitt, op. cit. (note 70), p. 128.
Ibid., pp. 33–40.
Ibid.,P. 203, pp. 103, 104.
Tylor, op. cit. (note 69).
Fison and Howitt, op. cit. (note 70), p. 179.
A. W. Howitt and L. Fison, “From Mother-Right to Father-Right”, J. Anthrop. Inst. 12, 33, 34 (1883). A. W. Howitt and L. Fison, “On the Deme and the Horde”, J. Anthrop. Inst. 14, 142–169 (1885). See also letter from Howitt to Morgan dated 18 Aug. 1881, in B. J. Stern (ed.), “Selections from the Letters of Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt to Lewis Henry Morgan”, Am. Anthrop. 32, 447 ff (1930). See also Howitt’s reply to McLennan in Nature, 7 Sept. 1882, p. 452.
A. W. Howitt, “Notes on the Australian Class Systems”, J. Anthrop. Inst. 12 (1883). Surprisingly by 1904, Howitt had forgotten that he had put forward this theory, and attributed it to Frazer. Frazer later realized the error and corrected it. See J. G. Frazer, “Fison and Howitt”, in Frazer, The Gorgon’s Head and Other Literary Pieces (London, 1927), pp. 315, 316.
A. W. Howitt, “Further Notes on the Australian Class Systems”, J. Anthrop. Inst. 18, 41 ff (1888).
A. W. Howitt, “The Dieri and Other Kindred Tribes of Central Australia”, J. Anthrop. Inst. 20, 36, 37 (1891). See also Howitt, op. cit. (note 93), p. 499 fn.
Howitt, op. cit. (note 94).
Ibid., p. 44 ff.
Howitt, op. cit. (note 93), p. 510. Howitt, op. cit. (note 94), p. 31.
Howitt, op. cit. (note 94), p. 42.
Marett and Penniman, op. cit. (note 48), p. 108.
Louis Schulze, “The Aborigines of the Upper and Middle Finke River… ”, Trans. Roy. Soc. Sth. Aust. 14 223 ff (1891).
An almost complete bibliography of Mathews’s publications up until 1904 is given in the J. Roy. Soc. New Sth. Wales 38 376–381 (1904).
A. P. Elkin, “A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, 1880–1955”, Oceania 26 249, 250 (1956).
R. H. Mathews, “Divisions of Australian Tribes”, Proc. Am. Phil. Soc. 37, 151–154 (1898).
The eight further articles are listed in the final article of the series: R. H. Mathews, “The Wombya Organization of the Australian Aborigines”, Am. Anthrop. NS 2, 494501 (1900).
R. H. Mathews, “The Origin, Organization and Ceremonies of the Australian Aborigines”, Am. Phil. Soc. Proc. 39, Plate VIII (1900).
R. H. Mathews, “Social Organization of the Chingalee Tribe, Northern Australia”, Am. Anthrop. NS 7, 301–304 (1905).
Nature, 9 May 1907, pp. 31–32; 28 Nov. 1907, pp. 80, 81.
Howitt’s message was published in the Revue des Etudes Ethnographiques et Sociologiques for December 1908.
Howitt Collection, La Trobe Library, Melbourne.
R. H. Mathews, “The Totemistic System in Australia”, Am. Antiq. 28, 147 (1906).
R. R. Marett, “Memoir”, in Marett and Penniman, op. cit. (note 17), pp. 22, 23.
Ibid., p. 25. Hays, op. cit. (note 32), p. 91.
W. Baldwin Spencer (ed.), Report on the Work of the Horn Scientific Expedition to Central Australia (London, 1896), Part IV, “Anthropology” by E. C. Stirling, pp. 45, 47.
Marett and Penniman, op. cit. (note 17), p. 26.
G. Elliot Smith, review of The Arunta by Spencer and Gillen in The Sunday Times, 11 Dec. 1927.
Marett and Penniman, op. cit. (note 17), p. 30.
W. Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (London, 1899), pp. 56–58.
Ibid., pp. 60, 61, 71, tables facing pp. 67, 81.
Ibid., p. 56.
Ibid., p. 55.
Ibid., p. 70.
Ibid., pp. 55, 59 ff. See also W. Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (London, 1904), pp. 70–77.
É. Durkheim, “Sur le Totemisme”, Année Sociologique 5, 104,105 ff (1900–1901).
Frazer, “The Origin of Totemism”, Parts I and II, Fortnightly Review NS 65, 836 (Jan. to June 1899). These two articles, which aroused a storm of controversy in the decade following their publication, provide a good brief introduction to Frazer’s views on totemism.
Marett and Penniman, op. cit. (note 48), passim.
Radcliffe-Brown. “Australian Social Organization”, Am. Anthrop. NS 49 154 (1947).
N. W. Thomas, Kinship Organizations and Group Marriage in Australia (Cambridge, 1906), p. viii.
Marett and Penniman, op. cit. (note 17), “Introduction” by J. G. Frazer, p. 1.
John G. Withnell, “Marriage Rites and Relationships”, Science of Man 6, 42 (1903). Quoted in Rodney Needham, Remarks and Inventions: Skeptical Essays About Kinship (London, 1974), pp. 141, 142.
Robert H. Lowie, review of W. H. R. Rivers, Kinship and Social Organization in Am. Anthrop. NS 17, 329, 330 (1915).
For an entertaining account of how this heavy-handedness was manifested in the medical profession, see Alex Comfort, The Anxiety Makers (Panther, 1968).
In an article called “Science and Society in Nineteenth Century Anthropology”, published in the 1974 volume of History of Science, Gay Weber sketches out a case for including professional affiliations within a generalized class-analysis of nineteenth-century anthropological evolutionism. See especially Weber, p. 281.
For an excellent account of the anthropological significance of the Brixham Cave excavations, see Jacob Gruber, “Brixham Cave and the Antiquity of Man”. In M. E. Spiro (ed.), Context and Meaning in Cultural Anthropology (New York, 1965).
George W. Stocking Jnr., Race, Culture, and Evolution. Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York, 1968), pp. 105–106. For a more general statement of the case that nineteenth-century anthropology was dominated by the desire to dispense with God as an active historical agent, see Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory. A History of Theories of Culture (New York, 1968), especially pp. 55, 210–211.
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Langham, I. (1981). Prologue. In: The Building of British Social Anthropology. Studies in the History of Modern Science, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8464-6_1
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