Abstract
The kinship system of Ambrym, an island in the New Hebrides, has for the past half-century been regarded by the cognoscenti as one of the more interesting examples of extant social organization. As we shall discover in Chapter VI, considerable excitement was generated among anthropologists by Bernard Deacon’s 1927 postulate that Ambrym possessed an elegant and complicated form of closed kinship system embodying six marriage-sections. More lately, the marriage-section interpretation of the Ambrym system has been strongly challenged,1 raising an anthropological problem of the first magnitude which has, from my reading of the evidence, not yet been satisfactorily resolved.
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Notes and References
H. W. Scheffler, “Ambrym Revisited: A Preliminary Report”, Southwestern J. Anthrop. 26, 52–66 (1970). Scheffler’s argument that the marriage-class interpretation of the Ambrym system represents a misconstrual of the data is of considerable theoretical interest, and, if my book had been intended as a contribution to social anthropology, I would have felt obliged to evaluate it. However, since the present work is being offered as a contribution to the history of the social sciences, since it appears that professional anthropologists are going to have a good deal more to say before one will be in a position to decide whether or not Scheffler is right, and since I am anxious to avoid the ultimate historical crime of forcing the past into false molds through too close attention to the opinions of the present day, I shall not be opening this particular can of worms. It should be mentioned, however, that in her doctoral thesis on “Kinship, Marriage and Ritual in North Ambrym” (University of Sydney, 1976), Mary Patterson argues, on the basis of extended fieldwork on Ambrym, that Scheffler’s reinterpretation of the Ambrym kinship data is mistaken.
W. H. R. Rivers, “Unpublished Notes on Ambrim”; “Introduction”, pp. 5–12, Haddon Collection, University Library Cambridge, Envelope 12000. Among Rivers’s surviving correspondence (Haddon Collection, Envelope 12039) there is a letter which gives an idea of the close relationship which Rivers maintained between himself and a favourite informant like Temar. The letter, dated 1 Mar. 1915, is signed “William Ambrim in the Mission Station Tangoa”, and presumably was authored by Temar. In very quaint English the writer thanks Rivers (and God) for sending “your love in the gift of watch”.
Ibid., p. 12.
Ibid., p. 1.
W. H. R. Rivers, The History of Melanesian Society, Vol. II (Cambridge, 1914), pp. 88, 89.
Letter from Bernard Deacon to A. C. Haddon dated 15 Feb.1927, Haddon Collection, University Library Cambridge, Envelope 16001.
Here Radcliffe-Brown has a footnote to A. Bernard Deacon, “The Regulation of Marriage in Ambrym”, J. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. 57, 333 ff (1927).
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, “A Further Note on Ambrym”,Man 29, 50 (1929).
See, in particular, W. H. R. Rivers, “Some Sociological Definitions”, Rep. Brit. Assoc. Adv. Sci. (1907), pp. 653, 654. Also section entitled “Terminology of Social Organization” in the fourth edition of the Notes and Queries on Anthropology, which was authored by a committee of which Rivers was a member.
W. H. R. Rivers, “The Father’s Sister in Oceania”, Folklore 21 58, 59 (1910). See also Rivers op. cit. (note 5), pp. 92, 94. For an excellent discussion of the emergence of the concept of bilateral descent in Rivers’s thought, see J. D. Freeman’s article “On the Concept of the Kindred”, J. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. 91 195–198 (1961). Freeman argues that in regard to descent, the concept of bilaterality is not evident until quite late in Rivers’s career.
T. T. Barnard, “The Social Organization of Ambrim”, Man 28, 133–137 (1928).
Ibid., p. 136.
In his Ph.D. thesis, Barnard calls the man “Lan”. However, in his article on “The Social Organization of Ambrim” in Man 28 (1928), Barnard adopts the spelling “Lau”, which is the one used by William Bowie in the letter where he tells Rivers that Temar’s information about the vantinbul had been wrong (Haddon Collection, Envelope 12000).
Quoted by Barnard, ibid., p. 135.
In actual fact, however, the situation tends to be more complicated than this, since the membership of a given vantinbul can cut across the territorial boundaries which separate one village from another.
Rivers, op. cit. (note 2), chapter on “Social Organization”, pp. 2–7. See also Bowie’s comments, which appear at the end of this chapter.
W. H. R. Rivers, Kinship and Social Organization (New York, 1968 reprint of 1914 edn.), p. 57.
Ibid., p. 57.
Ibid., pp. 57, 58. See also W. H. R. Rivers, “Is Australian Culture Simple or Complex?” Rep. Brit. Assoc. Adv. Sci. (1914), pp. 529–530.
W. H. R. Rivers, The History of Melanesian Society, Vol. I (Cambridge, 1914), p. 190.
Ibid., p. 190.
Ibid., p. 190.
Rivers, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 74, 75.
Ibid., p. 67.
Brenda Z. Seligman, “Asymmetry in Descent, With Special Reference to Pentecost”, J. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. 58, 533–558 (1928). Another disciple of Rivers, John Layard, favours a rather different marriage-class interpretation of data from Pentecost. Specifically, Layard points out (Stone Men of Malekula, p. 140 ff.) that a creation myth from south Pentecost seems to imply the present or former existence of a 232 type of six-section system similar to the one which he had postulated as a first approximation to the system of Vao. (According to Layard this latter system resembles the Ambrym system except that descent within the moieties is patrilineal rather than matrilineal, and descent within the trisections is matrilineal rather than patrilineal.)
Rivers, op. cit. (note 21).
Seligman, op. cit. (note 25), p. 540.
In an attempt to minimize the difference between the Pentecost system and the standard marriage-class systems of Australia, Seligman refers the reader to Radcliffe-Brown’s 1913 article on “Three Tribes of Western Australia” (J. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. 43, 143–194 (1913)) where, to use Seligman’s words, he demonstrates that “in the named classes of South-West Australia men are not free to marry any woman of the correct named class, but, within the class, marriage is regulated by consanguinity”. (op. cit., note 25, p. 549) However, in the passage to which Seligman is apparently alluding, (p. 155), the prohibited marriages mentioned by Radcliffe-Brown are all with people who are separated from ego by two generations, and which would therefore, in most cases, be socially and physically impractical anyway. What I am saying is that a system of marriage regulations which neglected to automatically prohibit the widely forbidden alliances of a parent with its child, and of a man with a girl and her mother, would have seemed less plausible than one whose only crime was the failure to rule out marriages which, on practical grounds, could have been entered into not at all or only rarely.
Rivers, op. cit. (note 23).
Rivers, op. cit. (note 17), p. 58.
Rivers, op. cit. (note 5), p. 89.
Ibid., p. 187.
The Crow and Omaha systems, of which Rivers would have been cognisant, constitute notable exceptions to this generalization.
Rivers, op. cit. (note 17), pp. 56, 58.
For a brief critical discussion of Kohler’s essay, and a cursory mention of the anthropologists (including Rivers) who followed his lead, see A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s Structure and Function in Primitive Society (Free Press, New York, 1965), pp. 56–58.
Cf. Rivers, op. cit. (note 17), p. 55.
Ibid., p. 58.
Ibid., p. 58.
c.f. ibid., pp. 59, 60.
Rivers, op. cit. (note 20), pp. 203, 204. C.f. Rivers, op. cit. (note 17), pp. 60, 61.
Rivers, op. cit. (note 17), p. 61.
Ibid., p. 62.
mid., pp. 62, 63.
Unpublished letter from E. Sapir to W. H. R. Rivers dated 7 Feb. 1917, Haddon Collection, Envelope 12022.
Rivers, op. cit. (note 5), p. 57.
Unpublished, untitled and undated typescript of a paper by W. H. R. Rivers, Haddon Collection, Envelope 12004. Since the paper is in a very rough and only partially corrected form, in quoting it I have taken a few liberties necessary to tidy up the English. However, I do not believe that I have altered Rivers’s meaning in any way.
Rivers, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 58–60.
Ibid., pp. 60, 61.
Ibid., p. 65.
Daily Telegraph (Sydney, 27 Aug. 1914). See also Rep. Brit. Assoc. Adv. Sci. (1914), pp. 531, 532.
Marginal annotation on preliminary typescript of this book, Oct. 1978.
Rivers, op. cit. (note 4).
Unpublished and undated typescript entitled “Marriage with the Wives of the Grandfather and Uncle” by W. H. R. Rivers, Haddon Collection, Envelope 12002.
Ibid., p. 11.
Ibid., p. 12.
Unpublished and undated series of rough hand-written notes entitled “Ambrim Relationship”, Haddon Collection, Envelope 12002.
Reference to Figure 11 reveals that each of the women who would be involved in these three anomalous marriages do, in fact, belong to the section into which an Ambrym man is allowed to marry. However, one should not conclude from this that such marriages are actually practised. In fact, the orthodox form of alliance in the Ambrym system — marriage with the mother’s brother’s daughter’s daughter — is considerably less anomalous than any of the above three unions, since it involves people who are separated by only one generation.
Rivers, op. cit. (note 2), chapter on “Social Organization”, p. 22.
See ibid., p. 21.
See, for example, the list of permitted marriages in ibid., chapter on “Marriage and Childbirth”, p. 2.
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© 1981 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Langham, I. (1981). Rivers and Ambrym. 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_3
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