VI. The Clan and the Family.
Independently of their intrinsic interest, the facts that I have so rapidly enumerated have a very wide bearing. Taken alone, they suffice to destroy altogether the generally accepted ideas as to the origin of human societies. The current doctrine, so often asserted, and manifestly inspired by the Edenic tradition of a terrestrial Paradise and by the memory of the Roman family, insists that human societies have always and everywhere started with the family, and by this word is understood the patriarchal family, essentially composed of the father and the mother, or at most the mothers and the children. From this first family, grouped submissively around one august chief, the father, similar families are supposed to have sprung, which, side by side, constituted tribes, cities, and states. This familial unit, supposed to be primordial, this “cellule” of societies, is held to be particularly respectable; the chief who governs it despotically, the father, has something enchanting about him. At his voice the celestial wrath bursts without mercy on the child bold enough to brave it. Even as late as the last century, the paternal malediction had the effect of a moral thunderbolt; in romances and theatrical plays the writers often had recourse to it in order to effect the catastrophes of their plots.
We are forced in the present day to renounce this traditional notion. We must bid adieu to the primitive patriarchate. The patriarchal, or even simply paternal family, does not date, at least in most cases, from the origin of societies.
The truly primitive stock is no other than the clan, that is, a small consanguine group in which the kinship is still very much confused. It was not in a day that the first men succeeded in constructing genealogical trees, or even in determining with any precision the degrees of consanguinity. Not only does the father not stand out as a principal personage from the background of the familial clan; he has not even yet any recognised social existence in the little group; in short, the actual physiological father has had in principle no ascertainable relationship with his children, for marriage was anything but monandric.
Within the primitive social unit, the familial clan, every one was consanguine, but in a confused way; the wives had several husbands, and the husbands several wives; the degrees of kinship were not individual, but applied to classes of individuals. At this period of social development it was difficult to distinguish as yet the real from the possible, fictitious consanguinity from real consanguinity. Every one had groups of fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters: filiation and the true ties of consanguinity in numerous cases could not be discerned.
In these groups of consanguine individuals, these clans with kinship still confused, the first thing that became most habitually differentiated was not the paternal family, for that could scarcely exist, seeing that the father of a child was not easy to designate; it was the maternal family, which we will now proceed to examine.
FOOTNOTES:
[928] McLennan, Primitive Marriage, p. 71.
[929] A. Giraud-Teulon, loc. cit., p. 170-172.
[930] Powell, Reports of Smithsonian Institution, 1881.