Kinship certainly gives rise to special rights and duties, but when unsupported by local proximity it loses much of its social force. Among the Australian natives, for instance, the clan rules seem generally to be concerned with little or nothing else than marriage, sexual intercourse, and, perhaps, blood-revenge.[57] “The object of caste” (clan), says Mr. Curr, “is not to create or define a bond of union, but to secure the absence of any blood relationship between persons proposed to marry. So far from being a bond of friendship, no Black ever hesitates to kill one of another tribe because he happens to bear the same caste- (clan-) name as himself.”[58] It appears that the system of descent itself is largely influenced by local connections.[59] Sir E. B. Tylor has found by means of his statistical method that the number of coincidences between peoples among whom the husband lives with the wife’s family and peoples who reckon kinship through the mother only, is proportionally large, and that the full maternal system never appears among peoples whose exclusive custom is for the husband to take his wife to his own home;[60] and I have myself drawn attention to the fact that where the two customs, the woman receiving her husband in her own hut and the man taking his wife to his, occur side by side among the same people, descent in the former case is traced through the mother, in the latter through the father.[61] Nay, even where kinship constitutes a tie between persons belonging to different local groups, its social force is ultimately derived not merely from the idea of a common origin, but from near relatives’ habit of living together. Men became gregarious by remaining in the circle where they were born; if, instead of keeping together with their kindred, they had preferred to isolate themselves or to unite with strangers, there would certainly be no blood-bond at all. The mutual attachment and the social rights and duties which resulted from this gregarious condition were associated with the relation in which members of the group stood to one another—the relation of kinship as expressed by a common name,—and these associations might last even after the local tie was broken. By means of the name former connections were kept up. Even we ourselves are generally more disposed to count kin with distant relatives who have our own surname than with relatives who have a different name; and still greater is the influence which language in this respect exercises on the mind of a savage, to whom a person’s name is part of his personality. The derivative origin of the social force in kinship accounts for its formal character, when personal intercourse is wanting; it may enjoin duties, but hardly inspires much affection. If in modern society much less importance is attached to kinship than at earlier stages of civilisation, this is largely due to the fact that relatives, except the nearest, have little communication with each other. And if, as Aristotle observes, friendship between kinsfolk varies according to the degree of relationship,[62] it does so in the first instance on account of the varying intimacy of their mutual intercourse.
[57] Cunow, op. cit. pp. 97, 136. Dr. Stirling says (Report of the Horn Expedition to Central Australia, ‘Anthropology,’ p. 43) that the laws arising out of the “class” (clan) divisions “have extraordinary force and are, in general, implicitly obeyed whether in respect of actual marriage, illicit connections, or social relations”; but I find no further reference to these “social relations.”
[58] Curr, The Australian Race, i. 69.
[59] Westermarck, op. cit. p. 107 sqq.
[60] Tylor, ‘Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions,’ in Jour. Anthr. Inst. xviii. 258.
[61] Westermarck, op. cit. p. 110.
[62] Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, viii. 12. 7.
A very different explanation of the social influence of kinship has been given by Mr. Hartland. He connects it with primitive superstition. A clan, he says, “is regarded as an unity, literally and not metaphorically one body, the individual members of which are as truly portions as the fingers or the legs are portions of the external, visible body of each of them.” Now, a severed limb or lock of hair is believed by the savage to remain in some invisible but real union with the body whereof it once, in outward appearance also, formed a part, and any injury done to it is supposed to affect the organism to which it belonged. “The individual member of a clan was in exactly the same position as a lock of hair cut from the head, or an amputated limb. He had no separate significance, no value apart from his kin…. Injury inflicted on him was inflicted on, and was felt by, the whole kin, just as an injury inflicted on the severed lock or limb was felt by the bulk.”[63] Mr. Hartland insists upon a literal interpretation of his words;[64] and this implies that the members of a clan are in their behaviour influenced by the idea that what happens to one of them reacts upon all.
[63] Hartland, Legend of Perseus, ii. 277.
[64] Ibid. ii. 236, 398, 444.