Ancient society

by Lewis Henry Morgan

When the Malayan system of consanguinity was formed, it may be supposed that a mother could perceive that her own son and daughter stood to her in certain relationships that could be expressed by suitable terms; that her own mother and her mother’s own mother stood to her in certain other relationships; that the other children of her own mother stood to her in still other relationships; and that the children of her own daughter stood to her in still others—all of which might be expressed by suitable terms. It would give the beginning of a system of consanguinity founded upon obvious blood-ties. It would lay the foundation of the five categories of relations in the Malayan system, and without any reference to marriage-law.

When marriage in the group and the consanguine family came in, of both of which the Malayan system affords evidence, the system would spread over the group upon the basis of these primary conceptions. With the intermarriage of brothers and sisters, own and collateral, in a group, the resulting system of consanguinity and affinity would be Malayan. Any hypothesis explanatory of the origin of the Malayan system must fail if these facts are ignored. Such a form of marriage and of the family would create the Malayan system. It would be a system of consanguinity and affinity from the beginning, and explainable only as such.

If these views are correct, it will not be necessary to consider in detail the points of Mr. McLennan’s hypothesis, which is too obscure for a philosophical discussion, and utterly incapable of affording an explanation of the origin of these systems.

III. That Mr. McLennan’s objections to the hypothesis presented in “Systems of Consanguinity,” etc., are of no force.

The same misapprehension of the facts, and the same confusion of ideas which mark his last Essay, also appear in this. He does not hold distinct the relationships by consanguinity and those by marriage, when both exist between the same persons; and he makes mistakes in the relationships of the systems also.

It will not be necessary to follow step by step Mr. McLennan’s criticisms upon this hypothesis, some of which are verbal, others of which are distorted, and none of which touch the essence of the questions involved. The first proposition he attempts to refute is stated by him as follows: “The Malayan system of relationships is a system of blood-relationships. Mr. Morgan assumes this, and says nothing of the obstacles to making the assumption” (p. 342). It is in part a system of blood-relationships, and in part of marriage-relationships. The fact is patent. The relationships of father and mother, brother and sister, elder or younger, son and daughter, uncle and aunt, nephew and niece and cousin, grandfather and mother, grandson and daughter; and also of brother-in-law and sister-in-law, son-in-law and daughter-in-law, besides others, are given in the Tables and were before Mr. McLennan. These systems speak for themselves, and could say nothing else but that they are systems of consanguinity and affinity. Does Mr. McLennan suppose that the tribes named had a system other or different from that presented in the Tables? If he did, he was bound to produce it, or to establish the fact of its existence. He does neither.

Two or three of his special points may be considered. “And indeed,” he remarks (p. 346), “if a man is called the son of a woman who did not bear him, his being so called clearly defies explanation on the principle of natural descents. The reputed relationship is not, in that case, the one actually existing as near as the parentage of individuals could be known; and accordingly Mr. Morgan’s proposition is not made out.” On the face of the statement the question involved is not one of parentage, but of marriage-relationship. A man calls his mother’s sister his mother, and she calls him her son, although she did not bear him. This is the case in the Malayan, Turanian and Ganowánian systems. Whether we have consanguine or punaluan marriages, a man’s mother’s sister is the wife of his reputed father. She is his step-mother as near as our system furnishes an analogue; and among ourselves a step-mother is called mother, and she calls her step-son, son. It defies explanation, it is true, as a blood-relationship, which it does not pretend to be, but as a marriage-relationship, which it pretends to be, this is the explanation. The reasoning of Mr. McLennan is equally specious and equally faulty in a number of cases.

Passing from the Malayan to the Turanian system, he remarks (p. 354): “It follows from this that a man’s son and his sister’s daughter, while reputed brother and sister, would have been free, when the ‘tribal organization’ had been established, to intermarry, for they belonged to different tribes of descent.” From this he branches out in an argument of two or three pages to prove that “Mr. Morgan’s reason, then, is insufficient.” If Mr. McLennan had studied the Turanian or the Ganowánian system of consanguinity with very moderate attention, he would have found that a “man’s son and his sister’s daughter” are not “reputed brother and sister.” On the contrary, they are cousins. This is one of the most obvious as well as important differences between the Malayan and Turanian systems, and the one which expresses the difference between the consanguine family of the Malayan, and the punaluan family of the Turanian system.

The general reader will hardly take the trouble necessary to master the details of these systems. Unless he can follow the relationships with ease and freedom, a discussion of the system will be a source of perplexity rather than of pleasure. Mr. McLennan uses the terms of relationship freely, but without, in all cases, using them correctly.

In another place (p. 360), Mr. McLennan attributes to me a distinction between marriage and cohabitation which I have not made; and follows it with a rhetorical flourish quite equal to the best in “Primitive Marriage.”