Kinship and Social Organisation

by W. H. R. Rivers

When, after making these deductions, I examined my record of the Pentecost terms, I found that its terminology corresponded exactly with those which had been deduced. The wife’s mother and the daughter were both called nitu. The daughter’s husband and the wife’s father were both bwaliga. The daughter’s children were called mabi, and this term was also used for the brother and sister of the wife. Lastly, the mother’s mother was found to be classed with the elder sister, both being called tuaga.

For the sake of simplicity of demonstration I have assumed that a man marries his own daughter’s daughter, but through the classificatory principle all the features I have described would follow equally well if a man married the granddaughter of his brother, either in the narrow or the classificatory sense. There was one correspondence, according to which both the husband’s brother and the mother’s father were called sibi, which does not follow from the marriage with the own granddaughter, but would be the natural result of marriage with the daughter’s daughter of the brother—i.e., with a marriage in which e was married by A’s brother.

I hope these examples will be sufficient to show how a number of features which might otherwise seem so absurd as to suggest a system of relationship gone mad become natural and intelligible, even obvious, if it were once the established practice of the people to marry the daughter’s daughter of the brother.

Such inquiries as I was able to make confirmed the conclusion that the Pentecost marriage was with the granddaughter of the brother rather than with the daughter of the daughter herself. After I had been put on the track of the explanation by John Pantutun I had the chance of talking to only one native of Pentecost, unfortunately not a very good informant. From his evidence it appeared that the marriage I had inferred from the system of relationship even now occurs in the island, but only with the granddaughter of the brother, and that marriage with the own granddaughter is forbidden. The evidence is not as complete as I should like, but it points to the actual existence in the island of a peculiar form of marriage from which the extraordinary features of its system of relationship directly follow.

When I returned to England I found that this marriage was not unique, but had been recorded among the Dieri of Australia,[15] where, as I have already mentioned, it is associated with peculiar features of nomenclature resembling those of Pentecost.

I must again ask, how are you going to explain the features of the Pentecost system psychologically? What psychological resemblance is there between a grandmother and a sister, between a mother-in-law and a daughter, between a brother-in-law and a grandfather? Apart from some special form of social relationship, there can be no such resemblances. Further, if there were such psychological resemblances, why should we know of their influence on nomenclature only in Pentecost and among the Dieri? The features to be explained are definitely known to exist in only two systems of the world, and it is only among the peoples who use these two systems that we have any evidence of that extraordinary form of marriage of which they would be the natural consequence.

I have now tried to show the dependence of special features of the classificatory system of relationship upon special social conditions. If I have succeeded in this I shall have gone far towards the accomplishment of one of the main purposes of these lectures. They have, however, another purpose, viz., to inquire how far we are justified in inferring the existence of a social institution of which we have no direct evidence when we find features of the nomenclature of relationship which would result from such an institution. I have now to enter upon this part of my subject, and I think it will be instructive to take you at once to a case in which I believe that an extraordinary form of marriage can be established as a feature of the past history of a people, although at the present moment any direct evidence for the existence of such a marriage is wholly lacking.

When I was in the interior of Viti Levu, one of the Fijian islands, I discovered the existence of certain systems of relationship which differed fundamentally from the only Fijian systems previously known. Any features referable to the cross-cousin marriage were completely absent, but in their place were others, one of which I have already mentioned, which brought into one class relatives two generations apart. The father’s father received the same designation as the elder brother, and the son’s wife was called by the same term as the mother. As I have already said, my first conclusion was that these terms were the survivals of forms of social organisation resembling the matrimonial classes of Australia, but as soon as I had worked out the explanation of the Pentecost system, it became evident that the Fijian peculiarities would have to be explained on similar lines. At first I thought it probable that the difference between the Pentecost and Fijian systems was due to the difference in the mode of descent in the two places. For long I tried to work out schemes whereby a change from the matrilineal descent of Pentecost to the patrilineal condition of Fiji could have had as one of its consequences a change from a correspondence in nomenclature between the mother’s mother and the elder sister to one in which the common nomenclature applied to the father’s father and the elder brother. It is an interesting example of the strength of a preconceived opinion, and of some measure of the belief in the impossibility of customs not practised by ourselves, that for more than two years I failed to see an obvious alternative explanation, although I returned to the subject again and again. The clue came at last from the system of Buin, in the island of Bougainville, recorded by Dr. Thurnwald.[16] The nomenclature of this system agreed with that of inland Fiji in having one term for the father’s father and the elder brother, but since the people of Buin still practice matrilineal descent, it was evident that I had been on a false track in supposing the correspondence to have been the result of a change in the mode of descent. Once turned into a fresh path by the necessity of showing how the correspondence could have arisen out of a matrilineal condition, it was not long before I saw how it might be accounted for in a very different way. I saw that the correspondence would be the natural result of a form of social organisation in which it was the practice to marry a grandmother, viz., the wife of the father’s father. Not only did this form of marriage explain the second peculiar feature of the Fijian system, viz., the classing of the son’s wife with the mother, but it would also account for several features of the Buin system which would otherwise be difficult to understand.

Diagram 5.