Kinship and Social Organisation

by W. H. R. Rivers

When I was in the Solomons I met a native of the Trobriand Islands, who told me that among his people the term tabu was applied both to grandparents and to the father’s sister’s child. I went into the whole subject as fully as was possible with only one witness, but in spite of his obvious intelligence and good faith, I remained doubtful whether the information was correct. The feature in question, however, occurs in the list of Trobriand terms drawn up for Dr. Seligmann[28] by Mr. Bellamy, and with this double warrant it must be accepted. It is a feature which would follow from marriage with the daughter’s daughter, for by this marriage one who was previously a father’s sister’s daughter becomes the wife of a grandfather and thereby attains the status of a grandparent. The feature exists alone, and, further, it is combined with other applications of the term which deprive it of some of its significance; nevertheless, the fact that a peculiar and exceptional feature of a Melanesian system of relationship is such as would follow naturally from a form of marriage which is practised in another part of Melanesia cannot be passed over. Standing alone, it would be wholly insufficient to justify the conclusion that the marriage with the daughter’s daughter was ever prevalent among the Massim, but in place of expressing a dogmatic denial, let us look for other features of Massim sociology which may have been the results of such a marriage.

In Wagawaga[29] there is a peculiar term, warihi, which is used by men for other men of their own generation and social group, but the term is also applied by an old man or woman to one of a younger generation. Again, in Tubetube[30] the term for a husband, taubara, is also a term for an old man, and the term for the wife is also applied to an old woman. These usages may be nothing more than indications of respect for a husband or wife, or of some mechanism which brought those differing widely in age into one social category, but with the clue provided by the Trobriand term of relationship it becomes possible, though even now only possible, that the Wagawaga and Tubetube customs may have arisen out of a social condition in which it was customary to have great disparity of age between husbands and wives, and social relations between old and young following from such disparity in the age of consorts.

In Tubetube there is yet another piece of evidence. Mr. Field[31] has recorded the existence in this island of three named categories of persons, two of which comprise relatives with whom marriage is prohibited, while the third groups together those with whom marriage is allowed. The grandparents and grandchildren are included in one of the two prohibited classes, so that we can be confident that marriage between these relatives does not now occur. The point to which I call your attention is that the class of relative with whom marriage is allowed is called kasoriegogoli. Li is the third person pronominal suffix, and we do not know the meaning of kasorie, but goga is the term used in Wagawaga and Wedau for the grandparents, its place being taken by the usual Melanesian term tubu in Tubetube. The term kasoriegogoli applied to marriageable relatives thus contains as one of its constituent elements a word which is probably the ancient term for grandparent in the island, since it is still used in this sense in the closely allied societies of the mainland.

We have thus a number of independent facts among the Massim, all of which would be the natural outcome of marriage between persons of alternate generations. To no one of them standing alone could much importance be attached, but taken in conjunction, they ought at least to suggest the possibility of such a marriage, a possibility which becomes the more probable when we consider that the Massim show clear evidence of the dual organisation of society with matrilineal descent which is associated with the granddaughter marriage of Pentecost and the Dieri of Australia. It adds to the weight of the evidence that indications of this peculiar form of marriage should be found among a people whose social organisation so closely resembles that in which the marriages between persons of alternate generations elsewhere occur.

I have no time for other examples. I hope to have shown that there are cases in which it is possible to infer with certainty the ancient existence of forms of marriage from the survival of their results in the terminology of relationship. In other cases, differences of culture or the absence of intermediate links make it unjustifiable to infer the ancient existence of the forms of marriage from which features of terminology might be derived. Other cases lie between the two, the confidence with which a form of marriage can be inferred varying with the degree of likeness of culture, the distance in space, and the presence or absence of other features of culture which may be related to the form of marriage in question. Even in the cases, however, where the inference is most doubtful, we have no right dogmatically to deny the origin of the terminology of relationship in social conditions, but should keep each example before an open mind, to guide and stimulate inquiry in a region where ethnologists have till now only scratched the surface covering a rich mine of knowledge.

LECTURE III

Thus far in these lectures I have been content to demonstrate the dependence of the terminology of relationship upon forms of marriage. In spending so much time upon this aspect of my subject I fear that I may have been helping to strengthen a very general misconception, for it is frequently supposed that the sole aim of those who think as I do is to explain systems of relationship by their origin in forms of marriage. Marriage is only one of the social institutions which have moulded the terminology of relationship. It is, however, so fundamental a social institution that it is difficult to get far away from it in any argument which deals with social organisation. In now passing to other examples of the dependence of the terminology of relationship upon social conditions, I begin with one in which features of this terminology have come about, not as the result of forms of marriage, but of an attitude towards social regulations connected with marriage. The instance I have now to consider is closely allied to one which Professor Kroeber has used as his pattern of the psychological causation of the terminology of relationship.

Both in Polynesia and Melanesia it is not infrequent for the father-in-law to be classed with the father, the mother-in-law with the mother, the brother-in-law with the brother, and the sister-in-law with the sister. The Oceanic terminology of relationship has two features which enable us to study the exact nature of this process in more detail than is possible with our own system. Oceanic languages often distinguish carefully between different kinds of brother- and sister-in-law, and, if it be found that it is only certain kinds of brother- or sister-in-law who are classed with the brother or sister, we may thereby obtain a clue to the nature of the process whereby the classing has come about. Secondly, Oceanic terminology usually distinguishes relationships between men or between women from those between persons of different sex, and there is a feature of the terminology employed when brothers- or sisters-in-law are classed with brothers or sisters in Oceania which throws much light on the process whereby this common nomenclature has come into use.